Do Some Trans People Pass? The Results

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ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

The first five pictures were of cisgender women; the second five pictures were of transgender women.

(Yes, I’m lazy.)

The cisgender pictures are from r/selfie; the transgender pictures are from r/transpassing, a subreddit where people post pictures of themselves to see whether they pass. Both were from the most upvoted pictures of the last month. The trans girl who hadn’t taken HRT was #8, the second girl with a flower crown; an astonishing 37% of voters thought she was cisgender.

Of the five cisgender girls, two were conclusively identified as cisgender, while three had less than sixty percent of voters identify them as either cis or trans. In two cases, the voters leaned towards cisgender, while in one case, the voters leaned towards transgender. Of the five transgender girls, three were conclusively identified as transgender, one was conclusively identified as cisgender, and the remaining girl was not conclusively identified either way, although voters leaned towards her being transgender.

My initial predictions were wrong; I thought that people would be far more likely to misidentify transgender people as cisgender and vice versa than they actually were. In fact, with two exceptions (one cis and one trans), the lean of the vote was in the correct direction.

However, I found the lack of consensus striking. I defined “lack of consensus” as failing to get at least sixty percent of voters to agree on whether you’re cisgender or transgender; by this relatively narrow definition, four women’s pictures were unidentifiable. Using a broader definition, in which fewer than two-thirds of voters agree, six women’s pictures were unidentifiable as cisgender or transgender. As qualitative evidence, several commenters mentioned that, if they hadn’t known that five of the pictures were of trans women, they would have assumed all or nearly all the pictures were of cisgender women.

My interpretation of this data is that base rates matter. Many people– I would roughly guess about half the population– are not readily identifiable as cisgender or transgender if there’s a 50/50 chance that they’re cis or trans. However, in the real world, 99.7% of people are cisgender; for this reason, pretty much all ambiguous people are read as cisgender all the time.

What matters, of course, is not the actual base rate but the perceived base rate. Sophia Kovaleva commented on the original post:

I recently spent 20 minutes arguing with Russian border control agents that my passport is mine, and the incorrect gender marker in it is not a result of “a technical mistake on the part of the organization that issued the passport”. Never mind bone structure or height or the pitch and resonance of the voice – they couldn’t clock me despite seeing my passport and having me literally saying “I’m trans” (well, technically I was saying “I’m changing my sex” in order for this statement to be accessible to them).

Of course, Russia is a very traditional and transphobic country, so the perceived base rate of trans people is extraordinarily low, perhaps zero. No amount of evidence would cause people to update in favor.

I myself have noticed that context matters. When I lived in a Southern state, I passed as male if I cut my hair, wore a button-down shirt, and didn’t talk very much– except when I went to anime conventions. Since many people crossplay at anime conventions, people didn’t expect that someone in male clothing would be male. Now that I live in San Francisco, I rarely pass: people expect butch women to exist. (Inexplicably, having green hair caused me to be read as male, until I started carrying around a baby a lot of the time, at which point people started reading me as female again. I have attempted to persuade my husband to wear a dress in an attempt to confuse people into gendering me as male, but no dice.)

This suggests an unfortunate tradeoff for transgender people. The feminist, trans-friendly places where being perceived as trans is least dangerous are exactly the places where it is most difficult for us to go stealth.

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Do Some Trans People Pass?

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ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

I am occasionally informed that no trans people ever pass, because their physiology and bone structure will inevitably reveal what sex they were assigned at birth. So let’s play a game.

Here are ten ordinary people’s publicly available selfies. Five are trans, five are cis. I am not going to include sources yet, because I don’t want people to be able to look up which is which; sources will be included in the answer key. If one of these is your selfie and you’d rather I not use it, I am happy to remove it. In a few days, I will post an answer key.

I have filtered for picture quality (i.e. nothing where you can’t see the person’s face) but did not deliberately choose pictures where the trans people passed particularly well. One trans person included is pre-HRT. All pictures are of women because men, regardless of assigned sex at birth, are much less likely to take selfies.

Ways of Thinking About Psychological Gender Differences

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not feminism go away, ozy blog post

Broadly speaking, I’ve noticed three different ways people can think about psychological gender differences: they can say there is no difference between men and women on a particular trait, they can say that there are two overlapping bell curves, or they can say that there is a fundamental, essential difference between men and women.

(To be clear, this is different from saying the difference is genetic or environmental. Whatever the cause of a psychological difference– genetic, environmental, or both– a person may think it resembles overlapping bell curves or that it is a fundamental and essential difference.)

First, some people think men and women are the same on a particular trait: for example, they might argue that men’s emotions are just as strong as women’s, that women are just as interested in sex as men are, or that men talk just as much as women do. They might think people are mistaken about the alleged difference: for example, the blog Language Log has written many posts arguing that men talk just as much as women do.

Sometimes, however, people think that men and women behave differently, but not because of an underlying psychological difference. They might believe that men and women face different incentives. For example, they might think that women are less likely than men to be interested in casual sex, not because they like casual sex less in the abstract, but because women are more likely than men to be shamed for having casual sex and less likely than men to have orgasms during casual sex. They might believe that women take more maternity leave than men do paternity leave because women have to recover from the physically difficult ordeal of pregnancy and childbirth and because pumping breastmilk is very inconvenient. Other times, people believe that different behavior is a product of discrimination. For example, women might be less likely to work in a particular field because hiring managers assume that they are incompetent.

Second, some people believe that there’s a psychological difference between men and women on the population level, but that many men have the more female-typical version of the trait and many women have the more male-typical version of the trait. This is easiest to see in a picture:

(Note that, in many cases, a person may believe the means are closer together than they are in this picture.)

An obvious example of a physical overlapping-bell-curves trait is height. Men are generally taller than women, but there are still lots of short men and tall women, and it’s not that surprising if any particular woman is taller than any particular man. Similarly, a person might believe that sex drive is an overlapping-bell-curves trait: men typically have higher libidos than women, but many men with low libidos and women with high libidos exist, and it’s not that surprising to find a heterosexual couple in which the woman has a higher libido than the man.

Third, some people believe in fundamental and essential differences between men and women. I’m going to do the worst job describing this one, because I basically don’t believe in fundamental and essential differences between men and women, but I’ll do my best.

The easiest way to observe this belief in the wild is to go to a bookstore’s relationship self-help section, where you will encounter books like Love and Respect: The Love She Most Desires, The Respect He Desperately Needs, Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus, and Act Like A Lady Think Like A Man. (Methodology: I looked on Amazon’s relationships bestseller list for books about gender.) As part of their fundamental premise, these books assume that no men primarily desire love, that no women want to retreat into their caves and refuse to talk to anyone when they’re upset, and that no men are willing to date women who don’t want sex that much.

But these beliefs affect more than relationship advice. I was recently reading Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, which made the following argument against gay marriage (edited for space):

The complementarity that defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman is crucial as well for the raising of children. There is no such thing as “parenting.” There is mothering, and there is fathering, and children do best with both…

[University of Virginia sociologist] Wilcox finds that “most fathers and mothers possess sex-specific talents related to parenting, and societies should organize parenting and work roles to take advantage of the way in which these talents tend to be distributed in sex-specific ways.” These differences are not the result of gender roles or sex stereotypes. They are a matter of what comes naturally to moms and dads, what moms and dads enjoy doing with their children…

[Rutgers University sociologist] Popenoe concludes:

“We should disavow the notion that “mommies can make good daddies,” just as we should disavow the popular notion . . . that “daddies can make good mommies.” . . . The two sexes are different to the core, and each is necessary—culturally and biologically—for the optimal development of a human being.”

What are the distinctive gifts of mothers and fathers? Wilcox reports, “Among the many distinctive talents that mothers bring to the parenting enterprise, three stand out: their capacity to breastfeed, their ability to understand infants and children, and their ability to offer nurture and comfort to their children.” And fathers, Wilcox writes, “excel when it comes to discipline, play, and challenging their children to embrace life’s challenges.”

As Popenoe explains:

“The complementarity of male and female parenting styles is striking and of enormous importance to a child’s overall development. . . . [F]athers express more concern for the child’s long-term development, while mothers focus on the child’s immediate well-being (which, of course, in its own way has everything to do with a child’s long-term well-being.) . . . [T]he disciplinary approach of fathers tends to be “firm” while that of mothers tends to be “responsive.” While mothers provide an important flexibility and sympathy in their discipline, fathers provide ultimate predictability and consistency. Both dimensions are critical for an efficient, balanced, and humane childrearing regime.’

This argument makes little sense from a non-essentialist point of view. From the point of view that psychological gender differences don’t exist, of course, it is nonsensical. With the exception of the capacity to breastfeed (which people with XY chromosomes do not have absent copious medical intervention), they argue, there is no reason that a parent of any gender can’t have any of those capacities. Who says fathers can’t nurture and mothers can’t discipline?

From an overlapping-bell-curves perspective, it is also silly. There are many more heterosexuals than there are gay people, and heterosexuals are more likely than gay people to have children. If even ten percent of women are as firm as the average man, then there are many more children who have a father and an unusually disciplinarian mother than there are children who have lesbian parents. Therefore, it makes sense to prioritize the unusual people getting married issue, perhaps by raising awareness that if you are a man who cares a lot about your child’s immediate well-being you should make sure to have children with a woman who prioritizes the future. (Alternately, since they’re willing to forbid gay marriage, perhaps they should require heterosexuals to take some sort of personality test to get married.)

But if men and women are basically different, those arguments sound like nitpicking. Sure, there are probably some playful women somewhere (they might argue), just like there are some people who only have one hand and some people who have eleven toes, but no one says “human beings have two hands except for certain people who have experienced tragic accidents.” At their core, men and women are basically different, and it makes sense to make policy based on that.

(Before the feminists and men’s rights activists of my blog howl, I’d like to point out that this is how the most striking physical sex differences actually work: there are in fact no cisgender men who can get pregnant and no cisgender women who can produce sperm. From a purely theoretical perspective, it’s not that odd to postulate that some psychological sex differences are equally striking.)

Is The Type One/Type Two Division Caused By Timing Of Transition?

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ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

[This should probably not be the first thing you read about Blanchard’s theories. I will consistently use “type one” to refer to so-called homosexual transsexuals and “type two” to refer to so-called autogynephile transsexuals, and it is the absence of neutral terms for these distinctions that have driven me to this problem. As always, a caveat that Blanchard’s theories are controversial and that there’s a replication crisis which limits the accuracy of any psychological research.]

So this is a super-fun request post. (Back me on Patreon and get a chance at a request post yourself!)

Monica sent me her thoughts on the type one/type two division. She argues that the division is in fact caused by age at transition, noting that age at transition is not precisely the same thing as when one became gender dysphoric. Later transition causes your brain to be exposed more to your birth sex hormones and you to experience more gender socialization for your assigned gender; we would expect more masculine behavior from this population. Sexual fantasies often don’t develop until adolescence and continue to develop in adulthood; earlier transitioners may have weaker or nonexistent sexual fantasies related to their gender. Orientation change is commonly noted as an effect of hormones; perhaps earlier transitioners are more likely to experience this effect, thus becoming exclusively androphiliac.

Children who were assigned male and who behave femininely may be more likely to transition early. Monica mentions that accepting parents may be more likely to allow their children to behave in a feminine fashion and to transition, and that early transition lends itself to selective memories on the parts of both families and trans people which exaggerate how feminine a child was. I’d add that more feminine assigned-male children may be more likely to be allowed to transition, while more masculine children take longer to transition because they have to get past more gatekeepers.

However, my own anecdotes suggest this is not the case. I personally know many type-twos who transitioned at nineteen or twenty; on r/asktransgender one may find type-twos who have come to a transgender identity as young as fourteen. By Blanchard, this really shouldn’t happen at all. In fact, given the number of trans women in Silicon Valley who come out in their twenties, the proposition that most type-twos transition in their forties or fifties would imply that (contrary to popular belief) there are in fact no cisgender male programmers at all.

Therefore I predict (with a fairly high degree of confidence) that Millennials will be far less likely to transition at midlife than previous generations.

It makes sense that this would be the case. Before relatively recently, there were two kinds of trans narratives. First, there were narratives that embodied cisgender anxieties far more than transgender realities: trans women were depicted as predatory and wanting to lure men into sex, or as pathetic mockeries of women, or surprisingly often both at the same time. (Trans men, of course, did not exist at all.) Second, and far less common, there were narratives from actual trans people sanitized for cisgender people’s consumption. You always knew you were a man deep down, you played with trucks as a child, you have definitely never been attracted to a man, your gender plays no role in your sexuality, and if you ever wore a dress it was by coercion and you threw it out and it is definitely not in the back of your closet waiting for Drag Night.

So whether people transitioned depended a lot on luck: it was hard to get any sort of idea about what trans lives were actually like unless you happened to meet a trans person. It was all too easy to have the idea that your gender dysphoria didn’t really count if you liked wearing eyeliner sometimes and had no deep-down sense of being male.

The trans and gay communities have been linked since inversion was a twinkle in Krafft-Ebing’s eye: thus, trans people who were part of the gay or lesbian community pre-transition generally encountered other trans people young and transitioned earlier. Trans people assigned male at birth who were not part of the LGBT community blundered around in a fog of shame and quiet misery unless they happened to stumble across a crossdresser group or something, and thus transitioned later. Trans people assigned female at birth who were not part of the LGBT community had… as far as I can tell completely nothing, and thus rarely transitioned.

Nowadays, we have Twitter and blogs and Imogen Binnie’s Nevada: narratives written by trans people, about trans people, for trans people. And these resources are accessible like never before. If some sixteen-year-old– hesitant, terrified, palms sweating– enters “am I transgender” into google, they will stumble across an article like this one (first result for me in incognito mode search). It’s not perfect, god no, but look at what’s on the list of signs the author was a trans woman: hating girly things, longing to be pregnant, crossdressing (!), repulsion at the idea of trans people, hating cameras, a bizarre fondness for the song “Lola”. And that means that that kid will not think “oh, I hated boys’ toys at a kid, I can’t possibly be trans”, will sort themselves out sooner, and will be able to transition.

In conclusion, I suspect the early transitioner/late transitioner thing is a mere artifact of transphobia and not a real division, and that trans people of the present generation will transition far earlier regardless of type.

Deontologist Envy

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my issues with anti sj let me show you them, not like other ideologies, ozy blog post, utilitarianism it works bitches

Many consequentialists of my acquaintance appear to suffer from a tragic case of deontologist envy.

In consequentialism, one makes ethical decisions by choosing the actions that have the best consequences, whether that means maximizing your own happiness and flourishing (consequentialist ethical egoism), increasing pleasure and decreasing pain (hedonic utilitarianism), satisfying the most people’s preferences (preference utilitarianism) or increasing the number of pre-defined Good Things in the world (objective list consequentialism). Of course, it’s impossible to figure out all the consequences of your actions in advance, so many people follow particular sets of rules which they believe maximize utility overall; this is sometimes called “rule consequentialism” or “rule utilitarianism.”

In deontology, one makes ethical decisions by choosing the actions that follow some particular rule. For example, one might do only the actions that you’d will that everyone do, or actions that involve treating other people as ends rather than means, or actions that don’t violate the rights of other beings, or actions that don’t involve initiating aggression, or actions that are not sins according to the teachings of the Catholic Church. While it’s allowed to care about whether things are better or worse (some deontologists I know call it their “axiology”), you can only care about that within the constraints of the rule system.

In spite of my sympathies for virtue ethics, I do think it is generally better to make decisions based on whether the outcomes are good as opposed to decisions based on whether they follow a particular set of rules or are the decisions a person with particular virtues would make. (I continue to find it weird that these are the Only Three Options For Decision-Making About Ethics, So Says Philosophy, but anyway.) So do most people I know.

I have some consequentialist beliefs about free speech. For instance, I support making fun of people who say sexist or racist things in public. I think it is fine to call someone a bigoted asshole if they are, in fact, saying bigoted asshole things. I appreciate Charles Murray refusing to speak at an event Milo Yiannopoulous is at because he is “a despicable asshole” and I wish more people would follow his example. And when I express my consequentialist beliefs about free speech a surprising number of my consequentialist friends respond with “but what if your political opponents did that?”

I did not realize we are all Kantians now.

I think there are three things that people sometimes mean by “but what if everyone did that?” The first is simple empathy: if it hurts you to be shamed, then you should consider the possibility that it hurts other people to be shamed too, no differently from how you are hurt. I agree that this is an important argument, and we could all stand to be a little bit more aware that people we disagree with are people with feelings. But even deontologists agree sometimes it’s necessary to hurt one person for the greater good: for example, even if you are very lonely and it hurts you not to get to talk to people, you don’t get to force people to interact with you against their will. So I don’t think that the mere fact that it hurts people implies that (say) public shaming should be off-limits.

The second is a rather touching faith in the ability of people’s virtuous behavior to influence their political opponents.

Now, if it happened that my actions had any influence whatsoever over the behavior of r/TumblrInAction, that would be great. I don’t screenshot random tumblr users and mock them in front of an audience of over three hundred thousand people, so the entire subreddit would close down, which would be a great benefit to humanity. While we’re at it, there are many other places people who read r/TumblrInAction could follow my illustrious example. For instance, they could be tolerant of teenagers with dumb political beliefs, remembering how stupid their own teenage political beliefs were. They could stop making fun of deitykin, otherwise known as “psychotic people with delusions of grandeur,” because jesus fucking christ it is horrible to mock a mentally ill person for showing mental illness symptoms. They could stop with the “I identify as an attack helicopter” jokes; I mean, I don’t have any ethical argument against those jokes, it’s just that there is exactly one of them that was ever funny. 

In general people rarely have their behavior influenced by their political enemies. Trans people take pains to use the correct pronouns; people who are overly concerned about trans women in bathrooms still misgender them. Anti-racists avoid the use of slurs; a distressing number of people who believe in human biodiversity appear to be incapable of constructing a sentence without one. Social justice people are conscientious about trigger warnings; we are subjected to many tedious articles about how mentally ill people should be in therapy instead of burdening the rest of the world with our existence.

Therefore, I suspect that if supporters of social justice universally became conscientious about representing their opponents’ views fairly, defaulting to kindness and using cruelty only as a last resort when it is necessary to reduce overall harm, and not getting people fired from their jobs, it would not have any effect on how often opponents of social justice represent opponents’ views fairly, behave kindly, and condemn campaigns to fire people. In fact, they might end up doing so more enthusiastically, because suddenly kindness and charity and not getting people fired are Social Justice Things, and you don’t want to support Social Justice Things, do you?

(I’m making this argument with the social justice side as the good side, but it works equally well for literally any two sides in the relevant positions.)

Third, there’s an argument I personally find very compelling. Nearly everyone who does wrong things, even evil things, thinks that they’re on the side of good. Therefore, the fact that you think you’re on the side of good doesn’t mean you actually are. (The traditional example is Nazis, but I think Stalinism is probably better, because in my experience most people agree that your average rank-and-file Stalinist supported an ideology that killed millions of people because they had a good goal but were horribly mistaken about how to bring it about.) So it’s important to take steps to reduce the harm of your actions if you’re actually doing evil.

Like I said, I find this argument compelling. But you can’t get an entire ethical system out of trying to avoid being a Stalinist. Lots of generally neutral or even good things are evil if a Stalinist happens to be doing them, such as trying to convince people of your point of view or going to political rallies or donating to causes you think will do the most good in the world. If you were a Stalinist, the maximally good action you could do, short of not becoming a Stalinist anymore, is sitting on the couch watching Star Trek reruns. This moral system has some virtues– depressed people the world over can defend their actions by saying “well, actually, I’m one of the best people in the world by Not-Having-Even-The-Slightest-Chance-Of-Being-A-Stalinist-ianism”– but I think it is unsatisfying for most people.

(I can tell someone is about to say “you can donate to the Against Malaria Foundation, there’s no possible way that could be evil!” and honestly that just seems like a failure of imagination.)

That’s not to say that trying to avoid being a Stalinist should have no effects on your ethical system at all. Perhaps most important is never, ever, ever engaging in deliberate self-deception. Of almost equal importance is not hiding inconvenient facts. If you know damn well the Holodomor is happening, do not write a bunch of articles denouncing everyone who says the Holodomor is happening as a reactionary who hates poor people. On a less dramatic level, if there’s a study that doesn’t say what you want it to say, mention it anyway; if you can massage the evidence into saying something that it doesn’t really say, don’t; take care to mention the downsides and upsides of proposed policies as best you can. These are most important, because they directly harm the ability of truth to hurt falsehood.

And there are some things that I think it’s worth putting on the list of things you shouldn’t do even if you have a really really good reason, because it is far more likely that you are mistaken than that this is actually right this time. Violence against people who aren’t being violent against others, outside of war (and no rules-lawyering about how being mean is violence, either). Being a dick to people who are really weird but not hurting anyone (and no rules-lawyering about indirect harm to the social fabric, either). Firing people for reasons unrelated to their ability to perform their jobs. I’ve added “not listening to your kid and respecting their point of view when they try to tell you something important about themselves, even if you disagree,” but that’s a personal thing related to my own crappy relationship with my parents.

But that’s not a complete ethical system. At some point you have to do things. And that means, yes, that there’s a possibility you will do something wrong. Maybe you will be a participant in an ongoing moral catastrophe; maybe you will make the situation worse in a way you wouldn’t have if you sat on your ass and watched Netflix. On the other hand, if you don’t do anything at all, you get to be the person sitting idly by while ongoing moral catastrophes happen, and those people don’t exactly get a good reputation in the history textbooks either. (“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” quoth Edmund Burke.)

The virtue of consequentialism is that it pays attention to consequences. It is consistent for me to say “feminist activism is good, because it has good consequences, and anti-feminist activism is bad, because it has bad consequences.” (Similarly, it is consistent to say that you should lie to axe murderers and homophobic parents, but not to more prosocial individuals.) This is compatible with me believing that if I had a different set of facts I would probably be engaged in anti-gay activism, and in fact many loving, compassionate, and intelligent people of my acquaintance do or have in the past. Moral luck exists; it is possible to do evil without meaning to. There would be worse consequences if everyone adopted the policy of never doing anything that might possibly be wrong.

There is a common criticism of consequentialism where people say “well if torture had good consequences then you’d support torture! CHECKMATE CONSEQUENTIALISTS.” Of course, in the real world torture always has bad consequences, which is why consequentialists oppose it. If stabbing people in the gut didn’t cause them pain or kill them, and in fact gave them sixteen orgasms and a chocolate cake, then stabbing people would be a good thing, but it is not irrelevant to consequentialism that stabbing does not do this.

Some people seem to want to be able to do consequentialism without ever making reference to a consequence. If you just find enough levels of meta and use the categorical imperative enough, then maybe you will be able to do consequentialism without all that scary “evidence” and “facts” stuff, and without the possibility that you could be mistaken. This seems like a perverse desire, and in my opinion is best dealt with by no longer envying deontology and instead just becoming a deontologist.

“Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” Is Bad Science

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ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

[content warning: brief discussion of suicide statistics]

Like anyone with a hobby of arguing about transness, I am used to debunking people’s dumb interpretations of studies. For instance, there’s the famous Swedish study which shows that post-transition transgender people have a higher suicide rate than cisgender controls, which is used to argue that transition increases suicide rate. There is also the National Transgender Discrimination Survey’s finding that people who have more transition-related health care are more likely to have had suicidal ideation, whch is interpreted as transition increasing one’s chance of committing suicide, even though people who are suicidal about dysphoria are probably more likely to seek transition-related health care.

But rapid onset gender dysphoria is unique. The Swedish study and the National Transgender Discrimination Survey are both good studies, and their actual findings are important: it’s useful to know that trans people are more likely to be suicidal than cis people and that people who have had transition-related health care are more likely to have a history of suicide attempts. They just don’t show the thing that people desperately want it to show. The study that allegedly shows the existence of a condition called rapid-onset gender dysphoria, however, was not even a good study in the first place.

The argument of the article is that sometimes people weren’t feeling gender dysphoric until they start hanging around with a lot of transgender people, at which point they suddenly experience gender dysphoria. How did they find evidence for this, you ask? Did they do a retrospective survey of transgender people asking how they became transgender? Did they identify transgender people, give gender dysphoria questionnaires to their friends on a regular basis, and discover that gender dysphoria increases over time if you have a transgender friend but not if you have, say, a lesbian friend?

No, they asked adolescents and young adults’ parents.

I do not think there is a transgender person in the world who disagrees with the claim that transness often comes as a surprise to one’s parents. Nor is it particularly surprising to transgender people that coming out typically worsens your relationship with your parents, that transgender people typically trust other trans people more than cis people as sources of information about being trans, and that transition often leads one to spend less time with your family and cisgender friends, particularly if they don’t accept your gender.

But here’s the question. If you’re a teenager or young adult, or you remember having been a teenager or young adult, think back to that time in your life. (My apologies for excluding any precocious eight-year-olds who read this blog; I hope this post will help you anticipate what you have to look forward to.)

For most people– even people who had pretty good relationships with their parents– it’s something like this. You carefully filtered the information about your life you gave to your parents. Band practice, favorite movies, and interesting college classes, yes; inner turmoil and struggle, not so much. You felt that your parents were probably as likely to attack or lecture you if you were vulnerable with them as they were to actually be helpful. The deceptions of ordinary teenagers are many: that some of their friends drink; that they sometimes finish their homework in homeroom; that sometimes when they’re going to the mall they’re actually getting felt up by their boyfriend.

A lot of teenagers and young adults who are facing hard times face them on their own or with the help of their friends. There are a lot of parents out there who believe they have a happy, carefree, well-adjusted teenager who happens to be unusually prone to not overheating, while the lives of three of that teenagers’ friends are oriented around helping them not to cut. Teenagers who are depressed, anxious, and suicidal are often afraid that if they told their parents they would be punished rather than supported; these beliefs are often correct. Fortunately, by the time you’re a young adult, you have medical confidentiality, so you may be able to seek therapy and psychiatric medication without your parents’ consent; unfortunately, that means that parents are likely to be even more oblivious about mental illness, since a major reason to tell them has been removed. In short, the parents of many mentally ill teenagers and young adults simply have no idea that their children are mentally ill.

Teenagers who are questioning their gender identity or sexual orientation, in general, don’t share that with their parents. You are unlikely to share with your parents your discovery of how hot gay porn is or your sneaking suspicion that your girl crushes were actually real crushes. Transness is even more unlikely to go unnoticed, because even today many transgender people experience gender dysphoria for years before they know they’re gender dysphoric; how do you explain to your mom “Mom, I keep having fantasies about having breast cancer so I don’t have to have breasts anymore and I don’t know why”? Even once a teenager has come to a stable identity, many teenagers are acutely aware that forty percent of homeless youth are LGBT; even if their parents almost certainly wouldn’t disown them, that “almost” makes the closet a very attractive proposition. A teenager often knows they’re LGBTQQA+ for years before they gather the courage to tell their parents.

You may have or have had a good relationship with your parents where you felt like you could share literally everything with them, as if they were more like a best friend than like a parent; many people do. But even if you did, probably many of your friends had the more ordinary sort of parent-teenager/young adult relationship. Most parents have inaccurate ideas of what their teenagers’ life is like, in at least some aspects; for mentally ill and queer teenagers, parents’ views are even more inaccurate. It’s no wonder that gender dysphoria– which is both a mental illness and a form of queerness– seems to come out of nowhere for many parents. And that doesn’t mean that the child hasn’t been gender dysphoric for years or even a lifetime.

Consider the finding that teenagers and young adults often have friend groups full of out transgender people before they come out as transgender. There are several perfectly reasonable, non-contagion-related explanations for this. The most obvious one is that trans people want to befriend other trans people. If a person starts questioning their gender months or years before they come out to their parents, they may have trans friends for months or years before their parents know anything about it.

Similarly, the exact same things that attract one self-closeted trans person to a group of friends may attract other self-closeted trans people. Trans people are disproportionately likely to be lesbian, gay, bisexual or asexual, and many straight trans people identify as lesbian or gay before they come out to themselves; the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance will probably have a lot of self-closeted trans people in it. Trans people have a lot of traits in common, often ones you wouldn’t really expect: it’s not very surprising if the school’s anime club has a couple of trans people. Self-closeted trans people often find out trans people strangely magnetic.

I don’t want to say that there’s never been a case of a person who believes they experience gender dysphoria when they don’t; I’ve personally known several cases. Having transgender friends may very well lead someone to believe they experience gender dysphoria when they actually experience depression, dissociation, feelings of insecurity about their gender non-conformity, or something else. But, first of all, that is clearly not “rapid-onset gender dysphoria”; it is a person being mistaken about whether they are gender dysphoric, which is a different thing. It’s a case of “I have chronic fatigue syndrome and a lot of depressed friends, so now I think I’m depressed too”, not a case of “being around depressed people is really depressing.”

Second, in my experience, people usually figure it out. Six months or a year later they sheepishly go around saying “yeah, I’m on antidepressants now and I feel a lot better and I really don’t think I’m actually a guy, go figure.” There is not an epidemic of people mistakenly transitioning for two decades because they got confused about what depression is. Of course, hormones and surgery can have long-term consequences. In my experience, while some pressure comes from overenthusiastic trans people convinced what worked for them is the universal solution for everyone, the pressure is most likely to come from people who don’t really accept trans people. If you’ve ever found yourself saying “I don’t see why I should respect his pronouns if he’s not even making the slightest effort to be a woman,” then the difficulties people who are mistaken about being trans face are on you. If we respect people’s gender identities regardless of whether they physically transition, mistaken people are far less likely to physically transition.

Bridging the Inferential Distance on Desexualization

Tags

not feminism go away, ozy blog post, sex positivity, speshul snowflake trans

[Related: Etiquette for People Who Aren’t Attracted To Trans Women]

I notice that conversations about desexualization are particularly prone to people misunderstanding each other. For instance, many people seem to round any conversation about desexualization off to telling people that they have to have sex with people they don’t want to have sex with, and then say something along the lines of “didn’t the gay rights movement prove that no one should have to have sex with people they don’t want to have sex with? Rapist!” Many other people assume that the first group’s concerns are a smokescreen for not wanting to deal with their own bigotry, and thus assume that they could not have any reasonable concerns about compulsory sexuality.

I don’t have a lot to say to the second group at this time (although theunitofcaring’s Meditation on Boundaries, which has been recently going around again, is excellent, and I endorse her statement that all conversations about desexualization need to begin from the baseline that people should promptly say “no” to intimate activities that they don’t want). But I recently found an article from a few years back that I think might help explain the second group’s position to my readers who are prone to the “rapist” thing. (Please note that the author of the article is pretty mean to techies, and if you don’t want to read that you may want to skip the quoted bit.)

Here’s an excerpt:

You might think an abundance of men is a great thing, but as a wise woman once said, “The odds may be good, but the goods are odd.”

“I’ve lived in Seattle for seven years, single most of them,” Annie Pardo, a 31-year-old freelance event and communications consultant in Seattle, wrote in an email. “The only thing that has changed is the increase in men I’d never want to go out on a date with.” She added, “Can’t believe they actually strap on those new employee book bags.”

For Reifman, the number of men versus women presents a challenge for guys like him—he can’t seem to get a date or hold the attention of the women he’s courting because, presumably, he’s got so much competition. But the reality is that all he has to do is have a personality. I’m serious.

The exact same scenario has been playing out in San Francisco for the last few years. One woman, Violet, a 33-year-old who has lived in the Bay Area for eight years, with one of those in the “belly of the beast,” Palo Alto, experienced many of the same things I and other women did. They had money, but they were boring. They had a lot to say about their job, but their development as a complete human being seemed to be stunted. And they exhibited little to no interest in the other person at the table.

“There were a lot of tech men. I could talk a blue streak about them. I don’t have much positive to say. The biggest thing, the thing that bothered me the most is I felt like my intelligence was greatly devalued,” she wrote. ”I am a smart woman. I have a master’s from Berkeley in philosophy. My brain is very abstract, though, the exact opposite of so many men in tech who have very concrete/literal brains. They interpreted information as intelligence. I constantly felt like I wasn’t seen or valued by them, even though I experienced a lot of them as having a very limited view of the world.”

Carla Swiryn, a matchmatcher for Three Day Rule, a start-up that offers curated online dating services in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, said that her female clients are often hit with a double whammy: “I often hear women say they either date A-holes or nerds—or if they’re really lucky, both in one,” she said. “They feel like they’re dealing with someone who has poor social skills, not a lot of style, and isn’t that attractive, or is decently good-looking, successful, or cool, but by default knows it and acts like it, with a huge ego and selfish mind-set in tow.”

One woman, Bridget Arlene, spent three years in Seattle for graduate school, and said that she actually moved out of the city, in part because of the type of available men—most of whom had computer science or engineering degrees and worked for Google, Microsoft, or Amazon. “The type of person who is attracted to these jobs and thus to the Seattle area seems to be a socially awkward, emotionally stunted, sheltered, strangely entitled, and/or a misogynistic individual,” she wrote in an email. Arlene said that she was once contacted by a Microsoft programmer on OKCupid who required that she read Neuromancer before “he would consider taking me out on a date. He was not joking.”

It goes on like that for a while, but you get the general idea.

So here’s my guess on the reaction of most of my readers to this article:

• You are totally allowed to have a preference not to date nerds, but it is neither kind nor necessary to write thousands of words exploring exactly how undateable you find us.
• There are lots of women who want to date nerds, actually? Maybe you shouldn’t assume your own particular sexual preferences apply to every fucking woman on the planet? Lots of women don’t find “socially awkward with a poor fashion sense” to be a dealbreaker. Lots of women are socially awkward and have terrible fashion sense themselves!
• You are not actually entitled to a dating market that only has people you find attractive in it. People you don’t find attractive are allowed to try to find love too. “Asking you out while being incompatible” is not something people are doing to you.
• Obviously everyone is allowed to have their own dealbreakers, even if some of their dealbreakers are kind of stupid. But god, maybe you could try being a little more open-minded? You might be swept off your feet by a really great guy who happens to wear a new employee book bag. Also, fashion sense is totally a solvable problem, you can say to your new boyfriend “give me a $500 budget and I will buy you clothes that fit.”
• Good fucking riddance, lady, if you’re going to be this much of an asshole we don’t want to date you either.

In particular, that last point is something I want to highlight. It is desirable that the author of this article become less of an asshole, in the same way it’s desirable that any person become less of an asshole. Presumably, if she became less of an asshole, she’d be more open-minded about dating people that she currently considers to be emotionally stunted sheltered man-children with poor fashion sense and an aversion to spending money on messenger bags. But that doesn’t mean you want her to skip the “become less of an asshole” part and start dating techies right now. For one thing, then some innocent techie would be saddled with a girlfriend who hates him. For another thing, being open to dating techies is a predicted consequence of the thing you actually care about, which is her not being an asshole. If she kept her preferences once she became less of an asshole, but no longer wrote long articles about how horrible people she happens to not be attracted to are, then this would also be a fine outcome. “If you did X morally good thing, then you would probably also behave like Y” is a different claim from “you should behave like Y.” You don’t actually want people to date people they despise.

And in my experience those points are what most people who talk about desexualization in an anti-oppression context– whether it’s about race, transness, gender expression, disability, or size– are actually saying. There are legitimate complaints one can have about another person’s sex-related behavior, which are not the same thing as trying to make them have sex they don’t want.

Some Observations On Cis By Default Identification

Tags

ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

As the inventor of the word “cis by default” and a person who occasionally checks who’s linking to my blog, I get to see quite a lot of people using the word “cis by default.” My estimate is that about half are using it wrong.

There are two equal and opposite errors. First, many people identify as cis by default when they are in fact gender dysphoric people who don’t want to transition. I certainly understand why gender dysphoric non-transitioning people relate to “there’s no part of their brain that says “I’m a guy!”, they just look around and people are calling them “he” and they go with the flow”, since there is in fact no part of their brain saying “I’m a guy” and they are in fact going with the flow of how other people refer to them. But not having a gender identity is a quite different thing from having a gender identity and choosing to present differently from what your gender identity is. I see people write things like “I really wish I was a woman. It would make me so happy to wake up one day and everyone is calling me ‘she’. It’s so weird to look at myself in the mirror and see a man. Female bodies are just inherently softer and better and more beautiful. I don’t like sex because having a dick disgusts me. I spend hours carefully removing all my facial hair because having a beard makes me want to cry. But I’m worried about facing transphobia and that I wouldn’t be attractive if I transitioned, so I guess I’m cis by default.”

In general, if you can write an entire paragraph about all your emotions about your gender, you are probably not cis by default.

Second, many people identify as cis by default when they are in fact regular cisgender people who are bad at introspection. I suspect this is part of what’s up with the Less Wrong survey finding that half of cis people are cis by default (the other part is that rationalists are pretty genderweird in general). It makes sense that cisgender people, particularly ones with relatively weak gender identities, have a hard time noticing their gender identities: in most cases, cisgender people have a body that is aligned with their gender and are very rarely misgendered, so there’s no reason for the issue to come up.

I also think that people’s ability to notice their gender identity is affected by what community they’re in. For instance, evangelical Christian books are full of passages like this:

Sometime between the dreams of your youth and yesterday, something precious has been lost. And that treasure is your heart, your priceless feminine heart. God has set within you a femininity that is powerful and tender, fierce and alluring. No doubt it has been misunderstood. Surely it has been assaulted. But it is there, your true heart, and it is worth recovering. You are captivating.

And New-Agey books are full of passages like this:

To answer these questions, we need to understand the nature of sexual passion and spiritual openness. Sexual attraction is based on sexual polarity, which is the force of passion that arcs between masculine and feminine poles. All natural forces flow between two poles. The North and South Poles of the Earth create a force of magnetism. The positive and negative poles of your electrical outlet or car battery create an electrical flow. In the same way, masculine and feminine poles between people create the flow of sexual feeling. This is sexual polarity.

This force of attraction, which flows between the two different poles of masculine and feminine, is the dynamism that often disappears in modern relationships. If you want real passion, you need a ravisher and a ravishee; otherwise, you just have two buddies who decide to rub genitals in bed.

Each of us, man or woman, possesses both inner masculine and inner feminine qualities. Men can wear earrings, tenderly hug each other, and dance ecstatically in the woods. Women can change the oil in the car, accumulate political and financial power, and box in the ring. Men can take care of their children. Women can fight for their country. We have proven these things. Just about anyone can animate either masculine or feminine energy in any particular moment. (Although they still might have a strong preference to do one or the other, which we will get to in a moment.)

The bottom line of today’s newly emerging 50/50, or “second stage,” relationship is this: If men and women are clinging to a politically correct sameness even in moments of intimacy, then sexual attraction disappears. I don’t mean just the desire for intercourse, but the juice of the entire relationship begins to dry up. The love may still be strong, the friendship may still be strong, but the sexual polarity fades, unless in moments of intimacy one partner is willing to play the masculine pole and one partner is willing to play the feminine. You have to animate the masculine and feminine differences if you want to play in the field of sexual passion.

(After having read The Way Of The Superior Man, I never want to hear complaints about trans people’s autogenderphilia again. At least we don’t claim that sexual attraction is literally impossible unless you’re an autogenderphile.)

There are lots of reasons to object to these passages! For one thing, they assume that everyone has a gender, which is not true: my guess is that a sizeable minority of cis people are cis by default. For another thing, they assume that the way that the author happens to feel gender is the way that every other person in the whole entire world happens to feel gender. If you’re a man who feels deeply affirmed in your masculinity by cherishing and loving your romantic partner and prioritizing him over your work, The Way of the Superior Man doesn’t want to hear from you. If you’re a woman who finds that being fought over by men makes you feel awkward and uncomfortable rather than assured in your femininity, Captivating has nothing to say to you. And they erase people who understand their genders in a nonbinary or gender-non-conforming way.

But I think it’s also possible to recognize the human experience described in those passages. For the author of Captivating, feeling feminine is a real thing and very important to her– a source of pleasure, a way of connection, an aspect of herself. For the author of The Way of the Superior Man, sexuality is fundamentally connected to gender. They might not frame their experiences in the same way I do, but I think in a certain sense they’re feeling the same thing I’m feeling.

However, I think a lot of liberal communities tend to stigmatize the open expression of cisgender people’s genders. Interestingly, feminists don’t. For instance, radical feminists have a framework for gender in the form of Adrienne Rich’s thoughts about lesbianism, Janice Raymond’s work on female friendship, or Mary Daly’s… Mary Daly-ness. Queers incessantly navel-gaze about gender.

But when you venture out from the weeds of feminist theory into the way normal liberals live their day-to-day lives, I can’t help but feel that a lot of liberals feel like the open expression of cisgender people’s genders is somewhat… déclassé. Not at all what our sort of people does.

(Transgender people’s genders don’t seem to be as stigmatized, because the popular sort of feminism that filters through liberal communities tends to believe that Trans Women Are Women. Consistency is not the strong point of shallow feminist analysis. That said, I think a large number of trans-exclusive radical feminists are not really radical feminists, but instead shallow pop libfems who are clever enough to notice that trans people’s existence contradicts their ideology.)

I want to emphasize that I’m not limiting this argument to people who actively identify as feminist, or even to people who don’t identify as anti-feminist. You can identify as anti-feminist and have a framework for gender which is influenced by your culture (as everyone’s is). If you grew up in any sort of vaguely liberal community, one of the things that influences it is the feminism– often oversimplified and misunderstood– which filters down to you.

But if you don’t read theory books, and your feminist thoughts are mostly along the lines of Women Can Do Anything Men Can Do and Feminism Is The Radical Notion That Women Are People and Look At This Badass Woman Breaking Through The Glass Ceiling, it’s easy to be leery about cis people’s gender identities. If you say that you have such-and-such a trait or do such-and-such a thing because you are a woman, isn’t that sort of like saying that women have to have that trait or do that thing? That is kind of suspicious! Men and women are the same except for their genitals! You can’t just go around saying you like wearing suits because you’re a man, I literally just posted on Facebook this Buzzfeed listicle of Fourteen Hottest Women In Suits.

And if you’re in that sort of situation, and you feel like it’s sort of shameful to go around having feelings about your gender, and you’re cisgender and don’t have particularly strong feelings about your gender in the first place… it’s easy to just sort of not notice them.

Like, that’s not even on the top twenty list of the weirdest contortions people get into about their gender.

And thus you get the situation that happened on one of the links into me, where a person said they were cis-by-default and then was asked whether they would crossdress if they knew that no one would think less of them for it and said “obviously not, I’m a man.”

Unfortunately, it is somewhat difficult to police these uses of the term, particularly since there’s no such thing as an objective measurement of whether or not someone has a gender identity. But this is why I am very skeptical about getting any sort of population estimate of how many people are cis-by-default.

The Cluster Structure of Genderspace

Tags

not feminism go away, ozy blog post, sex positivity, speshul snowflake trans

Categories are usually fuzzy. That is, when humans use a category, there are usually some members of the category who have all the traits you associate with that category, some members that have many of the traits, and some members where you have to make a judgment call about whether it counts or not.

The Cluster Structure of Thingspace provides several excellent and uncontroversial examples. For instance, think about birds. Robins and sparrows are very typical birds. Eagles are less typical than robins, but still very typical. Penguins are really fucking weird birds. And you have to make a judgment call about bats: for purposes of biology, a bat is not a bird, whereas for purposes of trying to decide which animals are kosher, a bat is a bird. You make the decision based on whether the more important bird trait is “related to dinosaurs” or “flies.”

Or think about mothers. A typical mother gives birth to and raises a baby who is genetically related to her. Less typical mothers include birth mothers, adoptive mothers, surrogate mothers, genetic mothers, lesbian partners of the mother who gave birth, and so on. A baby’s egg donor is still her mother in some ways– for instance, you’d want to look at the egg donor rather than the adoptive mother to figure out what the baby’s risk of getting a rare disease is– but she’s missing some very common mother traits like being pregnant with the child or raising it.

Gender is a very politicized topic. So it makes sense that while some people agree that whether bats are birds depends on whether you’re doing biology or theology, and that while penguins are birds you shouldn’t assume that they’re able to fly, this common sense goes out the window when you’re talking about gender. I am going to address two issues where poor reasoning about more and less central members of categories makes people deeply confused: biological sex and gender differences.

Biological Sex

Biological sex is actually a remarkably good classification system: something like 98% of humanity can be easily and unambiguously placed into one of two discrete categories, which has to be some kind of record. Of course, not everyone is a metaphorical robin. Eagles are quite common: men with gynecomastia and noticeable hip fat; women who can grow beards; women who have had hysterectomies; men who have had their testicles removed.

However, it all runs into trouble when we’re talking about transgender people (as well as intersex people, but I’m mostly going to focus on transness). People really, really want to insist that there is a single biological sex that we really are. They usually pick chromosomes as the deciding factor, perhaps because medical science is not currently able to change a person’s chromosomes. (I have seen people attempt to be intersex-inclusive by declaring “males” to be the ones with at least one Y chromosome and “females” the ones with no Y chromosome.) They then point out that you have to know what a person’s biological sex is for medical reasons and therefore we trans people are running around being special snowflakes by putting down our identified genders on medical forms.

Except there are actually a very small number of medical problems that are affected by sex chromosomes: for instance, whether you are XX or XY affects your risk of hemophilia or colorblindness; if your sex chromosomes are something other than XX or XY, you may be at risk of various health problems, depending on what your sex chromosomes are. It is usually possible to infer many traits from the fact that a person has XX chromosomes (well, in reality, we usually infer the fact that a person has XX chromosomes from their traits, because most people are not karyotyped). But trans people get biomedical interventions all the time.

For instance, a doctor might be concerned about prescribing a teratogen to someone who might be pregnant. In that case, what matters is whether the person is capable of getting pregnant (many trans men and some cis women are not). A doctor may need to decide whether to screen someone for breast cancer, in which case what matters is whether a person has breasts. Testosterone increases a trans man’s risk of high cholesterol, heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes, although probably not to the level that cisgender men have. And, of course, our unusual sexes present unique health issues: for instance, testosterone is a teratogen, which means that trans men who take testosterone have to be particularly careful about birth control use.

These are not theoretical issues. Trans people have been routinely denied sex-specific medical care, because insurance companies believe that there are men and there are women, and therefore there don’t exist any people who need both a prostate screening and breast cancer screenings. Intersex people even today receive cosmetic genital surgery as infants so that people don’t have to be disturbed by a person who doesn’t fit the categories very well.

The obvious solution to this issue is to say that whether a trans person’s sex is male or female depends on what question you’re asking. A trans woman on estrogen is male for the purpose of whether she should get prostate cancer screenings and female for the purpose of whether she should get breast cancer screenings. When thinking about his risk of high cholesterol, a trans man is probably best considered neither male nor female. We are bats, and you don’t have to have a firm position on whether or not we are birds.

Gender Differences

Men are more likely to use an ethic of justice, which emphasizes universal standards and impartiality. Women are more likely to use an ethic of care, which emphasizes a specific obligation to those you have interpersonal relationships with or those who are vulnerable to the consequences of your choices. The Cohen’s d of this difference (which is a measure of how different the two groups are from each other) is about 0.2.

This is a picture of a Cohen’s d of 0.2. (Picture comes from this excellent website.) It is genuinely difficult to tell that this is a picture of two bell curves instead of one. If you know someone is a man or a woman, it doesn’t tell you much of anything about whether they use an ethic of justice or an ethic of care.

Has that stopped anyone? No, it has not.

For instance, look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on feminist ethics, which includes an entire section on care-focused ethics which includes paragraphs like this:

Gilligan believes that Kohlberg’s methodology is male-biased. Its ears are tuned to male, not female, moral voices. Thus, it fails to register the different voice Gilligan claims to have heard in her study of twenty-nine women reflecting on their abortion decisions. This distinctive moral voice, says Gilligan, speaks a language of care that emphasizes relationships and responsibilities. Seemingly, this language is largely unintelligible to Kohlbergian researchers who speak the dominant moral language of traditional ethics—namely, a language of justice that stresses rights and rules.

Ah, yes, the distinctive moral voice of women. The one that sounds almost fucking exactly like the voice of men. That distinctive moral voice of women?

Putting known gender differences into the Cohen’s d chart generator is an instructive experience. For instance, here’s gender differences in masturbation and casual sex, respectively:

And here’s neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness/extroversion (the latter two have the same effect size), again in the order I listed:

Now, there are in fact some effect size charts that look like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. Here’s an example:

This is a picture of the difference in toy preferences at age three. I am not sure how useful this is for anyone who isn’t a toy marketer, but there you go. (Note that one-year-olds and five-year-olds both have less stark gendered toy preferences. Presumably male toddlers are from Mars, female toddlers are from Venus, and everyone else is from Earth.)

So what’s the takeaway here? (Besides “Ozy is fascinated with their new stats discovery,” of course.) The answer is that people are bad at categories. We learn facts about the typical man: for instance, he uses an ethic of justice, masturbates more, is okay with casual sex, is more introverted, is less neurotic, is more disagreeable, is less conscientious, and played with trucks but not dolls as a child. We then conclude from this that everyone we stick in the category “man” uses an ethic of justice and therefore we are perfectly justified in creating an entire subfield of ethics complaining about how the ethics of care is excluded because of sexism.

But that isn’t true! It is possible that people in a category are more likely to have a particular trait, but the size of this effect is not actually large enough for this to be useful information. In fact, in studies of gender differences, this is quite common!

While I’ve been picking on Carol Gilligan (and god is she an easy target to pick on), I think this kind of thought is actually more common among anti-feminists than it is among feminists.

Think about gender differences in permissive attitudes about casual sex. This is actually a fairly striking difference: about four-fifths of men have a more permissive attitude towards casual sex than the average woman does. (Of course, this might be caused by inborn tendencies, by cultural influence, or by a combination of both; you shouldn’t assume that a difference existing means it is biological.) You can see the effects of this difference clearly: for instance, it is generally easier for heterosexual women to have casual sex than it is for heterosexual men to have casual sex; gay men are more likely to have casual sex than lesbians are; there are essentially no full-service sex workers who target a solely female audience, presumably because women who want no-strings-attached casual sex rarely have to pay for it.

But there’s also a considerable amount of overlap: about seven-tenths of the two groups overlap. And that matters too! For instance, many people assume that casual sex must be a rapacious man taking advantage of an innocent woman who just wants love. But there are lots of women who like casual sex. Perhaps the women who have casual sex disproportionately come from the 20% of the female population who have more permissive attitudes about casual sex than the average man. In that case, we don’t have to be worried that hookup culture is harming women; it is merely catering to the desires of women who are a little unusual (eagles, not robins).

And I’m using a relatively stark gender difference, which would bias my case. Looking at something like neuroticism– where 65% of men are above the female mean, and there’s an 84% overlap– it’s hard to see much justification for an “essential masculine nature” or an “essential feminine nature.” Such reason is merely looking at robins and then assuming, in defiance of all the evidence, that they are the only kind of bird.

Against Blanchardianism

Tags

ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

[content warning: mentions of transphobic violence, slurs]

My understanding of transness bears certain similarities to those of the Blanchardians I know. I suspect that trans people fall broadly into two types, although as always sharp binaries erase the experiences of many people. However, I think that their proposed etiologies are absurdly incorrect. I believe that HSTS-subtype trans people experience gender dysphoria and are not simply transitioning as part of a rational decision, and I believe that autogenderphile-subtype trans people do not primarily transition because of a sexual fetish.

My true rejection of Blanchardian etiologies is that they don’t describe my experiences at all. Of course, I don’t expect this to convince people who aren’t me.

Regarding the HSTS subtype: I agree that it is likely that HSTS-subtype trans people are on a continuum with gender-non-conforming gay people. I too am struck by the similarity between stone butches and trans men, and by the similarity between drag queens (particularly historically) and trans women. The sharp divisions between these groups seem to me to be as much a political construct as an accurate description of empirical reality (read David Valentine’s excellent Imagining Transgender for more). There is an incentive for both trans people and gay people to support this separation. It is far easier to advocate for trans people’s rights if transness is disconnected from icky sex stuff. And gay people (particularly gay men) have a lot to gain from distancing themselves from the victims of transmisogyny.

Of course, people currently understand themselves as either a trans woman or a gender-non-conforming gay man, either a butch lesbian or a trans man. The categories we have available influence our behavior and self-understandings, and lead to a very real difference between butch lesbians and trans men in present-day queer culture. However, this is not true historically. Either we or the people forty years ago have to be wrong, and it seems quite likely to me that the answer is “us”.

That said, it seems to me that the HSTS theory– which generally implies that transition is a rational decision made because it is easier to get through life as a passing straight trans woman than as a flamboyant gay man– neglects the reality of gender dysphoria. It’s true that it’s hard to draw a firm line where a strong desire to be gender-non-conforming transforms into gender dysphoria. And it’s true that many people, particularly historically, chose to manage their dysphoria through being a drag queen, stone butch, etc., and that whether one becomes a stone butch or a trans man probably depends in part on which one gives you the best other life outcomes. But nevertheless there are many teenagers thrown out of homes whose parents would be fine with a faggot but not a tranny. And while “no fats no fems” is a trend in gay culture, gay men are mostly not going to straight-up assault or murder you for having sex with them as a feminine gay guy, while many straight men will. Conversely, there exist feminine gay men in Iran who have not transitioned, even though it is clearly better to be a straight trans woman in Iran than a feminine gay man. It seems to me that the only way to explain this is that “desire to live as a particular gender and/or sex for its own sake” is an actual thing which puts its thumb on the scales.

Regarding the autogynephile/autoandrophile subtype: I feel like autogynephilia theories, to succeed, must sail very carefully between Scylla and Charybdis, and so far all such theories I’ve seen have wound up being devoured by the monster or drowning in the whirlpool.

Scylla: In general, people do not disrupt their entire lives out of a solely and purely sexual motivation. People who kink on rape might roleplay rape, but they don’t try to get raped themselves. People with a public-use fetish might get tied up for public use at a play party, but they don’t generally do it on a street corner. I’ve met quite a few people with an impregnation fetish, and to my knowledge they have collectively had one unplanned pregnancy, which was a result of attempting to safely indulge the impregnation fetish and screwing it up.

Of course there are exceptions: some people with a rape fetish commit rape; some people with an impregnation fetish deliberately get impregnated; some people with a bimbo fetish get boob jobs. Perhaps many people are secretly autogenderphiles, but most people don’t transition. Let’s Fermi estimate this: 0.3% of people are trans; perhaps 0.15% are autogenderphiles. I’m going to guess that maybe 1% of people are willing to do something as life-changing as transition to satisfy a fetish. (If you are objecting that this is too low, consider that– unlike, say, rape and impregnation– autogenderphilia cannot be indulged on impulse when one is sexually aroused and not thinking straight and– unlike, say, getting a boob job– it involves a major disruption to one’s personal relationships, including perhaps a divorce and parental rejection. I consider this estimate conservative.)

This estimate would imply that 15% of people have an autogenderphilia fetish, making it one of the most common fetishes among men.  A study of the relative frequency of sexual fetishes suggests that this is not the case: “behavior of others”, the largest category into which autogenderphilia could conceivably be put, is less common than “body parts or features” and “objects associated with the body.” In particular, it appears that autogenderphilia is distinctly less common than foot fetishism, and far less than 15% of the population is interested in foot fetishism.

There are certain exceptions to my “people do not generally disrupt their lives out of sexual motivation.” For instance, people may cheat on their spouses, engage in 24/7 BDSM, or become polyamorous. However, these desires are generally not purely and solely sexual in motivation. A person who cheats on their spouse may find their relationship unfulfilling or be looking for a sense of validation. 24/7 subs generally find submission emotionally satisfying or have a romantic desire for a dominant/submissive relationship. Polyamorous people often value the freedom associated with being poly or not having to limit their partners’ sexual choices. While sexual motivation is no doubt one part of these decisions– a person may be more likely to become poly if they’re sexually aroused by their partner having sex with other people, or more likely to cheat if they’re turned on by the person they plan on cheating with– the emotional and interpersonal components play a more primary role.

From a gender-dysphoria perspective, transition makes sense: even if sexual arousal at the idea of being a particular gender is one aspect of why a person transitions, their gender dysphoria is still the primary motivation. From a perspective which does not accept the validity of gender dysphoria, you have to explain why this is the only sexual fetish that motivates people to this extent.

Charybdis: Researchers like Anne Lawrence argue that autogynephilia should be interpreted as a kind of romantic love which has affectional and attachment-based elements. When sexual arousal at the idea of being a woman fades, trans women may still feel an affectional bond to the reality of being women. Trans women may idealize the female body, as lovers idealize their beloved; trans women prioritize transition highly, as lovers prioritize their love; trans women may transition after some adverse life circumstance, as people use a new love affair to cope with some setback in life; people may find meaning and deep personal transformation in their gender, as they do with love.

I will set aside, for a moment, the argument that through an equal series of comparisons one could prove that the average musician experiences romantic attraction to the idea of being a rock star. (They idealize what being a musician is like, they prioritize playing music, they use music to cope with problems, they find a sense of meaning and personal transformation in music… those rock stars keep taking sexy pictures of themselves and they SAY it’s for the fans, but it’s probably a sign of their deep-seated autorockstarphilia.) A stronger question, for me, is: where are all the other people falling in love with themselves?

There exist trans women who are attracted to red-haired women, have a strong desire to be women, and have no particular interest in being redheads. By extension, there must presumably be men who are attracted to red-haired women, have no particular interest in being women, and have a strong desire to be redheads. Since red hair dye is readily available, these men would have no incentive not to admit that they are in love with themselves as redheads. Why aren’t they?

Maybe people are only capable of falling in love with themselves as a particular gender. This seems strange and arbitrary to me: our culture uses gender as the primary way of classifying people’s sexual attractions, but other cultures didn’t, and there’s no reason to assume that biology cares more about our classification system than the Romans’ active/passive system. But fine. Let’s grant that.

Where are the autoandrophiliac gay men? About 3.5% of the American population is lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Assuming again that 0.15% of people are autogenderphiliac, by my reckoning there should be 15,750 lesbian, gay, or bisexual Americans who are romantically in love with themselves (7,650 people who are just lesbian or gay). Fortunately, in this age of the Internet, weird people can find each other. Any group of nearly sixteen thousand people (or about seven thousand five hundred people, if you prefer to exclude bisexuals) ought to have a thriving Internet community, with its own Fetlife groups, tiresome discourse, and extremely niche porn. This community does not appear to actually exist; at best, a small number of autoromantics appear to comment on AVEN, but not in sufficient numbers to get their own forum. (To be clear, I’m not claiming there’s no such thing as autoromanticism; human sexuality is very diverse. I am claiming that it seems extraordinarily rare, far rarer than would be required to explain this theory.)

I have occasionally heard speculation that gay male bodybuilders are autoandrophiles. It seems to me that if that were the case it would be commonly known in gay male bodybuilder communities that many gay male bodybuilders are literally in love with themselves. Again, why would they hide it? It’s not like a gatekeeper is going to take away their squat rack if they don’t.

Finally, the autogynephilia hypothesis fails to explain one of the most striking facts about type-two transgender people, their distinctive personalities. The type-two personality could be characterized as “broader autism phenotype”, “nerdy”, or “really really weird”; someone in the Slate Star Codex comments called it “Heinlein protagonists”, which is honestly my favorite characterization. (Right down to the wacky political beliefs!) When I first read about Martine Rothblatt, a highly paid trans lesbian CEO who is trying to make a robot version of her wife so that her wife can live forever, I was like “yeah, that’s the kind of shit queer trans people do”. We’re strange people.

It is very unclear to me why autogynephilia would be the Weird Person Fetish. It’s not that only super-weird people transition: like I said above, autogynephilia is not that common of a fetish. Perhaps all fetishes are more common among super-weird people? Maybe there’s some connection between fetish and personality type? It’s an answerable question in theory, but Blanchardians appear strangely averse to trying to answer it.