Those Categories Do Not Work for Man (or Woman)
(adapted from a Tumblr post I wrote last year)
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I
Of the various woke movements that have popped up in the last several years, perhaps the most, well, intolerant of them all (and that's saying something!) is the transgender rights movement.
In a crowded field, I give them first place in re-writing language to assume agreement - "misgender", "gender-affirming" - even "he, she, him, her, them, they" (kinda puts redefining"racism" to shame).
Perhaps you think the pronoun thing is inevitable - maybe, but I don't think so. I think it would have been cool to develop a compound "he-she", "them-him", etc that would recognize that the gender was in dispute. I don't care about professional settings. What I care about is among friends. I would love to have a "she-he" (affectionate), a way to say, "You think you are a she. I recognize that and that you are responsible for your life and decisions. I disagree with your claim. Let's move on." (Ok, that would be a pipe dream, but I like it.)
The movement tries (hopefully unsuccessfully) to teach trans people to treat all disagreement as hate. This belief is, to say the least, not helpful for getting along and seems like it would be horrible for the mental health of the movement's "clients".
As you might suspect, I also think the trans activist movement is wrong on the object level, but that is not why I wrote this post. The reason I wrote this post is because I'm starting to wonder if the reason the trans movement is intolerant and the reason it is wrong are connected. 60-70% confidence: the project the trans movement is attempting to make is not within the normal elasticity of human nature. Such projects normally just fail, but when they succeed, they can only do so through extreme intolerance of dissent (cf. Communism), which is fatal to high levels of social trust, not necessarily through the project's original failings, but through the secondary destruction of fighting the humans in their society for so long.
But now I feel that I have to add a longer, less important to me, post as to why the trans movement is wrong. So here goes:
II
The best pro-trans argument I've seen is by Scott Alexander, a practicing psychiatrist, who is exceptionally tolerant of disagreement in his entire writing corpus, and wrote a defense of the new gender ideology (at least back in 2014 when he wrote it). It's very well reasoned and you should read it. My orders of magnitude shorter summary and my rebuttal follow.
Scott argues that many things, including sex/gender (which he treats as synonyms except for an aside recognizing that some people disagree), are a cluster of characteristics that allow freedom in choosing a useful definition:
Absolutely typical men have Y chromosomes, have male genitalia, appreciate manly things like sports and lumberjackery, are romantically attracted to women, personally identify as male, wear male clothing like blue jeans, sing baritone in the opera, et cetera.
Some people satisfy some criteria of manhood and not others, in much the same way that Pluto satisfies only some criteria of planethood and whales satisfy only some criteria of mammalhood.
According to Scott, in these edge cases, the common use definition (in 2014) makes chromosomes the tiebreak, but the trans activist project wants to change the tiebreak because it would help people with gender dysphoria.
Even if we disagree with his definitional argument, Scott argues “the primary thing in psychiatry is to help the patient, whatever the means” comparing the gender thing to a therapy solution so wonderful that I'm passing on the whole story1
The Hair Dryer Incident was probably the biggest dispute I’ve seen in the mental hospital where I work. Most of the time all the psychiatrists get along and have pretty much the same opinion about important things, but people were at each other’s throats about the Hair Dryer Incident.
Basically, this one obsessive compulsive woman would drive to work every morning and worry she had left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house. So she’d drive back home to check that the hair dryer was off, then drive back to work, then worry that maybe she hadn’t really checked well enough, then drive back, and so on ten or twenty times a day.
It’s a pretty typical case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it was really interfering with her life. She worked some high-powered job – I think a lawyer – and she was constantly late to everything because of this driving back and forth, to the point where her career was in a downspin and she thought she would have to quit and go on disability. She wasn’t able to go out with friends, she wasn’t even able to go to restaurants because she would keep fretting she left the hair dryer on at home and have to rush back. She’d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy, she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped.
So she came to my hospital and was seen by a colleague of mine, who told her “Hey, have you thought about just bringing the hair dryer with you?”
And it worked.
She would be driving to work in the morning, and she’d start worrying she’d left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house, and so she’d look at the seat next to her, and there would be the hair dryer, right there. And she only had the one hair dryer, which was now accounted for. So she would let out a sigh of relief and keep driving to work.
And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and what if it got out to the broader psychiatric community that instead of giving all of these high-tech medications and sophisticated therapies we were just telling people to put their hair dryers on the front seat of their car?
But I think the guy deserved a medal. Here’s someone who was totally untreatable by the normal methods, with a debilitating condition, and a drop-dead simple intervention that nobody else had thought of gave her her life back. If one day I open up my own psychiatric practice, I am half-seriously considering using a picture of a hair dryer as the logo, just to let everyone know where I stand on this issue.
I seriously love this story, but it's not apt to the gender controversy.
III
Scott is wrong about what the common use definition is (was?), but more importantly, the common use definition in 2014 and the basically unquestioned definition until some time within the past 20 years (which I will call the "traditional definition" from here forward) is good and useful and probably load-bearing, and the new definition isn't working.
The traditional definition is basically a physical appearance definition, which, in intimate spaces is a genitalia definition (technically still a cluster of traits, but a much much smaller cluster than Scott suggests). Some people are trans by this definition, and it had been generally accepted that sex change surgery changes one's sex, which was synonymous with gender, before the current controversy.
There's a purpose to the traditional definition. It's about the other meaning of sex - sexual intercourse and sexual reproduction and the many associated downstream effects thereof. No matter how well a woman gets along with her fellow lumberjacks at the ultimate MMA fight, what we need from sex/gender is a way to identify that she is the lumberjack that most of the other lumberjacks will look at differently, especially in the lumberjack shower. This is the load-bearing part. It has ripple effects all through how people treat each other and important for safety reasons to get right (Gestures in the general direction of Camille Paglia.)
Also, the traditional definition is intuitive to others. The new definition is not. (Imagine if the hair dryer woman had required everyone in her office to call her computer a hair dryer. I'm imagining that and laughing at the convoluted language in the tech support memos.)
In theory, the new definition would work if people's self-definition was good, or even better than the traditional one, at getting what we need - if it found the outliers in sexual attraction, both to and from a person. In the real world, considering the people who claim a gender different from how they look, I don't see that happening at all. I don't even see it picking out the outliers in the broader cluster. It's not finding boys who think like girls or vice versa. Instead it's demonstrating that it's the nature of humanity to misperceive the other sex, and to latch on to a typical-mind, simplistic, or caricature understanding of them. It's as if Alpha Centauri and asteroid belt object #5C312 noticed some similarities of themselves to planets and decided that they must be planets. Meanwhile, Venus and Mercury decided that they weren't. Then we just went with it and tried to go on talking about astronomy, never bringing up uncomfortable facts, such as that Alpha Centauri is so big.
(Aside on gay people and 3rd, 4th, etc genders skipped for some pretence of a semblance of brevity, or maybe just laziness. These don't rescue the modern trans argument.)
But what about the extreme cases with gender dysphoria? I'm not a psychiatrist and I don't have the clinical experience Scott has. It's hard to imagine the pronoun thing is working. If people need to tell others their pronouns, they won't be perceived as the gender they want to be. But more importantly, insisting here is part of where we destroy society. (See above.)
There has been a solution since the mid-20th Century. I already mentioned it - the physical sex change operation. I don't think we've developed anything better. Yes, surgery is a lot more expensive and permanent and life-changing than just changing pronouns. It can't and shouldn't be done lightly.
Society has a good reason for the traditional gender categories. If it is to keep them, the only gender changes allowed have to be costly (whether financially or otherwise or both). Sorry.
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