I ask myself some version of that a lot. Something like, am I just too weak-willed to be a proud gender non-conforming man? Have I not worked on my own brain enough, to make myself like my (now masc) body? Am I not brave enough and mentally strong enough to deserve gender liberation?
These questions aren't helpful. These are the kinds of questions that keep people in egg mode or in the closet for a very long time, myself included when I was on the other side of things. In them, there is no productive answer.
What if I am weak-willed, what then? I can't make myself stronger. Maybe I can be proud of being weak. That seems like a pretty gender-nonconforming thing for a man to do. What if I won't ever be able to psychologically willpower myself into liking my body, since that never worked as a woman or a man? Then I guess liking my body isn't the most important thing. I've lived this long not liking it. I can put that goal aside since it's not coming. Am I not brave or strong enough to deserve gender liberation? A freedom isn't a thing to be deserved, so I can cast that one aside too.
My position passing as a cis man gave me huge social rewards. I still hated being in it. On the path I'm on now, I'm going to lose a few of them. Go back to being stared at in the men's room and the locker room. and things like that That's okay. For some reason that feels more comfortable than fitting in. There's a lot of privileges a TME trans person gets, and I have a responsibility to own up to them. But I don't think anything like a semi-detransition affords social rewards. When people draw that conclusion they think it's a snap of a finger that retroactively makes you cis. And it doesn't. It's another transition. With all the social challenges and vulnerabilities that entails.
I suspect we have a different view of what being transgender is and means. I’m committed to a scientific view of the human animal. That’s why and how medicine works, much of the time. Under that view, there is no such thing as no longer being trans, any more than one can stop having good verbal acuity or great navigation skills or, say, same-sex attraction.
The relevant brain structures seem to me unlikely to be amenable to a change of such magnitude that the property is meaningfully changeable. (Of course we can damage the brain to reduce someone to non-verbal capacity but…)
Yeah, it sounds like we do. I have yet to see any convincing evidence that transness can be observed in the brain; gayness can't be either. I tend to see questions of the self and identity as being very mutable and contextual, and thus hard to pin down. Especially since science can really only serve to describe and predict, not offer any kind of prescription for how a person ought to make sense of how they feel in the particular.
In the studies conducted at Stockholm Brain Centre, treatment-naive transgender patients had two notable variations from typical. One, lower gyrifixation index in parietal cortex. That is, the area of the cortex where sensory nerves from the entire body terminate and where the body is represented by a “map” differs. The area is flatter than what it is in cisgender controls.
The other major difference has to do with default mode network where sensory input is related to perception and feeling of self.
Considering how extreme behaviours and feelings transgender patients report, it would be extremely surprising if we didn’t see major differences in brain structure and function.
Neuroimaging research is truly in its infancy and is prone to a lot of p-hacking, fishing expeditions, false positives created by data cleaning, and of course the often-mentioned small sample size problem. On a more conceptual level, attempting to identify a biological, observable "reason" why someone is trans is a dead end. What should we do if someone wishes to transition but doesn't have that biological trait? Should we screen for it before allowing someone to access transition-related care? What about trans people who don't want to medically transition but are firm in their identity? The search for biological reasons that people are queer/trans/gay/etc only reflect a scientific desire to explain, track, and control something that ought to be left to the rights of the individuals themselves. Even if there were a strong correlation between transness and any observable neurological structural differences, there will always be people who wish to transition who do not have them, and so it's a faulty theoretical orientation. And a dangerous one.
Let's start at step one. Let me know what you disagree with, ok? :)
Biological sex is not a discrete, independent, binary, property. Everyone has properties that fall somewhere on the spectrum we see for a given species, and, yes, there are usually, but not always, two modes for this distribution in adult animals.
However, we, humans, have created the classifications of female, male, and intersex. But it's always a human agent who makes the call of who is the 'last female' and who is the poor woman who loses her female-ness when she's plopped over into the category of 'intersex.' In actual reality, we are over 8 billion individuals, each with their unique blend of properties. Intersex as a category is just a crutch. (But it can be clinically useful)
You see the difficulty when you start asking for 'a rule of recognition' -- how to recognise the female-ness or male-ness of someone. You get word salad. For every rule I've heard, there are either naturally-occurring exceptions that show the rule doesn't quite do the job, or the person formulating the rule has some explaining to do for why they have so gerrymandered the definition.
Example 1. Having many genetic variants that code for 'tall' doesn't make you tall. Having the kind of sex hormone dominance that often correlates with being taller than most people doesn't make you tall. Height is a physical property we can measure, but where is the limit of being tall or just normal height?
If you get leg lengthening surgery, and you start hitting your head on low-hanging lamps, and you can suddenly reach the top shelf -- are you now tall or not? If you lose your legs in a traffic accident, are you still actually tall? Depends on how you want to use those labels, right?
So, what is a female? If you talk about producing oocytes, or having the kind of organs that can, or will be able to, or could earlier, do that, you've now excluded many PCOS women from being female.
If you make exception for those "hormonal imbalances" (as if nature has such a thing as 'right' hormones concentrations -- we have those hormones we have, and we might enjoy the results or not, but there's no right in biology) but not others, why?
Example 2. If an identical twin is born without ovaries, but gets one from her sister, are they now both female? Were they both female ab initio? If yes, then being female doesn't actually depend on having the type of gonad, sex hormone synthesis, pubertal development, or sex cell production that TERFs and intellectually lazy biologists use for classification into female sex.
If no, then we have made someone from not-female into female. Through surgery. Here, the TERF or lazy biologist has to explain why restoring function that leads to 'female-typical' course of development and life somehow fails to make the person female, despite them having "female" genes, sex hormones, anatomy and germ cells.
Or if she loses her ovaries as a child in an iatrogenic accident? She now no longer has "female" gonads, sex hormone synthesis, sex cell production, growth and development, and likely not psychology, either. Why is she still female, regardless? Genes?
But why base our classification of the animal body on genes? We don't classify someone as 'patient with haemophilia' if they don't actually express that property in their phenotype. Or "myopic" if they have 20/20 vision, no matter their genetic predisposition for myopia.
In nearly every other case, we base our classification on phenotype, gene expression, not the chromosomes or genetic variants. (Except medical genetics, but that doesn't save the essentialist thinker, either. Because there, our intention is to avoid letting someone go from 'has DNA that codes for condition X' to 'has condition X')
Ah, I’m not talking at that level. Here, I was thinking about how we might wish that humans stopped caring about what other people look like, but it’s not going to happen. They won’t even start looking beyond congenital properties that have no moral weight whatsoever.
Prof Glenn Loury said something like this in a podcast of his… ‘no matter what you do, some people will always see a <slur>. But you don’t have to be that. You don’t have to be a ghetto n… or a bad motherf… You can live as a black man with dignity’.
What I’m getting at is: the world is what the world is. If we go against the prevailing social codes, we cannot expect most people to reward us for it. Humans are the kind of social animal that cares for whether other people go along to get along or are contrarians or not afraid to rock the boat. The catch is, sometimes we are utterly in the wrong if we hold our peace for social rewards.
But this basic feature of human social life will remain: we like those better whose behaviour signals that they are with us, and like those worse who challenge our team.
Congratulations for figuring out how you want to live your life!
I was, however, left with a sense that you want to flout convention and tweak everyone’s noses while also enjoying the social rewards of fitting in.
I ask myself some version of that a lot. Something like, am I just too weak-willed to be a proud gender non-conforming man? Have I not worked on my own brain enough, to make myself like my (now masc) body? Am I not brave enough and mentally strong enough to deserve gender liberation?
These questions aren't helpful. These are the kinds of questions that keep people in egg mode or in the closet for a very long time, myself included when I was on the other side of things. In them, there is no productive answer.
What if I am weak-willed, what then? I can't make myself stronger. Maybe I can be proud of being weak. That seems like a pretty gender-nonconforming thing for a man to do. What if I won't ever be able to psychologically willpower myself into liking my body, since that never worked as a woman or a man? Then I guess liking my body isn't the most important thing. I've lived this long not liking it. I can put that goal aside since it's not coming. Am I not brave or strong enough to deserve gender liberation? A freedom isn't a thing to be deserved, so I can cast that one aside too.
My position passing as a cis man gave me huge social rewards. I still hated being in it. On the path I'm on now, I'm going to lose a few of them. Go back to being stared at in the men's room and the locker room. and things like that That's okay. For some reason that feels more comfortable than fitting in. There's a lot of privileges a TME trans person gets, and I have a responsibility to own up to them. But I don't think anything like a semi-detransition affords social rewards. When people draw that conclusion they think it's a snap of a finger that retroactively makes you cis. And it doesn't. It's another transition. With all the social challenges and vulnerabilities that entails.
I suspect we have a different view of what being transgender is and means. I’m committed to a scientific view of the human animal. That’s why and how medicine works, much of the time. Under that view, there is no such thing as no longer being trans, any more than one can stop having good verbal acuity or great navigation skills or, say, same-sex attraction.
The relevant brain structures seem to me unlikely to be amenable to a change of such magnitude that the property is meaningfully changeable. (Of course we can damage the brain to reduce someone to non-verbal capacity but…)
Yeah, it sounds like we do. I have yet to see any convincing evidence that transness can be observed in the brain; gayness can't be either. I tend to see questions of the self and identity as being very mutable and contextual, and thus hard to pin down. Especially since science can really only serve to describe and predict, not offer any kind of prescription for how a person ought to make sense of how they feel in the particular.
In the studies conducted at Stockholm Brain Centre, treatment-naive transgender patients had two notable variations from typical. One, lower gyrifixation index in parietal cortex. That is, the area of the cortex where sensory nerves from the entire body terminate and where the body is represented by a “map” differs. The area is flatter than what it is in cisgender controls.
The other major difference has to do with default mode network where sensory input is related to perception and feeling of self.
Considering how extreme behaviours and feelings transgender patients report, it would be extremely surprising if we didn’t see major differences in brain structure and function.
Neuroimaging research is truly in its infancy and is prone to a lot of p-hacking, fishing expeditions, false positives created by data cleaning, and of course the often-mentioned small sample size problem. On a more conceptual level, attempting to identify a biological, observable "reason" why someone is trans is a dead end. What should we do if someone wishes to transition but doesn't have that biological trait? Should we screen for it before allowing someone to access transition-related care? What about trans people who don't want to medically transition but are firm in their identity? The search for biological reasons that people are queer/trans/gay/etc only reflect a scientific desire to explain, track, and control something that ought to be left to the rights of the individuals themselves. Even if there were a strong correlation between transness and any observable neurological structural differences, there will always be people who wish to transition who do not have them, and so it's a faulty theoretical orientation. And a dangerous one.
Let's start at step one. Let me know what you disagree with, ok? :)
Biological sex is not a discrete, independent, binary, property. Everyone has properties that fall somewhere on the spectrum we see for a given species, and, yes, there are usually, but not always, two modes for this distribution in adult animals.
However, we, humans, have created the classifications of female, male, and intersex. But it's always a human agent who makes the call of who is the 'last female' and who is the poor woman who loses her female-ness when she's plopped over into the category of 'intersex.' In actual reality, we are over 8 billion individuals, each with their unique blend of properties. Intersex as a category is just a crutch. (But it can be clinically useful)
You see the difficulty when you start asking for 'a rule of recognition' -- how to recognise the female-ness or male-ness of someone. You get word salad. For every rule I've heard, there are either naturally-occurring exceptions that show the rule doesn't quite do the job, or the person formulating the rule has some explaining to do for why they have so gerrymandered the definition.
Example 1. Having many genetic variants that code for 'tall' doesn't make you tall. Having the kind of sex hormone dominance that often correlates with being taller than most people doesn't make you tall. Height is a physical property we can measure, but where is the limit of being tall or just normal height?
If you get leg lengthening surgery, and you start hitting your head on low-hanging lamps, and you can suddenly reach the top shelf -- are you now tall or not? If you lose your legs in a traffic accident, are you still actually tall? Depends on how you want to use those labels, right?
So, what is a female? If you talk about producing oocytes, or having the kind of organs that can, or will be able to, or could earlier, do that, you've now excluded many PCOS women from being female.
If you make exception for those "hormonal imbalances" (as if nature has such a thing as 'right' hormones concentrations -- we have those hormones we have, and we might enjoy the results or not, but there's no right in biology) but not others, why?
Example 2. If an identical twin is born without ovaries, but gets one from her sister, are they now both female? Were they both female ab initio? If yes, then being female doesn't actually depend on having the type of gonad, sex hormone synthesis, pubertal development, or sex cell production that TERFs and intellectually lazy biologists use for classification into female sex.
If no, then we have made someone from not-female into female. Through surgery. Here, the TERF or lazy biologist has to explain why restoring function that leads to 'female-typical' course of development and life somehow fails to make the person female, despite them having "female" genes, sex hormones, anatomy and germ cells.
Or if she loses her ovaries as a child in an iatrogenic accident? She now no longer has "female" gonads, sex hormone synthesis, sex cell production, growth and development, and likely not psychology, either. Why is she still female, regardless? Genes?
But why base our classification of the animal body on genes? We don't classify someone as 'patient with haemophilia' if they don't actually express that property in their phenotype. Or "myopic" if they have 20/20 vision, no matter their genetic predisposition for myopia.
In nearly every other case, we base our classification on phenotype, gene expression, not the chromosomes or genetic variants. (Except medical genetics, but that doesn't save the essentialist thinker, either. Because there, our intention is to avoid letting someone go from 'has DNA that codes for condition X' to 'has condition X')
Ah, I’m not talking at that level. Here, I was thinking about how we might wish that humans stopped caring about what other people look like, but it’s not going to happen. They won’t even start looking beyond congenital properties that have no moral weight whatsoever.
Prof Glenn Loury said something like this in a podcast of his… ‘no matter what you do, some people will always see a <slur>. But you don’t have to be that. You don’t have to be a ghetto n… or a bad motherf… You can live as a black man with dignity’.
What I’m getting at is: the world is what the world is. If we go against the prevailing social codes, we cannot expect most people to reward us for it. Humans are the kind of social animal that cares for whether other people go along to get along or are contrarians or not afraid to rock the boat. The catch is, sometimes we are utterly in the wrong if we hold our peace for social rewards.
But this basic feature of human social life will remain: we like those better whose behaviour signals that they are with us, and like those worse who challenge our team.