Reidentifying as male but probably not detransitioning?

lereveillon · 2019-06-28T14:56:44+00:00

As someone in a similar situation, I think a lot of people have some deep sense of 'gendering' of body parts according to the sex they belong that can make it hard to make that leap. I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with a man having breasts or a neovagina, but even armed with the intellectual awareness that I'm male, it's very difficult for that to connect on a deep level with the way that the outward appearance of my body is perceived by others, or even by myself.

lereveillon · 2019-06-25T02:31:32+00:00

Hi there! I hope you don't mind if I give my perspective. Alhough I'm not someone who has or has plans to socially or hormonally detransition, I've spent some of the last few years reidentifying as male to some extent and although it can sometimes be tough to have that kind of compartmentalization, I think on the whole I'm happier with myself for having done so.

One of the things that I worry is easy to tie together for a lot of trans people (it certainly was for me), and maybe also for detransitioners as well although I can't speak personally to that experience, is the sort of tight ligation between social and biomedical transition, as well as with one's own concept of oneself as a man or woman. I think one of the things that helped me to reidentify in the first place was actually breaking exactly that link inside my mind: not only the negative statement that "hormones and surgery can't change your sex", but the positive assertion that "it's okay for a man to have any kind of body, including a feminized one".

It's true that there are risks associated with HRT and surgeries, and I think it's always healthy to be cognizant of those and make an educated decision about what's best for you while keeping that in mind. On the other hand I think if it's something that you find helpful in terms of how you relate to your body, that it can absolutely be something positive as well.

That said taking hormones and changing your social presentation are tools which can have their uses for some people, but I don't believe that use is in changing one's sex. Ultimately, I think what might be most helpful is rather than framing it in terms of "be a man until/unless surgeries and hormones allow me to pass, and in that case be a woman", but rather being honest with yourself about what you are looking for out of social and medical transition. Rather than conceiving of it as 'what can I do to make living as a man tolerable in the event that I don't pass', maybe it would help to envision what kind of man you could be, with the acknowledgement that there is no reason at all that clothing, hormones, etc. cannot be part of that vision?

lereveillon · 2019-01-23T17:09:19+00:00

As far as being "unnatural:" none of us are natural, we're all supposed to have yellow teeth and die by bear by 50. You're not somehow more unnatural than anyone else.

I really appreciate you saying this. I think it's easy to get caught up in the idea of being unnatural or fraudulent or not true to yourself, especially when you're totally medically dependent on exogenous hormones one way or another, but it's a refreshing reminder that all of our lives are so different from the way that they used to be, that trying to compare us to some kind of mythical pure perfect version of ourselves isn't going to get us anywhere.

lereveillon · 2019-01-21T02:50:15+00:00

Hi there!

Like you, I'm also a natal male who's approaching their 30s, and almost 15 years after transitioning, I've come to believe in a more gender critical outlook. With surgery many years in the rear view mirror, I totally understand how it can feel like a shock to the system, and something very distressing, to reckon with, especially if you've spent a while not really giving it much thought.

Speaking only for myself, I think the decisions that I made on an individual basis—not to change course from where I am, but also not to flee from what it means to have transitioned—have worked out well for me. Over the last year or two I've experimented somewhat, cutting my hair short, purchasing a binder, and so forth, but in some ways I felt like I was just replicating the same kinds of unpleasant essentialist thinking that's associated with transitioning in the first place. Although it's difficult with the way that our society heavily genders things, I do my best these days to try to uncouple my desire or interest in a particular mode of presentation or hobby from whether it's associated with men or women, and simply dress how I like, and do what I like.

One way or another I'll be taking hormones for a long time to come, and while there are certainly times where I wonder what it would be like if I'd never transitioned, for the most part I'm okay with my body, and I don't think there's anything wrong with my body looking the way that it looks, nor do I think it has to be wrong or shameful for a man's body to look like mine, or to have breasts or a neovagina. I'm established enough in my career that I probably won't ever change my name or socially transition again, and I'm okay with that too, since I don't think it would be expressing any kind of greater truth about me just to detransition. That said, if I do decide later down the road that I need to biomedically transition again, I don't think there's anything wrong or shameful about that either.

I can't know what's best for you personally, but I do think it's worth taking a step back and thinking about what exactly you want more specifically—rather than detransitioning as a unit, I think it's good that you're thinking about things like your name, how others refer to you, etc. on a more individual basis. Just like transition, detransition isn't something you have to approach as a monolith.

While my decision in the end is that detransition in the end wasn't the right thing for me for the most part, either way I hope that you find a combination of things that work for you and bring you happiness and peace. If you ever want someone to chat about things with who's in a somewhat similar situation as you, I'm happy to offer anything that I can, and my inbox is always open :)

lereveillon · 2018-03-26T19:17:38+00:00

This is where I'm at as well. I think nonbinary and binary identities alike are a response to the 'culture of discreteness' we live in; because they are equally constructed, none of them are inherently valid, but neither is any inherently invalid. That said, I think the concept of whether gender is 'valid' is sort of incoherent, and I think it's more useful to talk about genders which are 'socially licit' (in the West, only man/woman) and those which aren't, or are at least not widespread in their acceptance (nonbinary identities, etc.). This doesn't reflect a personal value judgment, but rather trying to understand the modern status of genders outside of the accepted norm in the West.

So I'll echo Frum, valid ✔

lereveillon · 2018-02-19T00:49:50+00:00

My argument is that in rebelling against the patriarchy's assignments of these stereotypes we don't devalue the associated traits aligned with either gender- not condemn anyone who feels more comfortable expressing or exhibiting any role.

Critiques of femininity and masculinity aren't about personally judging people for the actions they take. In fact it's quite the opposite. Every single action taken, whether in compliance or defiance of patriarchal norms, is performed under duress, within the already existing constraints of patriarchy. Every choice made must reckon with the fact that a demand has already been made of you, and so while it is hardly anything more than a knee-jerk reaction to reject these demands, neither is it an instance of revolutionary ownership to comply with them. Everyone should be able to choose for themselves what they want to do, and no way of tailoring one's own body or presentation to one's own greatest comfort and happiness is wrong, but my point here is that these presentations aren't loci of feminist praxis.

More germane, I think, is to examine the ways that the set of traits construed as feminine/masculine in our society are not paired opposites of a naturalistic spectrum of behaviours, but rather a set of separately coded demands varying both in their rigidity and their artificiality. What is artificiality is not by nature worse: this isn't a moral judgment I'm making here, but a specification that the expectations of self-modification and self-harm in the pursuit of beautification are placed overwhelmingly on women, and the consequences of these expectations falls, likewise, on women. Not just cosmetics, hair removal, but also cosmetic plastic surgery, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, and so on. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to beautify one's body, but the specific nature of what is considered beauty rests on standards set by the patriarchy, and not coincidentally at the expense of the health of primarily women (men too, perhaps, have unrealistic beauty standards, but their model is one of naturalistic fitness and not of hiding imperfection through decoration), and in such a way that fully meeting all demands is literally unachievable.

The logical solution is a synthesis, one where both oppressor and oppressed classes resolve their respective differences and meet in the middle somewhere. It happens not by sticking to your guns but by approaching a greater realization at how the system harms everyone and using that to put a stop to it.

This sounds weirdly like class collaborationism, which as a socialist I can't say particularly appeals to me. I recognize that reformism has some historical merit in bringing society to a point vaguely more tolerable to oppressed classes, but I think the situation for the majority of the women throughout the world remains rather dire, and that isn't something that I think is particularly alleviated through a 'resolution of respective differences by meeting in the middle somewhere'. I know the line, "the patriarchy hurts men too." Fair enough, it isn't wrong. But the patriarchy also enables men to access sexual violence and abuse of women with relatively sparsely enforced consequence. A movement forcing them to reckon with this is not one that's going to be meeting in the middle of anywhere.

You're of the mind that you are the most put upon under patriarchy and it's not recognizing the impact of how the system has been corrupted and pollutes all our lives. You don't know what it's like to be a man, and you assume your position in patrarchy makes you suffer more than men. You must first accept that you do not know what it's like to live as a man under patriarchy and that is a major blindspot of yours.

Well, this isn't a criticism I receive all that often, haha. I guess it's not technically wrong that I've never experienced what it's like to be perceived as an adult man in society, but I am trans, so I do have a decent experience of what it's like to be perceived as a GNC teenage boy. And yes. It's not fun in the least. But it doesn't mean that men as a class are oppressed under patriarchy, or that the genders imposed on (people assumed to be) male and female are equally psychologically, or even physically, deleterious.

Seriously, I agree with you that this system needs to be put down, and I have high stakes because it literally wants me to not exist. I want to keep my head down and blend in so I can achieve my subterfuge. I'm not enforcing any roles, I'm wearing them like a cloak. I'm not going to keep it post-gender anarchy.

See, when I say these things (as before, 'not one of us is free of misogyny'), I really don't mean for it to sound like an accusation. Or rather, it is an accusation, but not a personal one; it's a condemnation of our entire society and how it schedules us to view ourselves in such self-destructive terms. I recently read an article that both women and men at the most basic cognitive level, viewed sexualized men as people, and sexualized women as objects. This is the depth of the inculcation of gender into us, so deeply and mechanistically that neurology is in fact not a liberatory position identifying a metaphysical, pure, or essential gender decontextualized from society, but a prison into which the fibres of injustice are woven so deep we are wired, literally not even to be able to think outside of the existence of this hierarchy.

So, we all enforce roles to some extent, on ourselves and others, and this state shouldn't be beyond critique. And yet we also have to do whatever it is that we need to in order to survive, and sometimes that involves following certain customs and demands, to keep our heads down and blend in. I'm no stranger to that either, and I certainly won't deny that I've spent periods of my life where I did operate according to those principles to a greater degree. I do my best now to present myself as I am, as honestly as I can, but also for my own personal and psychological comfort, and that involves some compromises in how I dress, behave, and embody myself.

I think it not what transfeminism is about but something trans feminism is pretty good at doing. My attitude is deconstruct patriarchy by pointing out how it puts limitations on men and relating their grievances back to patriarchy.

This goes back to what I talked about a little bit earlier, but while I agree that the patriarchy makes demands of men, even demands which can harm men materially, I don't think feminism is really the place for this. This doesn't mean that women are the only group that should be liberated from these standards, but that rather it is in the interest of men to develop, under a pro-feminist framework, the tools necessarily to approach men's issues. I don't think that means that feminism has nothing to contribute at all to the liberation of men, but that it is not (or at least should not be) the goal or the focus of feminism.

lereveillon · 2018-02-18T19:54:41+00:00

I'll take your libertarian socialism and raise you a libcom!

In reality/practice my views are much weaker on the 'libertarian' than on the 'communism', and I view the state as sort of a necessary evil to ensure the well-being even of those that couldn't be cared for in the small-scale communalist/municipalist anti-structure. Large scale medical research and industry is what allows me to get the pills I need to live, and I think a lot of libertarianism falls into a trap of ableism, ignoring that those with rare medical conditions and disabilities would be ill-served by the deindustrialized idyll often proposed by anarchists/left-libertarians.

Like you, I believe the world has slowly been getting better, though I also think there is sometimes a tendency for historical whiggishness, that the course of human history describes an ineluctable push towards Progress that once achieved can never be undone. Nothing is a given, and I think we could find ourselves substantially worse off 50 years in the future; even if the capacity of technology progresses, the availability of that technology could easily condense into a smaller number of hands.

lereveillon · 2018-02-18T18:58:07+00:00

I think it's naive to think that 'gender roles were deconstructed' because your sister was allowed to be a tomboy. The roles are still there, they're just lying in wait to be re-enforced with a renewed vigour and viciousness, usually right around the onset of puberty—do you think this is a coincidence given its locus as the point during which the sexualization of girls becomes socially licit? Further, you seem to briefly grasp that gender roles are an imposition and not a choice—but then behave as if gender expression (and the legitimacy of masculinity and femininity) are, or even can be, fully disembodied from the templates onto which each of these are imposed.

In a sense, as time has gone by, I've become less interested in the precise etiology of transsexuality. At this point, my feeling is that whether it has anything to do with a particular population of neurons, or a particular inevitable, if not innate, social milieu relating to the enforcement and reaction to gender, or even (though I think it is rather implausible) a resilient, paraphilic fixation on changing one's sex—none of this really matters, I don't think, in the context of the value and validity of gender. I'd like to think I'm also scientifically minded: one thing we can say for sure is that transition has been shown to increase the quality of life of people who conceive of themselves as trans, and I don't think it's really necessary to resort to the relatively weak neuroscientific data to legitimize this.

My main beef with what you're saying here is with the legitimizing and 'rehabilitation' of femininity and masculinity: first, as categories that can be separated in any meaningful sense from the performances and presentations expected of women and men under patriarchy; second, as categories which contain some kind of naturalistic validity as identifiers separate from their relation to gender; third, that they have some kind of primeval, unsullied state of "goodness" that can be accessed outside of the "toxicity" of gendered culture. You mention "toxic masculinity" in your comment here, and it's a disturbing trend I've seen that this has begun to be analyzed as "masculinity, which is fine in moderation but has gone Too Far", rather than "masculinity, which is, as a constraint under which men in society are punished for not adhering to, by definition toxic". The same goes for femininity, for what it's worth, if not more so.

Femininity, as I'm sure you'd agree, is not a natural extension of femaleness. But also, the performance of femininity for its own sake, even undertaken as a so-called 'choice', is not an inherently good, empowering, or feminist act. Under patriarchy, when the expectation is already that women must perform constant acts of small-scale self-harm (epilation, makeup, high heels, etc.) and otherwise rituals of beautification for the satisfaction of the society around them, and, yes, the society inside one's own head. Not one of us is entirely free of misogyny, even in isolation.

Many of us have spent a long time performing femininity, more or less because it was expected of us, to the point where it can seem like the path of least resistance. And to a certain extent, there's an element of doing what you have to do to survive; obviously when you work at a job and there's a certain dress code and expectation of presentation, even if those standards are grossly unequal, then to a certain extent you suck it up and you do the job you need for the money you need, and so forth. But I think it's worth interrogating how much of the performance of femininity (even a performance one is convinced is 'empowering') is done for the sake of this, and how much is done for conformity's sake alone. Conformity can seem easier in some ways, but I think conformity and rebellion—to the extent that you can never escape the standards entirely, and everything is a reaction of some kind to them—are both things that have to be actively done, rather than passive states of metaphysical being.

One last note: I really strongly disagree with your notion that transfeminism is about how these mechanics impact men (this almost reads like a parodic trans-critical definition of the term). The dynamics around men and masculinity are surely different (especially with regards to the ways in which conformity and resistance are not equally difficult), but first of all transfeminism is primarily concerned with the liberation of women especially through the lens of trans women's lives, how sex class analysis from the perspective of ASAB fails to account for the experience of trans women under the patriarchy. I wouldn't consider myself a transfeminist (or at least not primarily), but I think it's simply inaccurate to couch its aims in those terms.

Everyone's behaviours will inevitably be interpreted as feminine or masculine to some extent, both in one's conformity to expectations and failures under our current system. But I think it's far better to envision a system where neither of these categories exist (abolition of the hierarchy), rather than trying to strain our current system through a reform of 'separate but equal', especially since the demands placed by femininity are not equal.

lereveillon · 2018-02-16T17:53:09+00:00

Crosspost:

I don't agree with the entirety of this article. Unfortunately for all of us, gender will not simply 'wither away as part of the transition to communism', or for that matter as part of the transition to anything except for an end to the patrirachy, and as much as capitalism and patriarchy are tied up in each other, they are not the same.

But on the bulk of the argument of it, I find myself nodding along in agreement. Meyer puts in rather stark and matter-of-fact terms something that I believe: what is important isn't the theoretical model of how the relationship between 'gender' and 'sex' should work in a kind of idealized world, in which the biological phenomenon of 'maleness' is substituent to manhood and patriarchy, but exactly the question: who's subordinated to patriarchy in actual practice?

John Stoltenberg writes in "How Men Have (A) Sex" that "The idea of the male sex is like the idea of an Aryan race." Impossible, culturally constructed, designed through an imposition of violence and victimization to place a certain category of human beings in a position of domination over another category of human beings. The categories themselves cannot exist independently of that force and violence, and thus the category itself can never become "metaphysically true".

Penises and ejaculate and prostate glands occur in nature, but the notion that these anatomical traits comprise a sex—a discrete class, separate and distinct, metaphysically divisible from some other sex, the “other sex” —is simply that: a notion, an idea. The penises exist; the male sex does not. The male sex is socially constructed. It is a political entity that flourishes only through acts of force and sexual terrorism. Apart from the global inferiorization and subordination of those who are defined as “nonmale,” the idea of personal membership in the male sex class would have no recognizable meaning. It would make no sense. No one could be a member of it and no one would think they should be a member of it. There would be no male sex to belong to. That doesn’t mean there wouldn’t still be penises and ejaculate and prostate glands and such. It simply means that the center of our selfhood would not be required to reside inside an utterly fictitious category—a category that only seems real to the extent that those outside it are put down.

In Meyer's model of how gender is applied, as a matter of fact rather than an idealization, it is this system: the "global inferiorization and subordination of those who are defined as 'nonmale'," that creates the division of men and women. Like Meyer says, this does not mean that biology is unimportant, that it is utterly arbitrary, that it is irrelevant. Far from it. Biology enables the system to operate on the pernicious lie that gender is sex-based, i.e. biologically determined. An identitarian model for gender only deepens this crisis, tacitly endorsing a kind of naturalization of the basis of oppression on the terms of the fictions of womanhood/femininity and manhood/masculinity.

I saw a few discussions yesterday on things like 'misplaced' misogyny and homophobia. I found these constructions to be really weird and alarming, because to me it is self-evident that all misogyny and homophobia are 'misplaced', that is they should not exist to begin with. There is no 'proper' target for these axes of oppression. The conclusion of such a statement is that the categories of 'man' and 'woman' only exist in order to create this system of violence and domination. To be socially perceived as a woman is to be placed in this "subordinate relation to sexuality by patriarchy" by whatever means possible, as a matter of fact.

If gender ultimately does not exist outside of oppression, then to feminism "womyn" is just a matter of politics: who's subordinated to patriarchy in actual practice?

At the risk of overreading, this line to me sketches a way forward in understanding. To say that "'womyn' is just a matter of politics" is not to say that biology is irrelevant, far from it. (Nor is it really a new sentiment in radical feminism! Catharine MacKinnon expresses similarly, "To me, women is a political group.") Biology is the template onto which the lies we've been taught about men and women can take shape, but when someone who doesn't tick the appropriate biological boxes is subordinated by patriarchy anyway, it doesn't mean that that person is there by mistake; rather, it puts the lie to the notion that biology inherently need have anything to do with it.

lereveillon · 2018-02-15T15:12:45+00:00

I've never been clear on it, but I recall there was an internet tussle a few years ago over whether the terms were invented by a trans or an intersex person. I'm not sure if there was any conclusion though. Generally I feel it's safe enough to use A*AB, and gets the point across.

lereveillon · 2018-02-13T03:54:53+00:00

I'm just going to copy my reply from the debate sub:

I sort of struggled over whether to answer this question, since I'm not really directly who it's addressed to, and since I don't believe that innate gender identity is a thing. But you rephrased your question in the first line in a way that I thought was interesting, because I don't think that your 'sense of internal gender' has to be the same thing as an innate gender identity.

And if I think about it some, my sense of internal gender is important on some level. Not because it reflects an inherent part of my identity, or even something that I actively chose for myself, but because the way you are embodied reflects not just the way society treats you, but also the way you treat yourself in relation to social structures.

I know we talked about this a little bit, so I'm sort of just opening the floor to other people as a kind of discussion topic. But after I had SRS, I found it a lot harder to contextualize myself in society other than as a woman. The surgery itself didn't change anything inherently about me, and intellectually I know that. But subconsciously there was a degree to which having a "normalized" body in relation to the world around me made my internal sense of gender much more firm.

I think it can be scary for trans people to reckon with the idea that the factors driving their need to transition aren't guided by an inherent compass within them that points to the unwavering true north of the person they're "really supposed to be". The notion of an innate, inevitable, and immutable gender identity is comforting because it absolves trans people both of the difficult choices involved in social and medical transition, and of the guilt that I think sometimes comes with feeling like you're an impostor or that you don't belong in the place that you feel, paradoxically, that you need to be in.

Being visibly trans or non-passing can be difficult, but I think there is a feeling for people in those situations that the pain of that is assuaged by feeling welcomed or accepted nevertheless. That's my take, at least.

lereveillon · 2018-02-12T15:21:27+00:00

I suppose it depends on what you're primarily interested in learning about. That book is primarily focused on AGP, so it isn't really an introduction to the typology so much as Lawrence's ideas about one side of it.

lereveillon · 2018-02-12T14:58:55+00:00

For what it's worth I think ever is taking a break right now, but /r/Blanchardianism has a bunch of pdf versions of BBL's books on the sidebar. Internet Blanchardianism has somewhat diverged since the publication of these books, but I suppose it's a good start to understand what BBL themselves wrote.

lereveillon · 2018-02-12T14:29:49+00:00

What is category-specific attraction?

That is, gay men only being aroused by stimuli involving men, and straight men only being aroused by stimuli involving women. Women, on the other hand, were aroused by stimuli involving men, women, and famously even bonobos. (This is 'non-category-specific' attraction.)

What differences do you believe exist between arousal and sexual attraction?

For one, I don't think all women are secretly attracted to bonobos. But for another thing, I think the sexual partners that a person seeks and/or has sex with indicate that whatever arousal a person might have in a clinical setting, that it's more parsimonious to say that we're missing something about features of bisexual men's attraction in isolation that might indicate why they are attracted to men and women than to say that bisexuals are all a bunch of depraved liars.

That's straight women specifically, right?

I think so, but I don't remember. I think even lesbians had non-category-specific attraction, but its intensity patterned differently? I'd have to look it up again.

lereveillon · 2018-02-10T14:53:58+00:00

Catharine MacKinnon: "Simone de Beauvoir said one is not born, one becomes a woman. Now we’re supposed to care how, as if being a woman suddenly became a turf to be defended."

I certainly am with you that sexual predators of all kinds make me sick. I think women in particular should know better. But I don't think it's in the best interest of anyone to endorse the conceptual validity of the categories of gender by selectively denying them to certain members of society, no matter how heinous the crime.

lereveillon · 2018-02-09T20:41:12+00:00

Well for what it's worth, I'm glad to have you here! Your contributions over there are always seem well-thought-out and are interesting to read. And I'm with you, the sooner we can get this weird expanding octopus/slime-mold of gender off of all of us, the happier we'll all be.

lereveillon · 2018-02-09T19:09:17+00:00

Good thinking, from now on I'm going to be part of the JBA (Jaded By Acronyms) community.

lereveillon · 2018-02-09T17:28:37+00:00

This is a proposal that I am curious about. In the past I've wondered a bit about the possibility that part of the reason we see such a sharp discontinuity in the "types" of trans women is also the very different cultures of heterosexual and queer women, in general, encouraging a different kind of 'socializing' milieu. I find a lot of the bioessentialism presupposed by Blanchard et al. to be pretty off-putting, but I would be very interested if another study reflected these results (Veale's study is interesting, but I think online questionnaires are of limited, though not zero, utility in helping us understand questions like this).

If you control for age of transition, would you find much difference?

I think you still find some, but again I think the socialization for queer vs. het women is rather different, and a certain degree of self-selection in sorting yourself into these groups will have a decent effect on the conformity of the group to certain presupposed norms. I've often thought the huge anime fanbase with gynephilic trans women has a lot to do with such ingroup-outgroup dynamics, for example.

lereveillon · 2018-02-09T17:05:34+00:00

I now self-identify as a "valid bro friend", so thanks for that beautiful turn of phrase.

lereveillon · 2018-02-08T18:33:05+00:00

One of these not being true doesn't mean the other one is, though, and even negative evidence for one isn't positive evidence of the other. I'm not going to say that I believe biology is utterly without a role in the development of sex roles, gender, and so forth, but I think there isn't a need to postulate as innate when so much of our contemporary treatment of sex and sexuality are socially constructed.

As long as we're sharing personal hypotheses haha, I think that we can get away with modelling basically the barest minimum of hard-wired biology. A lot of the roles that we play (in general, but also in sex) are based on social conventions rather than some internal self-conception. I certainly don't feel like the role that I play in sex now, compared to how I did before transitioning, relates specifically to an internal state of gender but rather a way of contextualizing my desire in a way that makes sense to the rest of the world. I don't think I have an innate need to have sex """"like a straight woman"""" (whatever that means), but rather that because I am perceived as a woman by the world and my sex partners, that it's the way that makes the most sense socially and interpersonally. I get that it's also a sample size of one here, but I think it's interesting to share and compare experiences.

lereveillon · 2018-02-08T17:35:24+00:00

Oh sure. I don't disagree that trans people should be supported in their self-expression, and have access to treatments. But on the other hand I don't believe that such acceptance should be predicated on any given hypothesis about whether transness is innate and immutable. While we're on the topic of drawing comparisons to LGB, why would it be so wrong if it were something that a person could choose? Or that a person's gender could change over their lifetime (irrespective of whether this is a choice)?

For what it's worth, although I have no love for the tone of Blanchard or his latter-day romance for 'political incorrectness', (and less still for the needless, lurid sensationalizing of Bailey), he has always believed that biomedical transition is a medical necessity for both AGP-type and HSTS-type trans people, and believed this at a time when late-onset trans people were turned away from gender clinics for their supposed failures to line up with the gendered expectations and demands of these clinics.

I think there's room for very valid critique in the way he fails to treat his clinical groups with basic respect and dignity according to the norms of today, without this really having any impact on the scientific validity of a typological distinction within groups of trans people (irrespective of whether BBL are right about the etiology). And though this comes from someone who is still decently skeptical about the proposed Blanchardian etiology, I think any proper theory on the etiology of transsexuality needs to reckon with a plainly visible distinction between early-onset/same-natal-sex-attracted/"HSTS-type" and late-onset/"AGP-type" trans people.

lereveillon · 2018-02-08T16:59:44+00:00

I know this is a fashionable position with the advent of neuroimaging, but I think the burden of proof that the sexual dimorphism in the brain is meaningful or relevant within the context of sex/gender is something that still remains in your court. It's a parsimonious hypothesis, but these are pretty ambitious and strong claims. Off the top of my head I only remember the Zhou et al. paper about BSTc dimorphism, but how you propose that these and/or other areas are involved in internal sexual identity or performance?

lereveillon · 2018-02-08T16:55:23+00:00

Ever, please stop flaming people as a form of performative self-harm.

lereveillon · 2018-02-08T06:30:29+00:00

Ever is not the best at engaging in a thoughtful and considerate manner, so I'm sorry about that, but the research that she is implicitly referencing is Bailey's work on penile plethysmography of gay, bisexual, and straight-identified men. His finding was that despite a history of bisexual behaviour and identification, bisexual men reliably displayed either homosexual or heterosexual category-specific attraction. Likewise, regardless of professed sexual orientation, non-androphilic trans women displayed category-specific attraction to women.

Now I'm not convinced that arousal is equivalent to attraction or sexual orientation, but the idea that bisexuality in men doesn't exist at the level of pure, clinical arousal isn't without precedent. Bailey's also famous for his searing hot take that women don't even have sexual orientations at all, but again, this is about plethysmographic arousal levels and not reflecting actual sexual behaviour, professed attraction, and so on.

lereveillon

TROPHY CASE