A few months ago I watched this fascinating interview with a schizophrenic woman named Cecelia. Cecelia suffers from frequent, often terrifying hallucinations, that she’s had to teach herself to ignore in her day-to-day life. And while this fact alone would justify sharing the interview, what really blew my mind was Cecelia’s response when the interviewer asked her if she was hallucinating as they were talking:
In 1967 when I enlisted in the Marine Corps one of the questions that was asked was, "Have you ever committed a homosexual act?" That question goes to the heart of "is Feffy's husband homosexual?" What's in a word? Does it shine a light on honesty?
Is a person who is attracted to the opposite sex who has a one-time homosexual experience a homosexual? Heterosexual? Bi-sexual? The military questionnaire didn't ask about any of those identities, it asked about a homosexual act having taken place. If I was sexually attracted to a beautiful and passing non-transitioned transwoman and had sex with her in an act that included her penis would the answer to that question be, yes? I think that it would. Which of those identities should I claim? Which would others assign? Does it really matter? It does to the people who think identity is important. I don't dismiss that just because it is not a matter of importance to me.
I doubt that that question is still on enlistment/induction questionnaires, but it shines a light on Feffy's identity issue. If it is complicated for people without gender dysphoria, think of what a quagmire it is for the gender dysphoric.
Omg, Steve. You are intelligent, curious, compassionate, and, above all, patient. The deal with language and pronouns and descriptions of who we are is mind boggling, to say the least. You are an extremely wise and persistent voice in observing and articulating truth in perspectives.
I don't want to hurt anyone- particularly people who are so obviously suffering and appear to be fragile in a lot of ways.
I just cannot bring myself to deny reality. I can't believe that extreme plastic surgery and medications are preferable to having someone learn to accept the body they have. We ARE our bodies.
Having been suicidal at times, in my experience the best and *easiest* Way around that is to accept reality as it is. The biggest part-a that is to accept Yourself as You are, as opposed to how You wish You were. Now, there's a lotta people out there, most people, who will tell You they like themselves just fine. That's not what I'm "talking" about at *all.*
Therepy? You change Yourself or You don't. Nobody can do it *for* You. Not "saying" it can't help. Sometimes does, sometimes doesn't. Depends on both You and the particular therapist.
IMHO, this also applies to the trans issues. The number of people who call themselves trans [Edit: is very small], and the number of people who are genetically predisposed to rejecting [Edit:
replace "the" with "their"] biological gender is so small that if You said zero, You wouldn't be far off. Some are psychologically damaged and can't survive in the biological gender they have. Again, vanishingly slim.
The number of people who are trans because it's so common today? Nobody knows. But when pre-K are being told to question their biological gender? That it can be anything they want it to be? It's a lousy term, but this is what it means to call teachers and all-a them "groomers."
As a general rule of thumb, people along the spectrum of ability to SEE reality aren't gonna be materially changed by becoming trans. I guess I should say, IMHO.
TY, Steve. That about the first woman-I-forget-her-name [Edit: Cecelia] was fascinating.
Feffy is *not* deluded. Feffy knows that the reproductive organs and genitalia he was born with are those of a woman. He also experiences incredible distress at seeing breasts and a vulva where his mind tells him a masculine chest and penis should be . Feffy's reality testing in tact. He knows what body he was born with. People who are delusional (,prior to treatment) believe the hallucinations are real. Why not accept him as a man if in meeting him at a cocktail party, you would he assume he was a man? The difference between a butch lesbian and a trans man is the trans man feels genuine distress at his primary and secondary sexual charasteristics. The butch lesbian however has no desire for a penii sax and never has. And their must be some inherent sense of gender, or you wouldn't have girls saying I'm a boy and vice- versa..As far as harm to women,, I do think those questions are nuanced and on a case by case basis. I am very tired, so I will reply with those thoughts later.
This is all complex and metaphysical and pushes the limits of our abilities to empathize with someone else experiencing life in a radically different way than we do. Setting aside for now questions of how to handle this issue with children and young adults (18-21-ish), I am inclined to simply respect other people’s wishes for how they would like to be referred to, just as I wouldn’t insist on calling you Steven, even if it’s your REAL name, if you say you prefer Steve. This is of course harder for all of us because, culturally, we’re trained to asses the gender/sex of each person we meet and think of them/treat them in different ways depending on the bucket. So it drives us nuts when they’re either hard to categorize or they want us to categorize them differently than we think they should be. Now, I’m not naive- the vast majority of humans are XX or XY, and that binary has huge biological implications. But sometimes I think we overstate the biological and understate the cultural. Look at how we interact with other species- it’s interesting to know if your friends dog is a boy or girl, but you won’t think of them in radically different ways depending on the answer. Anyway it feels like both sides of this debate can get too hung up on these distinctions. Why does it matter if the word “gay” is appropriate for Feffy’s husband? If it’s important to both of them, they can call themselves gay. I don’t see how it affects any of the rest of us whatsoever? To me, there are much thornier issues to be working through here related to how we discuss these issues with youth.
I thought this was a fascinating conversation. At times, instructive.
But I'm a bit perplexed. Where are you seeing Feffie's delusion? Is it because he wishes to be a cis man rather than accepting that they are a trans man? If so, I agree that this is delusional thinking (or perhaps just a wish). Or is it because Feffie insists that their husband is still a gay man? My opinion is that it is rather a mental leap for them to think that way (and I also assume that Feffie's husband is actually bisexual). Not that my opinion should matter to Feffie or his husband!
Or are you saying that Feffie's delusion is that they needed to transition from a cis woman to a trans man in the first place? It sounds like Feffie medically transitioned and is healthier/happier now, due to that transition. My hope is that Feffie transitioned when they were a fully informed adult, of course. My understanding is that those experiencing severe, *genuinely* ongoing trauma regarding their biological sex is that that trauma comes from both gender misidentification and a rejection of their actual genitals. Being in the sex that they were born in causes them potentially lifelong mental distress, and so they medically transition. Certainly the older trans women I know can attest that they are much healthier and happier now that they are in the (trans) body that they wanted for many years. Also the medically transitioned trans man I know, who proudly recognizes himself as a "TRANS man" (bless him!) and who is married to a cis woman who considers herself "queer" rather than straight (bless her as well, words have meaning)... well he is in a much healthier place now, then when he was a suicidal teen who felt trapped in a woman's body.
I also think that the need to medically transition is a rare thing and not something that should be done before therapy and definitely not during teen years. The people I am referring to did not transition until they were 100% sure, after years of therapy and well into their late 20s or 30s. They took a conservative approach, realizing that this was a lifelong decision being made, one that would literally change their bodies forever.
Anyway, back to my question to you, about what you consider to be Feffie's delusion... I think you might mean the former (my second paragraph, rather than my third paragraph), but I just wanted to be clear on this!
This was so distressing to read! In a way, Feffy is absolutely right, there is no complete distinction between sex and gender, and he/she knows it. We are women because we are female; our gender is, indeed, a social construct, but this construct is based on real functions that our bodies have: gestating, menstruating, lactating, being in general shorter, slower, and weaker than a male's body, etc. The superficial stuff, like "presenting" (wearing dresses and makeup, having long hair, loving "girly" things) is the part that hurts us the most, and, alas, it is also the part adopted by transwomen to "prove" they are ... us.
Sorry for the deluge of top posts but if you are having this conversation on Medium I would counsel caution. If just one of these people complains that you are "bullying" you will be banned. Not suspended, banned, and any partnership program money you have coming won't come.
A week ago I posted a watered-down version of the post you praised as a breath of sane air; I had two responses. One was a woman screaming about "transphobia" (what a dumb word) but the other was some guy whose entire profile was a recitation of his "queer" credentials who admitted (and boasted) that he had not read past my opening sentence. He said that he was gathering a crowd to report my post. I blocked him and deleted the whole thing.
I was banned from Medium a year ago when one of those "nonbinary" twits reported me for "bullying"; my offense was to state, as I do often, that I will not use "they" as a singular pronoun. This person's responses to me were jaw-droppingly savage, bringing my dead mother into it, about the worst I've seen in my three decades online. Red-eyed savagery. Her avatar was a cartoon of a girl snarling in rage.
I had lobbed no insults, not said anything about the buffoonery that I regard "nonbinary" to be, I had just laid down my refusal to concede to an abuse of grammar. The fact that what she wrote to me was monstrously worse than anything I had written made no impression on Medium, they answered me with form letters. I lost a thousand followers and nearly a thousand dollars in PP money I had coming. To say nothing of a year of writing.
All I had done was say that I refused to refer to her or to any other single person as "they." Not that I had any reason to refer to her at all; I had already blocked her.
You have a commanding presence on Medium, but beware; the curators have swallowed the hook, line, and sinker along with the bait on this "trans" thing and if you write about this stuff you're playing with fire.
One consideration rarely mentioned: the vast majority of these "trans" people do not qualify as genuinely dysphoric. There are resources for helping the dysphoric and they are being drained by people who just want to get attention by jumping on the latest faddish bandwagon.
And they don't give a damn about the harm they are causing, to the dysphoric and to confused kids.
A suggestion I've seen which makes sense to me in today's linguistic landscape, is to describe the biological sex of people that a person is sexually attracted to, rather than focus on the match or mismatch of the sexes of the people involved.
Thus: one's sexual orientation might be "androphilic", "gynephilic", "biphilic" and perhaps "aphilic" for those with no sexual interest in any sex.
Why leave out "gender identity"? Few to zero people seem to have a deeply ingrained psycho-biological sexual attraction to others based on the other person's self chosen "gender identity" (tho they might have idiosyncratic lesser preferences like just as some people have a "type" in regard to height, weight, hair color, nationality, etc). Also "gender identity" has become very semantically confusing, with an ever expanded set of supposed "genders" about which few people agree. (Ask a thousand people for the dozen most common gender identities and see how many have the same list and mean the same thing by the terms they use). Trying to describe attractions by having words for each combination (or set of combinations) of gender identities involved would be a nightmare. So let's stick to SEXual orientation.
Classifying one's sexual attractions by reference to one's own sex may be becoming obsolete, as it seems deeply rooted in old taboos rather than being cleanly descriptive. We can observe that the majority of biological males are gynephilic and the majority of biological females are androphilic, without needing to bake that observation into our very terminology.
In 1967 when I enlisted in the Marine Corps one of the questions that was asked was, "Have you ever committed a homosexual act?" That question goes to the heart of "is Feffy's husband homosexual?" What's in a word? Does it shine a light on honesty?
Is a person who is attracted to the opposite sex who has a one-time homosexual experience a homosexual? Heterosexual? Bi-sexual? The military questionnaire didn't ask about any of those identities, it asked about a homosexual act having taken place. If I was sexually attracted to a beautiful and passing non-transitioned transwoman and had sex with her in an act that included her penis would the answer to that question be, yes? I think that it would. Which of those identities should I claim? Which would others assign? Does it really matter? It does to the people who think identity is important. I don't dismiss that just because it is not a matter of importance to me.
I doubt that that question is still on enlistment/induction questionnaires, but it shines a light on Feffy's identity issue. If it is complicated for people without gender dysphoria, think of what a quagmire it is for the gender dysphoric.
Omg, Steve. You are intelligent, curious, compassionate, and, above all, patient. The deal with language and pronouns and descriptions of who we are is mind boggling, to say the least. You are an extremely wise and persistent voice in observing and articulating truth in perspectives.
I love this so much- thank you!
I don't want to hurt anyone- particularly people who are so obviously suffering and appear to be fragile in a lot of ways.
I just cannot bring myself to deny reality. I can't believe that extreme plastic surgery and medications are preferable to having someone learn to accept the body they have. We ARE our bodies.
Having been suicidal at times, in my experience the best and *easiest* Way around that is to accept reality as it is. The biggest part-a that is to accept Yourself as You are, as opposed to how You wish You were. Now, there's a lotta people out there, most people, who will tell You they like themselves just fine. That's not what I'm "talking" about at *all.*
Therepy? You change Yourself or You don't. Nobody can do it *for* You. Not "saying" it can't help. Sometimes does, sometimes doesn't. Depends on both You and the particular therapist.
IMHO, this also applies to the trans issues. The number of people who call themselves trans [Edit: is very small], and the number of people who are genetically predisposed to rejecting [Edit:
replace "the" with "their"] biological gender is so small that if You said zero, You wouldn't be far off. Some are psychologically damaged and can't survive in the biological gender they have. Again, vanishingly slim.
The number of people who are trans because it's so common today? Nobody knows. But when pre-K are being told to question their biological gender? That it can be anything they want it to be? It's a lousy term, but this is what it means to call teachers and all-a them "groomers."
As a general rule of thumb, people along the spectrum of ability to SEE reality aren't gonna be materially changed by becoming trans. I guess I should say, IMHO.
TY, Steve. That about the first woman-I-forget-her-name [Edit: Cecelia] was fascinating.
Feffy is *not* deluded. Feffy knows that the reproductive organs and genitalia he was born with are those of a woman. He also experiences incredible distress at seeing breasts and a vulva where his mind tells him a masculine chest and penis should be . Feffy's reality testing in tact. He knows what body he was born with. People who are delusional (,prior to treatment) believe the hallucinations are real. Why not accept him as a man if in meeting him at a cocktail party, you would he assume he was a man? The difference between a butch lesbian and a trans man is the trans man feels genuine distress at his primary and secondary sexual charasteristics. The butch lesbian however has no desire for a penii sax and never has. And their must be some inherent sense of gender, or you wouldn't have girls saying I'm a boy and vice- versa..As far as harm to women,, I do think those questions are nuanced and on a case by case basis. I am very tired, so I will reply with those thoughts later.
This is all complex and metaphysical and pushes the limits of our abilities to empathize with someone else experiencing life in a radically different way than we do. Setting aside for now questions of how to handle this issue with children and young adults (18-21-ish), I am inclined to simply respect other people’s wishes for how they would like to be referred to, just as I wouldn’t insist on calling you Steven, even if it’s your REAL name, if you say you prefer Steve. This is of course harder for all of us because, culturally, we’re trained to asses the gender/sex of each person we meet and think of them/treat them in different ways depending on the bucket. So it drives us nuts when they’re either hard to categorize or they want us to categorize them differently than we think they should be. Now, I’m not naive- the vast majority of humans are XX or XY, and that binary has huge biological implications. But sometimes I think we overstate the biological and understate the cultural. Look at how we interact with other species- it’s interesting to know if your friends dog is a boy or girl, but you won’t think of them in radically different ways depending on the answer. Anyway it feels like both sides of this debate can get too hung up on these distinctions. Why does it matter if the word “gay” is appropriate for Feffy’s husband? If it’s important to both of them, they can call themselves gay. I don’t see how it affects any of the rest of us whatsoever? To me, there are much thornier issues to be working through here related to how we discuss these issues with youth.
I thought this was a fascinating conversation. At times, instructive.
But I'm a bit perplexed. Where are you seeing Feffie's delusion? Is it because he wishes to be a cis man rather than accepting that they are a trans man? If so, I agree that this is delusional thinking (or perhaps just a wish). Or is it because Feffie insists that their husband is still a gay man? My opinion is that it is rather a mental leap for them to think that way (and I also assume that Feffie's husband is actually bisexual). Not that my opinion should matter to Feffie or his husband!
Or are you saying that Feffie's delusion is that they needed to transition from a cis woman to a trans man in the first place? It sounds like Feffie medically transitioned and is healthier/happier now, due to that transition. My hope is that Feffie transitioned when they were a fully informed adult, of course. My understanding is that those experiencing severe, *genuinely* ongoing trauma regarding their biological sex is that that trauma comes from both gender misidentification and a rejection of their actual genitals. Being in the sex that they were born in causes them potentially lifelong mental distress, and so they medically transition. Certainly the older trans women I know can attest that they are much healthier and happier now that they are in the (trans) body that they wanted for many years. Also the medically transitioned trans man I know, who proudly recognizes himself as a "TRANS man" (bless him!) and who is married to a cis woman who considers herself "queer" rather than straight (bless her as well, words have meaning)... well he is in a much healthier place now, then when he was a suicidal teen who felt trapped in a woman's body.
I also think that the need to medically transition is a rare thing and not something that should be done before therapy and definitely not during teen years. The people I am referring to did not transition until they were 100% sure, after years of therapy and well into their late 20s or 30s. They took a conservative approach, realizing that this was a lifelong decision being made, one that would literally change their bodies forever.
Anyway, back to my question to you, about what you consider to be Feffie's delusion... I think you might mean the former (my second paragraph, rather than my third paragraph), but I just wanted to be clear on this!
This was so distressing to read! In a way, Feffy is absolutely right, there is no complete distinction between sex and gender, and he/she knows it. We are women because we are female; our gender is, indeed, a social construct, but this construct is based on real functions that our bodies have: gestating, menstruating, lactating, being in general shorter, slower, and weaker than a male's body, etc. The superficial stuff, like "presenting" (wearing dresses and makeup, having long hair, loving "girly" things) is the part that hurts us the most, and, alas, it is also the part adopted by transwomen to "prove" they are ... us.
Sorry for the deluge of top posts but if you are having this conversation on Medium I would counsel caution. If just one of these people complains that you are "bullying" you will be banned. Not suspended, banned, and any partnership program money you have coming won't come.
A week ago I posted a watered-down version of the post you praised as a breath of sane air; I had two responses. One was a woman screaming about "transphobia" (what a dumb word) but the other was some guy whose entire profile was a recitation of his "queer" credentials who admitted (and boasted) that he had not read past my opening sentence. He said that he was gathering a crowd to report my post. I blocked him and deleted the whole thing.
I was banned from Medium a year ago when one of those "nonbinary" twits reported me for "bullying"; my offense was to state, as I do often, that I will not use "they" as a singular pronoun. This person's responses to me were jaw-droppingly savage, bringing my dead mother into it, about the worst I've seen in my three decades online. Red-eyed savagery. Her avatar was a cartoon of a girl snarling in rage.
I had lobbed no insults, not said anything about the buffoonery that I regard "nonbinary" to be, I had just laid down my refusal to concede to an abuse of grammar. The fact that what she wrote to me was monstrously worse than anything I had written made no impression on Medium, they answered me with form letters. I lost a thousand followers and nearly a thousand dollars in PP money I had coming. To say nothing of a year of writing.
All I had done was say that I refused to refer to her or to any other single person as "they." Not that I had any reason to refer to her at all; I had already blocked her.
You have a commanding presence on Medium, but beware; the curators have swallowed the hook, line, and sinker along with the bait on this "trans" thing and if you write about this stuff you're playing with fire.
One consideration rarely mentioned: the vast majority of these "trans" people do not qualify as genuinely dysphoric. There are resources for helping the dysphoric and they are being drained by people who just want to get attention by jumping on the latest faddish bandwagon.
And they don't give a damn about the harm they are causing, to the dysphoric and to confused kids.
"Because the goal isn’t kindness, the goal isn’t truth or compromise, the goal is to have their genuine psychological distress validated."
The goal is attention, Steve, as you know well.
You were arguing with a person so completely overwhelmed with a fanatic preoccupation that she has lost contact with reality.
There are locker rooms, for one.
A suggestion I've seen which makes sense to me in today's linguistic landscape, is to describe the biological sex of people that a person is sexually attracted to, rather than focus on the match or mismatch of the sexes of the people involved.
Thus: one's sexual orientation might be "androphilic", "gynephilic", "biphilic" and perhaps "aphilic" for those with no sexual interest in any sex.
Why leave out "gender identity"? Few to zero people seem to have a deeply ingrained psycho-biological sexual attraction to others based on the other person's self chosen "gender identity" (tho they might have idiosyncratic lesser preferences like just as some people have a "type" in regard to height, weight, hair color, nationality, etc). Also "gender identity" has become very semantically confusing, with an ever expanded set of supposed "genders" about which few people agree. (Ask a thousand people for the dozen most common gender identities and see how many have the same list and mean the same thing by the terms they use). Trying to describe attractions by having words for each combination (or set of combinations) of gender identities involved would be a nightmare. So let's stick to SEXual orientation.
Classifying one's sexual attractions by reference to one's own sex may be becoming obsolete, as it seems deeply rooted in old taboos rather than being cleanly descriptive. We can observe that the majority of biological males are gynephilic and the majority of biological females are androphilic, without needing to bake that observation into our very terminology.