Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

by Helen Joyce

In the simplistic version of the new creed that has hardened into social-justice orthodoxy, gender is no longer even something that is performed. It is innate and ineffable: something like a sexed soul.

What is being demanded is no longer flexibility, but a redefinition of what it means for anyone to be a man or woman – a total rewrite of societal rules.

A liberal, secular society can accommodate many subjective belief systems, even mutually contradictory ones. What it must never do is impose one group’s beliefs on everyone else. The other belief systems accommodated in modern democracies are, by and large, held privately. You can subscribe to the doctrine of reincarnation or resurrection alongside fellow believers, or on your own. Gender self-identification, however, is a demand for validation by others. The label is a misnomer. It is actually about requiring others to identify you as a member of the sex you proclaim. Since evolution has equipped humans with the ability to recognise other people’s sex, almost instantaneously and with exquisite accuracy, very few trans people ‘pass’ as their desired sex. And so to see them as that sex, everyone else must discount what their senses are telling them.

The distinction between the sexes is not likely to be at all amenable to social engineering, no matter how much some people want it to be.

Every one of the dozen or so studies of children with gender dysphoria – discomfort and misery caused by one’s biological sex – has found that most grow out of it, as long as they are supported in their gender non-conformity and not encouraged in a cross-sex identification. Many of these ‘desisters’ are destined to grow up gay: there is copious evidence of a strong link between early gender non-conformity and adult homosexuality.

As gender self-identification is written into laws around the world, the collateral damage is mounting.

In his memoir of Weimar-era Berlin, Christopher Isherwood recalled its ‘whips and chains and torture instruments designed for the practitioners of pleasure-pain; high-heeled, intricately decorated boots for the fetishists; lacy female undies which had been worn by ferociously masculine Prussian officers beneath their uniforms’.

According to the ancient ‘one-sex model’, men and women were essentially similar, except that women’s reproductive anatomy was inverted and inferior. Women have ‘exactly the same organs but in exactly the wrong places’, wrote Galen, a Greek physician of the second century.

In Hirschfeld’s phrase, all people were ‘bisexual’, not in the sense of being attracted to both sexes, but in the sense of being both sexes. Male and female, Hirschfeld wrote, were ‘abstractions, invented extremes’. Homosexuals and ‘transvestites’ – Hirschfeld’s word for anyone from part-time cross-dressers to people with a strong, unremitting identification with the opposite sex – were simply intermediate types, unusually far from those notional end-points.

And if altering superficial characteristics such as dress, presentation and behaviour is understood as moving someone along a sex spectrum, then a woman who rejects those stereotypes is making herself less of a woman, rather than demonstrating that they are unnecessary to womanhood.

A decade later these became a standing body, the Harry Benjamin Foundation, which in 2006 was renamed the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). It is still the world’s most influential organisation in the field. Erickson also funded a research group led by Benjamin that aimed to set up an American sex-change programme. Among its other members was John Money, a New Zealander who had studied psychology at Harvard before joining Johns Hopkins University.

Money believed that what made someone a man or woman was not their body at all, but which stereotypical sex roles they were reared in.

In this way of thinking, girls and women were people who had been taught stereotypical femininity in early childhood and grown up to be decorative, domestic and subservient. Boys and men were those who had been taught stereotypical masculinity and grown up to be active, outgoing and domineering. But sometimes the socialisation might fail to take. A person might grow up highly atypical for their sex, perhaps even feeling like a member of the opposite sex and adopting that sex’s social role. In such cases, the wisest and kindest course of action would be to alter the body so that the person could be slotted back into the ‘natural’ order of things as a member of the opposite sex.

Money believed that what he called gender roles, meaning ‘all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman’, were malleable in the first thirty months of life – and after that unchangeable.

Since it was much easier to make genitals look female rather than male, it was mostly infant boys whose sex he ‘reassigned’.

Eventually, the Reimers told their child the truth, and he took the name David and reclaimed a male identity.

There were tragic addenda: in 2002 Brian, David’s twin, died of an overdose of antidepressants and two years later, aged thirty-eight, David killed himself with a gunshot to the head. Between his sex reassignment and death, thousands of children worldwide had been sterilised and brought up as members of the other sex, in part because his life as a girl had supposedly been such a wonderful success.

‘Every Adam contains elements of Eve and every Eve harbours traces of Adam, physically as well as psychologically,’ Benjamin writes.

And lastly, he nods to Money’s theories. Once ‘gender-feeling’ – some sort of amalgam of ‘feelings, attitudes, desires and self-identification’ – has become settled, if there is a mismatch with biological sex, then it is sex that must ‘yield’.

A definition of biological sex as reproductive capacity is, inherently, a communal one. It is about the role the individual plays within its species – whether that role is conceived of as shaped by evolution, ordained by God or something else. John Money’s gender roles, too, concerned how individuals fitted into society – which stereotypes their upbringing had fitted them to adhere to. Now the focus had narrowed. What mattered was whether an individual could provide the sexual, not reproductive, services that a man expected of his wife – an individual rather than societal contract – and how she felt about herself. Though it was not yet consistently named, ‘gender identity’ had arrived.

The title of Green’s book, published in 1987, gives his findings away: The ‘Sissy Boy Syndrome’ and the Development of Homosexuality. (He chose his title as a comment on the stigmatisation of effeminacy.) Most of these effeminate little boys, who rejected their maleness and wished ardently to be girls, were not future transsexuals, but future gay men.

In every one the majority outgrew their dysphoria, and a majority of those ‘desisters’ turned out gay in adulthood. The most recent, and best, of these studies, published in March 2021, followed 139 boys seen at a Toronto clinic between 1975 and 2009, around two-thirds of whom satisfied the clinical criteria for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. It found that more than 90 percent of them later ceased to feel dysphoric and became reconciled with their sex, generally before or early in puberty.

Green tried hard to persuade the parents of his ‘sissy boys’ to be accepting. ‘We would say: you don’t need to be a jock to be a boy,’ he told me when I interviewed him in London in 2017, two years before his death. ‘You don’t need to be a girl to draw pictures. There are other boys like your son. Find [non-feminine, non-macho] activities he likes, such as board games. We would say to the father: “So he’s not an athlete. He still deserves a father.” ’

It now seems very likely that male sexual orientation is, often or nearly always, set early in life and thereafter unchangeable. Some studies suggest a genetic influence; others, that the uterine environment plays a role.

It concluded that children who experienced distress with their sexed bodies often started out as merely gender-atypical, with the distress developing only as they learned that their feelings and behaviour were unacceptable to others. ‘Your framework for understanding these things depends on the cultural context,’ he says. ‘If you’re growing up in Samoa they don’t mean you change your body, whereas if you grow up in Canada or England the pool of possible interpretations that you draw on includes, “I’m a transsexual and have to undergo medical intervention and pretty radical surgery.” ’

For some, it is sufficiently intense and central to their sexual arousal to constitute a ‘paraphilia’ – an atypical, extreme sexual interest that may be classed as a disorder if it causes serious problems or distress. But male cross-dressers do not usually express cross-sex identification. ‘I was looking for the bridge’, says Blanchard, ‘between wearing women’s clothing as a masturbatory aid and wanting to be a woman.’

‘Here you had what, up till that point, had been called transvestism, and there were no clothes.’ Women’s attire was not the true object of such a man’s affections, he concluded: rather, the clothes were the means whereby a man gave life to that object, namely himself in female form. Blanchard turned to Greek to name this sexual desire: ‘autogynephilia’, which means love of oneself as a woman.

The first of those popularisers was Anne Lawrence, a transwoman who came across Blanchard’s work in 1994, aged forty-four and about to embark on transition. A medical doctor, she read everything she could find about transsexuality, but little resonated with her feelings and experiences. In the description of autogynephilia, however, she experienced the shock of recognition. ‘If you had asked, “are you a woman inside?” I would have replied, “I don’t think so,” ’ she says. ‘What I always knew is that I wanted to have a woman’s body. I hated the penis; I hated the erections; that’s what I had to change.’

In 1998 Lawrence published an essay about autogynephilia on her website, entitled ‘Men trapped in men’s bodies’ as a riposte to the trope that transsexuals are women trapped in men’s bodies. She then solicited anonymous, first-person accounts from other autogynephiles, and in 2012 published an analysis of several hundred in a book of the same name.

But almost anything coded female or feminine, she writes, can cause an ‘intense, perplexing, shame-inducing erotic arousal that seems to simultaneously animate and discredit [autogynephiles’] desires to have female bodies’. Her informants recount erotic fantasies of pushing a baby buggy, joining a knitting circle, being called ‘ma’am’, having bubble-gum-blowing contests with girls, wearing clip-on earrings, taking birth-control pills, having a Pap smear test, and so on and on.

The way they symbolise themselves as women in their imaginations has a ‘fetishistic flavour’ that is ‘qualitatively different from any superficially similar ideation in natal females’, Blanchard writes. For example, they report arousal at the simple act of putting on everyday women’s clothes. Natal women do not find getting dressed for work an orgasmic experience.

‘Forced feminisation’ – someone making a man cross-dress or undergo sex-reassignment surgery – is a staple of transgender erotica. Quite a few of Lawrence’s informants say they would find it shameful to be a woman, and that this turns them on. ‘Experiencing the daily humiliation and degradation of being a woman, forced to wear women’s clothes and lipstick, is extremely attractive to me,’ writes one.

And he writes affectionately about the eccentric and artistically talented Cher, whom he identifies as an autogynephile – though she vehemently disagrees. She tells him about the ‘robot man’ that ‘Chuck’ (her name pre-transition) constructed to enact his fantasy of vaginal penetration. It had a ‘penis’ made of a dildo, and an arm that could be manipulated to stroke his back. A mirror on the ceiling enabled Chuck to view this simulacrum of heterosexual sex, dressed as a woman with the robot man penetrating his anus.

Being transgender was to be understood as a matter of identity, not sexuality; Blanchard, Bailey and Lawrence were contradicting a cherished narrative; and everyone had to pick a side.

Activists had started to judge people and ideas, not according to the evidence, says Bailey, but according to a very particular notion of social justice.

‘If a guy decides he’s coming to work as a woman from now on, it’s one thing for him to say: “I’m coming to terms with the fact that I’ve always been a woman inside,” and quite another to say: “I’ve moved on from just masturbating in women’s clothes to wearing them all the time.” ’

‘There’s a critical difference between autogynephilia and most other sexual orientations: most other orientations aren’t erotically disrupted simply by being labelled,’ she writes. ‘When you call a typical gay man homosexual, you’re not disturbing his sexual hopes and desires. By contrast, autogynephilia is perhaps best understood as a love that would really rather we didn’t speak its name.’

This explains why such rage is mostly directed at women, even though it is men who commit almost all anti-trans harassment and violence. Blanchard’s observations of extremist transactivism in recent years have led him to believe that the leaders are mostly autogynephiles. Their anger results from ‘envy of women and resentment at not being accepted by women as one of them’, he has tweeted. ‘They direct their ire at women because it is women who frustrate their desires. Men are largely irrelevant.’ Consider the favoured insult of the angry youth wing of transactivism: TERF, which stands for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’. The first part does not refer to excluding trans people from jobs, housing or other goods: it simply means denying that identifying as a woman makes you one. ‘Radical feminism’ is feminism understood as a liberation movement to free females from the patriarchy – a man cannot be a radical feminist, only an ally. Only females, therefore, can be TERFs. There is no equivalent insult for males who deny that sex can be changed by self-declaration.

Lawrence adds another piece to the puzzle of transactivist rage. She posits that autogynephilia’s inwardly directed nature, and the frustrations attendant on requiring others to validate your cross-sex identity, mean that the condition co-occurs with narcissistic disorders more often than would happen by chance. And narcissists often respond to minor slights with disproportionate rage. It is not hard to find evidence of ‘narcissistic personality traits, including a sense of entitlement, grandiosity, and lack of...

‘chasers’ – men who desire (genitally intact) transwomen.

In his 1949 book, The Concept of Mind, the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle coined a felicitous phrase for the way dualists conceive of a person: as a ‘ghost in the machine’. Gender-identity ideology gives the ghost a sex – one that can differ from that of the machine.

What feminists used to mean by ‘gender’ was something external: a societal structure in which female people were inferior and subordinate to male ones. But within gender-identity ideology, it is an inner essence given public form by self-declaration. No one else can define that essence, and only you can know who you truly are.

The idea of a non-hormone, non-op transwoman – someone who retains a physiologically normal male body but understands themselves to be a woman because that is their ‘gender identity’, and expects everyone else to agree – would have seemed nonsensical to almost everybody. (Recall that in the allegory this is the type of person represented by Kid, who wakes up from the Matrix without the aid of a red pill.) And yet, in the two decades since the film’s release, this very concept of transness has conquered medicine, law, public policy and the media.

If identity is all, and a man or woman may have any type of body, then why bother with medical or surgical transition? And indeed, some cutting-edge activists now regard the very concept of transition as transphobic, since it suggests that a trans person needs to align the outer self with the inner, rather than just declaring who they have always been.

And indeed, many of those who feel driven to transition are anything but body-denialist: they are painfully aware that their bodies cause them grief, and desperate to accommodate themselves to those bodies. They are among the people most ill-served by an ideology that pretends bodies are inconsequential and easily changed, and that what makes a person who they are is a sexed soul, or a ghost in a machine, or a program running on a computer, or whatever metaphor you prefer. The truth is that we are our bodies, and our bodies are our selves.

And I will lay out the key elements that have enabled transsexuality, once understood as a rare anomaly, to be converted into an all-encompassing theory of sex and gender, and body and mind.

Within applied postmodernism, objectivity is essentially impossible. Logic and reason are not ideals to be striven for, but attempts to shore up privilege. Language is taken to shape reality, not describe it. Oppression is brought into existence by discourse. Equality is no longer achieved by replacing unjust laws and practices with new ones that give everyone the chance to thrive, but by individuals defining their own identities, and ‘troubling’ or ‘queering’ the definitions of oppressed groups.

Being a man or woman – or indeed non-binary or gender-fluid – becomes a matter of defining your own gender identity and revealing it to the world by the medium of ‘preferred pronouns’.

you want everyone to accept gender-identity ideology, they must be persuaded that sexed bodies are not material, and that gender identities are.

A wide variety of claims are made in support of these propositions. The way they are deployed is often reminiscent of the ‘Gish gallop’ – a debating technique named for creationist Duane Gish, who would fire out unrelated falsehoods, half-truths, irrelevancies and misrepresentations in quick succession to overwhelm his debating opponent.