D.J. Webb
Sexuality and sexual identity ought to be both uncontroversial and private. Yet extremist campaigns on the subject of “transgender identity” are increasingly making the news in a way that is disorienting. The real numbers of “transgender” individuals are very low, and so to that extent it is really a non-issue: possibly more significant to those who value a free society is the harpy-like screeching that accompanies this discussion. “How dare you say that?” scream the Twitter brigade, in a universally applicable cry of denunciation that I wearied of some time ago.
Let us be clear. From a libertarian perspective, if people really do want to have parts of their bodies removed, they should be allowed to do so. I am less happy with the notion of a doctor performing an operation to excise a healthy organ. Would a bona fide doctor cut your nose of for you if you asked him to do so? However, given the issues surrounding the sex-change debate, it seems likely that doctors would only perform this operation where they genuinely felt the patient required it in some sense. I agree that doctors should verify that the excision of a healthy organ is not just a whim, and so a period of time before the operation, coupled with counselling, would be good practice.
In a free society, some men will have their penises cut off and take drugs to suppress male hormones and promote female ones, helping them to grow breasts. That is their right, given the understanding we are talking about adults making a free choice. But that does not mean that they have any right of any type to insist on social acceptance that extreme operations of this kind—self-mutilations, in fact—make them “women”. They may act as, pose as and dress as women if they like, and make physical modifications to their bodies. Some people will regard them as women. Libertarians will support the right of other people to take a full range of views on this issue, ranging from supportive to opposed.
Let us go back to the concepts of sex and gender. Conservatives point out that the difference between male and female is an objective, biological reality: baby girls are born different from baby boys. The difference is natural. Girls are equipped by nature to play a different role in the reproductive process from boys. There is nothing arbitrary about the difference between boys and girls.
Gender is a word that properly refers to arbitrary categories, such as the grammatical genders of words in various languages. In French la mer is feminine; in Spanish el mar is masculine; and in Russian morje is neuter. There is no rhyme or reason for this, other than that nouns in –e tend to be neuter in Russian. The list of words “assigned” to various genders is therefore fundamentally arbitrary. Once the assignment is made, the word then behaves differently from words assigned to another gender category.
The use of the word gender to refer to sexual differences in humans derives from a far-left concern to establish the difference between men and women as entirely socially created. The theory goes that men and women are assigned to different roles in life at birth, on a fundamentally arbitrary basis, and then expected to act out those roles as if there were something objective or natural about those roles. The use of the word gender carries with it an implication that distinctions between men and women are false and unnecessary. Politically correct organizations, such as local councils, now routinely pose the following two questions on employment application forms:
- Is your gender identity the same as the gender assigned to you at birth?
- Do you currently live and work in the gender role opposite to that assigned to you at birth?
Of course, the reason why boys are assigned to the male sex at birth is because of the presence of male sexual organs, which equip a man to play one role and not the other role in the sexual/reproductive process. As such this is not an “assignment”, but simply a fact of life noted by nurses and parents upon birth of a child.
There is a fundamental contradiction in left-wing thought on this subject. The left wish to insist that there are no differences in personality/instinctive behaviour associated with sex: if women are different from men in society, it is purely because they are socialized to be so. If this is so, the alleged reality that some men feel like “women trapped in male bodies” cannot be so: they may be individuals who reject the socialization into a certain “gender role” that they rebel against, but they could only be women deep down within themselves if it were true that there are personality types or types of behaviour that are naturally female, and possibly encoded for in the genes. After all, a man who does not wish to act out a male gender role could just be and accept being an effeminate gay man. Why then the need for an operation?
In the end, we can all sympathize with an individual who genuinely feels himself to need mutilating surgery. I cannot but view such people other than as victims of the left, people who have been encouraged to embark on extreme, self-defeating actions that will make their lives much worse by left-wing activists who revel in the deconstruction of traditional social roles and traditional views that this is fostering.
To that extent, I would not like to be thought of as taunting someone with a genuine deep internal conflict on sexual identity. However, this is not the same thing as saying that I or anyone else should pander to such people, or even go along with their choice to mutilate themselves. It is a kindness to tell such people not to go ahead with the operation! For this reason, I cannot accept that society should reorganize itself along unnatural lines to cater to the extreme actions of a few. Birth certificates should definitely not be changed, other than in the very rare cases where people are born with ambiguous sexual organs.
The news that pre-operation “transgender” individuals want to use female toilets, female changing rooms and be sent to female prisons comes as a shock to me. Let us reiterate what is going on here: a man, who would have liked to have been born as a woman, but who has not had any surgery or hormonal tablets and thus is physically fully male in his external features, would like to use female changing rooms at the swimming pool, purely based on the claim that he “identifies” as a woman (in the jarringly politically correct use of the word “identify” as an intransitive verb).
An example is the man who liked to be known as Vicky Thompson found dead in Armley prison a week ago. This man was “pre-op”: a man with a penis and testicles, the works. He was not “transgender” at all, other than in the sense that he wished to be a woman. He had done nothing to assume the appearance of a woman physically. If he committed suicide out of frustration that he was not in a female prison, then I find that regrettable, but not something that should change social policy that a pre-op would-be transsexual should go to the prison corresponding to the “gender identity he was assigned at birth”. Possibly if someone has gone through the arduous route of having operations to alter his appearance, then maybe he can be accepted to have changed sex, at least in terms of appearance, and thus could be sent to a female prison.
While libertarians support freedom, this is not the same thing as saying that libertarians have to agree with every individual’s use of his freedom. It may generally be the case that libertarians are happy to “live and let live”, but we don’t have to approve of sex changes to be libertarian. Even more importantly, libertarians cannot support any compulsion at university or elsewhere as regards personal views on this subject. People should be free to express views for and against transsexualism. The shocking current trend for students to seek to prevent meetings on campus where someone might argue that mutilated men are not actually women as such requires us to reiterate again and again the importance of free speech. People who cannot stand to hear alternative viewpoints should not be at university in the first place.
More generally, there is a problem in the increasingly extreme nature of politically correct discussion that has moved on from the boring old debates around equality of the sexes (dubbed “gender equality”) to increasingly bizarre discussion of “gender identity”. This relates to transsexualism, but also extends to claims that people are increasingly pansexual, genderfluid or genderqueer today—terms that appear to mean that people increasingly do not accept either “gender roles” or the notion of sexual orientation as such. Society was much happier when men and women accepted their biological externalities. Student politics has a way of forging extreme paths that will then be imposed on the population at large. I think libertarians should oppose attempts to universalize such discussions, in order to spare people who are not at university from enforced nonsense of this type, in line with the argument I have made before that in a real free society the average person should be able to live in blissful unawareness of elite views on political or cultural topics.
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On lunch break here so have to be brief. I just wanted to bring out some points. I am a male to female pre-opp transsexual and a libertarian and have shock horror used female toilets and western civilisation did not collapse around me when I went into my cubicle, left the toilet seat down and did my business. I did not expose my private parts to other women or try to rape them. To the extent that they noticed me at all, none of the women seemed to be bothered I was there.
I guess by the standards of leftist egalitarian or social conservative philosophers I am either 100% male or 100% female. I tend to hold the commonsense real-world view that it if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and talks like a duck then it is a duck. Outside of leftist and rightist think-tanks this is the test that ordinary people give to transsexuals. If one passes as a woman then one is a woman, if one doesn’t pass as a woman then they are clocked as something ‘other’ (insert your opinion of a transsexual good or bad here).
Well, you then get to the question of why there are sex segregated toilets. If I (“cis-male”) used the ladies toilets, I wouldn’t expose myself or try to rape the women either. So, on what basis am I not allowed in? See the problem?
The problem is that one cannot take anything these people say at face value. We all know this has little to do with the reality of transexualism as a condition, but with deconstruction and critical theory. I remember some years ago in a “liberal” place on the internet arguing with a cultural marxist who talked almost gloatingly about how “traditional transsexuals” had been unhappy when they (the radical activists) took over the discourse and turned it from a medical question into a campaigning front based on critical theory of gender, and talked about how deconstructing gender was their last great frontier.
Of course it is all absolute nonsense. One could be kind and say that these people are philosophically ignorant (the philosophical struggle with what makes a thing a thing goes back to Plato and his wacky “essences” idea) but the truth is these people know what they’re doing; reality is described to fit to their objectives, and they just shout everyone down until they win. With Gay Rights running out of steam as a front, transsexuals became the new “minority” to be used as a front.
A while ago I was barred from commenting at the Guardian. They ran an article about a “transwoman” comedian who had outstayed their American visa and was put in a male prison, and how this is apparently unacceptable. This transwoman had male genitalia, a girlfriend (yes, “she’s” a lesbian, quelle surprise) and I dared to say that this was just a man in a frock and had no right to be in a womens prison. The Guardian didn’t like that at all.
Of course the irony is that many Feminists (notably, Julie Bindel and Sheila Jeffries) now find themselves persona non grata for believing that women are women and men are men. They are barred from University campuses, etc. How terrible it must be to be Yesterday’s Radicals.
I forgot to say, that I think this is a good article with which I am in general agreement. Sorry 🙂
~Thanks!
What transsexuals have to understand is that their mindset will not be defined as ‘normal’ just because they believe they are the right gender in the wrong body. I firmly believe that doing the operation will bring more years of hurt, embarrassment and even suicide.
The fusionist position on this is simple. As Social Conservatism plays a big part in the fusionist theory, we believe that as much people have the right to a private life, we would not promote transsexuality in public.
Other commentators have concentrated on the transgender issues in this article, I, however, would like to add my two ha’porth from a libertarian viewpoint.
The only legitimate interest I can have in the actions of another is if they are aggressing against persons or property – that’s it – finito.
On the proviso that another is not aggressing against persons or property, I can have no legitimate interest whether they identify themselves as male, female, gay, straight, transgender, or as a 25cm high purple spotted roller-skating unicorn. It’s none of my damned business.
It is entirely legitimate for me to consider myself male and straight and for me to dress in any way I think fit, and to feel proud, confused, miserable, angry, or in any other way about it.
It is also entirely legitimate for me to embrace, ignore, or hold in contempt any other person, for any reason, including so-called ‘gender identity’.
Of course, it is also entirely legitimate for others to embrace, ignore, or hold in contempt any of my opinions, beliefs, or lifestyle.
It is entirely legitimate for any person to dress themselves, decorate their bodies, or add to or remove from their bodies, in any way they see fit,
It is entirely legitimate for property owners to admit, or refuse entry to, any person they see fit, for any reason they see fit.
It is entirely legitimate for property owners to provide toilets and/or changing facilities as they see fit and to designate them and their use in any way they see fit.
It is entirely legitimate for property owners to dictate the actions of persons on their property.
It is entirely legitimate for persons to decide that a property owner’s rules for persons entering their property do not suit them. However, if they do, their only legitimate response is to leave, or not enter. The only exception can be due to some contractual arrangement.
As for incarceration, there are almost no circumstances whereby this is legitimate in a free society. The legitimate response to the only actions that are crimes, i.e. aggression against persons or property, is restitution, which is rarely best served by incarceration. Should a convicted aggressor be detained whilst working off his/her/its debt to his/her/its victim(s) it would be at a facility that both the aggressor and the facility mutually agreed to, and might include mixed or segregated facilities. It would be entirely up to the owner of any segregated facility to determine how he/she/it segregated detainees. It would be entirely up to the detainee to determine if the policies of a given institution agreed with him/her/it.
In short, when will so-called libertarians fully realize what it is to actually live like a libertarian and learn to shut the fuck up about the actions, beliefs, lifestyles etc. of other people who are not aggressing against persons or property.
1) We don’t live in a Libertarian society. It is impossible to “live like a Libertarian”, because the State and other people won’t let you. On this issue, if your personal opinions are such that you are identified as a racist, sexist, homophobe or now, “transphobe”, even though you have done nothing but hold an opinion which others have somehow discovered (maybe you were foolish and dared to politely express it in a discussion for instance) you will be barred from various professions- academia, education, social care, etc and if considered egregious the State may take action against you. You may be barred from access to children, adoption, and so on. You may be arrested and prosecuted, as with Emma West’s transgression of the “racism” crime. If you are at university, you will certainly be hounded by our equivalent of the Red Guards.
2) Restitution is not much use if you’ve got half a dozen bodies buried under your patio. Punishment has always been a central response to crime in human societies. Many libertarians of the anarcho-capitalist flavour I believe need to get their heads around the idea that not everything reduces to economics, and there is a fundamental difference between civil law (dispute resolution) and criminal law (punishment of transgressions of rights by force, crudely). There is no restitution that can compensate for the murder of your child, and there is usually little economic effect to be restituted following a rape. Much as Murray Rothbard liked the idea of us spending all day perambulating from courtroom to courtroom settling lawsuits as a replacement for current governance systems, it’s not actually much of a solution.
So, are you suggesting that libertarians completely sell out their ideals in order to ‘fit in’ and just wait until a free society emerges somehow in the absence of any anybody actually being a libertarian, and only then be a libertarian when everyone else is? It is completely possible to live like a libertarian now; today. I do already. All you do is mind your own damn business unless someone is aggressing against persons or property. What’s so hard about that? By playing the game by their rules, you are not advancing the cause of freedom one jot.
As for being barred from anything, or arrested etc. property owners, such as potential employers or media site owners, are entirely at liberty to bar me as they see fit for any reason, and each and every transaction anyone has ever had with those who call themselves ‘government’ is an aggression against persons and property.
Everybody exercises their own free will in every circumstance. If someone says, “I will only give you a job if you dye your hair purple and whistle dixie”, you decide for yourself either to say “Thanks! I’ll pass” or pucker up and offer to kiss the ring as well. If you are threatened by a thug, whether a mugger in the park, a person calling themselves a ‘tax collector’, or a Child Protective Services officer, you decide whether to co-operate under protest (however silent), run, or stand and fight, to the death if needs be.
As for vengeance versus restitution, we both have different ideas on the subject but, ultimately, the market will decide. So yes, economics will rule the day. If the masses chose to purchase private protection policies that put a dollar price on a life, then that will be the norm. If they opt for vengeance, then that will be. I know what I would choose, but that is largely irrelevant in the scheme of things. Btw. Do you have life insurance? Did you purchase a policy that put a dollar value on your life? Just asking.
Crimes are not a market activity; they are by definition external to it. Unless you are suggesting that criminals must obtain Public Liability Insurance, restitution is a non-starter. More significantly, the whole point of criminal law is that everyone gets the same punishment whether a prince or a beggar. What’s the price of a rape? £10,000? £100,000? A poor man could never make his restitution, whereas a rich man may think that a reasonable price and commit the crime expecting to pay out, since his marginal utility of the currency unit is much, much lower than the pauper’s.
There is a precedent in early Anglo-Saxon and other tribal laws, however these were passed at a time when members of social castes (free man, bondsman, slave, man, woman etc) were roughly economically similar and so prices could be crudely set (the Wergeld thing). Wouldn’t work today, even if we found it acceptable to put a price on crime like that.
And on the main point, I reiterate that however much you may think you live like a libertarian, the vast majority of people around you are not, and you can mind your own business only to find that everyone else minds yours. As per your example, the conditions under which you may offer or withdraw employment are strictly curtailed by the types of issue discussed by this article. Libertarians cannot hide in a hole pretending the world outside is not there. There is a cultural jihad underway which openly seeks to destroy what shreds of libertarian values still remain. We need to engage, critique and seek solutions. It is our business because it is forced upon us, whether we like it or not.
Ian, without the toxic influence of state interference everything will be a market activity. You pay for protection services now under the state, you simply have no control over the price or the quality of service you receive.
There exists a wealth of scholarly articles on how restitution might work so I am not going to regurgitate it now. If you are interested in the subject beyond denying that it would work, I invite you to do some research.
Having said that, I will make a few brief points.
First, in a free society, the market will decide everything including whether it prefers retribution or restitution, not you or I, or libertarian intellectuals, or any philosopher, or historical precedent. Entrepreneurs will design products for the market to embrace or reject including restitution and retribution based defence policies and customers will choose according to their individual values.
Second, protection policies will likely be insurance based where the purchaser decides on a level of cover so will chose values acceptable to them for various events such as rape, assault, murder etc. I cannot predict what the market might choose as appropriate restitution for e.g. rape, that will be a process of market discovery. That is the beauty and strength of markets as opposed to command economies.
Third, it is the protection provider who is likely to pay out to the victim the level of compensation pre-chosen and paid for by the victim, with the insurer recovering what costs it can from the perpetrator.
Fourth, to the extent that insurers can recover costs from perpetrators, policy premiums will be reduced.
Fifth, if victims choose retribution, the insurer will not recover any costs if the perpetrator is incarcerated or killed and will bear the additional cost of any incarceration, so premiums will be higher.
Sixth, because of the above, let’s say that retribution policy premiums are twice the price of restitution policy premiums (who knows what the multiple would actually be?). Purchasers would face the decision, “Do I receive X compensation for Y premium with the perpetrator working to pay for his crime literally, or do I receive the same X compensation but for 2Y premium because the perpetrator is locked up?” As I keep repeating, individuals will make this choice for themselves.
Lastly, any of us could face being found guilty of aggression against persons or property at some point and will face the consequences of the market choice between restitution and retribution. Which would you rather face? How would your preference for treatment as a perpetrator colour your market choice as a victim? Do unto others etc,
On your comments about living as a libertarian, it is important to grasp that you are not CONTROLLED by others in any way, at any time, in any circumstance, and no person living or dead ever has been. You are already entirely free to choose in every circumstance. You cannot say that the actions of others COMPEL you to respond in a particular fashion, only that your internal values make one response more attractive to you than another. Wind and rain do not compel you to don a coat, they just make this an attractive response, however, you are free to choose to wear anything you want or go out in it or not. Similarly, another not approving of your preferences in no way compels a specific response from you.
Libertarianism is an individual choice, not a collective choice. Me living a libertarian lifestyle has absolutely nothing to do with the actions of others. It really is as simple as me minding my own business unless others are aggressing against persons or property. Unless they are aggressing, I can have no legitimate interest in their actions beyond choosing a non-violent response. You are an individual and make individual choices. Reasoning that you are part of a collective and are somehow bound by the rules and customs of the collective is the very definition of collectivism.
Collectivism is a powerful tool of the matrix in which individuals are made to believe that they are not free and that their freedom depends on others. If you believe that you have to wait until approximately seven billion others make a pinky promise that they will not limit you in any way before you achieve freedom, the matrix has won. When sufficient individuals take the blindingly simple step of recognising that they are already free then society becomes effectively ungovernable. You see? Freedom does not require a violent revolution, or for everyone else to make you free, it just requires a sufficient number of individuals to say (and mean) “I am free”. That’s it. Freedom is free.
What makes you think that people will choose a market mechanism? They never have in the past. The most likely system that any society will choose is a feud system. If I think you’ve harmed me or a member of my family, me and my family come round and inflict escalatory harm on you and your family, and so on. Which is a much simpler system than insurance.
The problem for me with anarcho-capitalists, is you (and I mean, back to Rothbard as a collective “you”) first abolish the system, then start describing in infinite detail a… system, which somehow everyone magically adheres to without any means of compulsion, which is a problem because law always requires compulsion.
Let us say that you think I raped and murdered your daughter. You and/or your representative insurers/agency turn up at my front door and demand I attend your court. I say I’m not interested and slam the door in your face. This might be because I am guilty. It might be because I am innocent and have better ways to spend my time than exposing myself to potential claims for restitution or some other punishment. You can’t enforce your opinion of my guilt upon me, because you have no means of compulsion to do so. I have no contract with you, no contract with your agency to participate in this pantomime, and neither do I have an agency of my own since I prefer to look after myself, and if, by contrast, I think you’ve raped and murdered my daughter I’ll just come round with some friends and firearms and kill you.
You can’t have a system without a system. The whole thing just won’t get off the ground. Which is why it has never existed in reality; we moved in our culture from Feud to Wergeld dictated by State law; indeed, the whole point of inventing legal systems was to stop the escalating cycles of violence caused by the Feud approach.
Which doesn’t even get into the question of who gets the restitution anyway. Can’t be your daughter. She’s dead and buried. Who is our remarkably compliant rapist/murderer going to pay his fiver (he’s not very well off you see) a month to?
I completely agree with you that if a population with a statist mentality loses their god, the state, whether, through overthrow or collapse, they are extremely likely to immediately institute another god to favour them and protect them.
A free society will not come about because some authority imposes it on serfs as a policy. Voluntaryists are not going to form a government and then dismantle themselves, leaving the masses with an authoritarian mindset but no authority. That was never ‘the plan’ (we don’t have one) or our intention.
The essence of voluntaryism is the personal statement by individuals that they do not consent to be governed. If society reaches the happy state that sufficient numbers of individuals adopt such a philosophy voluntarily, then such a general condition will naturally arise and be durable (I have no opinion on what constitutes ‘sufficient’). If society arrives at a state of individual liberty and individual responsibility because its individual members so believe, then voluntary interaction will be their personal, individual choice – i.e. the free market.
As for the old statist saw that no society has ever tried statelessness, please stop mindlessly repeating statist propaganda and do some research. Personally, I couldn’t give a hoot whether there is a precedent or not. If nothing new could arise because precedence was required then innovation would be dead. However, to start your research look up the Harappan Civilization of the Indus valley or Brehon society in Ireland. Statelessness has existed and it has been affluent, stable, and enduring.
Lastly, I love the way that you accuse voluntaryists of going into excruciating detail about our fantasy, statelessness, reject all that work as unrealistic, then go into excruciating detail yourself about how your fantasy is the only way. Statism already doesn’t work, so attempting to defend a proven fantasy with academic argument is pointless.
As for specifying blow-by-blow details of how every aspect of a stateless society might work, including dealing with rape, who can predict what solutions that entrepreneurs might develop that gain market acceptance. For some ideas, please read/re-read some of the ‘excruciating detail’ you know already exists. What is certain is that if society rejects authoritarianism as its organisational paradigm then the only possible alternative is the market, i.e. market solutions will prevail.
Frankly, I see no further point in continuing this discussion as both of us are just repeating ourselves. Were there new points on either side then there would be something to discuss, but in their absence, maybe we should both accept that we are flogging a dead horse. I conclude that you are a closed minded, hopeless statist, welded to an authoritarian god, who believes that violence actually solves societal problems against all empirical evidence to the contrary, and I couldn’t care less what you think of me. Readers can decide for themselves which ideology rings more true to them, the one that declares them personally to be individuals who are free, and responsible for their own lives, or the one that declares them to be individually valueless inadequates, members of some collective who can’t be trusted to make decisions about their own lives. The End.
A few points.
The existence of Cultural Marxists who campaign for ‘trans rights’ does nothing to invalidate the claims of a person to be trans, anymore than the existence of radical feminists invalidates the right of a woman to stay at home and raise 2.4 children while mending her husbands socks. So, lets not conflate the Cultural Marxists with trans people.
Secondly, the binary genders (much like the rest of your biology) are created from a complex mix of genetic and endocrinological factors, pre-natal and post-natal development. Nature can (and does) mess up, speed-up, slow down, miss-order, or ignore development at any of these stages. Just look at the wide variety of intersex conditions. Biology is messy. Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) is a brilliant example; genetic males who are insensitive to the androgen hormone will develop as females, be identified at birth as female, and so probably raised as a female. They will usually have a vagina, but no uterus, and internal testes instead of ovaries. When identified as having the condition, most women (for they are women) continue to identify as female. Transgenderism (ie identifying as male) is no more common among female-identified genetically-male female-bodied AIS than the general population. Weird, huh? What does this suggest? That endocrine problems in a genetic males can produce a ‘female’ brain? A genetic male raised as a women IS a women? A mixture? The medical and scientific community can’t give us an answer, but this proves that gender is naturally malleable, endocrinologically and/or socially – probably via a mixture of both.
Even if nature is aiming for binary, and the body behaves, it actually produces a bi-polar spectrum. For every Arnold Schwarzenegger there is a Larry Grason, and for every Marlyn Monroe there’s a Fatima Whitbread. And right in the middle? Well, androgynous, gender-fluid people are nothing new.
Considering this, transgenderism is not a stretch. And once removed from the clutches of social conservatism and cultural Marxism, it not even very controversial. I mean, by DJ’s objections to body modification, we might as well object to ear piercing or tattoos (ah, he probably does).
Oh DJ, and this;
” I agree that doctors should verify that the excision of a healthy organ is not just a whim, and so a period of time before the operation, coupled with counselling, would be good practice.”
Really?! You say this like you think anyone does this on a whim? Do you think the medical profession doesn’t – and hasn’t always – taken its time on this? People are (rightly) expected to transition and live socially as their chosen gender, while being counseled, often for years before medical intervention even starts. Note, I said intervention – surgery isn’t even on the horizon at this point. Transition takes years, is technically reversible up until any surgery is completed (which is right at the end of the process, and not universal by any means. Lots of trans people never opt for full surgical transition. Concentrating on chopping-off penises misses so much of the reality!)
Ben, you’re quite right, I do object to tattoos – on anti-chav culture grounds. The fact that most of your comment related to rare genetic disorders shows how weak your argument is. Are you saying that all transsexuals have provable genetic disorders that show them to be women? Those who do would have a case when they say they were incorrectly “assigned” to a sex at birth. But in nearly all cases, transsexualism has nothing to do with genetic disorders. In no cases will excision of organs help the person’s real condition — I think there was that case in Belgium of a suicide by someone whose sex-change operation left him a freak. It is difficult to argue that even where someone does not relate to the “role” of his sex in society he will be better off by having a sex-change. Why not just live as a man with a personality and attitude to life that varies from the supposed “socially created gender role”? Given the fact that metrosexuality means that men are not expected to be as macho as they used to be, I fail to see how expected roles in society cannot accommodate every single person with male sexual organs. Two hundred years ago, this problem did not exist, and it seems that transsexualism is just a reflection of the “deconstruction” of social norms, with the transsexuals themselves actually victims of the sort of nonsense you spout!!! Long live the Cis! (not the sissies, mind you!)
djwebb2010 unless you cite some empirical and clinical studies proving that surgery (in addition to all other interventions prescribed in the standards of care for transgender health) has led to worse outcomes your opinion is just your opinion, it’s not science. There have been plenty of peer-reviewed scientific studies done on transsexuals, which show that post-operative transsexuals are satisfied with the outcome do not regret the surgery and report higher levels of emotional well being having gone through the entire process. This means not just gender re-assignment surgery, but hormones, hair removal, therapy, voice coaching and if needed facial feminisation surgery.
There is a higher suicide rate among transsexuals both pre-opp and post-opp than the general population but the suicide rate among post-opp transsexuals drops significantly following the surgery.
The biggest factor in determining suicide is the level of support the transsexual receives. Not only in accessing the medical interventions but in the support from the people around them namely family, friends, school and work. Put bluntly children of socially conservative parents who reject them are far more likely to walk into moving traffic like Leelah Alcorn did.
All Medical interventions do not have a 100% success rate. The fact that chemotherapy cannot always save a cancer patient does not mean that chemotherapy is invalid. Early diagnosis together with appropriate medical and emotional support leads to very effective treatment.
Nope! I don’t have to consult studies on post-operative satisfaction rates and show anything from them. If transsexuals wish to have an operation, that is up to them, and they can consult the available literature in making their choices. In the end, from a libertarian perspective, they can do what they want. But what they can’t do is demand social acceptance of their choice — and so your comment that post-op TS do better with broad social support is merely an attempt to take a non-libertarian line, demand social acquiescence in transsexualism. I’m pretty sure black people do better in the UK where the panoply of official anti-racism exists and no-one ever suggests to them they’re in the wrong country… In the end, all this discussion of “gender identity” is just extremist leftist babble, but if some people take it to heart, go and have the operation and then are pleased with the results, that is up to them, with the single proviso that others do not have to approve of all this.
Well you most certainly have the choice to turn your back on empiricism and the scientific method and dismiss it as leftism and extremism as if this were the authoritative proof. It just reveals that your claims are un-falsifiable dogma and should be dismissed as such.
As for demanding social acquiescence of transsexuals. It is something that an individual can and should demand as part of the terms of dealing economically or socially with other individuals, Boycotts, ostracism and shaming are entirely permissible in a voluntary society to achieve such acquiescence. Social Conservatives do it to their transgender children all the time heedless of the suffering they cause.
This sort of argument is in my view deeply flawed. There are many genetic and congenital errors in human sexual biology, as in all other areas of our biology. People can be born with no legs, or a tail, or with muscle that turns to bone (a rare, truly nightmarish affliction). None of this tells us anything about the psychological state of transsexuality or “transgender”. (By the way, as David pointed out in his article, “gender” has nothing to do with biology, which is described by the word “sex”- the use of “gender” comes from linguistics and literary theory, which reminds us that so do the theories of the Left; their originators are in the liberal arts, not the sciences, and Critical Theory itself is a bizarre transposition of textual analysis to analysis of reality. But I digress.
So far as we know, a human being knows nothing at all when born. I and you only know we are human beings because we learned that by observation. A baby does not know what its mother, a breast, milk or a cot are. It has certain behaviours, and it has a personality. But in terms of knowledge it is a tabula rasa.
It is therefore inconceivable that a person is born knowing what sex they are, or even plausible that this knowledge could be genetically encoded in the brain. It has to be learned. This distinction between knowledge and behaviour is important to grasp; male children have male instinctive behaviours, such as being more aggressive than females. But they do not know that these are male behaviours. They simply act. As they learn about the world, they learn how to describe themselves- their species, their sex, etc. A baby has a reflexive instinct to suckle anything that fits in its mouth. But it does not know what “suckling” is. That is a category, a description, which it learns later as it acquires a model of the world, and words to describe it.
A thought experiment may illustrate; imagine that we isolate an all female community on an island. The women running the place never mention sex, gender, or men. The girls growing up there are never told of such things. So far as they know, there is only one type of person and they have breasts and a vagina, and a hairless face, and so on. There is only one type of behaviour, which we (knowing about the sexes) would call “feminine”, but they, not knowing, would call nothing because there would be no masculine from which to distinguish it.
To posit congenital transsexuality would be to propose that a girl born and raised there could know that she is something of which she has no knowledge, know that she should have a penis and testes and hairy face, though she has no knowledge of such things. If “gender” is hardwired, this is what should occur. I don’t believe that anyone would seriously propose that this would happen. The simple fact is that there is simply no biological rational for encoding knowledge of this kind, or any kind- not only would it be absurdly difficult for evolution to get the right mutations in the brain construction to fit with reality, there is no need as sex, like species or anything else, is an observable that the child can learn from the world.
Transsexuality is certainly a real condition. It causes great distress. But the answers to why it occurs are not going to be found in deconstructionist philosophy.
I agree with Ian’s analysis. Also I would add that I do not believe “gender identity” issues were around 1,000 years ago. Sure, there have always been a minority of men attracted to other men (although I don’t think the “gay” identity existed 1,000 years ago; that would be to posit homoerotic sexual activity in a cultural context that simply did not exist), but there were no men convinced that they were destined to be women, but that for unknown, possibly genetic, reasons they ended up with female anatomy.