An actual thing
Ok let’s talk about that.
Transgenderism is an actual thing. Transethnicism, as far as we know, isn’t.
— Mitch Benn (@MitchBenn) May 11, 2019
What does it mean to say “transgenderism is an actual thing”?
It’s an actual thing in the sense that people talk about it a lot, but that’s not what Benn means, because he contrasts it with “transethnicism” which as far as we know, according to him, is not an actual thing.
So what does he mean? Presumably something like “an actual condition, not just a fashion or fad or subject of conversation.” But then how does he know it really is an actual condition, not just a fashion or fad or subject of conversation? Is his knowledge derived from the noisy shouting about it on Twitter? But that can’t be a good reason. Twitter shouting can’t be the criterion for distinguishing between an actual condition (physical? psychological?) and a fad.
And what part of transgenderism is the actual thing? Is it the feelings in the head, or is it the presentation of self? Is it dysphoria or is it a frilly little dress and red silk shoes?
And what makes that an actual thing while ruling out “transethnicism” as an actual thing? How can we know that?
I keep wondering where people get their confident knowledge on this subject when it’s all so…conceptual.
Seeing how quickly attitudes and opinions about things like this have hardened into orthodoxy still shocks me. Is it Orwellian? Kafkaesque? I don’t know, but it’s not good. “We” are dividing the world into the righteous and the heretics at an alarming clip. If you can’t get behind every tenet of current (!) trans thinking, you are self-evidently scum. A fascist, Nazi TERF bigot who lives to harm anyone different, and who deserves to be kicked in the head.
Funny that – I asked the same question at PZ’s place and was howled down mercilessly by the usual suspects, including the blogger over there is as happy as a pig in shit to criticise anyone not as woke as he, yet does not allow comment on his blog.
I honestly cannot see the difference – an obviously sincere, but misguided woman wanting to be black or a bloke in a skirt wanting to be a lesbian. Both are wants, not needs. In a lot of ways, these men wanting to be women are reminding me of the same “my needs are all that counts” bleatings of incels.
Of course, it’s the same with Otherkin. I once asked how identifying as a wolf was different from identifying as someone of the opposite sex and got similarly shouted down just as Roj @ 2 describes. If self-identification is all that is required to establish reality, why is one different from the other?
Because shut up TERF, that’s why.
Benn’s statement may as well be “Transgenderism is true because lots of people claim it to be true.”
I’m going to be very, very charitable to Benn here. And, (spoiler!) he will still be wrong.
Gender dysphoria describes something real. Little is known about that real thing. Furthermore, it may in fact not be one thing, but several distinct things. Our knowledge of how best to treat gender dysphoria or gender dysphorias is in its infancy.
Transgenderism is not gender dysphoria. Transgenderism is a cluster of (often contradictory) beliefs related to, but distinct from, gender dysphoria. Transgenderism posits that one does not need and should not have to have gender dysphoria in order to be “trans.” Transgenderism claims that “gender identity” can be fluid, and innate, and an inherent part of One’s Deepest Truest Self, or a matter of performance and self-presentation, or both, or neither. Transgenderism claims “Trans women are women” and “Trans men are men.”
It’s true that no such thing as “racial dysphoria” is acknowledged by psychiatrists (as far as I know.)
But transracialism certainly exists and is just as real as transgenderism. Which is to say, some people certainly do claim an “identity” as the sex or race they aren’t, and there is no good reason to take their claims seriously.
Yet here we are.
Say you woke up yesterday from a 50-year coma—and had thus missed out on all this gender identity theory and trans activism and social media argument and memes and all the rest. Would you be able to work out why being a woman is a matter of feelings, convictions, intuitions, or some kind of “identifying,” but being black isn’t? Would you be able to predict which one—transgender identity or transracial identity—was taken as self-evidently true?
Lady M @ 6 – well but I wasn’t asking how Benn’s assertion could be interpreted to make sense, I was asking what he thought he meant. He made a very confident but very dopy assertion, and I was teasing out what made it dopy.
O, I thought I was helping with the teasing out.
Of course on second thought I probably gave him too much credit.
But his assertion still doesn’t make sense even if you grant him the charity I did. At BEST he’s confusing gender dysphoria with transgenderism.
I like to point that out, because TRAs do it ALL THE TIME and it’s easy to miss.
Uh, only two posts ago, (TWO!) you yourself linked to a report of Ray Blanchard’s twitter suspension, noting that he is a world expert in gender dysphoria, and where Lady Mondegreen linked to his post that predicated the suspension:
Is it the choice of wording with “transgenderism” vs. “transsexualism” that’s confusing you?
Well, Dolezal seemed to KNOW that she was posing/lying. She didn’t invent a category of being to justify her actions. No ‘I have a black brain in a white body’ style fantasy.
Karellen, even if there is any confusion, is it really surprising? A big part of the TRAs agenda seems to be a campaign of misinformation. Transgender, transsexual, and intersex have become interchangeable, gender and sex are either seperate or the same, depending on which version suits a particular argument, and to dispute the claims of one group is to dispute the claims of them all. They’ve managed to engineer the whole thing to be as unfathomably illogical as the Holy Trinity, where opposing claims can both be true, where these three things are at the same time seperate, unique entities and indivisible parts of the whole.
In short, if there’s confusion it’s because the ideology is intended to confuse: one cannot make sense of an ideology that is deliberately designed to not make sense, and for which anyattempt at clarification is a heretical act for which one is to be punished.
AOS is right. We gender critical people are not the source of the confusion. We didn’t do this. We’re not stupid, we’re not malicious, and we’re not scheming. We’re trying to sort out a deliberate confusion *consciously caused by trans activists.*
We. Didn’t. Do. This.
Karellen, a “transsexual” is a person who lives full time as the other sex and has had surgeries to make their bodies look as much like the other sex as possible. Blanchard knows this.
Transgender activists and their supporters in the woke brigade don’t like the term and don’t use it. They prefer “transgender”, which is a loosely-defined umbrella term, perfect for bullshitting. Anyone can be “transgender.”
In his tweet, Blanchard used the umbrella term “transgender”, but I think it’s clear he was talking about people with gd, not college boys who put on a skirt and paint their nails and call themselves enbies.
“Transgenderism” really is an inchoate mess of an idea.
Julia Serano in Whipping Girl:
See how clear that is?
P. S. I’m embarrassed that I misused the word “inchoate” at 15. I thought it meant “indistinct”.
Karellen @ 11 – it’s not that Mitch Benn’s wording is “confusing” me, it’s that it’s vague wording. It’s not clear what he means by saying “transgenderism is an actual thing.” It’s a sloppy, vague, hand-wavey claim to base such dogmatic correcting on.
Also…what’s the indignation about? What does the previous post have to do with this one? Why does the fact that I “linked to a report of Ray Blanchard’s twitter suspension, noting that he is a world expert in gender dysphoria” make it surprising or outrageous that I asked what Mitch Benn meant by “transgenderism is an actual thing”? What Blanchard says or is or does isn’t the same as what Benn said, and gender dysphoria isn’t the same word as transgenderism, and “an actual thing” is still a somewhat vague descriptor.