One glassy-eyed celebrity after another
A rather sad account of transgender life:
Am I a woman? I used to believe I was. I used to have stars in my eyes. My role model was the Bond girl (and self-described “Transsexual Supermodel”) Caroline Cossey. She was gorgeous and glamorous. If she could do it, couldn’t I? Me, a socially awkward boy who struggled to find brotherhood in the company of boys, who more easily made friends with girls. Why not?
I have a lot of sympathy for that struggling to find brotherhood in the company of boys. I had friends who were boys who struggled that way. It wasn’t that they “felt like girls,” as far as I remember, so much as it was that they were nerdy aka bookish aka intellectually inclined aka not particularly keen on sports. The company of boys can be tiring.
In the very early days of the modern Internet, there was a non-commercial predecessor to Facebook and Twitter called IRC, or Internet Relay
Channel[Chat]. Using login credentials borrowed from a teacher, I used this chat network to seek out help. And I found it. For a misfit like me, finding a group of people who were accepting and validating was amazing. Maybe even intoxicating. These people understood me—or, even if they didn’t quite understand me, they would at least listen to me. Crossdressers, transvestites, and transsexuals—people who were gender non-conforming—a community where I belonged. Finally.
A community with a belief system.
“Born in a man’s body” became the accepted device for explaining our existence as transsexuals. To “cure” this condition, we were expected to take feminizing hormones and whatever other treatments were necessary to achieve femininity, commonly including hair removal (through the process of electrolysis, predating laser depilation), facial feminizing surgery, tracheal shaving to reduce the prominence of the Adam’s apple, surgery to change vocal pitch, rib reduction surgery, a list of implants including breast, hip, buttock, and cheek, and then finally sex-reassignment surgery.
…
You might be wondering about the women who wanted to transition to become men. They were hardly around. And truth be told, they weren’t particularly welcome in a space populated by gender-bending men. Antipathy toward the female sex is the norm in these trans spaces. It’s hard to make believe in the presence of the real deal.
I’ve noticed that. Boy howdy have I noticed that. I wish more people would.
While I wasn’t paying attention, a new thing called the “Transgender Community” arose to take the place of the thing I’d previously known as simply community. Whereas the community I’d transitioned with was mostly middle-aged white men of all different political views, this new community was mostly middle-aged white men of radically leftist ideology. Before, we had been a group of individuals brought together by an unusual commonality. Now, it’s a whole identity movement. What’s more, the previous antipathy toward women has become more intense.
So very intense.
My ignorance of the transgender cuckoo’s egg was corrected when I started that blog, which I used to explore the intersection of transgenderism and feminism. While there was heat on both sides of the divide, it was immediately obvious that only one side used threats of violence, violent (often sexual) imagery, and harassment as part of its strategy to confront its counterpart. I was shocked by the misogyny coming from “my side,” and spoke out against it.
If only more people would.
As I came to accept myself, and accept my choices, the depression lifted. I wrote more, trying to work out and understand my life through a different lens. Events and encounters that had previously left me confused and anxious started to make more sense when I realized I’d experienced them as a transsexual and not as a woman. In fact, my spiral of misery was practically an assured outcome given my effort to assert a womanhood that never existed and never can or will.
Since then, I’ve learned I’m not the only transsexual to have this revelation. The transgender community (such as it is) talks about authenticity, about true selves, about becoming ourselves. Why did I need to become a lifelong medical patient and have a dangerous surgery to reveal my “authentic” self?
Is there even any such thing as an “authentic self”? Hume said the self is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”
Now I’m 45. Almost certainly more than half-way to wherever I stop. If I keep taking estrogen, I risk a stroke and deep vein blood clots. If I stop, I risk skeletal deterioration. Teenage me had no way of appreciating the choices middle-age me would have to make. Do I regret my choices? As a child growing up during the AIDS crisis, and watching some of my friends damaged by drug addiction, there’s a chance that my choices left me better off than I might otherwise have been. If I regret anything, it’s that so few people helped me to understand the weight of my decisions, and that I was discouraged from believing in my own agency.
Of course there’s also a chance that those choices didn’t leave Corinna Cohn better off.
I don’t think that he could live with the decisions he made without making some assumptions about how any alternative choices would have been worse. Poor bloke.
It is interesting to me that the timeline he posits is pretty much the one I observed; first the MRAs took over (and destroyed) the ASD forums, posing as ‘self-diagnosed’, but got nowhere – they overestimated the indulgence granted to disabled people, and underestimated the wider hostility towards autism – and swiftly vanished from the community, only to re-appear as ‘self-identified’ ‘trans’. In both cases, they started by sympathising with the understandable frustration of genuinely autistic/dysphoric people (big overlap, there) with the convoluted and often unfair and apparently arbitrary route to official diagnosis in order to get support. Accustomed to sympathising with genuine cases, it was hard for the members of each community to see the cuckoo in the nest until it had already jettisoned the original brood.
The difference in the second wave is that they learned from their mistakes in the first, and got political behind the scenes. The similarity is that they managed to increase hostility towards the original communities, and will disappear into the woodwork again to reap the benefit of the destruction they have wrought on wider society.
Modern neuroscience agrees.
https://www.livescience.com/55999-is-your-self-just-an-illusion.html
A heartfelt but ironic statement, considering how anything other than Affirmation and encouragement is today considered transphobic in many circles and I would think worse now than then. An internal locus of control is seen as less important than ensuring that other people ‘validate’ one’s identity, and concerns about future physical problems resulting from major surgeries and hormones are too often dismissed with the insistence that the alternative is suicide.
Interesting reference to IRC. That’s what introduced me to atheism, skepticism, and humanism back in the 90’s. It played a major part in my life then, and I can still get nostalgic over it now. Religious debate rooms: good times.
I have a loved one who has gotten involved with the trans community, and finds support there that he didn’t know how to find elsewhere. At first, it was just sort of believing he was a she. Now it has morphed into hostility toward groups he didn’t feel hostile toward in the past. He breathes in the air of the trans community, and it has poisoned him.
Internet Relay Chat, not Channel.
iknklast: Sorry to hear that. Cults, man. Cults.
Internet Relay Chat makes a lot more sense.
How depressing to find one’s suspicions are true. It’s somehow more fulfilling to argue against that vast ballooning fantasy that is radical transgenderism. Being confronted with the reality of a sad, damaged, aging transsexual takes all the fun out of being right. I wish Cohn were a worse writer so I would empathize less.
I wonder what epithet they’ve come up with for Cohn? Can’t call him “cis.” Does “TERF” fit? Is there some catchy acronym that communicates the transgender equivalent of “self-hating Jew?” I can’t imagine the anger and threats that will be directed at Cohn for admitting that their “experiences as teenagers in the trans community was [sic] akin to grooming.” That’s right, TIMs who “affirm” the little kids: you’re psychological predators.
There is no completing becoming a woman for a trans woman. There is no end. Decades later, there’s just age, and damage, and clues to the lie in the mirror. I’m glad Cohn has reached some amount of peace with that fact.
The worst thing about this are not those who identify as the opposite sex who are disappointed by the change, but those who undergo the change and later change their minds. They have been neutered. And what’s worse, I suspect that a lot of the trans movement is actually a fad, something of a strange reverse moral panic. As it is trans people account for .6% of the population, by the most generous counts, and they seem to be sucking most of the oxygen out of the room.
If this is a fad, there is going to be a terrible price to pay when all those neutered children revolt. And anyone carrying water for all this is going to get caught in the blast.
The thing is, this is the key. Not to getting over the disappointment with being trans, but getting over the need to be trans. I can feel sorry for people who feel this; I am nearly 60, and still struggling to accept myself, and accept my choices. I am still in therapy. Hint: It doesn’t get better for everyone. Would it have been better if I had decided I was really a dude, changed my name, taken testosterone so I could grow a beard, and called myself “he”? Judging from the statistics, I would say not likely.
We need to accept ourselves as we are, and not constantly berate ourselves for what we could never be. I accepted while still in my teens that I could never be a singer as an occupation, for the plain and simple reason that I could not sing. Now I struggle to deal with all the things I could have done, but did not. My therapist continually points out what I did accomplish; it is a much larger list than I often realize, but still…yes, we have to accept who we are. We have to accept the choices we made. And this needs to be the focus of therapy for gender dysphoric people.
You are not in the wrong body, you are in your body. It may not fit how you see yourself (I struggle with body dysphoria; I know. And it was here that I was able to name it for the first time; so much for this site being unfriendly to people with dysphoria. Now my therapist and I can work on it). It may not fit what society thinks you should be. .The key is not to change your body, but to work with what you are and learn to accept it.
If that sounds facile, I’m sorry. It is facile. I know from experience it is not that easy. I am not speaking here to the depressed people struggling with their self-image. I am speaking here to the therapists and doctors and parents who will be the main support for these individuals. To my parents: Yeah, I’m a “girl” with a Ph.D. in the hard sciences; why the hell was that so hard for you to support? You would have supported either of my brothers in that. To society: Okay, I don’t wear make up, high heels, or nail polish. I am still a woman. Get over it. It’s none of your business. To my doctors: Thank you for not insisting I transition when I struggled to be a woman my own way. Thanks for not insisting I should be a man. Thanks for listening. Thanks for giving me a break when I couldn’t pay for therapy because I was so depressed I was disabled. Thanks.
Mark @ 8 – yes. The ones who change their minds are a tragedy, and I very much think it’s a fad. It keeps reminding me of the recovered memory fad and the visits from extraterrestrials fad.
I found out yesterday that a young relative of mine, whom I love very much, has told his parents he thinks he is trans. He’s chosen a new name and wants the pronouns to be she/her. He is15 years old. His parents are trying to be understanding and supportive, trying to get him a referral to GIDS etc.
But they’re also concerned. They pretty much overlap with me on thinking teens should not transition (physically at least) and that trans women are not women. We talked for a long time. This child has a history of depression and cutting. His parents think the trans thing explains the depression and cutting.
I think it could be the other way around. He’s a sweet kid, not at all aggressive and very artistic. That doesn’t make him a girl. But it is one of the oldest insults in the book in school to call a boy a sissy or a girl if they won’t live up to their standards of masculinity. Once upon a time, we could have treated him with counseling and if necessary, psychiatric assessment. Now I fear he’s close to the event horizon and we all desperately want to pull him back.
I don’t know what to do. We’re very close and I adore him. But I can’t see a path in front of him right now that is not filled with pain. I’m terrified of losing this gentle boy to the ravages of the TRA’s. I’m crying as I write this because I’m so scared.
Oh jeez I’m sorry Claire. That’s got to be horrific.
I wonder…He’s 15. Maybe give him a copy of It Gets Better? I’ve always wished about my teenage years that people had sat me down and made me look straight at them and pay attention and told me that high school is just a moment and after it everything changes.
Claire,
That’s a scary situation. I’m glad the parents are concerned, rather than jumping straight into affirmation and transitioning.
In case you haven’t already done this: you could do a lot worse than point the parents at the wonderful resource material provided for parents and schools by Transgender Trend in the UK. Their school guides have won awards. I looked over their school material when there was some controversy about it, and to my uneducated eye it looked excellent.
https://www.transgendertrend.com/schools-resources/
https://www.transgendertrend.com/resources-for-parents/
(I’m sure you’re also aware of the US organization 4th Wave Now, which serves a slightly different purpose.)
I can only imagine the anguish you’re dealing with. Hoping for the best.
If only I thought those videos would help my son…and yes, I do still refer to him as my son.
Cases such as this one serve to confirm something I have long suspected; no amount of clothing, make-up, hairdressing (and not just pink/purple/yellow/red etc. dyes), surgery, or external affirmation and validation will ever be enough to satisfy the individual that they are now truly what they claim to be, even for those who might actually ‘pass’ as their target sex, because the one thing that cannot change is self-knowledge. Yes, James might look in the mirror and see ‘Jemma’ but James knows that it is still James looking back at him, whether his transformation is a superficial clothes and make-up makeover or a full surgical transformation.
The disappointment has to be far worse for the vast majority who, no matter what they try, still fail to pass as their target sex when given the most cursory once-over, especially those whose transition is of the irreversible kind.
I suspect that it is this self-knowledge that is behind the hatred towards women as they represent what the transwomen know they will never be and will never be accepted as, outside of certain mutually-affirming circles of course.
I’m not denying that people need help with their gender issues, but it’s obvious that the first – and main – form of help should be psychiactric, treating the underlying issues rather than validating the delusions. Maybe that would slow the transgender suicide rate that is currently being blamed on society in general, and on feminists in particular.