Guest post: No not that kind of born as
Originally a comment by maddog1129 on We see you, Jonathan.
All the noise and agitation comes from transwhatevers: biological males who wish that they had been born as females, who want to be accepted as such, and for everyone else to play along.
I’ll take some issue with the emphasized language. I don’t believe for one minute that many, if any, really “wish that they had been born female.” They sit in a privileged spot, having been born male, such that they will never know or understand the second class citizenship (at best! At worst, it’s enslavement status) that is baked into being born female. They never wish for that! Oh, no! They can see the disadvantages of being actually born female, but they have no real inkling what it’s actually like to live it.
They never sign up for the drudge work of being female: the unpaid household labor, the childcare responsibilities, the invisibility, the imprisonment, the exclusion from public life. They only want the outer trappings — the clothes, the hair, the being deferred to in the chivalric sense of having doors opened for them, having their meals and gifts paid for by someone else. They absolutely abhor what would go along with being an actual woman: being ignored, being talked over, being shunted aside, being invisible, being excluded, being looked down upon, being paid less, being oppressed in the million and one ways that women are oppressed.
They like having their cake and eating it too: invading women’s spaces, taking women’s places, beating women at sports and taking their team spots, placements, wins, trophies, prizes, scholarships, and everything else. They love the opportunity to be champions and victims at the same time! They like being able to lie with impunity, being able to force everyone else to play along and validate the lie, and to punish anyone who won’t play along.
No, I doubt that any of them genuinely wishes to have been born female.
Good point. Not to mention the genuine physical challenges accompanying living in a female body – the innate ones, the ones caused by medical sexism, and the ones detailed in Invisible Women. They must know this, even if they’d never explicitly acknowledge it.
Maybe this also covers some of the differences I feel on the issue of transmen. There, I think a great many do wish, on some level, that they’d been born male from the get-go; the perks of privilege are pretty enticing. So many transmen have a sincerity that is lacking in the modern transwoman. (I’m drawing that distinction because, as I’ve noted before, prior to the age of the internet, I did know some transwomen who primarily sought to keep as low a profile as possible, and get on with life without a lot of disruption.)
I said:
For the transwhatevers as I see it, there are at least 3 sexes: 1. males, 2. females and 3. those born either 1 or 2, but who seek assignment to the other of those two categories. That leaves it open to them to either accept the disadvantages of being female as perceived, discussed and emphasised by, say, radical feminists, to pretend they are of no consequence, or else (at a guess more rarely) to work against them in whichever way they can.
But trans rights appear to be their only real concern, or as maddog1129 put it in the threadstarter:
To which OB added:
Well, maybe they believe that being a pretend female gives them whatever they are seeking, which is apparently permanent residence in Fantasyland. But they behave as if the fantasy is worthwhile for them.
I think that there are many men who wish to be women because they can’t fit into a masculine society, but they just have no clue what it means for women to be women. They say they feel like women, but in reality they feel like “not men,” as defined by their male peers. I think that this gender incongruence is the one legitimate tie that they have with gays who are not butch. I know there are many straight men who are suspected of being gay because they aren’t the macho sort, and I wish that those who are suddenly unquestioning on the idea that those men who are incongruent must be in truth female. It’s affirming the gender trap to think so, rather than attacking it. My website link is to the first post in a long time for Substack discussing the alternative hypothesis that men and teen boys are trying to avoid the masculinity trap by taking on the NB or trans label.
And then, of course, there are these athletes who see how easy it is to get medals in women’s sports and will be lauded by the press for it. For example, the guy who won a high-jump at 5’2″ as a trans athlete, when men’s competitions would require at least a 6′ jump.
I’m going to disagree here.
I believe maddog accurately describes a good chunk of contemporary “trans women”–I don’t know what proportion.
But I think autogynephilia is real, and we don’t know enough about it to make assumptions one way or the other.
It’s true that these men can’t know what it’s actually like to be a woman. But it doesn’t follow from that that their desire isn’t sincere. (I don’t know what it’s like to be rich, but, as Dorothy Parker said, I’m sure I’d be darling at it.)
I agree with Maddog, and I’m not sure which part you disagree with here, LM.
Mike, this part:
I think some do. I don’t know how many, but I don’t think anyone can, at this point. The phenomenon (autogynephilia) needs more study.
That the “woman” an autogynephile wants to be is purely an object of fantasy, that I absolutely agree with.
It’s that; it’s really impossible to know what they actually believe but it is also unlikely they wish they had been born female as maddog describes it. Better to assume the gobbos believe what they say the believe but also don’t know what they’re talking about.
Yeah, I guess my point was just semantic.
I think it might be a little more complex even than that; do they wish they were born women? Possibly. Did they wish that before googling their symptoms of depression, and getting told by the internet gods that they were trans? Probably not, at least for most of them. The only ones I’ve known have been people who transed as adults, and were never gender dysphoric as children. (I know this, because I knew them as children.) Many of them now believe they spent their entire childhood trying to get people to accept them as girls, to let them wear girls clothes, etc. It’s amazing what a little bit of internet searching can do, especially when followed by the pressure and the support of the trans “community”.