Attempting to shift huge weighty blocks of patriarchy all by herself
Helen Saxby takes a look at the idea of Gender Dysphoria:
There is an argument around the meaning and relevance of the term gender dysphoria since it has replaced ‘gender identity disorder’ in the medical literature. On the one hand there is a push to remove gender dysphoria from the list of necessary conditions to being assessed as transgender in law, but on the other hand the diagnosis is being jealously guarded by trans activists and allies. In summary the attitude seems to be ‘We may not need gender dysphoria anymore but you sure as hell aren’t going to have it either’. This plays out in the outrage shown towards two main groups of women: those who were tomboys as children and who therefore can see the dangers of extreme trans ideology in schools; and those who have teenage daughters who have suddenly become trans-identified with no warning, and who therefore can see the dangers of an ideology which is subject to social contagion.
So who is qualified or entitled to make a diagnosis of gender dysphoria? Gender dysphoria is defined on the NHS website as being ‘…a condition where a person experiences discomfort or distress because there’s a mismatch between their biological sex and gender identity’.
Yes it is, and it’s been nagging at me ever since I posted it the other day. It’s been nagging at me because since when is “discomfort or distress” at some part of reality seen as a medical condition? That is what the NHS is calling it, remember: the definition is in an entry under Conditions. People who want to be athletes or ballet dancers can feel massive distress at not having the right body type for what they want to do, but that’s not seen as a medical Condition. Why is just this one thing being conceptualized this way?
So who is qualified or entitled to make a diagnosis of gender dysphoria? Gender dysphoria is defined on the NHS website as being ‘…a condition where a person experiences discomfort or distress because there’s a mismatch between their biological sex and gender identity’. This is sufficiently open to interpretation for many people to take a view on it. On Twitter recently, trans ally Dr Adrian Harrop admonished a woman for calling her early childhood experience ‘gender dysphoria’:
I saw that at the time – Gia’s tweet first, and later Harrop’s magisterial dismissal – and gaped in astonishment. How in hell does Adrian Harrop think he can possibly know that? How can he possibly know that what Gia describes is radically different from what Authentic trans people describe even though the wording is identical?
Helen tells a similar story in much more detail.
Trans activists seem to be very angry at the notion that any old tomboy back in the day might have identified as trans given half a chance. This is especially odd considering the current push for self-ID, a notion that the only criteria for a trans identification should be self-declaration. Alongside the claim that a diagnosis of gender dysphoria should no longer be a pre-requisite for trans status, it is strange to see trans activists gatekeeping so furiously. But still, if a doctor can tell a woman she is wrong about her own self-diagnosis on the basis of a couple of tweets, self-ID is obviously not for everyone.
I often see trans activists and allies dismissing the views of women because they are not trans: saying that women who are mothers or lesbians or who used to be tomboys, can have no insight into what the trans experience feels like. But if experiential knowledge is so revered, then my area of expertise tells me a lot about the pitfalls of growing up female in a male-centred world: about body dysmorphia, eating disorders, risk-taking, addiction, self-harming, depression. Teenage coping strategies such as these are being dismissed and minimised if a confusion with gender identity is also present, and it is the trans lobby groups that have successfully pushed for this. My problems as a teenage girl and young adult would have all been swept up as one under gender ideology, much like consolidating a loan. Neat and tidy. One problem instead of six. I would have loved that. It is often said that you can’t make a child trans, as if the concept of being born in the wrong body is a benign idea with no potential to influence or inform. I disagree: I think you can make a child believe they are trans, and that it’s quite simple to do: just make sure all the adults in a child’s world are singing from the same hymn sheet, and ensure there is no access to a different viewpoint. Again, the trans lobby groups have been quite successful at this.
But I did not suffer from gender dysphoria as a child. (Am I allowed to say that?)
What I believe I did suffer from was the confusion that comes from heavily proscribed gender roles and an inability to escape them. Without any consciousness of the larger patterns at work, I was attempting, like many girls, to shift huge weighty blocks of patriarchy all by myself, without any tools. Forcing a way around one block would only ensure another one would heave into view. A good example is culture: it wasn’t much use to me to reject the messages of the popular culture of the time and run full-tilt from Benny Hill, only to find myself slap bang in the middle of the literary clutches of Henry Miller. When gendered expectations are shored up and policed by both individual men and wider institutions, they become nearly impossible to escape. I didn’t know this when I was young. I just thought I was a bit shit.
There’s a lot more. Read the whole thing.
I have never seen anyone put my own experiences so perfectly before. Another thing I experienced is the conflicting messages from a changing society. Those of us growing up in the 60s and 70s were on the cusp of changes that were happening so rapidly in society that we sometimes had trouble assimilating them. When I started school, girls had to wear dresses/skirts, and never “boys clothes”. By the time I graduated high school, girls were allowed to wear jeans, t-shirts, or pretty much anything that was suitably “modest”. We went through a phase during the transition where we could wear “matching pantsuits” and then a phase where we could wear “separates”, but it wasn’t until I was a sophomore in high school that we could be free to be as casual and devil-may-care about our outfits as the boys.
She forgot individual women. The most powerful messages of repression and gender expectations came from the women in my life, all of whom drank the Kool-Aid at a very early age and believed with all their hearts in the idea of separate spheres, women’s work, dressing like a lady, and all the other accoutrements that went along with being a girl.
Gender dysphoria? No, I never felt I should have been a boy. Cultural expectation dysphoria? Absolutely. I always felt like I should be allowed to be whatever I could be, and wanted to be…as a female human. And I wanted that for my sisters, my nieces, and any other woman out there.
Agreed. I did a lot of the same things Helen Saxby did as a child and I was lucky that my parents didn’t care to impose any kind of expectations on me. They helped me fight for the right to wear trousers to school, blew off teachers who complained that I was “as loud as one of the boys” and a know-it-all for not being afraid to put up my hand when I knew the answer to a question. We didn’t win every fight (I was kept out of the top set for maths despite boys in that set having lower grades than me, something the school never would adequately explain) but we won a good number because my mother is so awesome.
My dad was determined that I learn useful skills so that I didn’t have to rely on a man to do them for me. He taught me to do all kinds of things: gap spark plugs, rewire a plug, build a set of shelves, change a tire etc. My grandmother taught my brother to knit and sew by hand and on a machine. So, by some standards we were both “gender-nonconforming”. But we’re not trans. My brother is a father of three who works from home to be there for his kids, I’m a happily married childless-by-choice professional. But I can see how seductive transitioning could be when you’re angry at a world trying to fit your square peg into its round gender hole.
And this is where the whole puberty-blocking drug thing really worries me. Puberty is a difficult time precisely because it is a process of transition from child to adult. It’s very confusing. And the most important changes aren’t visible – they are the neurodevelopmental changes that we still don’t really understand. All we know for sure is that in other circumstances, delays to neurodevelopment have a range of serious downstream consequences for the individual. Why would anyone want to fuck with that?
This always annoys me;
Why is that rule only ever a one-way street? If women can’t speak about the trans experience because they have no experience of being trans, why is it that transwomen can speak of the female experience despite being similarly unqualified? Do the trans activists and their allies (super-woke cis people, also unqualified through lack of a personal experience of being trans, but with immunity from the ‘thou shalt not speak of trans’ rule) not see the glaring contradiction in that? Personally, I don’t think that anybody can be that lacking in self-awareness, so I guess it’s ‘one rule for us, another for you’. Or maybe ‘heads we win, tails you get the fuck out’.
Claire, your comment could, for the most part, have been written by any of my daughters. They rejected and refused to conform to gender expectations with our full encouragement and backing when neccessary (so many ‘talks’ with teachers!), and at home were taught everything from sewing to car maintenance, cooking to plastering (dry walling), ironing to wallpapering. I won’t say they all mastered all of it, but the important thing is that they don’t see any of that as male or female roles, just things that have to be done by someone. Because one daughter much preferred the traditionally male pursuits she might well have been susceptible to trans ideology had things been different but, along with her sisters, she’s never questioned her sex (or gender).
Oh, and my gran taught me to hand-sew when I was a young boy. Quite progressive for a woman born when Victoria was on the throne.
But transwomen are qualified, because they feel like women. They have always felt like women. Don’t you know that? And how do they know they feel like women if they aren’t women to begin with? But they are women! You transphobe!
It’s like arguing with cheese (except if you win or lose, you get to eat the cheese, and that’s at least a satisfactory ending – there is no ending with a trans activist).
Point out that they have not experienced what a woman experienced, and they will tell you how much more difficult, orders of magnitude more difficult, it was for them because they were treated like a man in spite of being a woman, they were not recognized as women, they were not validated, they felt literal violence every moment of every day of their lives because someone named them the wrong name, called them by the wrong pronoun, and treated them with the respect and dignity of a man rather than the abuse and disrespect and shitshow that a woman gets, so…except they wouldn’t say that last, since they think abuse and disrespect and shitshows only accrue to trans, and that it all comes from feminist women who are the single most privileged group that has ever, ever lived since the beginning of the Big Bang.
Which wouldn’t be absurd if there was any clear definition of what ‘trans experience’ might actually BE.