A thing we can’t know
The incoherence of it all.
“I wouldn’t say they’re transphobic, but they need to be careful what they tweet”
Lucy Clark, football’s first transgender referee, reacts to comments of ex-sports stars like Sharron Davies and Martina Navratilova on trans athletes in women’s sportshttps://t.co/G0PEAgNlJL pic.twitter.com/oacPu0gtd1
— Victoria Derbyshire (@VictoriaLIVE) March 4, 2019
Victoria Derbyshire asks “What about the suggestion that trans athletes should have a separate category of competition?”
So that muddies the waters right off the bat. The issue is trans women competing against women. Trans men aren’t being unfair to men or women by competing against men, so the issue isn’t “trans athletes” in general but trans women who compete against women. The bad question allows Clark to brush it off with “Come on, it’s 2 thousand 19 now” and similar generalities, ending up at “It’s totally unfair – we are human beings – nobody chooses to be transgender.” Wait, now – nobody? Do we know that? Does anybody know that? How could anybody know that?
Especially now that the standard has become “identifies as.” The Ideological Command is that if someone “identifies as” trans / a woman / a man / trans-non-binary / genderqueer and so on to infinity, then that is what she/he/they is. It is mandatory that we all take the identifying-as to equal being the category identified as; it’s a very serious crime to do anything short of that.
Given that fact, and the heated abusive rhetoric that backs up the mandate, how can we possibly know that no one chooses to be trans?
There’s also quite a lot of ideology around the idea that lots of people are potentially trans who haven’t quite realized it yet, or who are afraid to embrace it fully, or who are trans half the week and not the other half of the week. There’s quite a lot of moving between categories. There’s a lot of expansion of the categories, which means there’s a lot of variation in the descriptions of the categories. How, then, can we possibly know that no one chooses to be trans?
Also: there are a lot of psychopaths and narcissists and other kinds of shit-stirrers out there. There are a lot of trans women for whom the whole point of being a trans woman seems to be aggression against that inferior category of women who just are women, without the trans part. How, then, can we possibly know that no one chooses to be trans?
And even if none of that were true, still how could we know that no one chooses to be trans? It’s a mental state, and certainty about the mental state of all other people is not a thing we get to have.
Actually, it’s the other way around. Nobody chooses to be born whatever sex it is. We don’t choose it, it’s just a fact. We also don’t choose how well it suits us to be that sex rather than the other one, and that too is universal. There’s a range of intensity to how unheimlich our sex feels, and for some it’s so intense that they prefer to move to the other one – but that again is something no one can be certain about, including the person who feels it, because she or he doesn’t know how it compares to what everyone else feels. We all know only what it feels like to be ourselves, each one one at a time.
Lucy Clark is just wrong to make such a confident claim. Nobody can possibly know that no one chooses to be trans.
YAWN! Another day, another man telling real women they should “be careful” about upsetting the men. Yeah, whatever, dude.
Plus, it’s entirely beside the point whether or not anyone can “choose” to be trans. Whenever we segregate, we need a solid justification for doing so. There’s only one justification for segregating sports by sex, and that’s sexual dimorphism. If trans athletes believe it’s no longer just to segregate male and female bodies, that’s not an argument for allowing transwomen in women’s sports, it’s an argument for dismantling sex-segregation in sports altogether. Trans activists must also come up with a justifiable reason to uphold segregation based on pronoun preference, if they want to keep the “cis” males apart from the “trans” ones. It’s just so comically absurd when you look at it that way, isn’t it?
There’s a glaring contradiction between two big schools of TransThought: the one that claims transgenderism is totally a scientifically proven and identifiable state, and the postmodern, Butlerian one, according to which all gender, including trans-gender, is purely performative.
The adherents of the first school will handwave at numerous studies, secure in the knowledge that very few members of the general public read or can understand scientific papers, and only a fraction of those who can will have the time or the inclination to do so. If they did, they would quickly learn that that particular Emperor has no clothes. (For a rundown on one recent example, see: https://www.transgendertrend.com/tavistock-experiment-puberty-blockers/)
The adherents of the second school, a smaller and more academic bunch, are careful about what they say outside of the ivory tower. Judith Butler’s position–which boils down to, “it’s all a game of make-believe and we should all be playing, in order to queer the world,” is not at all compatible with the assertion that “Nobody chooses to be trans.”
By the way, there is another school, but it’s Verboten, taboo, double-plus Ungood and we’re not supposed to mention it: the Blanchard-Bailey-Lawrence taxonomy of male transgenderism. According to Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen, there are two main types of males who identify as trans women: those who were highly effeminate from early childhood (and overwhelmingly grow up to be sexually oriented toward men), and non-homosexual males with autogynephilia. According to Bailey, members of the first group do indeed choose to transition–and in fact, many of them make realistic calculations about it: if they think they won’t make attractive women, they don’t transition. The members of the second group tend to transition much later, often after heterosexual marriage and in stereotypically masculine fields like IT or the military.
I can believe some people feel a sense of inner compulsion to transition. But I do not for a moment believe that nobody ever chooses it, or that being “trans” is a simple matter of being “Born this way.”
Apologies. That link (though interesting) is about the supposed safety and efficacy of puberty blockers, not the supposed inherency of trans-ness. This one is better:
https://lascapigliata8.wordpress.com/2018/06/30/transactivists-war-on-reality-what-they-think-studies-show-vs-what-studies-actually-show/
Okay, Lady M, you gave me another site to bookmark. Which is going to further cut into my relaxing time (because I can’t spare any work time, writing time, or…well, I already gave up cleaning time and live with clutter). I hope you’re happy.
Lucy Clark is obviously a ‘real’ woman. Look, she’s even stood in front of the oven.