A constant preoccupation
Ray Blanchard talks to the National Review:
Kearns: What do we mean by “gender identity”?
Blanchard: What do I mean by it?
Kearns: Yes. Let’s start with that.
Blanchard: Well, back in the days when I was writing a lot on that topic, which is quite a while ago now, I tended to avoid the phrase “gender identity” because I think that it’s a trivial concept when it’s applied to normal people. I mean normal men and normal woman know what sex they are, and they respond to that automatically, like when looking for a washroom. But I think it’s only at very unusual moments that a normal man or woman has a conscious awareness of “I’m a woman” or “I’m a man,” and this is often a highly emotional situation.
Just as we don’t normally have a conscious awareness of “I’m bipedal” or “I’m a primate” or “I can read.” We take a lot of stuff for granted, and we don’t generally obsess over it. This is one of the places we part company with trans people: we don’t want to obsess over it, we want to obsess over things that are more interesting. Life is short, time is limited, we don’t want to waste huge chunks of it hanging sparkly ornaments on our Gender Identity.
So, I don’t find the concept of “gender identity” useful for normal people, and the concept of cross-gender identity is really not a normal gender identity which has found itself lodged in the wrong body. Cross-gender identity is a constant preoccupation with, and unhappiness about, the individual’s gender. So, I guess you could say I believe in cross-gender identity, but I don’t much believe in gender identity.
Does any of that sound political? No. That could be why it’s such an awkward fit as a branch of left-wing thought.
‘Normal people’? I hope that Blanchard has access to a nuclear bunker, because Wokey McWokefolk of Wokeingham will NOT be liking that. Not one little bit.
I was just reading an article on women’s athletics, and the article stated that “we now know that 1 in 60 people are intersex”. WTF? Who makes up these statistics? And why is this constantly conflated with trans?
I’ve had days when I needed to remind myself that I’m bipedal.
Bruce, that’s just offensive to homopedal, transpedal, and pedal-fluid people, not to mention thepedal-neutral, pedal-queer and otherpedal communities. You’re a pedalphobe
Bruce, you can’t assume bipedality is all about biology. It’s how you feel.
But seriously, folks: Semi-coherent rant coming. I’ve been reading here about the TRAs and gender identity and women being erased, and have contributed little beyond japery as above. I haven’t read any feminist theory, or gender theory, or postmodern theory, or, hell, music theory. I’m just your Average Nice White Liberal who doesn’t want to see anyone (except maybe the Dutch*) discriminated against or oppressed. So I sympathetically read the trans posters on the old FTB and thought, “Of course they should use the bathroom of their choice. Of course I can’t judge the truth of their sincerely felt identity. Of course I have to recognize the privilege of my cis heteronormative maleness.” And it was all so easy because the other side all seemed to be the usual censorious, bible thumping bigots.
Then the shit hit the fan at FtB and I fell away, Really, I had been a bit of a movement atheist and was all about PZ and Dawkins and Jen (hope she’s doing OK) and liked Ophelia’s sometimes cranky tough-mindedness. Also, I had a boring office contract gig and filled the lacunae at FtB and one or two non-related sites. Then I retired and found other things to do, but stuck with Ophelia as a fellow sufferer under Trump. And read about the vicious side of trans activism. And the erasure of women (hey, I’m a nice feminist guy too, right?). And the idea that maybe even the bigots might have a point about girls, or women who have been victims of sexual assault, might be understandably upset about sharing intimate spaces with a, um, penis-equipped person.
And then there’s my bewilderment at the expanding taxonomy of gender identity: Trans, genderqueer, non-binary, asexual, pansexual, and dog knows what else. How many tribes can we divide ourselves in to? Then there’s my twentysomething niece’s experience in all this, relayed to me by her sometimes, and through my sister. She, like young people since forever, is sorting out who she is. So her gender identity has been one of her explorations, and has hung out with what you might call a gender-eclectic bunch. And the reports I get back are that the various gender tribes are at each other’s necks nearly as much as with the so-called TERFs (a term she has blessedly never used). She’s getting pretty fed up with it all thank goodness. Okay, some of the drama is the kind of in-group/out group stuff the young do. Like the greaser/mod, nerd/jock divisions of old, but now with a self consciously socio-politcal dimension that makes it more like a multi-sided religious war.
So what do I finally make of all this? Well, I’m a hell of a lot more jaundiced about trans ideology and ‘identity’. So thank you for that Ophelia. And with the thought that all this will someday burn out and be looked back upon with mystified amusement at human folly. Or rendered moot by climate change when we’ll have more pressing and real things to worry about.
*obscure National Lampoon reference
AoS: Guess you told me! :-D
Jen is doing gloriously well. She got her literal dream job – literal in that she had spelled it out while in grad school – about a year ago.
Also: hooray that your niece is getting fed up with it. I hope the trend spreads quickly enough that not too many more people wake up to find themselves surgically and/or chemically altered in ways they wish they hadn’t been.
Ophelia, #9, I suppose the one good thing about transition by magical thinking, the idea that the thought is enough to make a man a woman, is that the transition is at least reversible with no lasting damage.
Bruce @6, that’s a nice summary of what a lot of us thought and felt back when we were FtB readers. The “I don’t know anything about this so of course I’ll believe them” way of thinking. A way of thinking that I have now fully purged from my brain, thankfully!