So where I found a tiny subculture of those who felt at odds with sex stereotypes and their bodies, Keira Bell was greeted by 15 years’ worth of mass acculturation to this avatar-first understanding of ‘identity’. She was embraced by an international, well-networked digital community, dedicated to promoting the idea that our ‘selves’ are self-created and independent of our bodies, and backed up by serious lobbying money and a well-developed medical infrastructure.
This identity-first vision of selfhood, forged in the disembodied online world, was an exciting novelty for me. For millions of now-adult children of the internet age, though, it’s baked into their worldviews as a core paradigm for reality. But the problem it faces is that once you take this paradigm offline, it doesn’t really work.
As the first incarnation of Facebook was launching in 2004, Amanda and Bryan were singing to the impressionable tween watchers of Ella Enchanted:
Through your eyes, I may see
With your love, you set me free
Wishes can come true
If you believe
It might seem unfair to subject something as ephemeral as a second-rate Disney soundtrack to a close reading. But bear with me, because the core idea expressed by this dreary ditty is contradictory in ways that have wider repercussions. On the one hand it claims: believe hard enough and magic will happen. Your true self will emerge. But it also claims that to make that magic a reality, I need to see myself through your eyes.
Thanks to the internet, we can all play at creating ourselves by believing hard enough. Online, no one can tell whether I’m really who I claim to be. Divorced from our bodies and the semi-random nature of who we know in real life, we are all free to find ‘our people’ and express whatever we feel our inner selves to be. If a ‘true self’ or group of ‘true friends’ starts to chafe, we can find another.
Offline, though, it doesn’t really work like that. Having created Sebastian, I found it easy to get people who didn’t know me well to use that name, but longstanding friends were a different matter. Put simply, it felt weird. And yet self-created identities feel unreal until they’re affirmed by other people, meaning Sebastian only ever was real inasmuch as people actually used the name. Even if my reluctance to demand validation from my parents is proof that I wasn’t truly serious about my new identity, it also pointed to a deeper truth: there’s no such thing as an identity created independently of the way others see you.
To reinvent ourselves without regard to our contexts also implies an inhuman degree of mastery over our bodies. The year Ella Enchanted and Facebook both appeared also saw the launch of one of the defining scifi series of the noughties. Battlestar Galactica depicted a fraying remnant of humanity pursued through space by the embodied-but-mechanical, humanoid-but-infinitely-reincarnated flesh/robot hybrid Cylons. In reality, though, it’s the other way round.
I can’t just upload a new face or different secondary sex characteristics when the old set no longer feel quite ‘me’. Just as our inner sense of selfhood is both consolidated but also constrained by the willingness of loved ones to recognise it, so our ability to apply the digital style of selfhood in ‘meatspace’ is limited by the stubborn refusal of our bodies to behave like a slate we can wipe clean and over-write at will with new selves.
I may have dreamed, as Sebastian, of being able to reincarnate as a new, unblemished me when the old one didn’t suit. But as has become apparent with age, I will always be pursued by the fraying, beleaguered traces of old selves: childhood scars, stretch marks, a C-section scar, the piercings I no longer wear.
Keira Bell, raised in the social-media paradigm of the authentic-but-infinitely-reinvented self, was on puberty blockers at 15 and cross-sex hormones at 18. By 20 she’d undergone a double mastectomy in search of her authentic self. And having discovered that this ‘authentic self’ did not bring the promised peace, she must now live with the bitter truth that the medical changes she underwent in search of authenticity can’t be erased by uploading a new profile picture. Her willingness to tell the brutal story of how she was misled shows enormous courage.
But in turn the traces and scars offer a clue to a more grounded and human understanding of self than the digital one. The scars, wrinkles and other traces now building up on my gradually ageing physiology are ‘me’ in a sense that’s far more profound than Sebastian ever was. And seen thus, ‘who you truly are’ isn’t something that comes from within, to be greeted with awed affirmation by a hushed and waiting world. Rather, it’s something that emerges, over time, in conversation with that world.
But the disembodied online world in which so many of us now consolidate our selves continues to repeat the lie that our selves are plastic, infinitely renewable, atomised and under our exclusive control as individuals. This untruth betrayed Keira Bell. It hacks at the foundations of what makes us human: our relationships, and our embodied limits. We should resist its further progress through our laws and institutions.
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SubscribeWe absolutely should resist its further progress through our laws and institutions. In fact, considering how far “progress” has taken us, resistance isn’t enough. We should drive it back and undo what damage we can.
But that’s not going to happen.
Anybody who would use language as combative as “resist trans-rights” (that’s how it will be framed) is getting nowhere near the power to affect laws or institutions. An OUTRAGED Piers Morgan and a few right-on Tory MPs, hoping to add to their liberal credentials by saying “absolutely unacceptable in current year” will see to that.
And there’ll be no long counter-march through the institutions either. We aren’t that inconspicuous and there aren’t enough of us young enough or willing to do it. Also, we don’t have 30 years to wait.
Maybe there’ll be some unfortunate poster child who’s tragic plight spurs the pliant majority into a reactionary spasm but I doubt it. It’s not like there hasn’t been enough to choose from.
As long as our society continues to worshiping the false idols of self-discovery, identity and non-discrimination, pathologically over-socialised fools will defend the dangerous lie that we can be whatever we want, untainted by our past and free from judgement, and the pliant majority, afraid or uncomfortable to turn on these idols, will tacitly support them, while their opponents continue to be unable to stop them.
If you don’t like where we are either, but are ill at ease with the thought of rejecting these idols, think very carefully as to why that is. It is feeble permissiveness “well, if it doesn’t harm anyone…” and the desire to be seen as non-judgemental that makes resistance so futile and our destination sadly inevitable.
There’s too much to unpack in there. One of many questions – Why is it a “dangerous lie” that we can be “whatever we want”? I would strongly dispute that sentiment.
Dispute away. Reality will be completely unaffected.
It’s funny this one generates so much response. ‘Triggered’ is the word that comes to mind
“Within reason”.
I wanted to be, at different times, a test pilot, F1 Driver and a millionaire investment banker. The truth is I didn’t have the necessary attributes to be any of those things, no matter how much I had strived, although any of them were physically possible.
As a white man I cannot “within reason” become black, or a woman.
Strangely the woke brigade are absolutely certain that a person can chose to be male or female, but it is a thought crime to want to change race.
No more than I can within reason become a coffee table or a small furry rodent.
Is a great thing to tell our children, but part of becoming an adult is realising that it isn’t true. That is why we also shouldn’t let children decide to to surgically cut bits of their anatomy off.
“The truth is I didn’t have the necessary attributes to be any of those things”
Of course you did mate. You have a body and a brain. Collections of cells and neurons, nerves and muscles. You have the capacity to be anything. I’ve met many millionaire bankers and a few pilots – none of them are all that. F1 is a bigger ask, just as a numbers game.
(I don’t approve of children being allowed to make those decisions either)
“Of course you did mate”
No, he probably really doesn’t. Body’s and brains have their limits, some are limited in different ways to others.
I have met so many fools who have gotten nowhere in life because they refuse to accept their limitations.
The better you understand your limitations, the further you’ll go.
Limitations are often self-imposed and the result of insecurities or low confidence. Imploring people to stay within whatever mental box they have self-imposed is a frankly ridiculous piece of advice.
A world of over confidence and ‘believing in yoursel’ is hardly unproblematic either. For one thing it seems to rather prize alpha male values – look at the 2008 financial and other crises. If anything we culturally over-value that sort of aggressive individualism.
We probably need a mixture of types of personality, not to instruct everyone to be as ‘ambitious’ as they can. Ambition is in any case generally, implicitly if not explicitly, defined in a very narrow way to mean being ‘successful in your career’, earning more money, having a big car etc etc, and certainly putting your ego first. What about inner peace, helping others in a quiet way, indeed a whole lot of values traditionally supported by many philosophers and religions?
I disagree. Limitations are usually the result of not understanding your environment, and not understanding yourself.
Sun Tzu “Know thy enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated”
Most people get stuck in life because they conflate what they enjoy with what they are good at relative to other people. They have no idea how wide the world is, where their niche might be, let alone their direction there.
Constantly I see people focus on what they are good at (i.e. what gives them maximum self esteem) and try to invent a world in which the things they have no idea about matter less.
So if they are good at typing, then they are the best secretary, and they will glibly ignore their lack of organisation ability that prevents them from rising to the top of the typing pool, out of it up to PA to the boss, and then boss of the company and finally the world.
Yes, if you are aware of what other people are good at then you can improve in those areas. However you are unlikely to enjoy that part of your job.
So you have to
Understand others’ strengths
Know your limitations
Reduce the limitations you want to reduce, but be realistic
Enjoy doing the things you are good at.
You may not get rich, but you’ll probably be happier.
I actually agree with most of your comment. Then I think about my own experience and I disagree.
While at university I had crippling anxiety about public speaking. I failed a module because of my inability to speak in public and present well. However, my job after graduating required lots of public speaking and I grew to relish it. It took a lot of time, preparation and effort. Someone else would have taken to the work much quicker than me but why should that concern me? I am now actually a good public speaker and have regularly given talks to 200+ people at conferences. I am very happy that I did not accept the limitations that I had imposed upon myself.
I think that’s the worst piece of life advice I’ve ever heard ‘understand your limitations’. It would make me want to end it all. ‘This is your box, you live here’ 🙁
I’m no self help groupie, but it’s blindingly obvious to me that the polar opposite is true. You find what fires you and you do that thing (X Factor and celebrity bullsh:t excluded).
Muhammad Ali said it best
“If I were a garbage man, I’d be the world’s greatest garbage man. I’d pick up more garbage and faster than anyone has ever seen”
Easy for Muhammad Ali to boast that having never been a garbage man. If people did not understand their limitations we would have no garbage men.They would be devoting their time and energy training to beat Usain Bolt, become professional footballers, astronauts, nuclear physicists. Fi drivers, actors adored by loving fans, leaders of the free world. If a person under 5ft with a good career as a leading surgeon at the age of 30 decided to throw it all in to have a go at becoming a professional basketball player would you really tell them that was a great idea and if so do you think that would be a good thing for society and those people whose lives he could save. In the world of words you can be what you want but not in the physical realm. The problem with aiming for the stars is that you are likely to fail and end up in the middle of nowhere, whereas had you aimed at Mars you could get there and that would be a great achievement.
You’re right of course, but in the realm of kitsch, where this stuff belongs, there will always be enough people dreaming of being a garbage man to pick up all the garbage.
There’s a book called Bounce by Matthew Syed that I’d recommend very highly. Case by case he explodes the myth of ‘talent’ (while still accepting that 5 foot basketball players won’t cut it)
The world is full of people who denigrate talent, because they want to believe we are born a tabula rasa.
And Matthew Syed is supremely talented at selling books that make fools believe in idiotic dreams.
Don’t join a winner takes all race unless you are talented.
Put in the practice, you’ll soon find out if you are talented or not.
Then do it for fun.
I am proud of getting average at loads of stuff I love, through hard work and persistence.
On the other hand I never stop working at my limitations (I am a terrible communicator, I have no charisma), so that I can continue to make a good crust at the stuff I actually am truly talented at.
There are lots of books making lots of claims. Maybe there is something to it, maybe its pure fantasy. Most likely I suspect its a case of start with the result and work the logic backwards to fit the theory. Very easy for the successful to claim their success was due to almost anything, you tend not to hear from the failures who tried the same and ended up with nothing. Even if the method was valid such things only create champions in a competitive environment where few adopt the method, there can only be so many winners whereas there is no limit to the number of losers.
Strange that nobody – so far as I’ve read – appears to have considered what relationship limitations (or absence thereof for that matter) bear to the absolute necessity of self-discipline, if one is to get so much as an inch toward what ambition has, however clearly or dimly, now conceived..
If your little garbage man told you that with a bit of training he could beat Muhammad Ali would you say yes chuck your job in, mortgage the house and go for it?
No I wouldn’t. The magic words there are ‘a bit of training’. There’s no ‘bit’. There’s years of pushing yourself to the top of your game, and importantly wanting to. If the garbage man’s 8 year old son told me ‘boxing is my life and I’ll spend 4 hours training every single day of my life until I’m 20’, then yeah I’ll bet on that boy’s chances of being a contender.
Along with the thousands of other boys with the same dream (they can’t all be world champion) who might have otherwise achieved excellent careers in a plethora of professions of great use to society if only they had directed all that effort towards something more realistic. Many of us start with such dreams and work towards them, I was a good at athletics and football, but at some point there comes a realization of the probability of success given your progress at that point, Who wants to be a millionaire, they all do but most at some point are faced with the choice do I stick with my dream and guess, risking I lose everything or do I take what I have in the bag.
If everybody took your your advice we would a handful of winners in each generation the rest losers while the economy goes to pot because nobody is satisfied with the mundane.
I have to say that I’ve also met many fools who seem to have done far better than anyone would have expected on the basis of self belief alone.
And we probably all underestimate the role that luck plays.
And for every successful footballer who dreamed of being a footballer there will be thousands of disappointed dreamers.
Self belief is incredibly powerful. It gives confidence and that can not be overestimated – look how the stock market works.
Very true – i know a lot of drivers in club racing who could show Hamilton, Shumacher et al the way home. Less so with Senna or Fangio but given an equal opportunity there will be some who can better even these greats.
Biological gender is separate from gender identity. There is nothing intrinsically female about the colour pink nor a dress-style piece of clothing. People often conflate biological gender with material items, opinions and behaviours. These are not gender defined beyond our own cultural understanding, which is relative to this moment in time. The fact that different human civilisations have conceptualised gender identity in diverse ways attests to this truth.
You can’t be whoever you want to be but allowing gender roles and traits to be more fluid, in my opinion, is not problematic and actually beneficial in terms of our personal freedom. I suppose it depends on how much value you place upon adhering to collectivist notions of conformity versus a person’s autonomy and personal liberty.
I wonder if society cared less about gender roles, would those kids be as driven to take the puberty blockers and have surgery. If they didn’t feel obliged to choose A or B, maybe they’d live happier as C.
Yes, I suspect you’re right. All the more reason for society to be more accepting and understanding.
“There is nothing intrinsically female about the colour pink nor a dress-style piece of clothing.”
I have to agree that you must be right – and yet, having had children ….
Children adopt the social customs of the time. You may think it is somehow spontaneous but it isn’t. There are social cues everywhere from day we are born as to how we should conceptualise our gender.
I suspect this is true to some degree.
What we refer to as gender is likely to include innate elements and elements which are socialised. It is also by no means obvious that socialisation is itself arbitrary – it may, to some degree, reflect an underlying genetic reality. Part of socialisation may support that reality, but it also may seek to temper it – by making men less aggressive, for example, or by channeling that aggression.
Many societies do seem to seek to socialise children towards a gender norm, but that norm itself may have roots in genetics. Children appear to play an active part in this socialisation, sometimes against the will of their parents.
It is far from clear that without this socialisation children would be “gender neutral” whatever that might mean.
People tend to believe that the gender norms prevalent in their own society are natural or innate. I believe that people overstate the role genetics play because the norms they believe in feel ‘right’. People find it hard to imagine a world where gender identity is radically different. I suspect this is a universal truth across human societies. To a degree we all believe that our customs are best.
I think that is certainly true. There was a time when people took short hair on men as being in some undefined way “natural” – even though, left to itself, it would grow long. And the historical record shows clearly that this was an aspect of gender which was open to change.
However, and Steven Pinker is very good on this, there is also the opposite trend amongst people with specific ideological commitments. That is, they believe that gender is more malleable than it is because it suits their ideology to believe it is malleable.
Neither of these belief sets tells us much about the truth of course.
As research on heritability and dna continues the trend is to show that we have underestimated the role of dna and massively overestimated the influence of the shared environment.
Where exactly the balance lies, we wait to see. But the idea that gender is entirely a social construct is already dead in the water.
There are relatively trivial examples of gender roles and behaviours, but more substantial ones as well, and you can’t necessarily conflate these. In the example you give, in fact the colours blue and pink have entirely reversed their roles as male / female signifiers in our own society over time, so in fact these are quite arbitrary though socially reinforced. (I am not sure how much it matters though…)
However most parents can see that young girls and boys – on average and of course there are overlaps – tend to behave and play in different ways, for example boys often play at soldiers whether or not they are provided with toy guns. Girls are generally more interested and better at people- oriented games and role-play.
The ideological insistance (‘blank slate’ argument) that men and women are in all essential senses indistinguishable except in physical streingth is problematic, because (a) all the scientific evidence shows there is moderate sexual dimorphism in human beings, (and (b) and more importantly, the complete denial of this can give rise to real unhappiness to individuals. Is it a problem if most primary school children are female and bricklayers male? But I would definitely agree that roles should not be forced, and I am all in favour of opportunities – and eyes – being opened.
For all the talk of ‘being whatever you want’ etc, it is fascinating how selectively this is applied. As mentioned elsewhere, it is absolutely taboo to self-identify as another race, though race is a far less essential category scientifically than sex.
And note how approving society now is to the ‘trans’ identfication, while being far less so regarding issues of gendered dress – boys not being allowed for example to wear skirts and dressses. Little fuss at all is made of this, even though the latter is far less likely to cause irreparable and long-term harm, than puberty blocking drugs and surgery.
Another example which I became aware of through a work colleague – is that there is little protection for women against employers insisting that their female staff wear high-heeled shoes, whose long term use is actually damaging. This probably affects many more people than the current gender debates. However perhaps it hasn’t been subject to any legal test cases, this not being a fashionable cause the middle-class ‘woke’ chatterati are interested in…)
“in fact the colours blue and pink have entirely reversed their roles as male / female signifiers in our own society over time”
Bit of a myth, and needs more research. The truth seems to be that in the US two rival systems existed. One triumphed.
At other times, and in other places specifically children’s colours existed, but were less gendered.
My own hunch (no evidence) on pink for boys. Red was seen as a masculine colour. Children’s clothes have to be washed frequently. Before the invention of colour fast dyestuffs they would naturally have faded to pink.
Who is seriously conflating biological gender with material items, opinions and behaviours nowadays? In my lifetime attitudes have changed beyond recognition and a good thing too. People are much more relaxed with every kind of sexuality and gender fluidity today than they were in my youth.
Although there have always been masculine, tomboyish girls and girly ‘sissy’ type boys, that was always accepted as part of the normal spectrum of difference. What’s worrying now is that those quite normal differences are being pathologized as ‘body dysmorphia’ in children as young as 10 and treated with puberty blockers, hormones and even surgery. We need to accept that kids are often very fluid and give them time to grow up before doing them possibly irreparable damage.
In my experience conservatives have become more relaxed around gender while leftists have become psychotically obsessive about it.
Weird, isn’t it? Not sure it’s the ‘Left’, though. The anarchos and commies I meet don’t seem to care about it, although they are now pretty careful to allow their confrères any gender performances and pronouns they want. It seems to me it’s the more proggie centrists that have become obsessive. In any case I don’t understand it, either. Could we not just allow people to perform whatever they want?
Well said. What a fuss about stuff that never mattered.
You need only read some of the comments here to see how rigid some people’s understanding of gender is.
But drugging children? Destroying Women’s Sports?
Complicated issues without easy answers. My point was that less rigid gender roles would go someway, hopefully, to alleviating our current predicament where children are prescribed life changing drugs.
“These are not gender defined beyond our own cultural understanding”
This is true in a sense. The specific gender markers differ between societies. They are in this sense arbitrary. But most societies do have these markers.
“we can be whatever we set our minds to be
Is a great thing to tell our children, but part of becoming an adult is realising that it isn’t true.”
Indeed, it’s almost a defining characteristic of maturity – to come to something like a realistic evaluation of both our potential and our limitations.
Sure. Change your sex all you wish, but every one of the umpteen trillion cells that make up your entire being will disagree with you.
Triggered, maybe, or perhaps lots of people think you are wrong.
Your definition of trigger and mine must differ. I don’t see anybody seething or even annoyed. But it’s self evident you can’t be whatever you want without consequence. Reality has constraints and when they are pushed against a reaction always follows. Sometimes the reaction is harmless and happiness is possible. Sometimes not and pain results.
The definition of “triggered” for lefties is: “any response of any kind that I don’t like.”
Fascinating. All you notice is the level of response. You appear to have noticed nothing of the content.
To most of us, “reality will be completely unaffected” is a perfect response to your delusional comment.
Care to engage with the content?
The ed of all these comments does that too, looks at the response level over content. Ironic really isn’t it?
I think you have, perhaps inadvertantly, hit on the crux of the problem. It is quite certain that your own and Mr Ryan’s realities are not the same. The paradigm of consciousness sees to that. Granted there will somne overlap but the chances of them being identical is zero otherwise you’d be the same bloke.
We could spend days discussing philosophies of reality and consciousness, Confucius, Dao, Kant. However we mere mortals do need some understanding of cause and effect. Many things can be examined and measured scientifically to enable a consensus.such as regardless how hard you may think a brick is, if you hit your head against one with sufficient force it will probably hurt. A mathematician might calculate how many people have had the same dream and aspiration as a percentage of how many have achieved that dream.
I agree. I want to be a hatstand. Who are you to deny me?
In the bad old days when there were ” mental asylums” I believe they were populated by people who thought they were a hat stand/Mark II Jaguar/ Archangel Gabriel etc.!
Maybe that was better than being mutilated and fed hormones?
Everyone is already a hatstand
Can I be a Mark II Jaguar then please.
I can loan you a drop head TR7 with a 16 valve engine.
with the big bore exhaust ?
Then I’m fascinated to know what it is you have decided to be and how successful you have been. My attempt to be irresistible to women failed miserably. That said, since I still believe I am, perhaps I should accept there is a difference between fantasy and reality
“Irresistible to women” may be too big an ask for you, Nicholas. Hatstand and MK II Jaguar might be easier.
I assumed that Eric was talking within the realms of reality and I was asking for his explanation of what he meant.
What I mean is not being boxed in to living some limited version of life set by your class/sex/peers/family. I mean putting 2 fingers up to people who tell you what you’re allowed to do with your life.
I’ve been successful at getting beyond what was expected from my social strata and schooling. Maybe not as much I’d like, but I’m not dead yet 🙂
“I assumed that Eric was talking within the realms of reality”
Massive rowback there
I guess we have a different understanding of what the word ‘reality’ means. I meant not hatstand or mkii jaguar. I don’t know where you think I was rowing massively back from.
You wrote: ” I think that’s the worst piece of life advice I’ve ever heard ‘understand your limitations’.”
Now you realize that was hyperbole (as the rest of us pointed out), and now you write “too big an ask” which is understand you limitations.
Self awareness is important for setting realistic goals. And you are lacking.
“Understand your limitations” is yes quite possibly the worst piece of life advice I’ve ever heard. It’s truly depressing and defeatist.
‘Too big an ask’ was written much Earlier in the thread and was supposed to be a joke to Nicholas. 🙁
I have achieved my goals so far. Those I haven’t done are because I’m too lazy. That’s my limitation, that’s most people’s limitation.
Most people are not among the best in the world because they’re not prepared to put in the work it takes. It’s that simple.
What is referred to by “Hatstand”, please?
A joke, now lost in amongst the thread.
“Why is it a “dangerous lie” that we can be “whatever we want”?”
Ask Keira Bell.
…..because it is Narcissistic; opposition and limitations are beneath one.
Accepting one’s limitations is manifestly the opposite of narcissistic.
Because what we want to be changes with time. Keira Bell (and many others) are only just learning that – and for them, it’s too late. The damage has been done.
All the more reason to be given the freedom to explore options, even within the world of the internet and the alternative identities it can offer, before fixing on any single one.
However much I want, I can never be the first person to climb Everest. Sooner or later “Whatever you want” runs smack into the brick wall of reality. The harder you are running the more that hurts. Of course we should pursue dreams and ambition, encouragement to pursue the impossible however, is dangerous and therefore unkind.
Kevin I think I hear your objection, but the problem is that we cannot decide this is what I will be, do etc unless we are in full control of all the variables and can bend them to our will. Obviously we want to encourage aspiration and enterprise, we want people to overcome obstacles and resiliently face a world of naysayers who would rob us of our dreams – the problem is online promises much that offline it can’t deliver. It’s just like the ‘swinging 60s’ promised so much and has yet to deliver. We must walk with care and compassion alongside people who are wrestling with life in affirming ways but dare to speak ‘truth in love’.
the late philosopher and Buddhist trickster Alan Watts, informed by Hindu epistemology, held that the notion fostered by the likes of Dr. Spock in the 1950s that parents should encourage children to believe they could be anything they wanted was spurious and harmful.
Which bit are you struggling with – that it’s a lie, or that it’s dangerous?
And are you referring to the current context, or life in general?
Well said Eric, but don’t let cynicism rob you of your voice, find grace and speak out!
and then there is the proposition that some of us are at a point where they recognize they did what they could when they had the chance”at significant cost”and years have passed and things have not gone as we would have liked but the truth of the matter is the future is no longer ours.
it is up to those to whom the future belongs to determine what it is.
& with “mental illness” now called “mental health”, madness is rendered normal which just further isolates the majority.
And, as I state elsewhere on this page, there are industries, lobbies, and funding backing it. As well as militants who are also involved in violence, such as the rioting that has devastated some cities in the U.S.
If a person is born with the xy chromosome then no amount of surgery, estrogen therapy, haute couture, or cosmetics will change the fact that that person is a male. If that person is in a horrific auto accident and burned beyond recognition the medical examiner will determine the victim was a male. The same goes for natural born females. To claim otherwise makes one a science denier.
What an excellent article by Mary Harrington!
John, you are not entirely correct. There are conditions of ambiguous gender which can be diagnosed by appropriate specialists in childhood, and chromosomes are not always the deciding factor in assigning appropriate gender. Treatment is often surgical. These conditions are rare and well-described and are not increasing in incidence.
A totally different situation is the 3000% increase in young people deciding they want to transition,- a psychiatric condition fueled by the internet on which no meaningful research has been done. It is quite wrong to treat these young people with hormone blockers and surgery. The condition has some connection with anorexia nervosa in that they are both examples of unhappy people trying to exert control over an aspect of their lives.
It is a shocking fact that many of these people who have had irreversible procedures later regret their decision but they are not given a voice. James Caspian of Bath Spa University was refused permission to study this group of individuals, not because the study had any academic weakness (the study was given academic approval) but because University administrators deemed it politically incorrect! Appalling!
I am not talking about fully-grown adults who decide to transition. That is a totally different matter and it is up to them.
Anorexia and wanting to change sex are indeed linked. They both spring from Narcissism, sadly. There are no short-cuts to gaining a secure identity; the Narcissist hopes otherwise. They get the attn. they seek, (mistaking it for love) but it is horrified sadness.
Similarly, if your skeleton survives a few hundred years to be dug up by an archaeologist, your sex can be established from your pelvis and skull.
Richard 3rd apparently had some slightly indeterminate aspects of his pelvis. Which did not prevent him fighting in battle.
you just aren’t trying with sufficient conviction to imagine
The work for a teenager of embodying an adult self has been regressively circumvented by unreal relationships – on line. This is a Narcissistic retreat in which teenagers mistakenly feel in control. In fact, their world is infantile; anyone disliked can be dismissed and “likes” scored up as phony acceptance. A herd mentallity is set up because no actual relating to other whole people is possible – online. Unsurprisingly, identity confusion abounds.
The development and maturation of the prefrontal cortex occurs primarily during adolescence and is fully accomplished at the age of 25 years. The development of the prefrontal cortex is very important for complex behavioral performance, as this region of the brain helps accomplish executive brain functions.
Neuropsychiatr Dis Treat. 2013; 9: 449″“461.
Published online 2013 Apr 3. doi: 10.2147/NDT.S39776
PMCID: PMC3621648
PMID: 23579318
Maturation of the adolescent brain; NIH
Stuff like this is mostly sad. We have people with clear issues and instead of society at large noticing that issues exist, there is a cadre of people who willingly pump children with life alternating drugs if not surgery. What an adult does is one thing but children are quite another, and even worse, the rest of us seem forced into a bizarre form of affirmative participation where we not only witness the gory details but are told to applaud them.
The NHS currently employs about 1.4 million people, a very small percentage of whom will be transgender and therefore the absolute numbers will also be very, very small. It is likely therefore that in some, or maybe even most, NHS Trusts (with the exception of those in Brighton, no doubt) there will not be any transgender employees at all. As well as a raft of policies to ensure that they do not suffer discrimination (fair enough) I now notice a trend for all NHS staff to add their preferred pronouns to emails. I expect this trend is present in other public sector organisations too. If I’m corresponding with someone called Susan or David I can really manage without being told they wish to be known as ‘she’ or ‘he’. Why are the vast majority of people who are not trans expected to adopt practices in order to make hypothetical colleagues feel more comfortable and ‘included’, even when they might not actually exist within an organisation? Who is driving this cultural change and why are useful idiots so keen to adopt this nonsense?
To mangle Spock
The needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many
the tyranny of the .0001 percent.
the tyranny of the <1%. You will conform and you will like it. At least that’s what it looks like from the sane part of the world.
If I’m corresponding with someone called Susan or David I can really manage without being told they wish to be known as ‘she’ or ‘he’.
Don’t be so sure; there are a few who will insist on ‘they’ or ‘them’ or one of a dozen made up terms. It’s how Jordan Peterson came to be known after Canada flirted with the idea of compelling people to use such terms in everyday speech. You’re right – why do the rest of us allow this sort of thing to be normalized.
To be clear, Canada didn’t just “flirt” with the idea. Consistently, deliberately misusing someone’s preferred personal pronouns is now considered hate speech and punishable by law.
I agree that consistently, deliberately doing it IS hate speech. However, I also agree with Peterson that no matter how hard we try, we can’t legislate people into having manners. What that law was for (legal and medical dealings) and its unintended consequences (becoming a weapon of identity politics) were entirely separate. I don’t agree with “hate speech” laws because hate speech is relative (Nazis can argue that the slogan to punch them is hate speech under its definitions), but that doesn’t mean that genuine hate speech doesn’t exist, and consistently, deliberately misgendering someone with the intent to cause unnecessary distress certainly counts. But just like anyone else who is a mannerless boor, people who engage in deliberate, consistent speech intended to cause unnecessary distress shouldn’t be immune from the social consequences.
insisting on a preferred personal pronouns is in fact hate speech
I’d love to hear a more developed argument for that. Simply insisting it doesn’t make it true.
People who insist that others deny the evidence before their eyes (Sam Smith is clearly a man, for example, whatever pronouns he insists we use) are boorish and I’ll mannered in the extreme. The definition of good manners is making other people feel comfortable. Making them squirm with embarrassment and alter their natural language to accommodate your own narcissism is not good manners.
bravo.
Yeah, my longer reply directly to the piece hasn’t been “approved” yet, but I addressed people who use transgender either to achieve an agenda or to “run away” from who they are in another post. J Yaniv and Karen White also fit this bill and as a transgender person myself, I hate that everyone’s impression of the community is extremists like them.
No one is going to tell me how to think. I do not like to be offensive and I find it offensive to be forced to use language which is not appropriate in my view
You do it all the time. We don’t get to individually decide what language is appropriate. Society does that.
Yeh, “mental illness” is now called “mental health” !
Yet I recall a time, not so long ago, when the left railed against society’s rules on expression. They rejected both the rules and the idea of even having such rules. Those who imposed them were “fascists” and those who complied were cowards.
George Carlin was a hero to the left when he pushed back against society’s rules with his “seven dirty words” routine, but not so much when he criticised “PC culture”.
First, the left makes us unenlightened types feel bad for not accepting the idea of free expression, but now we’re bad for not fighting against it?
poppy c**k.
poppycock
And I see people only know how to read the first sentence of a post. Sad.
It started with the American marketting idea that customer service staff get you christian name. We Brits want to shop in relative anonymity and don’t want to be on 1st name terms with strangers.
Applause is what Narcissists seek. If we ignored instead, they would find another way to get attn. This would be better for all.
Thank you for this article. It is devastating what young people are having to deal with and it is up to adults to manage the process responsibly so that young people do not make irrevocable decisions. I don’t know anyone who is anti trans, but I know many who are firmly against the way that this is handled in respect of the youth and also in respect of the way that there seem to be no boundaries between responsible transitioning and waking up one morning, self identifying as e.g. female and having access to female spaces. The world has gone mad.
The identity crisis of youth has always been excruciating, but in these ‘End of History’ pomo times, it’s stone cold grotesque. My inclination is less to blame the adults of the particular involved community, than the environing culture of capitalism and the fetishising of science.
Chelsea Manning is IMHO one of the precious few heroes of the age, but I fear that the cure she bought from the pomo-culture/med-tech world, will torture her more than the Marine prison at Fort Bragg.
Ft. Bragg is an Army post, not a Marine base, and Manning’s personal life, the professional actions were wholly unprofessional.
Sadly true. Identity doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it is, at the very least, extremely difficult to maintain a self-image that isn’t recognised by other people. Most of us ain’t Emperor Norton.
I think this is why, after a lifetime of struggling and agonising and trying to negotiate a ton of contradicting messages, I have pretty much resigned myself to being precisely what I look like. I’m one of those straight white thin-skinned nerd-boys that everyone hates. Whatever. If that’s an identity I can never escape, it’s also an identity that no one can take away from me.
I’m sure your mum loves you
Like most mothers, she loves me in a general sense while hating every single thing about me. It’s a bit of a cold comfort, alas. :p
I hope you recognize that she might be the one with the problem then.
You deserved/deserve to be loved absolutely for yourself and I hope one day you will be.
Mums aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be. Yours doesn’t sound very good at it.
“Well I’m not the world’s most masculine man
But I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man
And so is Lola”
Song from my youth. We tolerated Lola without a qualm because we were secure in our own identity.
Who says everyone hates you, and who are the people making that claim?
Dude, name one group of people who don’t hate straight white thin-skinned nerd-boys. Hell, we can’t even stand each other – nerd communities are among the most toxic ones there are!
I will grant you that some people who I know personally seem to be able to stand me, but as far as identities go, my identity is universally despised.
What is interesting is that there are methods to change. People I know who have radically lost weight have done so through fasting or cutting meals from their daily routine. Things are possible, but like everything worthwhile it is hard.
I suggest there is a term to describe the product of your struggling and agonizing, and that is wisdom. It accrues in curious and receptive minds and sadly, for the vast majority of us, has a lengthy gestation.
Thank you Mary, once again a wise, authentic and thought provoking essay.
“If you will not reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself. That does not only mean that you suppress who you are, although it also means that. It means that so much of what you could be will never be forced by necessity to come forward.”
“• Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
Thought provoking? Really? What thoughts were those? There are thousands of these screeds on the internet, with nary a fag-paper between them. It’s just another one of those.
Well, nevertheless you’ll be provoked by the first one you read.
your latent fear of thought provoking questions reveals much.
Thought provoking because it takes on the question of folk wanting an alternate identity – the alternate gender question is well covered, as you say, but this article is not fundamentally about that, is it.
People creating a fantasy identity and then going to the extent of medical mutilation to reinforce it? What the hell is going on?
There’s plenty further to explore with those questions.
It is Narcissism, sadly. No route to the formation of an adult identity can be manipulated without comeback. Look at anorexics! It goes wrong doesn’t it?
so your are saying you didn’t read it and are simply trolling.
If parents are afraid to regulate internet, and to stand up to the new order that mandates that they wholly support their children’s fantasies and demands, then this will continue to grow.
It’s a big money maker for the corporations and doctors involved in perpetuating this lie that you require meds and surgery to be your authentic self. And until that money is interrupted by enough lawsuits to matter, it’s not going away.
It’s also tethered to what lawmakers must surely have discovered as a happy accident: the ability to pass laws regulating free speech, which will surely not stop at pronoun usage.
Which, I might add, is absurd.
You can pass a law dictating that I use chosen pronouns or other new speak, but in our minds, most of us will still be rolling our eyes and thinking ‘yeah, right.’ Unless the plastic surgery you get is really stellar, it’s not hard to tell who is what, as our brains are wired to detect specific features. Hell, with MTF trans people it’s usually a second or two before you can be sure. They aren’t fooling anyone.
And none of us has an obligation to pretend/lie to make other people feel less vulnerable in this world. Seriously, what’s next? Why are we allowed to shame or sneer at anyone if this is the case? If a law protects trans people from speech that hurts their fragile feelings, what about everyone else?
This can’t/won’t stand, as it’s unsustainable.
We, as a world, have serious existential threats raining down on us, and this BS and having to coddle PC babies and perverts alike, who increasingly seem to be one movement, is wasting precious time.
Dudes, as your makeup runs from global warming heat waves, and you can’t get your hormones, what will we call you then?
Making yourselves the constant topic of conversation by legal events and endless whining is what will be your downfall. Being the fringe culture just isn’t enough. Now the LGBTQ is open to any range of paraphiliacs, and is demanding to control how others think as they become the mainstream entity hell bent on normalizing the fringe. Just stop.
I miss when it was just gay people wanting to be openly gay and not demanding to be the sacred unicorn of the world.
No trans person is special in any sense. The desire to demand to be seen as special and brave is a mental health issue. I won’t validate it.
Parents have no say over what images are sent to their children’s mobile phones, sadly. It is no longer possible to keep one’s childten safe from the amoral world of the internet. Lawmakers do not care. Childhood has been ended. While teenagers navigate their normal identity crisees, the less robust among them are made ever more identity-less. Desperate measures might seem more attractive than ordinary growing up.
The best article that I have ever read on these issues. Hands down! Thank you.
“Believe the voice inside of you, live out your dreams and make them true”.
To be honest this whole thing about dreams makes me want to gag. Especially when the dreams turn out to be so crass. It’s a piece of very American kitsch.
And unless most people’s dreams are to have an average marriage, with an average job and an average house, clearly most of them never come true.
As an antidote, I think it was Fernando Pessoa who said “the most contemptible thing about dreams is that everybody has them.”
Somehow that clears the air.
Plus there’s nothing more boring than listening to other people telling you the content of last night’s dream.
unless you are a psychoanalyst
it’s still boring, but you get paid.
you can’t be a psychoanalyst then. They are always fascinating if you are, as are people’s conscious fantasies.
Self identification is the ultimate irony – abandoning the individual to join an externally pre-determined identity group.
the revolution will not be televised…but it will be imagined, or so I imagine.
Mom: Why did you get that tattoo?
Son: Because I want to be an individual! ….just like everyone else.
Crikey, and my sister thought I was odd for pretending to be Charlie George for most of the school holidays in the 1970s. Still, and as always, I was a few decades ahead of the curve.
An interesting and thoughtful article, thank you.
The demographic this writer apparently represents must be the most boring, narcissistic, own-genitals-contemplating in human history. I got about a quarter of the way into this before losing interest and the will to live.
Indeed. The most vital question in the whole trans debate is: who cares? Almost nobody is affected. The issue has no implications outside of the lives of a few borderline mentally ill people. Also, there is almost no prejudice against it because most people have never even met a ‘trans’. The thing that annoys ‘trans’ people is that they are laughed at. But that is not transphobia, its just human nature. They look weird and they are weird. People are going to laugh.
the tyranny of the <1%. You will be made to care, and you will be made to applaud.
you will be made to applaud and pay for the privilege.
That is, unfortunately, not accurate. There is an ever-growing number of adolescent girls declaring themselves to be boys. In my daughter’s year at school, there were three out of about fifty. It is deeply troubling. A recent book, Irreversible Damage by Abigail Schreier, details this trend, which she has pegged as a peer social contagion because it is so often “caught” through peer groups, both online and not.
“People are going to laugh.” Agree, but only when the fixated Other (usually Male-Female trans) cannot disguise biological reality. My experience of a ‘trans’ person was 30 years ago; before it became abuse of children by money-making medics and illegal to question (courtesy of Mrs May) and the governing party in Canada.
A delightful young man, a student friend of my son, was known to dress in female ‘gear’ in the privacy of student accommodation. He was accepted by all, and explained to friends, he felt more comfortable dressed as a girl, because …. as a child, reared by ‘hippy’ parents in a commune in (if memory serves) Plymouth(? ) … he was always dressed in girl’s clothes.
After graduating, he acquired a job in America, and later wrote to my son that he had decided to undergo the relevant surgery to ‘transfer’ from male to female. In 2005, four years later, my son received a telephone call informing us, his friend had been found dead,in his own apartment, from an overdose of prescription drugs.
Look up Karen White before spouting nonsense about this not affecting anyone in real life.
The damage is done to the people who are forced to deny truth, science and the evidence of their own eyes.
“… who cares?”
your presence argues that you care
Perhaps you should have read to the end. You might have learnt something,
I very much doubt it. I really do. If some loony thinks he’s Napoleon, we don’t rearrange the entire world around his neurosis. There is no difference at all between Brian from Catford thinking he’s Napoleon and Brian from Catford thinking he’s Brenda from Catford, except that Brenda from Catford thinks he’s the most important person who ever lived and won’t shut the fcuk up about himself. Brian / Napoleon is typically a lot less self important.
These freaks are the least important or interesting people in the whole wide world.
Psychosis not neurosis.
I very much doubt it. I really do. If some loony thinks he’s Napoleon, we don’t rearrange the entire world around his neurosis. There is no difference at all between Brian from Catford thinking he’s Napoleon and Brian from Catford thinking he’s Brenda from Catford, except that Brenda from Catford thinks he’s the most important person who ever lived and won’t shut the fcuk up about himself. Brian / Napoleon is typically a lot less self-important.
These freaks are the least important or interesting people in the whole wide world.
but we should rearrange our world to accommodate your very specific and flaming neuroses you compulsively burden us with?
this topic appears to have triggered you.
and yet here you are seeking confirmation of your own existence.
When there is a tension or conflict between our inner feelings and our environment, we used to believe it wise to try to adapt to our environment. I might feel strongly that there should be a mountain range to the East of my city, because it would be beautiful and majestic, but I recognize that there is a physical reality which does not conform to my wishes. So I adapt myself to the situation, and take vacations among mountains.
Our awareness of accelerating technological progress makes us increasingly skeptical of the robust “given-ness” of the natural world. Our individual physical bodies are increasingly seen as an open architecture amenable to substantial modification. This, despite the fact that after 50 years of intense research, we still cannot cure or prevent cancer, nor hundreds of other chronic illnesses.
We seem to have concluded that the risks of radical intervention, against the medical advice of Nature, are indeed not a sufficient deterrent against our wishes and inner feelings. We are open to the idea that there are no longer limits to what is possible for our species. And we are increasingly confident that our dreams are obtainable. We proceed now from the idea that we ought not to adapt ourselves, but the world.
After 50 years of intensive research, we have got quite a lot better at curing, treating and preventing many forms of cancer. That’s not to say that I agree with the transhumanist position that “Death is an engineering problem”.
Have we? I’m not sure the stats bear that out. They are predicting more deaths but slightly less deaths per million. From 171 in 2010 to 151 in 2020.
https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/…
New Cancer Cases
We predicted trends in new cancer cases and cancer deaths in the United States to the year 2020… Rates for many cancers are decreasing or stabilizing, but the number of cancer cases and deaths will continue to increase.
Between 2010 and 2020, we expect the number of new cancer cases in the United States to go up about 24% in men to more than 1 million cases per year, and by about 21% in women to more than 900,000 cases per year.
The kinds of cancer we expect to increase the most are”
Melanoma (the deadliest kind of skin cancer) in White men and women.
Prostate, kidney, liver, and bladder cancers in men.
Lung, breast, uterine, and thyroid cancers in women.
Over the next decade, we expect cancer incidence rates to stay about the same, but the number of new cancer cases to go up, mostly because of an aging White population and a growing Black population. Because cancer patients overall are living longer, the number of cancer survivors is expected to go up from about 11.7 million in 2007 to 18 million by 2020.
The average life expectancy for a breast cancer patient has increased dramatically in the past few decades (as have others). So great progress has been made. But, having been ‘cured’, they are more susceptible to another cancer.
I actually linked to the CDC stats. “great progress” is a rather subjective term.
Well, I don’t have the figures to hand, nor the time to assemble them. Butr let me illustrate why it’s not as simple as counting cases. Let me put some imaginary and extreme cases to illustrate some of the difficulties.
1. Many forms of cancer appear only quite late in life. If life expectancies increase, due to improvements in treatment of other diseases, public health, nutrition and so on, then the rate of cancer will tend to increase irrespective of improvement or not in cancer treatment.
2. You have to die of something. If we get better at preventing death from, say, heart disease then deaths from cancer and everything else will increase.
3. Suppose that a form of cancer used to kill within a month of developing: but that thanks to new treatment, a good quality of life can be maintained for ten years before death. As a result of this advance, the number of people with this form of cancer in the population will go up by a factor of something like 100.
I just linked to the numbers. LOL. That was the CDC link.
Thanks for pointing that out. But as I hope I illustrated, you need quite a lot of auxiliary information: such as age profile, treatment rates for other major conditions, ethnic composition, … . Raw numbers of just cancer diagnoses and deaths are not nearly enough to get a good picture.
…it is narcissistic fantasy that there are no limits though. Sadly, NPD is not easy to treat.
lyrics by Peter Sutcliffe.
Great, honest piece.
Excellent, and moving, article, thank you.
Thank you Mary, a revealing and thought provoking piece.
I missed the news that the Canadian actress Ellen Page had become Elliott Page until I read Brendan O’Neill’s article at Spiked. Yes, it’s on his Wiki Page. And yes, the whole film business is built on people pretending to be other people. But usually the casting director puts some sort of plausibility restraint on the choice of actor.
And this latest identity change looks less plausible than Arnold Swartznegger declaring that he is now Daphne Golightly. In fact, it is more implausible than the scene in “Inception” where Ellen/Elliott gazes at Paris folding over on itself.
Does this mean that all Elliott’s previous films will need to have their credits edited/falsified?
Nope. It means out of work Ellen Page is now soon to be in work Elliot Page.
There is a niche for transgender actors. Makes more sense than the equally unrealistic “I’m thirty years younger” type of plastic surgery, used to achieve the same end – i.e. prolong a flagging career.
Great piece by Mary. The Canadian sex researcher Debra Soh speaks about the changes that a girl goes through in puberty that are irksome in her book “The End of Gender”. Even small-breasted girls will find the development of breasts uncomfortable and it is worse for larger-breasted girls. So a double-mastectomy, instead of being a terrible mutilation, just seems like a way of eliminating a problem, and it is much easier to do if you can convince yourself that you were born in the wrong body. Kristin Bell only underwent a double mastectomy at 20, but she had already been on puberty blockers at 15, according to Mary. The law should really not have permitted a child to undergo these kind of changes prior to reaching the age of majority. If Kristin had not been on puberty blockers at 15, would she have made the same decisions about cross-sex hormones and a double mastectomy once she turned 18? It is absolutely sick that the so-called President-Elect of the United States, Joe Biden, wants to let six- and eight-year-olds make decisions on these things.
“Believe the voice inside of you, live out your dreams and make them true”.
the concept of selflessness has been lost…the open hand of desire wants everything.
Mary seems to have rather run the gamut in terms of identity. In “The Tyranny of Queer Theory”, she mentions how she scandalised her lesbian commune by bringing a man back for a one night stand. While in “The Desperation behind Only Fans”, she remembers “the thrill of being a perky young woman and getting older men in positions of power to do things for you”. All this, as far as I can judge (not that I do!), was at the time when – as we now learn – she was sometimes Sebastian.
There should surely be a novel in it!
if not a novel a screen play. it truly is a 21st century coming of age story line.
a prequel to “Idiocracy” perhaps.
What a sad society we have become, just because we have the technology (medication, surgical), wealth we allow ourselves to be captured by pressure groups and woke thugs that subsequently damages and disadvantages a significant group of confused young people. As well as the waste of NHS resources that could be deployed elsewhere. The trans community and supporters should be ashamed of their biased activism.
I hate it when concern from non-trans children and the social pressures placed now by the transgender community, two very real issues, are debated using reasoned transphobia as an argument. This article does illustrate a major issue in the transgender community – that there are plenty of people who claim they are transgender and think they are transgender because they think it will change their personalities. Denying that gender dysphoria exists and is common, however, throws the baby out with the bathwater.
I’m very sorry the author was one of those types of “trans,” but her experience is that of a cis-gendered woman who thought she was trans. Mine is of a trans man whose dominant biology made me ashamed of who I was most of my life because my secondary biology included things like thick, dark facial and chest hair that felt physically satisfying but made high school hell for me because “girls don’t have beards.” This made the other, more hidden physical effects of being transgender shameful secrets that I’ve only revealed recently. Aside from the fact that I am far from the only girl with facial hair is the fact that the “acceptable” route for women to deal with gender dysphoria is b**b and nose jobs. Well, I want my b**b job to compliment the rest of what I physically look like, and that includes a beard, which means people are going to mistake me for male anyway. And if I had known about transitioning when I was in high school, if transitioning had been then what it is today, I would not have spent the 30 years that followed so deeply ashamed of my body and the physical pain that accompanied my dysphoria. It wouldn’t have been this big secret that I liked these things, even though other people didn’t. Because of all that, even with the Internet and many transgender friends, acquaintances, and significant others, I didn’t realize I was transgender until I was 43.
I am even around the author’s age and had the same exposure to the Internet. In fact, I was one of those Very Online people since PC Link (late 80s AOL predecessor, now ancient history). So the fact that it took me so long to see my dysphoria through the lens of being transgender in order to feel comfortable with myself around other people is remarkable and speaks to how much I was influenced by common social ideas conflating biology with expectations.
Where I am in total agreement with the author is that, in the rush to make up for people like me (and the ones who are even older and realizing it for the first time), we’re trying to make everyone who has even the slightest personality spoke into a transgender person. Having started hormone therapy, I see people claiming to be transgender “but not medically transitioning by choice.” My dysphoria is not their fetish. I see some kids who are genuinely transgender and other kids who are simply exploring their identities being treated as the exact same. I see our society as trying to overcompensate for past denial and mistreatment of gender dysphoria by overaccepting it. I live in the United States, and I’ve been given to understand that our overtolerance is actually practically “transphobic” compared to overtolerance in the UK and Canda. So I know that is a thing that is happening, and it probably helped me personally quite a bit, but it’s still overcompensation.
As much as many detractors of transgenderism in kids want to deny it using the argument that kids don’t know enough about sex biology to know if they’re trans or not, that argument goes both ways. The only real way for anyone of any age to figure out if they are gender dysphoric or not is for all of us to recognize what it looks like and for someone trained to guide – not mislead – people through their personal identity issues.
And I can’t reiterate the author’s main point enough, even if I disagree with how she got there: your personality is not the same as your biology, and changing your body is not going to change your behavior or the way you think. Transitioning is not a way to run away from who you are on the inside, as too many people use it. Being transgender right now is pretty much extreme cosmetic surgery but it only changes your body. From there, though, a lot of people are tricked into thinking they might be trans due to strict enforcement of gender roles, so girls do this and guys do that and if you do the wrong thing you’re called names and told you’re the opposite sex so you believe it… but that’s the social construct part, not the biology part. (In fact, the fact that so many people can be “convinced” they’re transgender is evidence that gender is a social construct that revolves around biology and not an inherent part of biology!) The two are mutually exclusive, and that’s just as true for women who get b**b jobs and men who take supplements and lift weights as it is for people who take hormones and change their sexual biology.
Then again, even being transgender, I’ve been told by trans extremists that my views are transphobic, and right now the inmates are running the asylum. So a last caution is that most transgender people just want to pass as who they are and don’t want people to know they are transgender. I don’t care because I have so much public history as a woman (you see even my profile isn’t changed yet), but you’ll find that a lot of the other people who don’t care that people know are also some of the worst examples of the trans community. I don’t believe, for example, that J Yaniv is trans, and I do believe that person is only making things worse for people like me with their extremism. Balanced voices like mine, transgender people and allies calling for moderation from the extreme elements of the community, tend to get shouted down as transphobic. But there are more of us than there are of them, which is another reason it does us all a disservice when policymakers listen to only them.
That was very interesting Jennifer. Thanks for taking the time to write it. This sentence jumped out at me – “I see our society as trying to overcompensate for past denial and mistreatment of gender dysphoria by overaccepting it”
This obviously explains both the vocal pro-trans lobby on the left and the extreme antipathy to the issue from the right.
But the question remains, how to distinguish between dysphoria which should be treated surgically and which treated psychologically. Or is ‘treatment’ the wrong idea completely. Shouldn’t society just care a lot less about what sex people identify as, and treat individuals as you find them.
As much as the utopian dream of treating each person as you find them is wonderful, on an intimate level, it’s unrealistic. While libido isn’t always reproductive, it is a drive with that aim, and sexual attraction is driven by libido. Who we are attracted to is very personal, and who we don’t like, are repelled by, or afraid of is also very personal. Society should stop imposing gender expectations based on biological sex, but biology is biology and absolutely a part of what we can do physically, whether transgender extremist activists want to admit it or not.
So for the second part of your comment, it is unrealistic to expect society to erase some to capitulate to others, especially in intimate matters. Condemning a person as transphobic for their sexuality is tantamount to rape in my eyes. Transgender people in sports mostly favors trans women, who retain enough of their muscle mass to be as controversial as women with naturally high T, especially in contact sports. That’s not transphobia, it’s biology, sexuality, and reality.
Psychological dysphoria is the type that comes from social expectations, and discerning that from physical dysphoria is in as much of a transitional phase as I am right now. Since there are extremists on every side of the issue, the exploration necessary to understand and educate is being overshadowed by the type of extremism that convinced then unconvinced Keira Bell. Everything that isn’t bending over backward for the transgender community, especially transgender women, is shut down as “transphobic” and written off alongside genuinely transphobic arguments. Now there’s a bunch of celebration for “transgender people who choose not to transition”, which seems to be a contradiction to me, and definitely an insult to those of us whose dysphoria compelled us to. (And never fear, that opinion has gotten me accused of transphobia by people who know full well that I’m transgender…) As long as discourse can’t take place, as long as we conflate behavior with biology so deeply it shames the psychologically dysphoric, as long as we keep moving the goal posts of what transgender means while erasing any notion of biology, there will be no room for the investigation necessary to truly understand it, meaning fewer Jazz Jennings and lots more Keira Bells.
excellent article and thank you for confirming my status as an old geezer [the old fart kind not the Old Faithful in Yellowstone kind, you Brits and your pronunciations of English always good for a chuckle, you’d think it was your language or something]…I had to look up “normie” I had a good guess as to what it meant but was gut punched when it showed up in Apples dictionary which regularly misses much used words from the past.
Perhaps/maybe much of the confusion about sexual and biological identity is caused by the wide spread presence of hormones in our food and water.
Hormones have powerful all the way down the line effects on the biology of all mammals, especially in this case young still maturing human beings. Even minute traces of hormones can and do have a powerful effect.
Growth hormones which are used on a massive scale in the meat industry (chickens, cows, pigs), the milk and dairy industry and the now everywhere presence of hormone mimicking plastics, especially of the cling wrap type.
And perhaps the widespread use of antibiotics in feedlot operations too.
That’s a fascinating idea. 10 upvotes. There have been many articles exploring whether estrogen, for example, is responsible for declining human sperm quality and sex changes in wild fish. You could well be right. My instinct is that its more (but maybe not only) about human social behaviour and changing attitudes about what’s normal and acceptable. Whether that’s showing us something that already existed in people but can now be more open, or whether it’s a pull factor giving confused hormonal teens and the mentally unstable something to hang their neuroses on, is another big conversation.
The essay did make me think about another way of looking at this. Artists in the broadest sense have often used their art to represent an alternative view of themselves and often to explore alternative views of themselves. The internet, in a way, makes that option available to many more people.
It also made me think of UK comedian Lee Ridley, who due to cerebral palsy is unable to speak other than through a communication device. His comedy is often based around the disparity between the way he feels and sees himself and the way others see him.
Mary tried on Sebastian, and found the suit didn’t fit. Now she has new suits which she presents to us in these pages and elsewhere. I’m sure she’ll have others in the future.
I’m not arguing that anyone should be taking any medications or undergoing surgery unless they are wholly committed to that and fully informed and understand the implications and the consequences.
But I think I do dispute the idea that we have one irreducible identity, as perceived by others and that this is directly related to our physical state (stretch marks, secondary s e x organs, disabilities, gender etc), and we need laws and institutions to prevent us from experimenting with that identity in less restrictive realms than the physical.
and the other side of identification, profiling
It’s such a first world issue, the trans thing. Transhumanism. A product of consumer capitalism. Meanwhile, the real world is getting much harder for the majority of humans to survive in.
if not for first world angst the pages of many virtual publications would be blank…too often those publications pages are chock o’block full of words and yet utterly blank.
the Unhe[a]rd is doing a better job than most at challenging thought on all wings, all fronts and in every nook and cranny of every sub-sub culture.
“This identity-first vision of selfhood, forged in the disembodied online world, was an exciting novelty for me. For millions of now-adult children of the internet age, though, it’s baked into their worldviews as a core paradigm for reality. But the problem it faces is that once you take this paradigm offline, it doesn’t really work.”
this captures precisely what Trump has done, instilling in his minions an alternate reality”only difference being that taking it offline doesn’t appear to have made a difference as of yet.
and then there was Monty Python’s “Mouse Problem” in the dark ages of 1969.
I am not part of this community. but I know people online who are. I have been concerned by posts where the trans person is distressed by a) not being accepted into the sisterhood of women, as if there was one; and b) worried about looks and not looking feminine enough, i.e. caught up in the preoccupations that afflict many of us around appearance (including a concern about how feminine you look as a cis woman). It’s more “feminine” than they think, but not in the way they may have hoped. This conforms to the suggestion in the article that “there’s no such thing as an identity created independently of the way others see you”. As an extrovert I know this all too well without changing anything major about myself. I then reflect on the journey they took to get to this point and wonder whether it was a dysphoria that can’t be fixed by a sex change that led to this process. I have no idea, since I can’t identify with the desire to change gender. On the other hand, I have seen highly successful lives in a new gender, computer scientist Lynn Conway being a case in point.
Yeh. Well. I wanted to play rugby league for Australia when I was a kid. Ends up it just wasn’t me. Great essay thank you.
Seems to me that this whole mode of thinking is based on the fantasy of the ‘American Dream’. This has been part of the nonsense that includes ‘just believe’ and ‘if you work hard enough’. We are limited by our physical bodies, emotional make-up, spirituality, upbringing, surrounding culture etc etc. Becoming something in our minds and transferring that to the real world is absurd.
However, things are not quite so clear because all controlled change and development, all new ideas and inventions begin in someone’s mind and the progress of the past, say, century would have seemed, in large part imaginary fantasy to our forebears. I guess Mary is right, that the ability to live in a world unhindered by physicality has led to the gross imbalance that we see today.
Hopefully, in the swings and roundabouts of real life, painful experience will eventually bring us back to a more sensible place.
“We have been taught to neglect, despise, and violate our bodies, and to put all faith in our brains”¦the special disease of civilised man might be described as a block or schism between his brain and the rest of his body. This corresponds to the split between “I” and “me,” man and nature, and to the confusion of Ouroboros, the mixed-up snake, who does not know that his tail belongs with his head.” – Alan Watts.
Alan Watts was not talking about gender dysphoria in that quote, but it certainly holds some insight into this topic. Of course, gender dysphoria is a real condition for certain individuals no doubt, but I think waiting to see how the gender die is cast until we’re adults and make a (at least potentially) more mature and informed decision regarding the possible transformation of our whole bodies and place in society is a wise course of action. Let our bodies, once they have gone through puberty at the very least, inform us of how we feel as much as our brains do, if not more so honestly – all those confusing and conflicting self-identifying illusions in our minds just leave one dizzy after all.
Besides, adults don’t know who they really are, so how can we expect children to know any better, at least once they have started to become ‘civilised’ that is?
I agree with you, but isn’t there a point that the older you transition, the less physically convincing it will be ? I don’t have an answer, I’m just saying that it’s maybe not as simple as saying ‘wait til you’re 21’.
There was concern a few years ago about web sites or social media groups that were said to be effectively promoting anorexia to vulnerable teenagers, particularly girls, with or prone to eating disorders. There was a related concern that social media algorithms were promoting increasingly extreme sites to users who showed an interest in them. I never understood what the motivation was for promoting that sort of material. Have those sites, and the people behind them, any connexion with those supposedly promoting gender anxiety? Or is it all just one big moral panic?
On my notion there are three kinds of people:
There are Subordinates that just want someone to tell them what to do.
There are Responsibles that are committed to doing what God tells them to do.
Then there are Creatives who want to do their own thing and are trying to discover “the meaning of life, the universe, and everything” for themselves.
The modern lefty way to be creative is that you get to decide whatever you want to be and society better honor you, because justice.
But the eternal way is the Hero’s Journey into the unconscious, from which you will probably not return. If you do return it will not be as the Ego Hero beloved by adoring crowds, but as the Sacrificial Hero who dies on the border between Order and Chaos so that others may live.
I think that most of us aren’t really up to the challenge of a truly Creative life. Nor ever will be.
Thankyou for writing this article. There are parents in the UK ( and other countries ) looking at their beautiful children and wondering why on earth they want to change their pronouns and name, especially when there has been no earlier indication, desire or feeling that they should be, or are the opposite to their biological sex. I will 100% argue he/she/him/her pronouns refer to male/female biological sex NOT an inner sense of feeling, your inner sense of feeling ( or as nowadays insisted, gender ) is your self expression, style and personality. A preference to likes, dislikes, clothing, hairstyles, interests and so on is all to do with ones individual style & personality and absolutely does NOT mean there is a need to identify or become the opposite to ones natural biological sex. Sadly the current trend seems that impressionable teens, who are perhaps mentally vunerable, are being misguided into believing there is something wrong with their “inner self / gender identification”, which just fuels further mental health issues, anxiety and dysphoria. YES it fuels it, it rarely cures it. The majority of these poor kids just need to be told they are perfect the way they are, to be helped and guided to feel more comfortable with themselves and their natural bodies whilst they grow and develop into the well grounded, well rounded adults of the next generation.
Life was simpler and more honest when it was appropriate to “call a spade, a spade.”
Is not that innocent comment considered to be racial now?
Yes it is. The Ace of spades has high levels of skin melanin.
so much for digging up the garden.
and don’t you dare bring the hoe into the discussion
Simpler, yes. Honest, no. You don’t think people weren’t always as screwed up as they are now? I don’t. Then you buried it, now you’re encouraged to embrace it. The latter isn’t without its own set of problems (as we see here) but on balance I still think it’s heading in a better direction.
” You don’t think people weren’t always as screwed up as they are now?”
of course people have always been a hot mess, difference being we used to be polite and not make it a burden for others.
“…the disembodied online world in which so many of us now consolidate our selves continues to repeat the lie that our selves are plastic, infinitely renewable, atomised and under our exclusive control as individuals. This untruth betrayed Keira Bell. It hacks at the foundations of what makes us human: our relationships, and our embodied limits. We should resist its further progress through our laws and institutions.”
this is a distillation of yet another internal contradiction of libertarian thought.
It is rare to find such an authentically wise exposition as this piece by Ms. Harrignton.
Well done.
It is difficult to take an article that begins with the claim that the internet forced the author to change her gender seriously, but I’ll try. Does it matter to anybody that statistically, very few trans people regret transition? Does it matter to any of you that most transsexuals report increased self-confidence and higher levels of satisfaction after gender transition? Would you care if I told you that gender transition can and often does save lives? I have no doubt that Mary Harrington was a confused teenager, and I don’t hold it against her. But that she’s morphed into a very confused adult is less forgivable. No, the internet doesn’t force anybody to change their gender. Reality check, gender transition takes a long time and for anybody who is in error about their gender identity, as Ms. Harrington apparently was, they usually realize this long before surgery, as she did. That doesn’t mean that mistakes aren’t made in transgender healthcare, as they are in any field of medical care, but it does not seem cogent to extrapolate from the suffering of a few (usually very young) individuals and make claims about gender itself, as the author has done.
I care about the facts. But you have omitted one of the most extraordinary – that we, in a period of less than 10 years, have seen the figures of referrals to the Tavistock GIDS for gender dysphoria switch entirely and dramatically from low levels of mostly boys wanting to transition to females to three-quarters of a large number being girls wanting to transition to males. As a feminist interested in achieving women’s equality, and one (like all of us) challenging stereotypes for both men and women, I think there are many reasons why girls might prefer to be men. But these are social and psychological reasons. As Keira says, she was a troubled teenager and thought her life would be much better if she were a boy. Now she longs to be back where she was, a girl, now woman. It is profoundly shocking that the research has been so poor – indeed lacking, so the judges in the judicial review could not know what the outcomes have been. The money that appears to be behind the whole idea that sex is non-binary and ‘assigned’ at birth rather than observed and recognised, that gender, (sex and gender are not the same) is infinitely malleable, has created a world in which far too many young people have medicine, and surgery, removing perfectly healthy body parts on thoroughly unscientific ‘facts’. Of course there is a diagnostic category of gender dysphoria but when it has always to be ‘confirmed’ as even very young children claim they were ‘born in the wrong body” (excuse me, what other body can anyone have?) then it is dangerous for them and everyone else too. To me, a sociologist, the pattern of referrals and transitions looks exactly like a social movement. It does not help those who have genuine gender dysphoria and ruins the lives of those who only thought they did.
I would care it it were proven to be true. As it is, it is just another BS fake statistic peddled by a tiny but noisy group of fanatics.
No-one said it does, but there is a lot of evidence that it is persuading a lot of people that it would be a good idea to do so.
That at least is true.
it does not seem cogent to extrapolate from the suffering of a few (usually very young) individuals and make claims about gender itself,
Nor is it cogent to ignore them. Anecdotal evidence is still evidence and “mistakes” made here tend to have lasting effects. The larger issue is why the rest of us have to be dragged into what is very much a personal matter.
Try and be consistent, Alex. This is from one of your comments earlier: ‘the tyranny of the <1%. You will be made to care, and you will be made to applaud.’ (your capitalisation)
The comment quoted I understood to mean you supported a post saying that trans people were a tiny minority and there for not worth worrying about. Your comment above I understand to mean that a tiny minority of the tiny minority who are not worth worrying about shouldn’t be ignored. Which is it?
There is no inconsistency. They ARE a minority among minorities and I never said they’re “not worth worrying about.” I said prevailing orthodoxy demands that you care whether you wish to or not.
In the comment above, Erica makes my point. She’s pro-trans and and also dismissive of anyone who had a bad experience and talks about it. Sorry, but if she and others are going to demand people’s attention, they have to live with attention that bucks their dogma. As for me, I’m live and let live. What adults do is their business. Kids are a different matter.
it is curious that I found Ms. Harrington to be a very centered adult and you to be somewhat triggered and emotionally unhinged by what ever portion of the article you actually read beyond the headline.