Especially since once you know, you can’t “un-know…”

The basic issue in the case of intersex and transsex seems to me to be the same one: Where do we get our sexual identity? Is it physical? Mental? Social? If a combination, what sort of combination? Is it innate at birth? Is it immutable?
We usually use science to answer questions like those. But we can’t experiment on humans, so the most powerful tool of science is unavailable. And especially when the question is so personal and political, science struggles to provide an answer.
When I took the seminar, most experts thought that those few people who thought their physical sex was the wrong one were physically intersexual to some degree. That is, that their sexual identity had at least some physical component. That is still being debated today.
We have made some progress in understanding the science of sexual identity, but as this article suggests it’s very hard to rely on scientists as we normally would. Political pressures and informal censorship make it doubly hard.
Trying to apply unsettled science to real life led to tragedy in one case. I mentioned the book Man & Woman, Boy & Girl. That book argues that sex identity is cultural, citing a case where the author John Money advised that an infant boy (“John” in the book) whose genitals had been severely damaged be surgically, hormonally and socially raised as a girl (“Joan”). The author claimed the transition had been a success.
When I took the seminar, the case of John/Joan was known not to be as John Money had claimed. A later book, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, tells the story of “John”, raised as a girl, and his identical twin brother, raised as a boy. It’s riveting and macabre. And tragic. The book tells the story as one of amazing survival against tremendous odds, but sadly first “John” and then his brother committed suicide a few years after the book was published. Once a top scientist at Johns Hopkins, John Money is now seen by most to have been an arrogant and amoral man.
How do we handle sexual identity issues? I’ve thought about and read about these issues for decades now, but I’m no expert on the subject. Trouble is, the experts don’t have answers either. I hear people say we should “follow the science” in cases like this. But what do we do when the science leads us nowhere?

But it wasn’t meant to be like that. It was supposed to be a technique in which one’s opponent helps to build your strongest argument and then argues against that; this was to foster trust during arguments and confidence that your opponent is engaging seriously with your pont of view.

Here’s my experience: My earliest memories are of wanting to look like a girl. I never remember a time when I was open about that. I’m talking 4-5 years old and I already knew I wasn’t supposed to feel that way so I kept it a secret. I hid my sister’s clothes under my bed during the day so I could put them on in secret at night. I had lots of dreams in which I was a girl. It didn’t make me unhappy at that age. I had a pretty idyllic upbringing as a normal boy. Good family. Good friends. I was very lucky. I didn’t hate myself, my body, or think I was a girl. It was just something I thought about in the same sense a kid might lie in bed and imagine how great it would be to be able to fly or have superpowers, well I thought about how great it would be to wake up a girl the next day. My life involved mainly boys as friends and playing Sports. The older I got the more aware I became that this other thing in my head was unusual but I was able to completely wall it off from my everyday life. Being good at Sports and also being reasonably good looking meant as a teenager I was pushed into what from the outside looked like a quite stereotypical ‘macho’ experience. I was captain of various Sports teams at school. Girls liked me.

Two things then happened which made this feeling start to really affect me. From late teens onwards I felt this growing disconnect with my body. That it was changing in ways that made me not see myself in the mirror anymore. I felt warm, open and compassionate as a person and I looked in the mirror and saw a cold, hard, angry reflection. It was like an alien thing was growing on my exterior, pushing what I felt was the real me further inside until eventually I felt trapped and beyond uncomfortable in my skin. It’s like a permanent sense of having a piece of clothing on that is irritating you-you want to tear it off but you can’t because it’s your body. Eventually I realised that what I didn’t like was the more extreme ‘maleness’ to my appearance that had developed in late teens/early 20s. I guess at that point it had become what you might have heard other trans people describe before about simply feeling wrong in their bodies.

The second thing that happened which really started to make me feel horrible and that life was going to be difficult is quite sensitive to discuss. As I went through puberty and started to have wet dreams I was always a girl in those dreams. I thought I was a straight male as a teenager so to experience that was extremely distressing-as was beginning to realise that when it came to actually having intercourse my body didn’t really seem to respond. I didn’t desire it. Didn’t seek it out. Didn’t want it. That started to make me ‘odd’ in relation to my peers. You have asked me about my sexuality-the answer to that is that I don’t have one. It is like my brain is wired to expect my body to be female and the fact that it isn’t means that part of me just doesn’t work in any functional way. I say that not because I am claiming that actually is the fundamental scientific explanation-but because it most accurately describes the experience.

I can tell you what I do now know for certain as I sit here today as a 35 year old man-if I woke up tomorrow in the body of the biologically female version of me, that would cure these feelings. If I could go back and intervene in my early/mid teens and have my body shaped by female hormones instead of male ones, that would also cure these feelings. Why? Because it would be like putting out this fire in my mind. There are actually many trans people who describe that same feeling once their body is running on different hormones irrespective of any physical changes. The interpretation is often because it corrects some kind of ‘wired in’ mismatch in the brain. I have no idea whether that is a real thing. Again, I am just reporting the experience.

For me I am 35 year old born male in a very male looking body. I have no interest in looking like a man in a dress. The kind of person the commentors here react so negatively too. I am an introvert. I am not camp or proudly queer in my expression or personality. I do not want that attention (despite yet another person in the comments who is convinced that this is all because I want attention) I just want to look like a normal person.

Could it be some psychological process that took hold in my mind beginning from very early years? Sure. Is there some kind of ‘mental correction’ that could help me? I’m not against the idea that there might be. But if the people in the comments again convinced that this ‘reeks of mental illness’ could direct me towards that help it would be much appreciated because I’ve tried a lot at this point. I have spoken with a therapist and taken courses on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. I use those tools to help with other things in life but I’m afraid here they don’t make a dent. It feels so pervasive, instinctive and almost subconscious in nature that trying to ignore it or change it feels akin to trying to change your sexuality or some other fundamental thing about who you are. And any time I can go a day or two without being hit with that feeling of wrongness in my skin and the hopelessness about the future that comes with that-I have a dream where I am female anyway and it all comes flooding back.

If I want to convey one thing here it is that, in my case and in many others, this is a feeling that happens to you, against your will and in spite of your best efforts to make it go away. 

Below is the answer to the questions you asked.

What is your definition of a woman?

I don’t know and I don’t care.

If you feel that you are one, then what is it that you feel you are?

I don’t feel like anything other than myself. Above is my experience. None of that makes me feel like anything other than myself. Whatever words other people want to use to describe me I don’t really care.

Is it that you sexually desire men rather than women?

Explained above.

That you prefer to be seen in women’s clothes?

I’d like to be able to wear women’s clothes and look like a woman. I’d like to be able to wear androgynous clothes and look like a woman. In reality I do not look like a woman in either of those scenarios, so no, I do not prefer to be seen in women’s clothing. I would rather look like a man in men’s clothing than a man in women’s clothing.

Is this really true: ‘the thousands of trans people out there who just look like normal, unassuming men or women?’

Yes. It is. Google Trace Lysette, Valentina Sampaio or Geena Rocero. Go on Reddit and search for r/transitiontimelines, filter by ‘top’ > ‘all time’ and then scroll for however long you want. The fact that you think it isn’t true speaks to the fundamental ignorance you usually find in places like this. I hold no judgement or ill-will towards that, why would you know about a World that you’ve had no reason to experience? Especially now that you are being fed a warped, clickbait, identity politics version of that World which only serves as confirmation bias to your ignorance. We are all socially conditioned to think of this as a taboo thing. I was the same growing up. I didn’t know what was possible. You didn’t see trans people anywhere. I only remember one programme Channel 4 put on late at night called Sex Change. I watched that and felt like I was doing something wrong or seedy. I suspect it’s how you might feel if you actually take my advice and look for trans women on the internet. Why would a ‘normal’ person go and search that out? Wouldn’t that be a a bit of a weird thing to do? But you can bet that as soon as some criminal or pervert does something horrible the Daily Mail or some other news outlet trafficking in outrage will make sure that you see THAT. Your personal social media algorithms are already likely fine tuned to perform a similar kind of narrowing of your experience (a problem that extends much farther than just trans issues)

When you look at some Pride rally or other congregation of trans people, the ones who don’t ‘pass’ will catch your eye. The others won’t because…guess what-you’ll believe them just to be normal men or women and have no idea.

But purely because of the hand I have been dealt in life I was pushed to find out everything I could. Once you’ve read and listened to enough experiences, viewed enough convincing transitions, day after day, year after year, what eventually happens is that social conditioning just melts away. Trans people are just people like the rest of us. As good or as bad as the rest us. You also start to realise that science is pretty incredible and the human body is quite malleable.

I see people in places like this talk about surgery a lot. I’m not sure they are even aware of what hormones do. For example I think people have no idea that when it comes to male to female transitioners, if they start in their teens before/around/or even after puberty in a lot of cases, estrogen will make their bodies completely indistinguishable from a natural female’s (excluding genitalia obviously), including bone structure. Even in their 20s people have a pretty good chance of looking indistinguishably female with hormones alone. The older you get the less likely it becomes.

This is really pertinent when it comes to the debate around young people. I’m all for anything that prevents people doing things that they might later regret but it’s that knowledge I feel is often missing from the ’non-trans’ side. I would ask those people to think of the prototypical ‘man in a dress’ vision that they have of a trans woman. An older person who loks obviously male with their deeply masculinised bone structure, face, skin, hair etc but have tried to change that with hormones and surgeries. Then go on Youtube or Instagram and look up Emma Ellingsen. She is a 20 year old trans girl who started treatment young. There are many others like her. Then imagine it’s your child. Which of those two lives do you think is a happier one? Which would you want for your child? They seem like different fundamentally different things but they aren’t. It is the exact same condition being addressed. They were both children once with both possibilities ahead of them.

I don’t really know where I stand on how young people should be able to start. It’s a difficult question to answer. I am very sympathetic to being really careful about it but I also see that most of the outrage comes from people completely unaware of the kind of life they are condemning some young trans people to (my perspective here is obviously very much from the male to female side) Regardless of that question-I also use this as a way to illustrate the ignorance when it comes to suicide rates. In the example above-who do you think is more likely to be depressed? If there is a high suicide rate in trans people (I don’t know if that’s actually true btw I haven’t looked into it. Maybe it is but again it always seems to come from people who in the next breath display their ignorance so I have never taken it very seriously) then that doesn’t reveal anything about the fundamental nature of the condition. It doesn’t reveal anything about what works as a treatment without controlling for the wildly differing outcomes possible in terms of how convincingly one ‘passes’ and is able to live normally as the desired gender. And yet what we appear to have happening is something extremely cruel (I accept unknowingly a lot of the time) where people are wanting to deny access to treatment, then those same people see the outcome of that (ie the ‘man in a dress’) and use it to inform their views that it’s ‘barbaric’, ‘doesn’t work anyway’, ‘is a mental illness’ etc etc. It is a self-fulfilling cycle of ignorance and has an extremely cruel effect.

Here’s a list of things I also believe:

There are loads of stupid people within the trans movement expressing stupid things and it’s often those things that make the headlines.

There are fundamental differences between women and trans-women. Obviously.

I don’t give a toss about pronouns. They are just mouth noises. I think it’s mad to get so offended if people use them wrongly but I also think that, just like if I told you my name and you went ‘nah­­ I’ll call you something else’, if you deliberately decided you weren’t going to use my preferred pronoun ones  I’d just think you were a bit of a knob. You see some pretty crazy, hysterical stuff about these mouth noises heralding the downfall of society.

Bathrooms-I don’t know. That’s a hard one.

Trans athletes shouldn’t compete in the Sport of their desired gender. In many ways the distinctions we draw when it comes to Sport are arbitrary. Serena Williams would spank me at many Sports purely because of her bone structure and genes, so is that really any different than a born male beating a born female because of theirs? But when it comes to what is the most fair line to draw for most people, clearly it’s biological sex at birth. That’s tough for a lot of trans people but I think it’s just one they have to suck up. There is obviously an advantage to having had a body shaped by male hormones even if at the time of competition that’s not the case.