Trans Substantiation, Part 2

Let's Get (meta)Physical

Let’s get the science out of the way. The Society of Evidence-Based Gender Medicine is a great resource for those looking for more information about pediatric gender dysphoria; don’t miss the recent detailed fact check of our government’s radical stance (shared by the American Academy of Pediatrics, naturally) on the issue, which stands as a stark outlier to international norms. If you prefer a short video with the basic research highlights, Ryan Anderson has a good one (his book length treatment is here). For a fantastic book on the issue, which you can read along with your teens, I highly recommend Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage. Don’t buy into spittle-flecked dismissals of these highly evidence-based resources as ‘haters’; if you take the time to engage with them, you will see that they demonstrate great compassion for those suffering from gender dysphoria. It is a compassion characterized by not wanting young children to spend their adult lives regretting the decision to permanently sterilize themselves; it is compassion for those literally immature youth who are one well-meaning, gender-affirming teacher’s influence away from being stuck in a body forever unable to experience full sexual pleasure and doomed to undergo interminable rounds of physically, emotionally, and financially draining medical and surgical interventions.  

              Putting the evidence aside, let’s address the real issue: metaphysics. The nature of being and identity. How do I know I exist? How do I know I’m me, and not you? These aren’t obvious questions. Have you read much Heidegger lately? It’s over my head; I start to see terms like “being-in-the-world” and my eyes glaze over. I’m sure there are valuable ontological insights in the writings of other famous philosophers, but I lack the intellect and the philosophical training to appreciate them. How about your 4th grader? Unless she has a pretty good grounding in Husserl, Schopenhauer, and Descartes, I doubt she’s capable of making a coherent argument for her sensation of existing in the wrong body. I’ve been to medical school and know the training doctors get, and I can assure you her surgeon doesn’t have the philosophical bona fides to engage in that discussion, either. So, as government and institutional pressure in favor of unquestioning ‘affirmation’ mounts, there’s a very real chance that the poor girl’s life will be irreversibly altered by a multidisciplinary team of highly credentialed experts who have never thought deeply about what being in the right body means.

Suppose I had the artistic chops to precisely capture what it feels like to be me. I pour out my inner moods with James Joyce-ian stream-of-consciousness precision. There are over a billion folks on the planet; pretty good odds that some dude somewhere reads my magnum opus and realizes he feels the exact same way. What then? What to do when that guy, living until now in blissful ignorance, realizes that he is a Texas pediatrician trapped in a Somali accountant’s body? Or am I him, trapped in my body? Who should get cosmetic surgery to end up resembling whom? I don’t even tan well! How do we decide?

As long as we’re asking the easy questions, what can it possibly mean to feel like a woman? Is it a specific woman in particular? Or womankind in general? Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin? How do you know that it is you who feels like them and not in fact they who feel like you? Seems like a key distinction to hammer down before permanently castrating oneself. If you do both indeed feel the same, why subject yourself to the pain and expense of surgery? Wouldn’t it be simpler for them to just start dressing like you? Perhaps they could adopt your hairstyle and try to mimic your voice. Why is the burden on you to change your appearance to be more like them, rather than on them to make themselves look like you? And if they did indeed assent and change themselves to look like you, would that make you feel better? After all, if the idea is to change things until you look like the people you most feel like, there you have it. Unless there’s something else there, something deeper, that you aren’t fully aware of – perhaps some desire to alter yourself fundamentally, to cut parts of yourself off, not in order to more closely resemble someone else, but for deep, hidden reasons that only years of counseling might uncover. Or maybe, like many a child before, you are lonely and miserable and unhappy with your body, only your teacher, instead of giving you a few Judy Blume books and a big hug, tells you breast binding is the path to happiness.  

              I do not know what it feels like to be a man. I only know what it feels like to be me – and even that is an imperfectly-examined, oft-changing identity. My dad and my brothers are men, but we have widely different interests and emotions. I certainly don’t know what it feels like to be a woman. Gathering clues from observing my wife, it seems to involve a strong desire to acquire accent pillows. But that is likely to be a social construct – after all, women existed long before accent pillows, or to-die-for glittery eye shadow, or romcoms, or aromatic candles, or whatever other regressive stereotype you may harbor about the fairer sex.

Casting stereotypes aside, one of the few tangibly and uniquely masculine experiences in life is fatherhood. Everything else – wearing pants instead of dresses, preferring ice hockey to ice dancing, being unable to differentiate between fifty shades of identical white paint – may indeed be a social construct. Fatherhood transcends time and place, it is a universal. Similarly, motherhood is uniquely female. If I am right – if, in a sea of everchanging, socially constructed sex roles, the one true thing is the potential to bring new life into the world – how cruel that this is the very blessing that the American Academy of Pediatrics, the US government, all manner of major corporations, and transgender advocates want taken away forever from young children. With procreation permanently out of the picture, sex roles do indeed become nothing more than a matter of subjective feeling. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Thank you for reading. Tomorrow’s installment: on having a dead daughter instead of a live son.