Transition: a conflict with reality
How transition interventions destabilize both oneself and society
To live as “trans” is to live in conflict with material reality.
This should hardly be a controversial statement. The diagnostic language around the psychological distress that drives a transgender identity describes a conflict (or “incongruence”) between one’s subjective identity and one’s objective biology. What’s controversial are differing opinions on whether or not the outcome of transition is positive and healthy.
As a medical intervention for gender-related distress, a transition purports to align the body and the mind — by putting the body into conflict with reality to assuage the conflict of the mind.
As a social intervention for gender-related distress, a transition requires the participation of everyone around the individual involved. Society itself must assuage the conflict of the mind by pretending that the conflict of the body does not exist.
Many people went along with this in the past — surely it was polite to refer to a man as “she” if it distressed him otherwise — but we are now reaching a tipping point where there is a broader understanding of what a comprehensive rejection of sex classes would mean.
It would mean allowing males to undress in changing rooms next to females; it would mean permitting male athletes to compete against female athletes; it would mean having male prisoners share cells with female prisoners; it would mean that females taking testosterone could be labelled “pregnant men”; it would mean that estrogenized males could be encouraged to breastfeed babies; it would mean that schoolchildren could be punished for addressing a “nonbinary” teacher “incorrectly”; and it would mean that a child who insists on rejecting their own sex be treated in a way that disregards everything we know about human development.
To achieve “trans liberation” would be to succeed in a widescale collapse of the differences between male and female.
There is likely only a small number of people who would bother undergoing medical interventions to appear as a facsimile of the opposite sex if they weren’t also granted society’s blessing to opt into the demographic of that sex.
Society never actually gave its blessing for this suspension of disbelief, though. It used to be that the success of a transition was measured by how well an individual “passed” — that is, whether people largely participated unknowingly in affirming a person’s identity. The modern trans movement instead has issued affirmation as a top-down command from activists. Deny what your eyes see before you or be vilified as hateful.
There were a couple of mass shootings earlier this year that involved male perpetrators who identified as transgender, and people often brought up an explanation for this behaviour in which society is blamed. We are told it cannot be easy to live as “trans” in a world full of bigots.
“Bigots,” of course, refers not only to people who are cruel, but to every person who will not uncritically affirm the experience of a trans-identifying person (no matter how polite they are about their firmly-held belief in reality). To activists, failure to affirm is itself a cruelty.
The need for affirmation extends all the way to casual reminders that a trans-identifying person is not the gender they claim to be, such as hearing that only women get pregnant or seeing anatomy diagrams of the two sexes. These are things that obviously aren’t meant to be personally offensive in any way but which come as painful little reminders. Reality is inescapable, so these moments are pretty much constant.
Instead of encouraging an individual to build the mental resilience to overcome those moments, the answer proposed is to revise the textbooks, rewrite the government websites, publish research that argues that sex is “assigned” at birth rather than immutable and unchanging, and “correct” people’s birth certificates.
The underlying message in blaming society, however, is that, until we have achieved the goal of “liberation,” we should continue to expect violence from a small number of trans-identifying individuals. This isn’t a civil rights movement asking for simple integration and equal rights. This is a hostage situation demanding a restructuring of society.
I don’t think every person who chooses to transition is violent, and I think most of them are more of a threat to themselves than to anyone else. However, I do think everyone who claims that violence committed by transitioning individuals is a result of mental illness rather than trans identification is ignoring the fact that subjectively identifying as something that you objectively are not is a symptom of mental illness.
It is not society’s burden to create an environment that stabilizes individuals whose lifestyle involves a disconnect with reality. It is the burden of trans-identifying people to find coping methods that don’t involve making threats of violence if society fails to comply with their method of choice.
Interventions offered to people seeking to ameliorate gender-related distress rarely ever revolve around improving one’s state of mind. They focus on changing outside circumstances: altering one’s appearance and convincing others to affirm the identity (with persuasion, deception, or coercion).
Even with perfect affirmation from society, though, the internal conflict for a trans-identifying individual persists. This internal conflict can often be projected onto innocent people whose only crime is not identifying as “trans.”
Subreddits dedicated to transition are full of, for example, men relaying how they are jealous of women who got to experience a “normal” girlhood and expressing feelings of “missing out” on female experiences (like having a period or becoming pregnant). People even become angry that normal women and men aren’t grateful enough for the privilege of being born without the distress of a “trans” experience.
This happens because transition exists in service of “should” statements: “I should have been born the opposite sex.” “I should look different than I do.” “People should treat me how I feel internally.” “Institutions should change to accommodate me.”
“Should” statements are considered cognitive distortions according to certain styles of therapy. They are wishful thinking. They are rejections of reality. They are judgements about what is true. Those painful little reminders of reality that trans-identifying people experience are painful because “should” statements cause feelings of shame — that one is not doing enough or being enough.
But that internal judgement will exist even without reminders from the world, because your own body is a reminder of what you truly are. No matter how many surgeries you have, an altered male never becomes female, and an altered female never becomes male.
Trans activists are fighting a losing battle. You cannot win against nature. You cannot win against God.
People can decide for themselves how to interact one on one, but I don’t believe we have created a net good for humanity by telling both adults and children to suppress their instincts about biological sex.
I think it’s bizarre that I grew up in a culture where celebrating difference was progressive, only to have activists turn around and say that real progress is denying that meaningful differences exist.
If anyone can be a woman or a man just because they genuinely feel that they are one, then medical transition serves no purpose whatsoever. If a vagina has no connection to being a woman, there’s no reason for a man to claim to be a woman when he experiences distress over not having one — and there’s no reason for a woman to claim to be a man when she experiences distress because she does. There has to be a universally understood blueprint for a transitioning person’s “embodiment goals.”
Activists might claim that a penis can be female. Politicians might place men on their all-female panels. Journalists might refer to a male shooter as a female.
But let’s be frank. Everyone knows what the blueprints are. Pretending we don’t isn’t getting society anywhere healthy.
Look for part two of this topic where I discuss how the conflict with reality caused by transition continues in detransition and the subsequent task of radical acceptance.