Although there has been some pushback in the work of Anne A. Lawrence (a self-declared autogynephilic25) and others, the idea that transsexualism is in any way propelled by autogynephilia has become a considerable source of aggravation to trans campaigners. The reason for this sharp U-turn is obvious. And it takes us back to the hardware-software issue. If people have a particular sexual kink then it may be due either to hardware or to software. But it is hard to persuade society that it should change nearly all of its social and linguistic norms in order to accommodate those sexual kinks. Society may tolerate you. It may wish you well. But your desire to dress in lady’s knickers is no reason to force everyone to use entirely new pronouns. Or to alter every public bathroom. Or to bring up children with the belief that there is no difference between the sexes and that gender is a social construct.
If trans were largely, mainly or solely about erotic stimulation then it should no more be a cause to change any societal fundamentals than it would be to change them for people who get a sexual thrill from wearing rubber. Autogynephilia risks presenting trans as a software issue. And that is the cause of the turn against it. For – as with homosexuals – there is a drive to prove that trans people are ‘born this way’.
What makes all of this even more complex is the fact that built into the actions of many trans people is something that surely demonstrates (as in the case of Jan Morris) that their desire to be in the body of the opposite sex surely cannot be a mere fantasy or kink. After all, it is hard to think of anything which demands more commitment from a person than the decision to have irreversible surgery that permanently transforms their body. Any man willing to have his penis cut off or flayed and then turned inside out can hardly be said to be taking matters lightly. Such a procedure might be considered the precise opposite of a hobby or lifestyle choice. Yet even this does not ‘prove’ that trans is a hardware issue. For there are almost no extremes that some people will not go to in order to satisfy something they believe to be true. The question becomes about whether what one person or even a lot of people believe to be true about themselves has to be accepted as true by other people or not.
The Trans Breakthrough
This lack of evidence is one reason why some people believe that the whole trans issue is a delusion. And this undertow of suspicion exists even while society as a whole is being encouraged to accept trans people’s claims on their own terms.
In April 2015 the former Olympic athlete and reality television star Bruce Jenner came out as a trans and revealed his new identity as Caitlyn Jenner. She immediately became perhaps the highest-profile trans person in the world. Within weeks she was on the front cover of Vanity Fair with the headline ‘Call me Caitlyn’. The Annie Leibovitz photo shoot showed Jenner in a slinky corset-set, showing off the top of her breasts, while the bottom part rode up to what the world would learn were her yet to be removed male genitalia. Leibovitz’s shoot cleverly got around the most visibly male parts of Jenner’s anatomy. Not just with the crossed legs getting around the bulge issue, but with her arms tucked behind the body so as to reduce the former Olympian’s shoulders and biceps. One year earlier Time magazine had put the trans actress Laverne Cox on its cover with the headline ‘The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s Next Civil Rights Frontier’.26 That feeling of a new frontier needing to be broken through was in the air. As Ruth Hunt of Stonewall said when the group added transgender campaigning to their work, ‘It’s their turn now.’27 Gay had essentially been done. And everybody seemed to know the contours of racial and women’s advancement. Some people – perhaps especially legacy magazines with falling circulations – seemed ripe for a new civil rights battle. Caitlyn Jenner’s timing turned out to be perfect.
The year 2015 was the one in which trans rights, visibility and demands went mainstream and Jenner was everywhere. Aside from the ubiquitous Leibovitz shoot, there were months when it seemed Jenner had made a clean sweep through every awards ceremony in America. Glamour magazine named her one of its ‘women of the year’. At the ESPYs (Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly award) Jenner was awarded the Courage Award and was given a standing ovation by the arena full of sports men and women. Like everything else in the growing trans story, every fragment and splinter of it had the potential to take out anybody who even hesitated before the stampede. Or in the ovation.
During and after the ESPYs the American Football quarterback Brett Favre was lambasted first on social media and then in the rest of the media for not clapping Jenner enthusiastically enough. Although Favre joined the standing ovation for Jenner he controversially took his seat again before everyone else in the audience had taken theirs, and this was caught on camera. For this behaviour the New York Post denounced the culprit’s insufficient enthusiasm with a piece headlined ‘Brett Favre makes the ESPYs uncomfortable for everyone’.28 Nobody seemed certain precisely how many seconds of standing ovation it was correct to give a trans woman receiving an award for courage. Some attention to the etiquette in the Soviet Politburo might have helped. The only lesson unarguably imparted was that if everyone is applauding a trans person you should make sure that you are the last person to resume your seat.
Other shards from the Jenner controversy struck with equally unpredictable regularity. In July 2015 the then 31-year-old conservative commentator Ben Shapiro was among a number of guests invited onto Dr Drew On Call on HLN to discuss Jenner’s courage award. One of the other guests, seated beside Shapiro in the studio, was Zoey Tur, who was introduced as a ‘Transgender reporter’. Some way into the discussion Tur was asked by Dr Drew whether Jenner was really ‘brave’. Tur expressed the view that ‘being brave is being yourself’, and being transgender is ‘about the bravest thing you can do’.
At this point Shapiro expressed his view that by celebrating Jenner people were ‘mainstreaming delusion’. ‘Why would you call it “delusion”?’ asked another, outraged, female guest. Shapiro continued and in passing referred to Jenner as ‘him’ rather than ‘her’. Although Jenner had been Bruce for 66 years and had only identified as Caitlyn for three months, everybody else in the studio immediately turned on Shapiro, criticizing him for being rude. ‘It’s her,’ the same outraged woman insisted. ‘You’re not being polite to the pronouns. It’s disrespectful.’
Ignoring how you can be polite or otherwise to pronouns, Shapiro dug in. ‘Forget about the disrespect,’ he said. ‘Facts don’t care about your feelings. It turns out that every chromosome, every cell in Caitlyn Jenner’s body, is male, with the exception of some of his sperm cells. It turns out that he still has all of his male appendages. How he feels on the inside is irrelevant to the question of his biological self.’ At which point the only other guest in the studio who had expressed mild criticism of Jenner getting the award (on the basis that Jenner was rich and white and had not been sufficiently outspoken in the past on LGBT issues) swiftly announced that he was not ‘on board’ with what had just been said. Perhaps the distancing was necessary given what followed.
The host tried to calm things down and invited Tur to tell everyone about the science of gender dysphoria. Tur announced, ‘We both know chromosomes don’t necessarily mean you’re male or female.’ She then put a patronizing hand on Shapiro’s shoulder and told him, ‘So you don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re not educated in genetics.’ Shapiro tried to ask whether or not they were allowed to discuss genetics but was interrupted again. And so he then said to Tur, ‘What are your genetics, sir?’ At which point Tur put her hand on the back of Shapiro’s neck and said menacingly, ‘You cut that out now, or you’ll go home in an ambulance.’
A fairly unfazed Shapiro said, ‘That seems mildly inappropriate for a political discussion.’ And while it would ordinarily be assumed that other guests might frown at a threat of violence in the studio, the present dynamics were such that everyone instead turned on Shapiro. ‘But to be fair, you’re actually being kind of rude, and that’s not fair,’ one of the other male guests proclaimed. Anot
her male guest denounced Shapiro, saying that he must have known that saying ‘sir’ would be ‘egregiously insulting’. After all of which Tur was allowed to tell Shapiro, unchallenged, ‘You’re consumed with hatred. That is who you are. You’re a little man.’
Shapiro had not lost his temper during any of this. He had not ‘trolled’ Tur. After she had threatened to send him home in an ambulance he had not said, ‘That’s not very ladylike behaviour.’ He had not waited for her to punch him and then told her ‘Gosh you punch like a man.’ He had not even pointed out how strange it was for somebody who had done what Tur had done to their body to now be trying to emasculate him by denigrating his size. Shapiro had simply stuck to a point about the significance of biology that would have been uncontroversial even a few years earlier but which was now held with such widespread opprobrium among the media and celebrity classes that they would rather defend a threat of physical assault than someone who had not been ‘polite to the pronouns’.
The swiftness and near-completeness of the stampede in one direction may have had several causes. One (exemplified in the Time magazine cover) was the fear, suspicion or hope that trans is the new gay, women’s or civil rights and that anybody caught on the wrong side of the trans fence in this decade will look back as regretfully – and be looked upon as negatively – as society looks back on those who argued against those movements. And in some sense the similarity is there. If there is nothing genetically different about gay people then the only thing that signifies a difference is their behaviour. Gay people are gay when they say they are and when they do the things that show them to be gay. Likewise, perhaps, people are trans when they say they are, and no outward sign – or any biological signifier – need be there in the trans case any more than it is expected (or demanded) in the case of being gay.
But there is one very significant difference. If a gay woman falls in love with a man or a gay man suddenly falls in love with a woman, or a straight man or woman suddenly falls in love with a member of their own sex, all of their existing biological hardware is still in place. A gay person who goes straight or a straight person who goes gay is doing nothing that is permanent or irreversible. Whereas the end-point of trans advocates is irreversible and life-altering. People expressing concern or urging caution in regard to transsexualism may not be ‘denying the existence of trans people’ or claiming that they should be treated as second-class citizens, let alone (the most catastrophizing claim of all) causing trans people to commit suicide. They may simply be urging caution about something which has not remotely been worked out yet – and which is irreversible.
A concern which many people stifle in public arises precisely from this concern about irreversibility. News of an increase in the number of children claiming to be gender-dysphoric, and the growing evidence of a ‘cluster effect’ when such claims begin to be made (that is, that once a number of children in a school claim to be in the wrong body similar claims expand exponentially), means that parents and others are not wrong to be wondering and worrying about where this is all leading. Questions about the age at which people who believe they are in the wrong body should be allowed to access drugs or surgery are worth contesting deeply. Not least because there is growing awareness of children who may have identified as having gender dysphoria but who then grow out of it – many of them to become gay. This heaps problem upon problem. Nobody likes recalling the time when gay people were told ‘it’s just a phase’, but what if trans is (even on occasion) just a phase? And what if that phase is realized only too late? These questions are not primarily ‘transphobic’ but rather child-centric, and the attempt to pathologize such concern has made this tripwire far uglier than it needs to be.
One Young Man’s Story
Naturally this is a sensitive subject and for that reason I am going to change the name of the person I am about to describe. Let us call him ‘James’. But the person is real, his case is not uncommon and he is the sort of person whose story should at least be in the mix in the societal discussion now under way.
Now in his twenties, James was born and brought up in the UK. In his mid-teens he found himself attracted to the gay scene and to the drag scene in particular. He had a lot of gay friends and from the age of about 16 began to spend a lot of time in drag clubs. He liked the people, he liked the scene and its closeness. The people he found there seemed to him almost like a ‘lost generation of people’ who huddled together in this world because they were worried their parents would disown them if they knew they were gay or liked doing drag. As a result these people didn’t just have fun together, they became ‘like a family’. Eventually James himself started doing a bit of drag. Around this time he also became very close friends with someone in their early twenties who had transitioned from male to female – a person who seemed to James to be completely fabulous.
At around the age of 18 James went to his family doctor and plucked up the courage to tell him, ‘I think I’m in the wrong body. I think I might be a woman.’ For the year and a half or so after this he started travelling around seeing different doctors, trying to find one who had a better sense than his family doctor had about what he was actually going through. Finally at the age of 19 he got a referral to a psycho-sexual service in Manchester and sat for three and a half hours of psychoanalysis. He was asked about his sex life, his relationship with his parents and much more. In fact he was slightly taken aback by how intimate the questions were. But the counsellor’s conclusion in Manchester was clear. ‘You’re trans,’ he was told. And so he was referred to the gender identity clinic at Charing Cross in London.
The waiting room there was colourful, with everyone from ‘the very feminine to Bob the Builder in a wig’. Six months later a workshop of around 20 of them were brought together. The consultant gave them the National Health Service’s best understanding of what had brought them to that room. They were told (as Dr Benjamin had told Morris), ‘We know it is a problem with the brain. We can’t operate on the brain so we do our best to make the body match the brain.’ And this then became the NHS’s role in dealing with the case of James and others. Six months after that workshop he had his first one-on-one interview, which went into considerable detail. There were questions about relationships and work. The all-round stability of the person was obviously important. James saw endocrinologists and had a testosterone reading. The fact that the reading was low on one occasion (in fact it varied at other readings) was taken as proof that there was indeed a trans issue that needed addressing. Looking back, James is struck by a number of things. One is that he was never offered any counselling. How he said he thought he felt was just accepted. And there was another thing. ‘It was all a bit too nice,’ he says now. There was ‘never any pressure’. Never any ‘grilling’.
Two years of living as a member of the opposite sex is taken as proof that the person can go to the next stage. And since the NHS meetings were all six months apart, James came up to his two-year mark after only a few of them. At this stage the issue of hormone replacement therapy came up. As James says, ‘If you’re patient and play the game it is ridiculously easy to get hormones. You just turn up twice a year and wait.’ And of course people in the groups as well as friends on the scene swop stories of how to get to this next stage.
James went on oestrogen, which included daily doses as well as injections. Accounts from him and from others about the nature of this process hits – among much else – right at the heart of claims that there are no essential differences between the sexes. Indeed, in any other context the descriptions of the effects of oestrogen on the male body would be considered wildly sexist. James’s experience was much like that of others who start taking oestrogen and anti-androgens (testosterone blockers). Among the things that happened was that he became more emotional than he had been before. ‘I cried a lot.’ His skin began to soften and his body fat began to redistribute. But he noticed other things. The movies and even the music he liked began to change – as did what he liked in bed.
James took the oestrogen for more than a year. He had been a late developer and there was speculation over whether he had in fact still got a small amount of puberty to go through when he had begun taking hormones. He also had two meetings – one by Skype and one in person – about the possibility of moving to the next stage. He knew that the backlog of cases meant the NHS couldn’t be hurried to this part of the process, but he says that he raised with them the possibility of going for private treatment abroad for gender reassignment surgery. A place in Marbella on the Costa del Sol had been recommended by a number of people and he says that the NHS neither tried to endorse nor stop him when he mentioned that he was thinking of taking this route. He got information on the costs of procedures, drugs and even flights. ‘I came very close to doing it,’ he says. ‘I am very glad now that I didn’t.’
Even during the time that he had been on hormones and had been looking to going to the next stage of transitioning, a number of things had begun to preoccupy him. So far James had only really heard one side of the argument. His friends on the trans scene had shown him a path down which he might go too. And the NHS had not seriously questioned the wisdom of his going down this path. They had treated him as someone with a condition that needed fixing. But online James sought – and found – contrary points of view. Through alternative media he discovered YouTube stars and others who were questioning the wisdom of his decision, including younger and hipper people than he had expected. He was also struggling with his faith. Brought up as a liberal Christian, he went around and around questions of God and design. On the one hand, ‘If God doesn’t exist then my body isn’t designed.’ But he also came to think that people who said that they had been born in the wrong body took a very egocentric view of things, as though this was ‘a challenge that had been given to them’. If the whole universe was a coincidence, ‘Why do so much so drastically for the sake of changing myself?’ He began to wonder whether the answer to some of his questions didn’t lie in psychology rather than surgery. Specifically he began to look at ‘what I need to do to be content with my body, not change my body’. Of all the consultants he had spoken to, none had engaged him in questions like these. ‘I was never encouraged to look into it too deeply.’
The Madness of Crowds Page 25
