Well, I’ve been through the ringer on this whole gender topic, trying to be open minded and intellectually virtuous. Part of that is following the science.
There does appear to be a group of people who experience severe dysphoria which is alleviated by transition. There are detrans out there, but it is the minority. I’ve seen estimates from 1-8%, that’s not a whole lot.
Are these people “trans?” What does it even mean to be trans? Are detrans people not “truly trans”?
Alice Dreger and others who research autogynephillia have shown that it is more than an erotic paraphillia, it also contains a romantic type of love. So we can’t write it off as a fetish.
I personally am over gender. I was fine with it when it was just trans women. I wanted to support them and whatever and frankly was glad to see males who wanted to be women.
But when I was introduced to non-binary females (and males) is when I started having issues. They were pushy and demanding and annoying. I didn’t see why I was any different from them, yet I was “cis”.
The more immersed I got in the QT world, the stronger my dislike for gender became. Gender roles and stereotypes hurt me in my life. The patriarchy really left its imprint on me in a myriad of ways I’m trying to undo now. Yes, I am coming at this topic from a place of pain. This is something the anti-TERFers have never failed to point out.
Yes, I could embrace gender as a big art project, I do appreciate the nonbinaries within the gender paradigm, because they are mixing it up.
I feel like I am as trans as the next person. I could self ID if I wanted... and I feel pressured to prove myself when I’m around gender people.
But as much as trans people might be a real innate thing (or at least there is a group of people who feel a desperate need to socially and medically transition and whose lives are improved by transition)... I still feel like the whole thing is crazy on a lot of levels.
I am a body worker, and I go on high alert when I see a mind/body split being talked about as a natural state. From my albeit brief foray into studying gender systems in indigenous cultures, I see no convincing precedent for the situation we have in our culture today. Namely, I see no precedent for androphillic ftms or gynephillic mtfs. The majority of language terms for trans people are things like winkta (male homosexual who acts like/dresses like a woman). It’s mostly gay mtfs.
The other thing is
Anyway I realize there are people who spend way more time than me deliberating and fact checking these things, so if they say transgenderism is a pan cultural human phenomenon I’m inclined to believe them.
So I convince myself into a corner that I am just bigoted and wrong, and rad fem is as much of an unscientific orthodoxy as trans.
It does bother me that a lot of outlets speaking out about transgender stuff also disagree with same sex marriage. What if we are just a bunch of bigots?
So I go ahead and accept gender self ID, and use everyone’s pronouns, because what do I know, maybe they are “really trans”. I don’t want to be hateful or disrespectful after all.
But then over time as I get distance the more the doubts build and build. It just doesn’t feel right. It is positively dominating the “queer” community. Gender identity is an idea that gets in your head and makes everything about gender. I’ve heard “afab transmasculine” people say “I don’t think about it” but literally what is it beyond a thought in your head?
The whole gender thing does not sit right with me. It just doesn’t. Maybe I am just like those racists or homophobes of the past who just don’t feel like “it’s natural” or whatever. I keep wrestling between the rock of being a “transphobe” and the hard place of swallowing gender ideology and accepting that people who feel a fundamental disconnect from their sexed bodies are experiencing something as natural as same-sex attraction.
I don’t know, I feel so lost. Hence why I post this rambling vent.
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