Let me tell you about myself.
I’m short.
My driver’s license says 5’3″ — that’s rounding up. To be sure, I’m the tallest woman in my extended family, on my mom’s side. It’s the Greeks, or at least my Greek grandfather. But I really, really don’t like being short. My oldest son grew taller than me a couple years ago by now, the stool is a permanent fixture in the kitchen, and I really hate having to literally look up at people in conversation at a social event.
On the plus side, I’d always been thin, or, at least, of normal weight — though these days, I’m at the very high end of normal. (The two pounds I lost during Lent? Gained them back with Easter candy.) But I’m also flat-chested. Really flat-chested, they-don’t-make-bras-in-my-size flat-chested (yes, my mom used to recommend padded bras, which I rejected), and, combined with abdominal muscles that stretched out during pregnancy and never went back, even after losing the baby weight (three times! Three times I lost the baby weight!), I still look 4 months pregnant, which, I’ll tell you, seriously limits the clothing styles one can wear. (Right now, with the extra 10 pounds since I hit 40/started telecommuting, I’ve been buying my pants from the thrift store, getting the vanity-sized labels, but even in my thinner days, those “real women” viral posts look like runway models compared to my gut.)
Am I especially upset about this? Do I obsess about it? Not really. Really, we have enough cash that we could afford the necessary cosmetic surgery to remedy 2 of the three flaws, though I’ve never really considered it and, truth be told, I’d rather have more height than more chest or less paunch, if such a medical treatment existed.
All of which is context for my thoughts on the whole transgender issue.
Consider that for the last generation, or more (depending on how you count), the feminist message has been that all the things that we associate with being male or female are socially constructed. Playing with dolls vs. toy trucks, liking frilly “pretty” clothes or plain, arts and crafts or sports — for many years the project had been to expose boys to “girly” things and girls to “boyish” things with the expectation of creating a new generation equally interested in all of these. Now they’re beginning to concede that many of these preferences seem to be innate, as tendencies at least, though, quite appropriately, they believe that girls and boys should be free to follow their interests even if they lead to activities typically associated with the opposite sex.
But now? A boy who likes dolls really is, deep down, a girl, and a girl who likes bugs is really, deep down, a boy, we’re told. Or, at any rate, these children insist that that’s the case because, well, they’re kids, and the parents don’t seem to understand the simplicity and black-and-white-ness of a child’s understanding of the world.
And teens and adults?
Bruce Jenner says he has the “soul of a woman” and will be undergoing surgery and hormonal treatments with the purpose of giving his body the outward appearance of a woman.
This isn’t just wanting to play with dolls any longer. Is it about being able to dress like a woman, style one’s hair like a woman, in a manner that, in 2015 anyway, is socially-acceptable? (And why, in an era in which women generally don’t wear dresses on a day-to-day basis, does it seem that transgenders “becoming” women become exaggerated versions of women?)
The idea of believing that, deep down, you are, though genetically male, in some real way, a woman, that you have a woman’s brain — well, it just isn’t believable to me. True, there are claims that the brains of transgenders men-become-women are more similar to women than men, in what’s revealed in a CT scan or the like, though I don’t know how credible this is, but that doesn’t mean that such an individual is a woman, any more than that a flat-chested woman, or a tall, muscular woman, or a woman with one too many dark upper-lip hairs or that pesky unibrow, or other “male” physical characteristics is a man.
But to imagine that your brain somehow has some innate knowledge of your sex, male or female, well that sounds a bit too new-agey to me. It almost feels like a religious sort of belief, the way that the Catholic belief in transubstantiation must appear to “outsiders.”
And to take this further and say, I am really a man/woman, instead of a woman/man, and need to have plastic surgery to have my body conform to my image of what it should be?
Does Bruce Jenner “need” to have his privates snipped off, to be mentally whole, to a greater degree than I need a tummy tuck? Does he “need” implants more than I do?
So that’s why I’m a skeptic.
To look at your body, if you’re a man, and be convinced that you have an appendage that shouldn’t be there, not due to a mental illness but because your brain is somehow wired to be a “woman inside” — no, that doesn’t seem credible. And all the more so upon seeing the lengths these individuals go to, with extensive plastic surgery to look more feminine, and even vocal chord surgery to sound more feminine. It seems much more believable that this conviction is a matter of internalizing preferences that are generally associated with the other sex, in a way that takes the next step from “I wish I were a XXX.”
That being said, I have no problem with a woman preferring conventionally masculine activities, or a conventionally masculine appearance, or, a man wanting to look feminine, so long as such an individual is willing to accept that in the business world and other professional sorts of contexts, clothing is about convention, not personal expression.
But to accept the concept that an individual can announce that they have changed their “gender identity” and, suddenly, the rest of us are obliged to change the pronouns we use to refer to that individual, and welcome that person into locker rooms that had previously been off-limits to them?
That being said, here’s the bigger question:
so what?
Is there a moral dimension to the issue?
Of course, if to be transgender means that you truly are, in a deep way, a person of the opposite sex from what your body parts and chromosomes indicate (and, by the way, for clarity, intersex people are a special case, not a part of this issue), then it may indeed by immoral to deny these people the plastic surgeries and legal and social recognition of their change.
But even if transgenderism isn’t “real” and isn’t a true medical need — is there any harm done? And, no, I don’t think it’s a simple as “it’s morally wrong to mutilate your body, and these surgeries are mutilation,” especially since we — society and government — are being asked to give this recognition on the basis of an individual’s declaration alone, surgery or not. (Besides which, “it’s a sin to surgically modify your body” is a hard pitch to make as a generally-applicable moral rule rather than a particular religious requirement, and there are other instances where “mutilation” is OK — no, not the “I want to be an amputee” but cases where a birth defect or injury means that the first step towards fitting a person with a prosthesis is to amputate a deformed limb.)
So far as I can tell, there are plenty of conservatives and Christians who take the approach of either accepting the basic premise of TGism or at least, an agnosticism coupled with “no harm done.”
But we’ve now moved so far beyond a few rare cases to something much bigger. We are being asked to welcome people-with-penises into female changing rooms (and, in theory, at least, though I don’t know about actual occurences, onto high school sports teams), and people-with-boobs into male changing room. We are being asked to ask others what their “preferred pronouns” are, and adopt them, whether it’s he and him for a genetic woman, or something more exotic like they and them for an individual or even invented terms like ze and zem. We are told that one’s biological sex is wholly irrelevant, and one’s gender is whatever one wants it to be, and is, ultimately, meaningless anyway.
In the same way as gay marriage ultimately has resulted in the insistence that there is no ultimate meaning to “marriage” other than what the state deems, as its legal definition, and that there is no meaning to “mother” or “father” except as traditional terms for female- or male-identifying parents, and that those parents are so only as a result of legal recognition, at least in the case where a child’s birth has been orchestrated via technology; so too the TG cause, as it exists today, seeks a radical re-ordering of society. And that’s the bigger issue.
But beyond that — beyond issues of family life, for instance — it feels like there’s a bigger picture that TGism is part-and-parcel of the idea that truth and reality about the world are whatever you choose them to be. This is harder to articulate, but it feels as if the whole TG project is connected with a wider worldview that’s unsettling, at the least, and potential quite destructive.
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