AN ANONYMOUS READER writes:

First, thanks for your website. I donated once, but due to my strange name you thought I was a man, but I am actually a woman in her mid-20s.

I’m writing about your post on the transgendered vs. feminist controversy that broke out at Portland State University. I think this story is extremely revealing, and you’re not approaching it quite the right way. Let me explain!

I would argue that it is not right to lump LGB with T, and perhaps traditionalists should expose and exploit this gap.

To support this argument, the following facts about transgenderism:

1. It is a different phenomenon from homosexuality. Sure, they may both be lumped under the same umbrella of “gender confusion,” but they are different things. The most clear evidence of this is that often transgender people will find homosexual relations as repulsive as normal people do. Further, most of them are “heterosexual” in the sense that those who think they are men want to be with women, and those who think they are women want to be with men.

2. It can be a very deep, sad condition. “True” transgenders show signs of it from childhood. One striking example of how deep it can be is one man who would repeatedly dream of giving birth, sometimes actually feeling birthing pains. Another is one man who would avoid going to public restrooms, as going into a ladies’ room (as instinct told him) is obviously not allowed, and going into a men’s room made him feel uncomfortable and self-conscious. The last chapter of the book “As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl,” on the case of the boy who after a botched circumcision was raised as girl, has a good discussion on the complexity of this condition.

3. It is strong evidence of the immutability of gender roles. It is truly the exception that proves the rule. These people are confronted every day with the very strong differences between male and female. If it were possible to live as a female while living in a male’s body, they wouldn’t be miserable, they wouldn’t even feel weird.

I wish I could expand on this, but I haven’t gotten my thoughts in order about it quite yet. But this third point is KEY. And it is demonstrated by the story you posted.

Feminists offer the transgendered a false solution by destroying gender roles: if men and women all act the same, then whether you think you are male or female is moot. But we know as traditionalists that this is not true.

Further, cases of transgender people are often presented as if they showed that gender is a fluid thing. However, as stated before, it is the total opposite. I’m sure the top feminist and homosexualist minds know this: but it is an inconvenient truth, so they distort it to the greatest degree. This has to be stopped.

I hope this makes sense. I look forward to learning what you think about it!

Thank you for your support. Let me respond to your points one by one.

I would argue that it is not right to lump LGB with T, and perhaps traditionalists should expose and exploit this gap.

Transgenderism “is a different phenomenon from homosexuality.”

It’s true, some of the “transgendered” are not homosexual. But it appears that most are; others tend toward different sexual anomalies. From a 2000 article in Atlantic by Carl Elliott, who examined facets of “gender identity disorder:”

Ray Blanchard, a psychologist at the University of Toronto’s Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, studied more than 200 men who were evaluated for sex-reassignment surgery. He found an intriguing difference between two groups: men who were homosexual and men who were heterosexual, bisexual, or asexual. The “woman trapped in a man’s body” tag fit the homosexual group relatively well. As a rule, these men had no sexual fantasies about being a woman; only 15 percent said they were sexually excited by cross-dressing, for example. Their main sexual attraction was to other men.

Not so for the men in the other group: almost all were excited by fantasies of being a woman. Three quarters of them were sexually excited by cross-dressing. Blanchard coined the term “autogynephilia”—”the propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of oneself as a woman”—as a way of designating this group. Note the suffix -philia. Blanchard thought that a man might be sexually excited by the fantasy of being a woman in more or less the same way that people with paraphilias are sexually excited by fantasies of wigs, shoes, handkerchiefs, or amputees. But here sexual desire is all about sexual identity—the sexual fantasy is not about someone or something else but about yourself. Anne Lawrence, a transsexual physician and a champion of Blanchard’s work, calls this group “men trapped in men’s bodies.”

Those who fit into the second category above impose on those individuals of the opposite sex with whom they are involved the semblance of a homosexual relationship.

It can be a very deep, sad condition.

I agree.

It is especially sad when people, even children, are encouraged in this condition and receive no support for overcoming it. But, good grief, I don’t consider the sort of bathroom distress you mention serious suffering. Perhaps those with this condition would do well to remind themselves that there are people who are worse off. They might read stories of individuals who have undergone horrible life conditions and survived heroically. They should seek consolation in the permanent things.

“True” transgenders show signs of it from childhood.

There’s no such thing as a “true” transgender. Psychological conditions such as this are speculative, not objective conditions. Diagnosis is based on symptoms which can be interpreted various ways.

We are in the midst of an epidemic of “transgenderism” and there is good reason to blame, in part, the power of suggestion. As Elliott mentions, similar to multiple personality disorder in the 1970s, mass hysteria is likely at work. That’s not to say that people undergoing this disorder are not experiencing something real. They are, but many are likely channeling psychological sickness, distress caused by cultural breakdown and spiritual rebellion into this socially acceptable form.

Again from Elliott:

By regarding a phenomenon as a psychiatric diagnosis—treating it, reifying it in psychiatric diagnostic manuals, developing instruments to measure it, inventing scales to rate its severity, establishing ways to reimburse the costs of its treatment, encouraging pharmaceutical companies to search for effective drugs, directing patients to support groups, writing about possible causes in journals—psychiatrists may be unwittingly colluding with broader cultural forces to contribute to the spread of a mental disorder.

….

But it is possible to imagine another story: that our cultural and historical conditions have not just revealed transsexuals but created them. That is, once “transsexual” and “gender-identity disorder” and “sex-reassignment surgery” became common linguistic currency, more people began conceptualizing and interpreting their experience in these terms. They began to make sense of their lives in a way that hadn’t been available to them before, and to some degree they actually became the kinds of people described by these terms.

These people are confronted every day with the very strong differences between male and female. If it were possible to live as a female while living in a male’s body, they wouldn’t be miserable, they wouldn’t even feel weird.

Ironically, while all of society is denying the centrality of sex differences, the “transgendered” insist that sex differences matter. Yes, that’s a good point. However, it’s not just “gender identity” that matters, it’s male and female. Science is not capable of changing a man into a woman or a woman into a man.

Feminists offer the transgendered a false solution by destroying gender roles: if men and women all act the same, then whether you think you are male or female is moot. But we know as traditionalists that this is not true.

Further, cases of transgender people are often presented as if they showed that gender is a fluid thing. However, as stated before, it is the total opposite.

The traditional view is that sex is immutable. The current belief is that “gender identity” is immutable, not innate sex. Whatever one feels oneself to be, either male or female, cannot possibly change. So the thinking goes. Of course, this is not true as some have overcome these psychological conditions. So you’re right, if “gender” was considered fluid then it would be recognized that people can overcome “gender identity disorders.”

Ironically, “transgenderism” proves the immutability of sex — both the biological and psychological aspects of it. A woman can never have the experience of being a woman trapped in a man’s body. A man can never have the experience of being a man trapped in a woman’s body. Feeling like a man trapped in a woman’s body is within the range of female experiences. One’s innate sex always entails psychological experiences unique to that biological reality. So a man is always a man. And a woman is always a woman. “Gender” cannot be transcended.

— Comments —

James N. writes:

The interesting thing about “transgenderism” is that, as it becomes medically discredited, it becomes sociologically formidable.

You might have to go to Pattaya (Thailand) to get your penis cut off, but you can go to the girls room in half the elementary schools in the country.

Someday, we will figure out what it was all about.

A reader writes:

It all reminds me of “The Emperor Has No Clothes” by Hans Christian Anderson.

But I don’t have much confidence of eyes being opened as long as the “experts,” and especially the mainstream media, assure us the lie is the truth.

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