dovetailing
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User ID: 2225
dovetailing
1yr ago
Part III: On Desire
Let's take a step back and do a little philosophy.
Desire is a funny thing. It seems to refer to several different things, but these things are connected and bleed into each other. At the least, I can identify four different types:
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Desire-as-passion: thus the desire to eat when hungry, to have sex when horny, to engage in violence when angry, and so on. The 'animal' level, so to speak.
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Desire-to-experience: thus the desire for beautiful scenery, like a waterfall or a sunset, or to see a great painting.
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Desire-to-possess: Not necessarily as property, but being able to call that which is desired one's own, in some sense. Thus a man might desire a wife (or to marry a particular person); or someone might desire to have a best friend. But ownership, too, as one might desire to have one's own house and to put one's own stamp on it.
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Desire-to-be: Thus a person who desires strength wishes to be strong; a person who desires virtue wishes to be virtuous.
Some things are properly (up to you whether this refers to natural law or merely to normal psychology; it works either way) desired in one way or another, and some in multiple ways. Thus it is proper to desire-to-experience a beautiful waterfall, a little silly and quite selfish to desire-to-possess it, and ludicrous to desire-to-be the waterfall. On the other hand, particular skill is something that one might reasonably both desire-to-experience (to see the master at work) and desire-to-be (to become a master one's self).
The above may not be the best possible classification of desire, but it will do for our purposes.
Part IV: Bleeding Desires as Etiology of Positive-Primary Trans
When I had my first crush, at around age 11, I was fixated on the object of my affection in all the usual awkward ways that a boy having his first crush does. I'll spare you the embarrassing details. But one thought, so potent and so strange that it has stuck with me for the decades since, was this: "I want to be her; but failing that, being with her is a good second-best."
Which is to say, my normal desire-to-possess had thoroughly bled into an unusual desire-to-be.
The thing about the Blanchard autogynephilic typing is that it is obviously true. A lot of MtF trans people were, apparently, highly masculine (c.f. Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner) before transitioning, and a lot of them seemed to have sexual fetishes around being a woman. The other thing about the Blanchard autogynephilic typing is that it is obviously false. A lot of MtF trans people that the Blanchard typology would categorize in that way report that there was a lot going on other than autogynephilia, and that the autogynephilia was not the primary consideration.
The standard Blanchardian answer, as I understand it, is that (a) autogynephilia is an "erotic target location error", and that (b) the other feelings reported by the autogynephilic types are sublimations of this erotic feeling. While this is not entirely implausible, it seems like too much of a false-consciousness hypothesis and gives too little credence to the internal reports of the people themselves. Moreover, it is rather contradicted by my own experience, to which I am inclined to give a good bit of credit.
Instead, I propose that the real source, of both the autogynephilia and the other parts of the often intense desire to be female (to posess a female body, to have feminine qualities, to present in a feminine way), is this bleeding of desire. A man will properly desire-to-experience and desire-to-possess femininity, to see and touch a woman, to call her his wife, to admire her, and so one; he will properly desire-to-be some masculine qualities and virtues (strength, stoic steadfastness, etc.). But what happens if these desires bleed and mingle; if desire-to-experience and desire-to-possess are also experienced as desire-to-be? "I want to be her." Or, more generally: "I want to be female, with a female body and feminine characteristics."
Now, say that these are your feelings. You dive a little too deep into these desires; take them a little too seriously; allow them to shape your self-image and identity (and the "trans" label and memeplex certainly encourages that! though it can absolutely happen in its absence) -- and now, maybe, you start to believe in them; to believe that you really are, deep down a woman or girl, not a man or boy; to believe that you will be fundamentally unhappy if your desires are unrealized; to be horribly uncomfortable with your maleness and male body because it means that you are not female with a female body...
Part V: A Self-Indulgent Epilogue
So, given that the egg_irl bait story at the beginning was me, how is it that I didn't fall down the trans slippery slope I just described, and am happy and successful as a mostly normal (albeit very nerdy) man?
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I grew up in a setting where "trans" was not in the water. It wasn't until I found that brief treatment in a textbook that I even knew anything in that vicinity was a thing.
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I correctly identified my fantasies as fantasy. That my desire to be female had the same likelihood of being fulfilled as the childhood desire to magically fly under my own power as in Peter Pan; which is to say, none at all.
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I had (and have) religious beliefs that preclude acting on these desires.
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Eventually, introspection on my feelings and thoughts led me to the above assessment of their source. Knowing why I have this disordered desire is a great step to overcoming it.
Even still, the desires and fantasies were sometimes overwhelmingly strong (see the part about lucid dreaming and self-hypnosis). I don't think I'm at risk anymore, but in the absence of the above factors, I think that younger-me could have, to his massive detriment, gone the other way.
Frankly, I think I dodged a bullet.
dovetailing
1yr ago
I thought the twist would be that Hilary transitioned at some point MTF later in life, hence the choice in name, rather than that Hilary and Sam were the same person.
That's funny; I didn't actually think of that interpretation at all. I chose the name "Hilary" (an ancient name, almost always male until the 20th century) because of its meaning, since "Hilary's" story had a happy ending.
it makes me wonder how many boys right now might be being pulled into transitioning when they would have grown up to be perfectly fine with being a cis male like me.
I suspect the answer is pretty large, and it's one of the things that frankly makes me most angry about trans activism. It's part of why I felt compelled to write my thoughts down.
Someone linked this blog post here about a week ago
I'm almost certain I read that blog post shortly after it was published, when it was linked back on Reddit. And yet somehow I missed this line:
as if my brain just doesn't draw that much of a distinction between people I want to be with and people I want to be like
which echoes my own experience so much (though the blog author's actions... don't) that I can't fathom how I didn't latch onto it the first time. Another data point for my theory, I guess?
That's an interesting thought about desires bleeding in the other direction. One thinks of the phenomena of hero-worship, or parasocial relationships, which might have something of that in them? I'm not sure about that being a common source of homosexual feeling -- my sense is that there's something else going on, there, at least in the central case. I'll try not to speculate about that, though; I am in agreement with C.S. Lewis here: "I have a reluctance to say much about temptations to which I myself am not exposed."
I'm definitely in agreement that having bigger priorities makes things less of a big deal. I don't think that's always sufficient, though; people can have sincere bigger priorities and still be tormented by contradictory desires (and even act on them, c.f. St. Paul: "For the good that I will to do, that I do not do, but the evil that I will not to do, that I practice.") for a long time.
dovetailing
1yr ago
I only perused that subreddit once; perhaps unsurprisingly when it was linked from the Motte a few years back. The impression I got was that the users would interpret every little thing as proof that the author was trans (overwhelmingly MtF). Posts were either in the "I wanted to wear pretty dresses, and I thought about being a girl. I just realized that means I'm 100% trans!" vein, or were point-and-laugh at some internet content and deciding that the creator was totally trans but in denial, with the same standards of evidence. (I think that second one was the purpose of the sub. I don't know why so many subreddits not only engaged in point-and-laugh behavior, but made it their raison d'etre; it's invariably toxic.) The result was trans-maximalist groupthink, I guess?
I hope I didn't create the impression that my experience was the only possible one; I can't see into everyone's heart, of course.
dovetailing
1yr ago
I wasn't aware of that episode in Kaczynski's life. The Wikipedia article makes it seem like his response was rather different than mine, though -- is it misleading on this?
(I share other things with Kaczynski too, like fascination with mathematics. It doesn't really bother me; I have things in common with people whose actions I abhor as well as with people I admire...)
I haven't read that book, though I had heard of it. The title is absolutely genius. I might give it a look, if for no other reason than to see to what extent others' stories support my analysis or not.
I think a bunch of them are profoundly miserable in a way they wouldn't have been if they had tried to make peace with their reality.
I think I agree with this.
I think there's a subset of them that just wants company for their misery, to drag others down the path they were guided down.
They do say that "misery loves company," and I wouldn't rule out there being some people like that, but... that seems uncharitable? Like, I'd find it more likely that these people have an ideological commitment to a mistaken idea of what's good for them and others than that they are being actively malicious.
From observing some of my acquaintances who have gone down that path, the desire to evangelise has appeared in every single one of them, making "jokes" about slipping pills to people and asking "so when are you going to come out too?"
Joking about slipping pills to people is pretty concerning. The evangelizing thing is interesting; I guess (loose categorization here) there's 3 major (not mutually exclusive) reasons people evangelize for something:
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They love it and are super excited to share it.
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They think they have a moral imperative to evangelize.
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They are themselves uncertain of or insecure in their decision, so they evangelize partly to convince themselves that it's a good idea.
Without, hopefully, trying to mind-read too much, your acquaintances sound like number 3.
FYI, some of my comments (Including the OP and a reply to @07mk) have taken / are taking many hours to appear for me when I'm not logged in. Possibly it's a new account thing. Edit: all my earlier comments have now appeared.
I wanted to add a few notes that didn't really fit in with the original essay, or that occurred to me afterwards.
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I'm not sure how much "autogynephilia" is supposed to overlap with what I've described. Certainly in the "it's a fetish" sense (which seems is the plain meaning, since as far as I'm aware that's how "-philia" is used in this context) it is much more narrow, to the point of being wrong. I suspect some of its proponents might claim that it covers all of the feelings I described, but I disagree, for exactly the same reason that I disagree that affection and "being in love" are the same thing as lust; they are related, but not identical. And at any rate the "it's a fetish" sense seems to be how it is present in popular consciousness.
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I hope I did not imply that my analysis is exhaustive. The same end result can have disparate causes, and I can't read others' minds. I do suspect it accounts for a lot, though, and in a better way than the dominant narratives.
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I think our culture has a terrible narrative around desires, which seems to be something like, "Desires are good! They are also a fundamental part of you, so if you have especially strong desires, you should build your identity around them! Unless your desires are just obviously evil, in which case you are a bad person for even having them." I find the approach found in ancient Christian thought (and elsewhere) to be much better: "You can have rightly or wrongly ordered desires. You can desire something good, but in a bad way; you can desire something that is good, but less important, more than something that is better and more important; you can desire something that is in fact bad, because you erroneously feel it is good. Having disordered desires is bad, but it's bad in the way that being sick is bad; it's not morally equivalent to acting on those desires. You should strive to rightly order your desires, and in the meantime to not act wrongly on account of them; this will make you better off in the long run."
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Rereading, I may have created the false impression that my experience was of this as an all-consuming thing. In reality, though it was a big part of my inner life (I wouldn't have gone out of my way to engage in fantasizing if it wasn't) for a number of years, it was not the biggest or most important part.
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Based on a couple of the comments, apparently I was miscalibrated about how obvious my twist at the beginning was. If I'd known, I would have written the reveal differently! For whatever it's worth (and at the risk of overexplaining the joke), here's why I thought people would guess it: (a) the tone of the "stories" was that these were archetypes or composites, created for the sake of illustration, but (b) there were too many incongruous or unique details (at least in the first one), suggestive that these stories were of real people, and that the tone was for the sake of producing a twist; then (c) the details that were included or left out were somewhat complementary, but not technically contradictory, suggesting the "it's the same person" reveal over other twists, (d) the details, at least for the first, are rather intimate and indicate that the author knows the subject really well, so probably it's autobiographical.
dovetailing
1yr ago
I'm not quite sure how to respond to this, so forgive me if I come off as too defensive, but...
There's clearly some truth in what you're saying, in that no boy who wants to be a girl, or man who wants to be a woman, really knows what it's like to be the other sex, and fills in their lack of knowledge with rosy fantasy in their imagination. But I don't think that this is (usually) an implicit comparison to the 99th percentile, just some amount of generic idealization. My first crush, the one I had weird thoughts about wanting to be, was just some sweet-but-awkward girl who went to my church; and maybe I was just relatively oblivious but I doubt an 11-year-old has any concept, accurate or not, of what kind of life a spectacularly beautiful woman would lead.
dovetailing
1yr ago
And somebody have the backbone to stand up to those for whom it is a sexual fetish, identify it as such, and tell them they're not transgender, they're perverts
Perhaps I can prevail upon you to be kind to perverts? I encourage you to read my essay downthread; I believe the thing you are referring to is more common, and more complicated, than you think -- but that aside, surely having disordered desires should be treated as a mental illness, in much the same vein as the other things you describe?
dovetailing
1yr ago
So - what are your recommended solutions to the issue of transgender ideation and other culturally bound issues?
Find susceptible people before they get eaten by the toxic memes, and give them genuine sympathy and counseling, I guess. Tell better stories and offer better philosophies so that they don't latch on to the destructive ones. The cat's out of the bag, which is why this is an issue to begin with, so pure shame or pointed silence is off the table -- they'll just go find groups that tickle their ears. The teenage girl who is uncomfortable with her body needs personal care before she gets convinced that being anorexic would make her special or that she'd be happier as a boy.
I guess this solution is just "Replace the unhealthy cultural memes with healthier ones," but there's really not any other possible solution anyway. This is a cultural problem and you can't just Do Something to solve cultural problems.
Well, there is a first step to replacing the unhealthy memes with healthier ones that doesn't require winning the whole culture, and that's making sure the healthy ones are at least on offer and available to the people who need them. Be the change you want to see in the world?
dovetailing
1yr ago
I confess that I am confused by this response. Who is being officially deputized by whom to kill whom? And how does any of this make sense in the context of @FarNearEverywhere's parent comment, which already posits a massive change in how the official parts of society deal with trans stuff?
dovetailing
1yr ago
I agree that the things you've outlined (everything is a tournament profession; success at being a man is measured in terms of impossible ideals; the previous masculine success parameters are less attainable than they used to me) are real problems. Probably solving them would mitigate the kind of gender issues that "end on incel forums" (or in suicide, another thing that's been trending up).
But I'm not sure I buy that these are root causes of a substantial fraction of MtF transitions. Are the majority of transitioners really people who have decided they should become a woman because they think they will fail (or have failed) at being a man? I'm curious as to what evidence makes you think that is the case. If you're right, that makes the problem much easier than I think it is, which is a really good thing!
dovetailing
1yr ago
I think it's a small proportion but I also think that unfortunately they are the loudest and most visible and most online.
It seems we differ in our estimates here. Maybe it would help to draw a distinction between, let's say, people with disordered sexual desires (in which group I would include any autogynephilia in natal males), and people who are "visible perverts" (you know about them because they do perverted things in public or are publicly loud about their proclivities). I agree that the latter group is rare and unrepresentative of trans people, and it's crazy that the trans lobby doesn't want to get rid of them (probably this is downstream of "pride" stuff). I think, though, that the former group includes probably the majority of MtF trans individuals as well as a decent percentage of men who don't transition. This is probably not usually acknowledged because it's perceived as unflattering to trans people, and to be fair the people loudly crowing about how "it's just a fetish" are being cruel and are not helping the matter.
I think we ought to have some charity even for the "visible perverts" crowd; they need it even if they don't deserve it -- but what I'm really referring to here is the other group. Right now all they are hearing is either total silence, "Eww, you pervert", or "That means you're really a woman deep down! You must be trans!" I think there is a need for counseling, along the lines of "So, you know how you really really want to be female? And how you find that idea sexually arousing, too? Yeah, that's a thing; it's something a bit wrong with you, but it doesn't mean either that you are disgusting or that you are 'really' a woman or should try to become one. Let's try to help you figure out how to deal with your feelings."
dovetailing
1yr ago
Are you referring to trans activists, the "visible perverts", or to the "disordered desires" group? Granted there is overlap, of course, but I think it's the first two groups who are doing the damage. A lot of the third group doesn't (or doesn't yet) even consider themselves trans! If you want them to not get eaten by the trans meme, you've got to provide some kind of compassionate support. Because when the options are suffer in solitude, get shamed and ridiculed, or listen to the seductive whispers telling them that they can satisfy their desires and join a group that will continually affirm them, it takes a pretty strong will to not pick the third option.
dovetailing
1yr ago
I guess I don't see how this has much to do with what I'm saying. The post I was originally responding to suggested:
And somebody have the backbone to stand up to those for whom it is a sexual fetish, identify it as such, and tell them they're not transgender, they're perverts
as a way to dissuade these people from transitioning. In other words, tell people with autogynephilia that they are disgusting and should go away, which seems both cruel and unlikely to work. I'm proposing compassion instead, because I don't want these people to end up deciding they are trans, I want them to get help.
For whatever it's worth I have little love for the trans lobby and am pretty incensed at all the propagandizing and abuse of state power to enforce their ideology. I just happen to think that many, probably most, trans individuals are also victims here, in much the same way that lonely people who get targeted by lovebombing and join a cult are.
dovetailing
1yr ago
I have no idea, and we aren't really asking that question to transitioners. Detransitioners often talk about things like that, but they are a particular subset of people, and if nothing else subject to the same biases that eg Ex-Mormon or Ex-Muslim forums are subject to.
Not only are we not asking, the question is so politically fraught we probably couldn't get good answers anyway.
I can recall, though not cite offhand, numerous examples of trans people in writing and in real life telling me what feeling like "not a man" and "not a woman" felt like. And it always involved some kind of assumption that because I am a man I strongly feel a constant sense of being a masculine stereotype.
I wonder if that assumption is more likely to be a cause or an effect. By which I mean, you've observed a certain misconception in your trans acquaintances about what it's like to be a normal man; how do we tell the difference between the chain (have this misconception) -> (think they fail at being a man) -> (want to be a woman) -> (trans), vs the chain (want to be a woman) -> (trans) + (reinterpret ordinary experiences as evidence for transness) -> (implicit misconception)? Not saying you're wrong, just the second seems more intuitively plausible to me and I'm not sure how one would tell.
I think this problem is much bigger and harder to deal with than a "medical illness" answer; this is a society wide phenomenon experienced by most people, transitioners are just those at the bottom of the fragility/mental stability totem poll who slide off into the strange.
Ah, I see what you mean. It's an easier problem only for the narrow question of "how hard is it to deal with trans ideation once you are intervening in someone's life", but a broad social problem is much harder to fix than a few people with mental illness.
dovetailing
1yr ago
Slightly meta question: In the replies to my post in the most recent CW thread, @IGI-111 recommended the monograph Men Trapped in Men's Bodies by Anne Lawrence. So I found an electronic copy online and read it.
Would anyone be interested in reading a multi-part book review / summary of the book? I thought it might be interesting so I started working on one, and am about halfway done with a draft (4k words so far), but it occurs to me that there's not a lot of point in finishing it if people are tired of the topic.
Related: for the mods, if there was interest and I completed it, would it be appropriate to post it in its own thread(s), like @drmanhattan16's recent review? I think I can keep the overt culture war out of the review, but the topic itself is, well...
dovetailing
1yr ago
Reading that review/reaction was a bit weird, because while I see where she's coming from (not only is reading about fetishes gross, but a lot of these people do seem to admit to sexist or objectifying attitudes towards women), it really feels like she's somehow getting the causality backwards. While I can't be sure for every case, I strongly suspect that most of these people's specific sexual fantasies of humiliation/sexism/etc are downstream of the memes of sexism in the culture (I hesitate to say "sexist memes", because while some of them are indicative of sexism, others are probably due to the broadcasting of "look at all this sexism women experience" from feminists).
That is, the causal chain runs from the cultural memes (sexist or about sexism) to the sexist fantasies, because what's ground-level arousing/desired is being a woman, and that's what these people either (a) think being a woman is like, or (b) think is proof or evidence of being a woman. If other things were culturally available as "the essence of being a woman", that's probably what they'd fantasize about instead. Whereas Lorelei seems to think that the source of the sexism in these fantasies is in these people's male sex drive, because she thinks that the male sex drive is the source of the sexism in the culture?
Re: drag queen story hour; I'm agreed these are terrible. Though weren't drag queens originally a subculture of gay men, not transvestic fetishists? I'm not familiar with any of the groups involved, so I may be mistaken -- or maybe it's not the same people anymore now?
Edit: Also, does that mean you'd be interested in reading a review, or no?
dovetailing
1yr ago
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1yr ago
I agree that the line is blurry. I think that Lawrence thinks of a sexual orientation as having emotional/romantic aspects, whereas a paraphilia would just have the facially-sexual ones; so sexual orientation is about love+lust, but paraphilia is just lust. In practice I think this is more a matter of respectability.
This is an interesting point about loss of agency. One thing I didn't touch on in this review but that came up in the book is that apparently a decent chunk of the sexual feminization fantasies of autogynephiles are forced feminization fantasies. That wasn't the case for me, and I just figured that it was an intersection with the (common) BDSM paraphilia, but you may be onto something about the attractiveness of passivity for someone who is always (expected to be) responsible. Or maybe it's more of a thing where lack of agency is seen as feminine, and therefore desired? (I don't think the common theory -- usually offered to explain rape fantasies -- that lack of agency gives the fantasizer an excuse to not be morally or socially culpable for their actions is at all plausible here.)
dovetailing
1yr ago
Since MtF and FtM are largely different phenomena:
MtF: 1. this seems to pick out the wrong set of people. There are lots of men who seem to believe that women have better lives, and even some who are unhappy enough that they go to very dark places (e.g. incels) but they don't seem to be the ones lining up to be trans. 2. Autogynephilia is a thing, and it would be deeply weird if a condition that is uncommon in the general population but very common among trans people didn't have anything to do with transitioning. 3. A lot of MtF trans people have been willing to go through some really hard stuff (extensive medical treatments) and have blown up their objectively good lives as men in order to try to become women; I suppose you could consider them to be extra deluded, but that doesn't seem to be a parsimonious explanation.
FtM: Here that explanation is somewhat plausible for some of the short-hair-and-guy's-clothes-enby types or for the people who want to get pregnant but still have people pretend they are men, but in general it doesn't seem to work. We have a long history of women pretending to be men in order to enter men's spaces, get more respect, or engage in male-only activities: everything from women taking male pen names, to Mulan (yes, a folktale/myth, but still) or the women who pretended to be men so they could become doctors, up to at least one female Christian saint who pretended to be a man in order to enter a particular monastery. But they appear to be in a totally different category than the girls who want to cut off their breasts, who seem more like the extreme end of "girl is uncomfortable with her body because puberty" intersecting with the pro-trans social environment, and not particularly concerned with e.g. earning more money.
dovetailing
1yr ago
Not that I can recall. I got a little of the usual crap from peers about being a nerd instead of a masculine/athletic type, but that's not at all the same thing, and they didn't know about any of my more feminine interests (I only had a few -- overall I was within normal "nerd" range). My family didn't care, but then I never did anything like cross-dressing, it was all stuff like "interested in cooking and sewing and likes pretty colors" which hardly counts when there's also "interested in math and computers and likes video games" going on even more prominently.
I just don't get forced feminization fantasies, so maybe the reason I don't find plausible is actually correct but I just don't understand other people's psychology. My fantasy was always either undergoing a magical transformation willingly, or having been female all along (i.e. including imagining a different childhood/puberty). I didn't think the thing I wanted was shameful (although wanting it was, hence why I didn't share it), just impossible. And why would I imagine something unpleasant if there was a pleasant version?
dovetailing
1yr ago
Relatedly, I maintain that the left vs right spectrum are best understood as religious schism within the western enlightment, with the adhearants of Locke and Rousseau on one side and the adhearants of Hobbes on the other.
Which implies that left vs right politics are fundamentally post-Christian.
Drawing this out a bit further: I believe you are right that the alt-right and woke left are, in many ways, cut from the same cloth. But the "red tribe," even the overtly religious part, is just as much a product of modernity and is in many ways post-Christian in outlook, despite the Christian trappings.
I rather think this is a bad thing.
dovetailing
1yr ago
Your comment made me think: there's an essay here, somewhere, about how grand scope secondary world fantasy is a fundamentally Christian impulse. It allows one to imagine things that are facially inconsistent with Christianity but elucidate it. I think that it's no accident that Tolkien was a Catholic.
Whereas most fantasy (I except traditional faerie-stories, slightly[*]) stories set in the real world are at best uncomfortable from a Christian perspective, because Christianity itself is a thing in the real world and you have to fit that in somehow. Does anyone remember that old HPMOR meta-fanfic with the wizard-Christians? I felt that, as really awkward as it was, it was more honest than the original HP in that way.
[*] Obviously many faerie-stories have a pre-Christian origin and skate by on that. But people tried to wrestle with these things in ways that would make moderns very uncomfortable; IIRC there are some stories about Irish saints converting faeries to Christianity...
Inaugurating my participation at themotte.org with a new handle because I'm not sure I want the following post to be connected to me in real life.
Every time the psychology of trans stuff comes up at ACX or here I want to write this essay; this time I finally did.
Toward an Etiology of Trans
Part I: Two Stories
Our first story is about a boy who we will call Sam. From well before puberty, Sam had thoughts about wanting to be a girl. A favorite passage in his children's books was the one in The Land of Oz where the enchantment on the hero Tip is undone, transforming the boy into the princess Ozma. He didn't much like the things that motivated other boys: sewing and crochet were more interesting than sports. And his sense of aesthetics was (and remained) more feminine than masculine -- pastel colors and flowers, not bold colors and cars. He especially liked cut gemstones, and wanted to wear rings.
As he got older, Sam would frequently fantasize about being magically transformed into a girl; in puberty, his very minor gynecomastia (just little nodules under the nipples) provided fuel for these fantasies. As a teen, he discovered in an old development textbook a description of "transsexual reassignment", which occupied his attention for a while, though it seemed no more realistic than his fantasies of magical transformation. A sexual side to his fantasies was emerging, too: autogynephilia (though he had no word for it); but the fantasies were not only sexual ones. As well as a female body, Sam wanted feminine traits: beauty and sweetness and the freedom to adorn oneself with dresses and jewels.
Sam observed that his fondest nighttime dreams were ones where he was a girl. He practiced lucid dreaming and experimented with self-hypnosis largely in order to encourage these dreams, and to better imagine and better half-believe, in that partly-conscious realm at the boundary to sleep, in his feminine transformation.
These fantasies continued, more-or-less, into his young adulthood. He practiced less deliberate lucid dreaming, but savored the dreams when they came. But he kept them secret -- how weird it would be, for a man to confess to wishing he could become a woman, much less that these fantasies were often arousing. And in any case, they were impossible desires for what could only happen by magic; Ozma and Tiresias don't exist in the real world.
Our second story is about another boy; we will call him Hilary. Hilary was a typical boy of the nerdy type. He liked dinosaurs and astronomy and collected rocks and coins. He was especially good at math, and liked to spend time playing video games and learning to program in Basic.
When Hilary hit puberty and middle school, he had his first intense crush on a girl, which of course went nowhere. That didn't stop; his life from then on was a series of such crushes, of course on all of the smartest girls he knew, and each of them life-shattering (hah). In the meantime he excelled at math competitions, learned more programming, and played Civ and Starcraft and similar games. He fantasized about someday being a great mathematician.
Hilary finally had a girlfriend in college, though it didn't work out. A while after college, he found a woman who was pretty and smart and who consented to marry him. He has a happy marriage, a satisfying life and community, and a job in tech.
Sam, of course, seems like a clear example of the MtF trans type. /r/egg_irl would have a field day. Hilary, on the other hand, is pretty clearly a standard, well-adjusted man, though in the "nerd" rather than the "jock" mold. Pretty different, right?
The reader will have guessed that, of course, Sam and Hilary are one and the same person, whose story is simply told from different points of view.
The astute reader will have also guessed that they are both me.
Part II: Trans is not a Fundamental Category
The trans movement, to the extent to which it can be said to have a coherent philosophy and not just a number of disagreeing proponents, appears to assert two things:
Male and Female, Man and Woman, are not fundamental, biological things. Whatever their specific theories, the "trans X are X" formulation and all manner of similar things imply that one can "really be" a man or woman according to one's choice, perhaps with some hormonal help, not subject to the diktat of mere biology.
Being Trans, on the other hand, is a fundamental part of one's identity. One can see this by the typical reaction to statements to the effect that social transition, hormone treatments, and surgeries are misguided and harmful to the people undergoing them: the immediate outcry is that the speaker wants to "harm Trans people", or is "transphobic", or worse.
The first part of my thesis is that this is the reverse of the truth. Male and Female are fundamental, biological things; notwithstanding edge cases like intersex conditions, and social dimensions to behavior and dress, there really are fundamental differences between men and woman. Many of these differences are gross physical ones associated with sexual reproduction. Others are secondary, but highly, highly correlated (I'll leave the obligatory discussion of clusters in high-dimensional space to the reader's imagination). In the vast majority of these ways, the vast majority of trans people fit their natal sex better than their desired/chosen one, and the medical treatments provide at best poor facsimiles (the dreams of an actual transformation from man to woman or the reverse remain fully in the realm of fantasy).
On the other hand, Trans as an identity is largely chosen and a social matter. Now, let me make clear what I am saying and not saying here. Taking the example of MtF, I affirm that the following are real things:
Desiring to have a female body, whether this desire is sexual (autogynephilia), nonsexual, or (more likely) both.
Desiring to be feminine (in other ways).
Having some key interests or tastes which are more typically feminine than masculine.
Feeling uncomfortable in one's male body.
Having distaste for masculine things / feeling unsuited for a masculine role.
(I am avoiding the term "gender dysphoria" -- it's a vague description, covering multiple of the above items, which frequently masquerades as an explanation.)
But the choice to label having some assortment of these feelings as "Trans" is a choice, not a natural category or fundamental identity, and is highly subject to social norms and pressures, as evinced in the recent explosion of Trans identification.
While both positive (wanting-to-be) and negative (wanting-to-not-be) feelings do frequently co-occur (and from the movement rhetoric, there is the expectation that they will always co-occur), I get the impression, partly from anecdotal evidence and partly from introspection, that often one set is primary and the other is secondary -- with the secondary one perhaps caused by fixation on the primary. Much has already been written about the etiology of negative-primary trans, particularly in FtM cases, where young women who are depressed and generally uncomfortable with their bodies due to puberty and for social (or other) reasons become convinced that their femaleness is the problem and that they would be happier if they were male or sexless.
The other major case, positive-primary in MtF, seems stuck in either the Blanchard-Bailey categorization, which asserts that most of these are driven by autogynephilia, or in its emphatic denial.
(Continued in reply)
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