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Given the response to my post below about culturally bound illnesses I figured it would make sense to write out a top level post specifically discussing gender dysphoria, since I expressed a desire to avoid that topic initially. I was inspired by Scott Alexander's recent post on culturally bound illnesses.
The basic idea of my previous post is that some illnesses which seem quite common in our society, things like anorexia, depression, chronic pain, and gender dysphoria, seem likely to be highly culturally mediated - i.e. they would not exist if the cultural norms we are inoculated in didn't account for them. This goes against the standard narrative for LGBTQ+ people, who often put forth the idea that before a minority gets social approval, there are a ton of 'closeted' individuals who simply live in suffering. Under this model, the social approval actually creates the urge to, for instace, sleep with the same sex or transition gender. (I'm less confident about homosexuality being highly cultural.)
I'm sure someone here could give a better history of rough numbers of trans individuals/gender dysphoria cases over time, but the gist seems to be that numbers have exploded recently. A quick search shows laughable results such as:
And then on the exact same website:
This is some of the most clear double think I've ever seen, and I tend to be much less invested in the trans debate than many here. Other studies are more honest explaining that:
I think this whole topic presents a clear problem, but I'm less sure about the actual solution. I'm sure many would jump at the chance to say we should just tell people who have gender dysphoria to suck it up and keep it to themselves, but I doubt the feasibility of that given how easy it is to create subcultures on the internet. Also, if you try to apply that frame to other problems like say anorexia, or depression, the failure modes become extremely clear.
Then again we can't just let these culturally created illnesses run rampant through our culture, and I predict they will only become increasingly problematic as our communication infrastructure and leisure time scales up. Ideally we want to replace these unhealthy cultural memes with healthier ones, but we run into a chicken and egg problem.
So - what are your recommended solutions to the issue of transgender ideation and other culturally bound issues?
Expand the Universe of Acceptable/Respectable Ways to be a Man or to be a Woman
I want to be clear on what I think "trans-ness" is: there may be some hard-core of people with a physical brain-illness/defect that causes them to feel born in the wrong body, but the majority of people tempted by transition are pathologizing the natural feeling present in most people of not living up to the Masculine/Feminine ideal. Most people who transition either dislike or feel incapable of living up to their gendered ideal, and flee it rather than fail at it. I've also spoken about how Ricky Bobby morality has poisoned our youth: the idea that you can do whatever you want as long as you're the best at it means that most people are inevitably failures, and that they respond to failure by seeking out extremely obscure games and metrics to regain self-esteem (looks nervously at rock climbing wall).
I suspect that a big part of what causes men to consider transition is an over-intense idealization of what a man is. When transwomen talk about how they weren't men, how they felt that masculinity didn't fit them, they often aren't describing actual men I know, they are describing a cross between early-season Don Draper and peak-80s Stallone/Ah-nold, they're describing a being of infinite assertiveness and Nietzschean-Ubermensch privilege over the world. In these poor minds, there but for the grace of God after all, a man is Ron Jeremy in the bedroom and Gordon Gekko in the boardroom and Audie Murphy in a fight. That's a cool ideal, one I might strive towards at times, but it is one that no one meets.
If one considers that to be a man one must meet that standard, the only conclusion one can reach is that one is not a man, can never be a man, the project of being a man will always fail. What is trangenderism then? It is an alternative project for those who fail at the project of their birth gender. If being a man means if you ain't first you're last, means the world telling you that you are never good enough until you're a 10% bodyfat crossfit competitor who runs his own corporation; being trans means the supportive section of the world telling you that you are doing a great job, it's a project you can't fail at. It's a hobby that 100% of people who try are affirmed in how great they are at it, even in the early stages, and that hobby/project grows to consume the lives of those who feel they can't succeed at anything else.*
A man can earn 100k and squat 400lbs for reps; he'll be surrounded by people telling him he needs to work harder until he's Elon Musk and that 400lbs isn't bad for a noob but what's the record and anyway maybe you could drop a weightclass and keep the lifts up. When a man puts on a little bit of eyeliner and posts on a trans subreddit, he's surrounded by people telling him he is super valid and totally passing gorgeous.
So that's a lot of words on the problem, what do I think is the solution? We need to expand the universe of how you can be a man. Not just in terms of masculine/feminine interests, though I don't really buy into gendering most things anyway (I love a fruity cocktail on a Saturday night and a sweet iced coffee to chase the hangover away Sunday morning), but in terms of what success looks like. When the masculine ideal was having a steady job, getting married, raising kids as a good father, and maybe owning a home, a lot of men could feel like they fulfilled that ideal. How do we modernize that ideal for a world where women have entered the workforce and often in pair-matched cases out-earn men? Where violence is so proscribed that too many men die without any scars? Where delivering security to your family is impossible, even being secure that you have a family can be impossible?
I'm not sure how we do that, but rebuilding a complete masculinity that men can aspire to is how we solve gender issues, both the kind that end in surgery and the kind that end on incel forums. Hell, I consider the best project that feminism can undertake to help professional women achieve their ambitions to be building a better Himbo, in the Joe Rogan mold, who can support his brilliant lawyer/executive/politician wife without feeling less-than because he draws his self-worth from other sources. Everything else is downstream from there.**
*I don't believe this has much correlation with objective measures of success/failure/masculinity, rather with self-perception of success/failure/masculinity, which is only marginally related.
**I think most of this could be flipped to the feminine with more or less the same effect, but obviously I am somewhat less familiar with what it feels like to be a woman.
The relentless positivity of the trans community isn't a positive - it's a negative. It's a defense against the immensely shitty situation of potato-shaped Norwood 3s getting memed into thinking they can become cute anime girls. It's fleeing to the sanctuary of a Legally Protected Class.
Personally, as a gay man who suffers from pretty awful insecurity about himself (particularly my disgusting body), I've found that one thing that has helped me feel like more of a man has been doing a physical labor occupation.
Absolutely. It's terrifying to think that without a very physical job and a few active hobbies I might have turned into one of those poor nerdy guys getting literally brainwashed by anime.
Thanks for teaching me the term for my family's balding pattern...
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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!
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.
I can go dig through forums to find evidence, but this isn't an issue I think about a lot so this is more the gestalt from the Myers-Young Associated Statistical Survey, acronym for short.
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. When my experience of being a man is constantly falling short of that stereotype, from 13 to 31, and probably onward to the grave. I'll try to find the Slate(?) article in particular that I'm remembering, but it was a piece by a transwoman contra-TERFS arguing that transwomen never had male privilege because before transition they "weren't the men who were hitting on their secretaries, the guys making dirty jokes in the locker room after the football game, the frat boys having competitions in objectifying women." Right away you have the apex fallacy, equating "men" to executives, athletes, popular fraternity brothers; and not to autistic nerds, janitors, or obese unemployed. The idea that if you aren't a really great man then you aren't a man at all.
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.
Not only are we not asking, the question is so politically fraught we probably couldn't get good answers anyway.
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.
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.
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This is a great response, I absolutely agree and think I’ve been flailing towards something like it myself. There definitely needs to be a shift in modern masculinity away from physical violence and ore towards social fluency, emotional stability, and overall intelligence. At least that’s where I’ve been able to carve a niche for myself.
Unfortunately it seems like family is a hardwired instinct for a lot of men, and I think a big problem is a lack of male role models. With the rise is divorce rates it’s not uncommon for men to grow up not seeing a single well adjusted, relaxed, competent man. Especially not one in a happy marriage. In fact I’m over thirty and can’t think of a single one in my life, including myself - though I do aspire to be there.
While I do know men who are married and accomplished, they’re all so damn neurotic I can’t seem to respect them or truly look up to them. The media doesn’t help either, with the bumbling dad tropes. I’d be curious if people could name one good father figure in modern media. (Bandit in Bluey is great but he’s a dog.)
Anyway, older men have largely failed to adapt masculinity so I suppose it’s up to the coming generation to salvage what we can.
I think that all men are neurotic and insecure. I have traveled and dated all over the world and every man you can imagine thinks they're a piece of crap at the end of the day. Every man in my family that I've known my entire life is like this. I think it's intrinsic to being a man. I have met men who are insanely hot with huge muscles and are, to me, the perfect example of masculinity and even they are extremely insecure. I am a thousand percent less neurotic and insecure than I was ten years ago but even today I'm just a snide comment away from spiraling again into self doubt. I think it's downstream of sexual selection, men are so driven to procreate and have sex that we lead ourselves into madness when we aren't actively fornicating. It sounds bad at first but taking this perspective has made me more empathetic to fellow men I meet. We're all self doubting. Dating as a gay man can be so dire because we often tear at each others' insecurities. It makes me have more respect for women who seem to be able to lend sanity to the male psyche in a way other men can't.
Also expanding this as a quick reply to @fivehourmarathon's post above, which I agree with strongly: He proposes that we need a new kind of masculinity we can perform or grow into. (I think that's a fair assessment of the point, correct me if I'm wrong.) I think it's a good proposal, however I think an easier fix would be to encourage people on an individual level to actually support and urge on masculine qualities in men. I can remember times people in my life have told me I have certain manly or masculine traits and it is a huge confidence boost for me to remember those times. I think we dislike making these comments as a culture because we don't prize masculinity as a trait.
Wouldn't it be the other way? Sex is far easier to get on demand for gay men than straight men. Straight women don't enable the sexual excesses of men, they check them.
I get this too. My workplace is entirely men and it's nice to 'blend in' and feel accepted.
Yes, I was saying straight men and gay men alike are driven to madness when we're not getting laid. When I think about how much harder it is for straight men to get laid than gay men I feel surprised that straight men are able to keep it together as well as they do. I wouldn't want to jump through the hoops that you guys have to jump through to have sex and don't envy the runaround at all.
Taking this to its dramatic extreme, the older I get the less I care about the trappings of society and can't help but feel like all the niceties and luxuries of life are a sort of masculine "nesting" instinct to attract female mates. Since I don't have to lift a finger to get laid as a gay man and this is becoming more and more clear to me, the allure of luxury goods is less and less appealing- and indeed, at a certain point simply highlight my insecurity rather than enhance my masculinity itself. When it comes to attracting men as a man, you want to display security, and nothing looks less secure than some insane piece of fashion or a botox'd face or a piece of jewelry or a fugly haircut or basically anything other than the body you were born into. Women may demand these luxuries to feel safe, or as a signal that the man is flawed/able to be tamed/sensitive, but men find them as cringe markers of insecurity (which is much easier to notice in someone else than in yourself, by the way.)
I'm not 'you guys', I'm gay as well though I'm not a very typical gay man. But it's my observation that the hoop jumping that straights engage in has value. Men should want to be tested and challenged.
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I am not so sure about this. A lot of male indulgences (luxury watches, expensive liqueur, expensive technical or mechanical toys) are at best tolerated by women, not actively sought out. My internal model is that I have to spent weirdness points to indulge in them. Part of that may also be that my social class actively discourages overt displays of wealth (you're supposed to be more subtle, like talking about that time you spent a sabbatical in Tibet).
Culturally bound as you say, but male adornment as status symbol dates back to before the Greeks. The Great Male renunciation is the anomaly not the historical norm.
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Basically they are extremely driven workaholics or highly passionate about something, but they're also constantly anxious and can't seem to relax. They don't have a confident, relaxed air is another way to put it. Hard to put into words I suppose.
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I think you’re on to something and it does kinda dovetail with something I’m noticing on the other end of the spectrum— what they think a woman is, or what it feels like to be an “internally female being”. The thing I’m seeing is a conflation of the trappings of femininity— dresses, domestic activities, an femininity in the aesthetic choices of media and decorative art. Now, there are women like that, and women who aren’t. Most natal women don’t do that stuff, and certainly don’t do it all the time. And for that matter, a lot of women like and even play sports, like masculine-coded media, wear t-shirts and jeans and skip the makeup.
What I think we’ve done to gender is made gender into a completely binary choice, and said that if you don’t do them or don’t do them “right” it’s obviously because you aren’t that gender. And it’s really weird because we don’t do this with any other identifying choices. I can be a Christian in lots of ways without my identity being questioned too much. I can be my race no matter how much or how little of the cultural aspect I identify with (I can even identify with the cultural aspects of other ethnic groups and still keep my racial identity— nobody has ever questioned whether an Americanized Japanese descended person was still Asian, or whether an Otaku was White). Gender somehow is a uniquely binary situation where you either identify 100% with all the trappings of culture and aesthetics or you surrender the man or woman card.
But then I think a lot of how modernity has commodified identity bears some blame here. Identity in the West, outside of race is largely a set of choices to be made, which isn’t how identity worked for most of human history. For most of history, you were given almost everything in your identity, then you lived up to that. You didn’t save the princess because you wanted to be a knight. You were born into that warrior caste and thus behaved like a knight. And even if you didn’t, you were still a knight, just a bad one. But if you have to be a good knight, perfectly chivalrous and brace and awesome with a sword to be a knight, then what do you do with a bad knight? And if being a knight is a choice, might a bad knight simply go be something else?
One thing that applies to those who transition into gender or into Christianity is that the convert must demonstrate zeal, while those born into a religion can be lax. I'm going to use Islam because it is more racialized in America. There is nothing in the Quran about race, my blonde hair and blue eyes qualify me for Islam as easily as my Pakistani friend. But our behavior will be judged differently. If we both move through the same mosque community, I obviously a convert and he obviously born into the faith, I will be held to a higher standard before being taken seriously. If he drinks a little, eats some bacon occasionally, misses prayers sometimes, people might say he is a bad Muslim but they will not doubt that he is a Muslim. If I convert, and then I keep drinking and eating pork, most people would say I never converted at all, that it's all a farce, a put on.
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FWIW this is basically the exact rift between people who are "trans" and people who are "gender nonbinary" (or queer or otherwise gender nonconforming) in the LGBT world. I remember back on tumblr around 2010 a lot of gay/queer people were quietly shading transgenderism because being trans basically reinforces the gender binary whereas being queer/NB is something outside the binary. You don't hear about it much these days because trans is such a mainstream issue and people who aren't fully on the trans positive bandwagon are labeled TERFs or whatever, but the issue isn't really fully resolved.
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In a society which exalts women, and values their opinion as much as todays western does, men alone cannot redefine what a man is.
Greater acceptance of short and passive men among men, wouldn't alter how the they are perceived by women.
There is a contradiction here in how you cite only examples of men. The disparity between how intrasexual relations are between men, who encourage other men to try harder, to put in more for effort, to achieve greater things, versus how they are between women, where exaltation of self-improvement in the field of femininity isn't common, of praising the most womanly woman, who is great at all things associated with the fairer sex.
One could blame contemporary feminism, which in its vulgar form is interpretted as women being deserving of high status by their mere existence, while men have earn their worth; and the absense of parallel movement as influential which would tell men they are Kings no matter their lack of achievements.
Thus one would expect the sex which, you claim, gatekeeps membership in it would less commonly transitioned into, than the one which places less value on what makes its sex special. Yet as "What is a woman?" is due to feminism each year given a greater variety of answers, trans men are growing faster than trans women.
I agree, which is why I label it as the most important job for Feminism to help promote the careers of professional women.
I cited only examples of men because I am a man, I experience life as a man, so it's easier to write, and the post was long enough without getting into women. But I think women suffer from an equally destructive set of societal expectations in today's world. A pretty girl used to be pretty enough if she was top ten in a high school class of one hundred, now she has to be prettier than thousands, pretty on a scalable level. But also a young professional girlboss, but not too successful then men won't like you; smart but not too smart. A 40 year old middle class housewife 100 years ago had pride, easy and carefree, secure in her home in her husband in her children in her place in the community. Today we expect women to be all things at all times, and we never give them security. We expect a 40 year old woman to fuck like Samantha from Sex and the City, to Lean In like Sheryl Sandberg, to mother like a Mormon mommy blogger, or maybe to Tiger Mom like Amy Chua, to craft and decorate like an Insta influencer, to never get old but never be young and naive either. She is to raise her kids to be independent and leave her and maybe call her once a month after, she is to love her husband who at any time might leave her alone having wasted her first fruits in sacrifice to a false promise of forever.*
Transmen equally view being male as an accomplishment, as a project to create meaning in their lives. Transmen are satisfied with being male, they don't have to strive to be ubermensch when mensch is good enough.
*Very, vanishingly few women benefit from divorce. It is mostly a negative sum transaction. It is popular for men to view themselves as the victims, and therefore women as the putative victors; in reality as in Roadhouse nobody even won a fight.
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