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Transgenderism is religious dogma taken to its logical extreme. The fundamental thesis of the religion is complete mind body dualism. They see humans as a blank slate sould that randomly attached to a body and thereby has had many constraints and suffering imposed on it. Their goal is to liberate the free soul from the constraints of the physical world. The view can't be understood outside their theology. HBD, genetic explanations for class our sex differences, are the ultimate heresy against their religion. They invalidate the core principle and understanding of their theology. The woke ideology is built on a worldview that free souls were created, they were bound to physical constraints through evil and the march of history is toward liberating the soul.
The more tech Silicon Valley take is that this will be done through genetic engineering/AI/fusion powered utopia. The more social science approach is through "justice".
Academia has fallen into a pit because academia consists of writing commentary to other peoples work. In the social sciences the commentary is to a large extent based on philosophers and thinkers that had ideas that are invalid. Rousseau doesn't live up to scientific scrutiny. Yet the ideas that stem from his thinking aren't tossed out. There needs to be a search algorithm that can search citations iteratively and redact those papers whose fundamental principles are false. Papers built on ideas such as "Existence precedes essence" are wrong since your DNA is at least as old as your existence, since you became you at the point of conception or later.
Wokeism in Academia is theologists arguing about the number of angels on a needle. They are taking religious ideas with weak scientific basis and arguing them to their logical conclusion. Transgender issues are so explosive even though they are marginal issues since they fundamentally are a clash of theology. Theologians could spend centuries arguing about the word "Filoque", we are seeing similar debates today centering around the new religion.
Transgenderism is secular, godless materialism taken to its logical extreme. Its logical conclusion is biological essentialism and determinism. They see humans as animals with an unchangeable "gender-drive" - such that a biological man who wants to be a female must be so out of a material fact of their biology, rather than spiritual confusion or sin. Their goal is to chain humans to their base biological impulses and confusions, rather than liberate the soul to pursue individuality and God's plan. That a young girl might wear male clothing, cut their hair, wrestle, or be uncomfortable with puberty can't be an individual's contingent, flawed exploration of their self, but must be a fact of their biology to be physically treated with medicine.
... of course that isn't true either, it sounds like something a radfem would say, but it seems about as plausible as your claims? The bad parts of trans are maybe in some way analogous to mind-body dualism, but a lot of things are analogous in some ways to a lot of other things, and that doesn't make it one cause. "Liberate the soul from the constraints of the physical world"? What does that have to do with wearing dresses or doing makeup? And no trans people that I know of explicitly claim mind-body dualism, or even hint at it. "My brain is the wrong sex" is claimed to be a physical condition of development causing specific desires to be different, not something about souls. Being very wrong about philosophy and science, and getting mad at those who disagree, doesn't make something a religion, by that standard everyone is religious.
The claim that gender dysphoria, and by extension transgenderism, is explicable by reference to a disorder in the physical substrate (e.g. exposure to unusually high levels of prenatal estrogen/testosterone) is widely seen in the trans community as a "truscum" stance to take. In these circles, arguing that only male people with neurologically "female" brains are truly trans women would likely result in accusations of gatekeeping and denying trans people's "lived experience". In my experience, it's far more common to encounter claims that everyone has a "gender identity" known and knowable only to themselves, completely independent of their underlying neurochemistry, unbeholden to social influences, and that being diagnosed with (or even experiencing) gender dysphoria is not a prerequisite to being authentically trans. Such a conception of what a "gender identity" is seems functionally indistinguishable to the traditional conception of an immaterial soul.
In my experience, the internet trans community is happy to use 'brain scans of trans people are more like desired gender than birth gender' in arguments, which is what I was referring to.
Other than the immateriality part (a gender identity, here, is a set of gender-related perceptions or desires rather than something supernatural), the soul part (no communication with supernatural entities, no life-after-death, no creator, etc), and everything else in the traditional conception? Yes, both gender identity and immaterial soul have big problems, and they are vaguely similar in some ways, but that's not 'functionally indistinguishable'.
Right, but have you ever heard a member of said community arguing that "until someone's divergent neurochemistry has been confirmed by MRI or CT scan, you are not obliged to address them by their preferred pronouns"? Even truscums don't go that far: a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria by a psychiatrist (without an expensive MRI or CT scan) is considered sufficient.
In the Internet trans community, the alleged similarities between the brains of trans people and the typical brains of people of their desired sex is treated as an interesting fact, not as a rule-in criteria for who is "really" trans and who isn't.
Right, they pick different arguments in different contexts because their beliefs about what trans is (specifically referring to the All Trans People Are Valid ones) aren't particularly coherent and partially come from a desire to validate other 'trans people'. Trans brain mean trans is real (good), denying hormones on brain scan means an individual trans isn't real (bad). This isn't either materialism or dualism, it's an entirely different thing.
In much the same way that non-consequentialists sometimes reflexively fall back on consequentialist arguments when trying to persuade consequentialists, dualists sometimes resort to monist arguments when trying to persuade monists, even though they themselves are not monists. In the past, I've argued with Christians who've claimed that when you perform brain scans on people in states of religious ecstasy (speaking in tongues etc.), these brain scans look completely different to people having seizures or any other comparable neurological state. I have no idea whether this is true, and in fact whether or not it's true is beside the point: even if this finding was decisively invalidated, it wouldn't impact on these Christians' belief in an immaterial soul or an afterlife one iota. Likewise, trans activists argue that brain scans prove that there's an anatomical basis for gender dysphoria and hence transgenderism, but even if this claim was decisively proven false, that wouldn't actually result in any of the people making the argument to change their minds. In their view, "gender identity" is something fundamental to a person's essence, knowable only to oneself and hence impossible for an outside person to invalidate. This belief doesn't depend on factual evidence from MRI or CT scans; at best, those are just a helpful bonus to bolster a belief which is essentially unfalsifiable.
Their view is that if you say you're trans, you are trans, because denying that would be incredibly mean to a trans person and being trans is cute and valid. There aren't any essences involved. Like, what identity-essences does a genderfluid person have, or someone who wants to be a boy sometimes and a girl at other times? It's just 'you are trans if you say you are and you get to do whatever you feel like', which doesn't seem particularly dualist, just dumb.
I understand what you're saying, but I really don't think it's as simple as that. If it was just "mean" or rude to claim that a trans person isn't really trans, would we really see all this hysterical rending of hair about "denying our right to exist", "invalidating our identities" and "committing literal genocide"? I don't think this is just hyperbole for rhetorical effect: I think a lot of trans activists take this really seriously and think that their gender identity is something special and ineffable. I mean, the trope of a trans person's gender identity being validated by how they present as a ghost or in the afterlife is common enough that it has its own TV Tropes entry: we're not just pulling dualist interpretations of the worldview out of our ass here.
Their "essence" is that of a genderfluid person, whose gender identity fluctuates over time. It's tautological but self-consistent.
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