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When discussing pharmaceutical and surgical interventions in the treatment of gender dysphoria, the gender-critical among us often draw parallels with bodily integrity identity disorder. This is a rare psychiatric disorder in which a person experiences profound distress because of the presence of one or more of their limbs, and requests to have these limbs amputated to alleviate said distress (or tries to amputate them themselves). Colloquially, one might say that people with this condition are able-bodied but identify as disabled.
Given that no one thinks that surgical amputation is the correct treatment for this psychiatric disorder, we gender-criticals argued, it follows that surgical intervention is the wrong approach for people with gender dysphoria. If it's wrong to amputate a mentally ill's person's arm just because they say it's causing them distress, how can it be right to do the same for a penis or breast?
Sadly, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens, the medical establishment has noted the parallels, and it is coming to a rather different conclusion:
Nothing specific to add to this* beyond despair. The Anglophone medical establishment appears to be fully ideologically captured. It doesn't matter if the Tavistock is shuttered and there's a rash of lawsuits directed at youth gender clinics in the US: if you're a medic who's internalised (or been made to internalise) the gender ideology worldview, the implications of that worldview and the role of the medical establishment it affirms have far-reaching implications in medical domains unrelated to gender medicine itself. At this point I honestly can't rule out psychiatrists prescribing anorexics appetite suppressants to aid them in achieving their "bodily attainment goals".
*Other than why the fuck are Canadian doctors so keen to help their fellow citizens maim or destroy their bodies??!!
Whatever it is, I think it is the same thing that motivated Dr. Frankenstein.
Lust for knowledge, really? Maybe you could make the argument for Hirschfield and his era but that's not what's happening here.
The definitive portrayal of Dr. Frankenstein, of course, is Mary Shelly's novel. Before I respond to this, I am curious whether you (@IGI-111) have read the book, and, in case you have, whether, upon reflection, you think it is accurate to describe Dr. Frankenstein's driving motive as "lust for knowledge".
I have indeed read the novel, and though it was some years ago I think I remember it very well since it speaks to my sensibilities (both in terms of framing devices and man's relationship to Technics) and does so in more subtle a way than is usually depicted. Your question is hence understandable, but I indeed had in mind the proto-science-fiction novel.
As with any complex character, Victor's motives can be argued about of course. One can certainly attribute the ultimate cause of his great sin to his grief or other such mitigating circumstances, but it is my strong conviction that what moves him once he decides to bury himself into work at the University is indeed lust for knowledge. One can also make a case for the more obvious sin later called out by himself in his last words: ambition. But that hubris is not separate from what I'm describing here. He's not doing it because it would grant him prestige, he goes to great lengths to conceal the deed, he's doing it because he wants to know if he can do it.
He has no mind as to the consequences, implications or morality of his work, he is simply moved by the need to complete it. Which is made obvious by the lengths he is ready to go, the corners he is ready to cut, and ultimately, his immense disgust at himself and his creation once the work is completed.
The Creature comments on this itself, as you know, but I think the best argument for the central conflict of the novel being caused by this particular tendency is the cultural reception of the novel and Victor's character becoming such an allegory for the mad scientist that further works flanderized him to the degree you know.
There is more sin to the good doctor of course, and more virtue. But if there is a center to the universe of the novel it is indubitably the act of creation motivated by the sole unexamined desire to know how and if the unholy can even be done. It is after all "The Modern Prometheus".
If this analogy has any legs, it has to be about the desire to see if man can be turned into woman and vice versa, about transhumanism and the escape from the binding of natural laws without regard for prevailing morality. Not the petty bureaucratic impulse of classification and normalization that moves Canada as a nation and its managerial ilk today, which itself is justified by conforming to a morality, not disregard for it.
While it is true that Dr. Frankenstein wanted to know something, I think to state that as his motive, and leave it at that, leaves out what is most essential. I submit that Victor Frankenstein has more in common with Faust, or Elric of Melniboné than he does with, say, Paul Erdos, or Thomas Edison (doesn't it feel so?). Like Faust and Elric, but unlike Erdos or Edison, Dr. Frankenstein commits copious moral transgressions in the service of his compulsive quest (e.g., desecrating dead bodies, theft, vivisection). In his effort to cross certain boundaries as a far term objective, he crosses boundaries that he knows, or ought now, should not be crossed in the here and now. He could have violated those boundaries in a quest for knowledge, or, like Elric or Gilgamesh, in a quest for something else. So, I think Frankenstein's quest for knowledge is relatively incidental while his quest by forbidden means, for what he ought to know is within the exclusive dominion of the gods is essential. Like Prometheus.
From this I suspect one difference between you and me is that I believe Dr. Frankenstein -- along with Faust, and Elric, and the trans-mutilators -- are recklessly crosswise of morality plain and simple, not merely "prevailing" morality. They all lie to themselves to justify the intoxicating ecstasy of crossing boundaries, and seeming, for the time being, to get away with it. Like Prometheus.
Indeed I think our disagreement here may see its source in our different approaches of morality as a philosophical object.
It seems fair to characterize your view as accepting some visceral, objective, absolute, perhaps divine, morality. My own soul offers me no such luxuries and I am unfortunately bound to the perhaps cynical Nietzschean skepticism: morality is a subjective and instrumental construct of power. Tradition and natural law, though the elect of my own prejudices, I can't resign myself to call universal.
That said, we can perhaps mend the gap a bit.
The thrill of transgression you point to is real, that "meddling with the primal forces of nature" does indeed have something exciting about it.
I submit that this excitement is nothing else that will to power. That self-same transcendent impulse that is enabled by technics. The essence of modernity, and the bending of nature to one's will. There is something of this in trans-anything. It is undeniable to anyone who is intimately familiar with the matter. The power to decide that one of the most immutable components of one's condition is now subject to one's own control is awesome.
And in a sense, this is also what motivates the Canadian bureaucrat. But his isn't a thrill of bending nature to will, or at least not through so direct a mean. So I will still insist that, though both impulses can be arranged in the same rubric, be it of modernity or of hubris, they are still meaningfully different.
And this difference is I think extremely relevant to our current moment and key to understand no less than the present and future of politics. The current battle lines of elite and counter elite in the west are once again drawn on a precise difference between two modes of dealing with modernity. And that difference is quite exactly the one we are talking about here, between an individual desire of transcendence, escape and a collective desire of management, control.
Management and control by what agency and to what end?
Power is an end in itself, as Orwell noted.
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