Thursday 16 January 2020

The Quest for the Real Trans - Beliefs and Meta Beliefs


I'm seeing a lot of people expressing concern about how genderism is rushing young women into trans medicalisation. How this is failing young women, who are not really trans. How therapists, in their concern to help people who are really trans, are failing those who, mistakenly, only think they are trans. How the doctors and the therapists should take more care to be sure who is really trans and who is not.

Their concern is that we, as a society, are failing to distinguish between people who are really trans and people who only think they are trans, or may be misled into thinking they are trans.

Before we can hope to make this distinction, we need to know what "being trans" really means. So, from the experts:

"An umbrella term to describe people whose gender is not the same as, or does not sit comfortably with, the sex they were assigned at birth."

Perhaps I'm thick so I'll look up what the experts mean by gender:

Often expressed in terms of masculinity and femininity, gender is largely culturally determined and is assumed from the sex assigned at birth.

That can't be right, they said that gender is something that belongs to an individual, the something that "is not the same as, or does not sit comfortably with, the sex they were assigned at birth", but they say that is "largely culturally determined".

Just below that, I find:

Used to describe when a person experiences discomfort or distress because there is a mismatch between their sex assigned at birth and their gender identity.
This is also the clinical diagnosis for someone who doesn’t feel comfortable with the sex they were assigned at birth.

Well perhaps as gender transition is supposed to help alleviate Gender Dysphoria, we should look at "Gender Identity"

A person’s innate sense of their own gender, whether male, female or something else (see non-binary below), which may or may not correspond to the sex assigned at birth.

So if we assume that they were talking about Gender Identity in their definition of trans, we could refactor it to something like:

"Trans: An umbrella term to describe people whose innate sense of their own gender is not ..... the sex they were assigned at birth".

So being trans depends on an "innate sense of gender" (ISOG)? How do we know what our own ISOG is? Its not our sex, it can't be all that cultural stuff, because surely, cultural stuff is not innate. Its not our body, its not how we behave, stonewall tells us that:

How a person chooses to outwardly express their gender, within the context of societal expectations of gender. A person who does not conform to societal expectations of gender may not, however, identify as trans.

So the only way of knowing what someone’s “innate sense of their own gender” is , is to ask them, and all they can base their reply on is what they believe. There are no tests, no numbers, no bacillus on a slide, no chromatograph. All that’s left is a belief about our own sense of gender - "I think I believe I feel like a woman/man".

Can we really be mistaken about what we believe? Can we think we believe something, only to find out later that we only thought we believe something? I’m not a philosopher, the nearest thing I can think of is religious faith

So who is really trans and who is really trans, Who really believes they are trans and who only thought they believed they were trans?

Or is it all just bollocks?