When I read about cases like yours, it sounds so different from teens like mine, where there sure seems like there was no history of dysphoria and then “rapid onset” happens.
This is one of my deepest concerns. Girls who were never even tomboys suddenly getting medical treatment. So obviously the result of some kind of social contagion through political propaganda. I'm very sorry to say that feminism has some part to play in this making girls feel that they are missing out on something.
Appreciate Claire’s willingness to put out her thoughts. So many questions! For instance, you say you felt a thrill being called ‘her’. Do you get occasionally misgendered (called sir) and, if so does it bother you? I’ve gotten that, embarrassingly (called sir or monsieur when, I’m not!) Kinda bothers. Sometimes I correct (‘Je ne suis pas un homme’). Mostly I don’t say anything. Told that to a woman in a gay bar (back in the 80’s) who said she felt like a gay man in a woman’s body. She (now he?) said “I wish that happened to me!” I attribute it to being a tall, big woman with a low voice (shrugs)? Can’t find clothes or shoes in ‘womens’ sizes so I try to find feminine looking (?) men’s shoes, teeshirts, etc) as much as possible.
Heck, going into music school I discovered I had a tenor range! So they put me in the middle of the choir, next to the men, so it wouldn’t be so obvious. Didn’t mind, tenor is a lovely range. Even found youtubes of famous tenor women.
I found this very disturbing. It seems to be more of the ‘true trans’ mythology with an unchallenged belief that he belongs somehow in women’s spaces because he is post-op. It’s just so misogynistic because women are just background noise, our objection not considered important enough to even register. What about the recent years where women have said a resounding no?
If you could find it within yourself to read Claire's book, you'll find that she is well aware of social norms surrounding spaces and sensitive to those norms and by no means out to upset the apple cart. I'd warrant that if you did not know her, she could walk into a women's restroom that you were using, discreetly take care of her business, and you would b none the wiser. In the article she clearly states her position on sports (transwomen should not be in women's sports) and on prisons. I can't remember her touching on women' shelters for abuse and rape, etc. but I'n sure she would be off the mind that those spaces should only be staffed by females.
Frankly if all people that had transitioned conducted that process and behaved afterwards like Claire, ie just lived their life being sensitive to societal norms, this whole thing about gende would be a non issue.
I reject the whole idea that there is something lacking “within” myself because I am pointing out the obvious - a man interviewing a man with complete complacency and lack of acknowledgment that him being in women’s spaces is an imposition. This is not about whether he passes or not - that can’t be a criteria for making spaces mixed sex. Here he is on changing rooms and prisons:
“I mean, I haven't been in a shared changing room for a very long time. But if I did, well, at least I wouldn't be embarrassed in that way.”
As for women’s prisons, Claire said, “There seems to be a number of people who suddenly decide they're transexual the moment they're sentenced to prison. It's just obvious that this is just a ploy that this is to get access to women's spaces.”
However, if someone has “gone through the proper process that’s taken several years” and had reassignment surgery, Claire said, she doesn’t see a problem with the individual being placed in a women’s prison, “especially for a white-collar crime or a driving offense or something.” She added, “I think it should be fairly obvious to the authorities which people should be allowed in women's prisons.””
This is the ‘true trans’ idea, that somehow making an effort makes a man eligible to enter women’s spaces. I am challenging that. It’s not a competition to see which man is more sympathetic, and I am not lacking if I challenge that.
I agree that there are a host of important reasons why women’s prisons need to be separate from men’s, and how men identify and/or what procedures they have undergone do not change this. I do think men have a far greater tendency than women to feel competent to weigh in when it is clear, as in this case, that they are not doing so from a position of actual expertise. For expert information on this issue, I recommend Keep Prisons Single Sex USA: https://usa.kpssinfo.org/
Obviously there will be nothing I can say to influence your views if you came to this blog with the firm belief that there is no 'true trans' experience.
The whole myth of ‘true trans’ hasn’t survived scrutiny. As the joke goes: ‘What’s the difference between a transsexual and a transvestite? About 18 months.’
When TRAs started yelling ‘no debate’, women carried on debating. A lot of reading, discussion, research. Books, essays, podcasts. We formed new organisations. We are having speaking events, conferences. I’ve met with local and national politicians to discuss how this issue affects women’s rights. Do you really think that ‘true trans’ as an idea can survive the scrutiny? It’s too late. The transsexual effort to preserve the ‘true trans’ idea petered out in 2018. Brianna Wu is trying to revive it, but telling people not to listen to ‘Terfs’ because ‘their brains are cooked’ isn’t going as well as he hoped.
It is now almost fifty years since I had knowingly had any contact with a member of the Beaumont Society, and I was never a member. I certainly understand that there are wives of members who have taken second place in their husband's lives. Obviously this is not a good state of affairs, but this in no way has anything to do with me.
To throw a cat amongst the pigeons perhaps I should mention that since completing my medical transition I've had relationships with two lesbians (25 years apart).
They both initiated the relationships, and they both considered it a lesbian relationship. Make of it what you will. That came from them.
Thanks for your response, I hope I indicated uncertainty in my expression of different ideas, of course you're welcome to challenge them.
I understand that my response could be taken as judgemental or overly personal, I suppose I am reacting against people in the broader public who latch on to narratives as evidence of metaphysical claims that then support their desired ideology.
But as well as having concerns around child safeguarding, I am actually interested in the many ideas that come up around trans identity, which touches on philosophy, psychology, history and basic questions around what is identity, and what is it to be a Self? So don't fear that I am some dreadful transphobe that has it in for you, live your best life as you see fit.
But when it comes to questions like ‘what is trans’ then we can all have a view and there should be no sacred cows. I happen to think that the culture bound discussion of trans isn't sufficiently appreciated. Clearly the prevalence of trans has gone up, even before the recent ROGD cohort. I think trans relates to modern identity and while there might be some underlying factors it is constructed as a cultural phenomenon. Obviously there's AGP articulations as fetish type learned behaviors or a kind of sexuality, there's also considering trans against other types of identity issues as a broader class. There's also the traditional transexual narratives from born in the wrong body to medical treatment for dysphoria, and then the postmodern turn with transgenderism. Now I'd argue it's turned to a cultural contagion phenomenon. As I say, I'm interested in ideas.
The observation that lesbians feel they are in a lesbian relationship with you is interesting but carries low epistemic weight. First, what does that mean for them, male homosexuals can feel typically heterosexual and still engage in gay sex, the mental attitude and self understanding are part of the story but not the whole story.
Also while I think gender is flexible it's important to be clear with what is real (eg what is a woman?) and if it's flexible and natural to be on a spectrum how do we defend the desire for surgeries and medical treatment. Why couldn't it be possible to live with varied gender expression without changing the body, which seems socially regressive to me.
Thanks for your interesting comment and proving you aren't a dreadful transphobe LOL
I agree with you that it raises philosophical questions and I have addressed this to some degree in the post I made on my own page about CS Lewis and his views, an unlikely person you might think but possibly the only person to use the word 'transsexual' between Magnus Hirschfeld and Harry Benjamin.
I agree with you about how it has become a constructed cultural phenomenon and a lot to do with cultural contagion. There are of course many aspects to this but I think the Butler direction taken from Foucault in the '90s is the key one ideologically.
About the lesbians. I'm not saying definitively that that 'makes me a woman' but to establish that there are different parameters at work here and these women were willing to accept me as such when it comes to people arguing over whether I 'should be allowed' to use women's toilets.
Frankly, why don't they just come out and say that they want to publicly humiliate me by forcing me to use men's toilets?
When I was taken ill some years ago and had to spend a couple of nights in hospital I was put in a female ward. I didn't have to say anything, it just happened. I don't think the nursing staff (at the hospital where I was once a nurse myself) would be willing to put someone like me in a men's ward and besides, all the men would be saying like what?
One of the principle ideas behind making laws is that they should take in all factors and not just to be ruled by one consideration as the hard gencrits try to argue. Surely bodily morphology and social perception count for something?
Lewis is interesting on nature which provoked a thought, if transhumanism is the trajectory which some trans advocates point to, disregarding our biological nature say, what is the nature that drives the transhumanism? I guess it could be contingent, ie chaotic, or Hegelian towards something divine or morally neutral? Others might invoke ‘the machine’… Anyway, excuse me if this is well outside your scope of interest, but was led to a Lewis essay by your prompt.
Well after being called a transphobe constantly you’ll excuse me for being sensitive to it.
Interesting about CS Lewis, he was a thoughtful person so I'll look out for his perspective.
I think the ship has sailed with automatic accomodation for transexuals. When sex reassignment surgery (a misnomer really) was common and transexuals were rare, accomodation happened quietly without much fuss.
In the current environment, with self-ID and a whole host of divergent people, including male sex offenders, wanting to assert their rights to women's spaces and actually getting support through some flabby legal reasoning, then feminists understandably are resisting the prior accomodations. You might like to reflect that the changes you desire also remove women’s rights based on sex class.
In practice it will be contextual and accomodations can be made. A passing trans-identified man could continue to use bathrooms without fear, though other contexts such as hospitals and changing room might depend on genitalia. Sports should hew to biological advantage and actual sex/testosterone tests. Third spaces will become more common.
It's weird because sex is both undermined and made more important/essentialist than it really is. But if we remove the basis of sex being biological, then we have an incoherent category. The solution is treating people ‘as-if’ they were the opposite sex but too many people are wanting to claim this category.
Of course your last sentence is the case. The entire point of my book is that this category has been infiltrated, colonised and weaponised.
But those such as myself who have quietly integrated and assimilated into society, and contributed to it, should not be punished retrospectively for what we did which was accepted by society at the time and even passed into law (although the 2004 Act is greatly flawed) now that the situation has been abused.
Acceptance of what has passed into cultural custom is part of common law. We seem to be facing a pushback at the abuses of this acceptance which could amount to a purge, a pogrom against those of us who have been accepted in society for decades.
Thanks for a great and sane article. I am gender critical but what Claire says is known by me...but hard to say in the midst of all the shouting and nastiness. We're all human beings.
I must read her book. But what isn't talked about here is the sexual fetishism and agp aspect. I read Conundrum but felt there was a lot unsaid and I thinkJan Morris was rather more complex and perhaps less honest/ nice than s/he wanted people to see.
I'm planning to write about AGP at some point in my own Substack, but one thing I would like to say beforehand is that AGP as described by Blanchard is an acquired sexual paraphilia. So wanting to be a girl from one's earliest memories can hardly be considered as such. However, repressing one's wish can certainly leave someone seriously bent out of shape by having to go through a male puberty. My body was at war with me and itself.
So, Claire's story (“I was someone who, from the earliest memory, felt that their body was wrong, and however much I tried to correct myself, it was completely irreversible,”) seems to vindicate the trans activists and trans allies, including parents, who say to listen to the children because they know. There really is such a thing as a trans kid!
This presents a conceptual and strategic dilemma for sex realists. It means trans isn't just a social construct. There may be children who would actually benefit from social transition. Some of them might not even experience body dysphoria or suffer from comorbidities.
Sex realists will point to Claire and others like Claire to call for more stringent gatekeeping to separate the so-called "trans kids" who are actually future gays or lesbians or victims of virtue signaling parents trying to score points from the little boys and girls who are correct when they say they feel their body is wrong. Trans activists, on the other hand, will want to use Claire to finish bashing down the few gatekeeping functions that exist.
Then there's the quagmire the adolescent gender mess. How are we supposed to distinguish the Claires among the gender distressed from the trans trenders (you know they're out there) and the unfortunate teens who've gotten their wires very badly crossed?
I don't pretend to have answers except that giving in to the trans lobby would betray the majority of the gender questioning for whom transitioning would likely be a terrible and irreversible mistake.
The main problem we face at present is the politicising of 'trans' and the propaganda contagion experienced by young people. I was sui generis back in my day because there were no outside influences. I don't know what the answer is except to exercise more discernment. And take time. Don't jump to conclusions.
I'm just very worried that we are close to 'morally mandating transsexualism out of existence' as Janice Raymond argued 45 years ago.
It's not a 'moral' question in the sense that she meant.
Interesting read, but in the end Claire and the sympathetic transexual cohort falls short of what is needed to escape judgment unscathed. Instead of a meek assertIon that "I have deep reservations about these things" a solid "NO" is required.
I think you've missed my point. The title of my book refers to the ideological war that has been waged on gender in the last couple of decades, which is surely the case?
Thank you for sharing this story. I hope to read your book and hope you might read mine as well. (The Trans Train: A Parent's Perspective on Transgender Ideology and Medicalizaton). I appreciate this respectful discussion of complex issues.
Sounds like a confused person from his narratives. No judgement there, many of us are, but not much insight to be had.
The latent features I picked up that I got were a persistent dysphoria that has been the focus of his life, AGP type desires (wanted to be the women during sex) and ambivalent outcomes. This is from a pretty skeptical stance admittedly but one of the systemic problems of this issue since it's onset is taking first-person narratives at face value and neglecting the unreliable narrator and motivated reasoning that is really the first learning of practical psychology.
I mean I'm assuming there are other boys with feminine tastes, features and elevated estrogen that don't experience dysphoria, so what is it that makes people dysphoric? Early negative experiences or parental failures are often dismissed by people who have actually dismal childhoods. I'm not saying I know more about the narrators life than he does but I don't need to take it as gospel either. I think in terms of a normative human psychology we have to accept something abnormal like dysphoria is pathological, ie results from a condition.
From my uneducated speculation, it sits more within identity formation with layers of gendered content, perhaps because of underlying effeminacy- but the condition itself relates to identity alongside other conditions of the experiential self like dissociation, depersonalisation. There's also something about confusing the narrative self with Being.
But I don't think true trans exists and I can't see it as healthy outcome for someone to manage a psychological condition by acting as if they are someone they are not. Even starlets like Christine Jorgensen, one of the original true transexuals, seems on my admittedly limited reading to have had an ambivalent existence.
Most likely of all we need to appreciate the culture bound layer that makes ideas available (ie through influential books, Jorgensen had a copy of The Male Hormone which influenced her). A subset of transexuals are adamant (don't you find so many to be adamant?) their story runs different to the new generation of 'transgenderists', but both narratives were provided by the culture for the autobiographical self to take up. Now we are seeing a confused consumer gender medicine, cosmetic surgery narrative that is about embodiment goals and there is rearguard action here because the transexuals know they have the most palatable/believable version of the trans narrative.
Claire is so based! She’s a great example of how so many trans people are just trying to figure out what’s best for their lives and happiness. It’s the loudest, most upsetting people who get the most attention
Thankyou Hyggieia! I wish people would take your view instead of accusing us unjustly of all sorts of things. If the crazy activists weren't causing so much trouble I never would have needed to write my book. I saw this coming ten years ago when I started writing it.
I’ve been thinking recently that similar to the civil right movement in the 60s, we’ll see a middle ground common sense movement come about that most people will support. In the 60s, we had extremists on either side with people like Malcom X and then hateful segregationists. MLKs movement was a peaceful middle ground and his version of civil rights is what found success. Right now with trans rights we have trans activists with unrealistic and unpopular demands like early childhood medical interventions and trans women in female sports, then fully exclusionary GC people on the other side. Whereas when you poll everyday Americans, they support trans rights for access to trans healthcare for adults, anti discrimination laws, but oppose things like pediatric medical interventions and want common sense regulations for fairness in sport. There’s no large movement to speak to that middle ground, and I think we’ll see more peace in the gender debates once we have a movement that arises from the middle.
We need to pull down the extreme rights activists and their propaganda while at the same time getting the gencrits to accept that transsexualism *does* exist but needs firm triage and gatekeeping to avoid serious abuses of all sorts.
Well written. Nice to see an article about an old school AGP that isn’t some creepy person wanting in. Lesbian dating app which seems to be so many of the AGP males these days.
I am not "AGP". To suggest this is to believe that a child of four can acquire a sexual paraphilia. Nonsense! Read my book to find out about the neurodevelopmental background to this.
A thoughtful and sensitive exchange between Claire and Ben. It left me with hope. Thanks for the article and sharing Clair's story.
Thanks a lot Ray. And you give me hope that there are people who are willing to listen and treat my story with respect.
Grateful for Claire's integrity. Live not by lies.
Thankyou Jeff.
Claire seems like a saint!
I'm very flattered that you might think so! LOL
When I read about cases like yours, it sounds so different from teens like mine, where there sure seems like there was no history of dysphoria and then “rapid onset” happens.
This is one of my deepest concerns. Girls who were never even tomboys suddenly getting medical treatment. So obviously the result of some kind of social contagion through political propaganda. I'm very sorry to say that feminism has some part to play in this making girls feel that they are missing out on something.
Appreciate Claire’s willingness to put out her thoughts. So many questions! For instance, you say you felt a thrill being called ‘her’. Do you get occasionally misgendered (called sir) and, if so does it bother you? I’ve gotten that, embarrassingly (called sir or monsieur when, I’m not!) Kinda bothers. Sometimes I correct (‘Je ne suis pas un homme’). Mostly I don’t say anything. Told that to a woman in a gay bar (back in the 80’s) who said she felt like a gay man in a woman’s body. She (now he?) said “I wish that happened to me!” I attribute it to being a tall, big woman with a low voice (shrugs)? Can’t find clothes or shoes in ‘womens’ sizes so I try to find feminine looking (?) men’s shoes, teeshirts, etc) as much as possible.
Heck, going into music school I discovered I had a tenor range! So they put me in the middle of the choir, next to the men, so it wouldn’t be so obvious. Didn’t mind, tenor is a lovely range. Even found youtubes of famous tenor women.
Thanks again for your story!
I found this very disturbing. It seems to be more of the ‘true trans’ mythology with an unchallenged belief that he belongs somehow in women’s spaces because he is post-op. It’s just so misogynistic because women are just background noise, our objection not considered important enough to even register. What about the recent years where women have said a resounding no?
If you could find it within yourself to read Claire's book, you'll find that she is well aware of social norms surrounding spaces and sensitive to those norms and by no means out to upset the apple cart. I'd warrant that if you did not know her, she could walk into a women's restroom that you were using, discreetly take care of her business, and you would b none the wiser. In the article she clearly states her position on sports (transwomen should not be in women's sports) and on prisons. I can't remember her touching on women' shelters for abuse and rape, etc. but I'n sure she would be off the mind that those spaces should only be staffed by females.
Frankly if all people that had transitioned conducted that process and behaved afterwards like Claire, ie just lived their life being sensitive to societal norms, this whole thing about gende would be a non issue.
I reject the whole idea that there is something lacking “within” myself because I am pointing out the obvious - a man interviewing a man with complete complacency and lack of acknowledgment that him being in women’s spaces is an imposition. This is not about whether he passes or not - that can’t be a criteria for making spaces mixed sex. Here he is on changing rooms and prisons:
“I mean, I haven't been in a shared changing room for a very long time. But if I did, well, at least I wouldn't be embarrassed in that way.”
As for women’s prisons, Claire said, “There seems to be a number of people who suddenly decide they're transexual the moment they're sentenced to prison. It's just obvious that this is just a ploy that this is to get access to women's spaces.”
However, if someone has “gone through the proper process that’s taken several years” and had reassignment surgery, Claire said, she doesn’t see a problem with the individual being placed in a women’s prison, “especially for a white-collar crime or a driving offense or something.” She added, “I think it should be fairly obvious to the authorities which people should be allowed in women's prisons.””
This is the ‘true trans’ idea, that somehow making an effort makes a man eligible to enter women’s spaces. I am challenging that. It’s not a competition to see which man is more sympathetic, and I am not lacking if I challenge that.
I agree that there are a host of important reasons why women’s prisons need to be separate from men’s, and how men identify and/or what procedures they have undergone do not change this. I do think men have a far greater tendency than women to feel competent to weigh in when it is clear, as in this case, that they are not doing so from a position of actual expertise. For expert information on this issue, I recommend Keep Prisons Single Sex USA: https://usa.kpssinfo.org/
Obviously there will be nothing I can say to influence your views if you came to this blog with the firm belief that there is no 'true trans' experience.
The whole myth of ‘true trans’ hasn’t survived scrutiny. As the joke goes: ‘What’s the difference between a transsexual and a transvestite? About 18 months.’
And so in two lines you dismiss the entire subject.
I think I did it neatly in the first line tbh :-)
When TRAs started yelling ‘no debate’, women carried on debating. A lot of reading, discussion, research. Books, essays, podcasts. We formed new organisations. We are having speaking events, conferences. I’ve met with local and national politicians to discuss how this issue affects women’s rights. Do you really think that ‘true trans’ as an idea can survive the scrutiny? It’s too late. The transsexual effort to preserve the ‘true trans’ idea petered out in 2018. Brianna Wu is trying to revive it, but telling people not to listen to ‘Terfs’ because ‘their brains are cooked’ isn’t going as well as he hoped.
The article mentions the Beaumont society - here is a blog about the society relating stories from the wives of these transexuals.
https://gendercriticalwoman.blog/tag/transvestites/
It is now almost fifty years since I had knowingly had any contact with a member of the Beaumont Society, and I was never a member. I certainly understand that there are wives of members who have taken second place in their husband's lives. Obviously this is not a good state of affairs, but this in no way has anything to do with me.
To throw a cat amongst the pigeons perhaps I should mention that since completing my medical transition I've had relationships with two lesbians (25 years apart).
They both initiated the relationships, and they both considered it a lesbian relationship. Make of it what you will. That came from them.
Thanks for your response, I hope I indicated uncertainty in my expression of different ideas, of course you're welcome to challenge them.
I understand that my response could be taken as judgemental or overly personal, I suppose I am reacting against people in the broader public who latch on to narratives as evidence of metaphysical claims that then support their desired ideology.
But as well as having concerns around child safeguarding, I am actually interested in the many ideas that come up around trans identity, which touches on philosophy, psychology, history and basic questions around what is identity, and what is it to be a Self? So don't fear that I am some dreadful transphobe that has it in for you, live your best life as you see fit.
But when it comes to questions like ‘what is trans’ then we can all have a view and there should be no sacred cows. I happen to think that the culture bound discussion of trans isn't sufficiently appreciated. Clearly the prevalence of trans has gone up, even before the recent ROGD cohort. I think trans relates to modern identity and while there might be some underlying factors it is constructed as a cultural phenomenon. Obviously there's AGP articulations as fetish type learned behaviors or a kind of sexuality, there's also considering trans against other types of identity issues as a broader class. There's also the traditional transexual narratives from born in the wrong body to medical treatment for dysphoria, and then the postmodern turn with transgenderism. Now I'd argue it's turned to a cultural contagion phenomenon. As I say, I'm interested in ideas.
The observation that lesbians feel they are in a lesbian relationship with you is interesting but carries low epistemic weight. First, what does that mean for them, male homosexuals can feel typically heterosexual and still engage in gay sex, the mental attitude and self understanding are part of the story but not the whole story.
Also while I think gender is flexible it's important to be clear with what is real (eg what is a woman?) and if it's flexible and natural to be on a spectrum how do we defend the desire for surgeries and medical treatment. Why couldn't it be possible to live with varied gender expression without changing the body, which seems socially regressive to me.
Thanks for your interesting comment and proving you aren't a dreadful transphobe LOL
I agree with you that it raises philosophical questions and I have addressed this to some degree in the post I made on my own page about CS Lewis and his views, an unlikely person you might think but possibly the only person to use the word 'transsexual' between Magnus Hirschfeld and Harry Benjamin.
I agree with you about how it has become a constructed cultural phenomenon and a lot to do with cultural contagion. There are of course many aspects to this but I think the Butler direction taken from Foucault in the '90s is the key one ideologically.
About the lesbians. I'm not saying definitively that that 'makes me a woman' but to establish that there are different parameters at work here and these women were willing to accept me as such when it comes to people arguing over whether I 'should be allowed' to use women's toilets.
Frankly, why don't they just come out and say that they want to publicly humiliate me by forcing me to use men's toilets?
When I was taken ill some years ago and had to spend a couple of nights in hospital I was put in a female ward. I didn't have to say anything, it just happened. I don't think the nursing staff (at the hospital where I was once a nurse myself) would be willing to put someone like me in a men's ward and besides, all the men would be saying like what?
One of the principle ideas behind making laws is that they should take in all factors and not just to be ruled by one consideration as the hard gencrits try to argue. Surely bodily morphology and social perception count for something?
Lewis is interesting on nature which provoked a thought, if transhumanism is the trajectory which some trans advocates point to, disregarding our biological nature say, what is the nature that drives the transhumanism? I guess it could be contingent, ie chaotic, or Hegelian towards something divine or morally neutral? Others might invoke ‘the machine’… Anyway, excuse me if this is well outside your scope of interest, but was led to a Lewis essay by your prompt.
https://americanreformer.org/2023/06/c-s-lewis-and-trans-everything/
Well after being called a transphobe constantly you’ll excuse me for being sensitive to it.
Interesting about CS Lewis, he was a thoughtful person so I'll look out for his perspective.
I think the ship has sailed with automatic accomodation for transexuals. When sex reassignment surgery (a misnomer really) was common and transexuals were rare, accomodation happened quietly without much fuss.
In the current environment, with self-ID and a whole host of divergent people, including male sex offenders, wanting to assert their rights to women's spaces and actually getting support through some flabby legal reasoning, then feminists understandably are resisting the prior accomodations. You might like to reflect that the changes you desire also remove women’s rights based on sex class.
In practice it will be contextual and accomodations can be made. A passing trans-identified man could continue to use bathrooms without fear, though other contexts such as hospitals and changing room might depend on genitalia. Sports should hew to biological advantage and actual sex/testosterone tests. Third spaces will become more common.
It's weird because sex is both undermined and made more important/essentialist than it really is. But if we remove the basis of sex being biological, then we have an incoherent category. The solution is treating people ‘as-if’ they were the opposite sex but too many people are wanting to claim this category.
Of course your last sentence is the case. The entire point of my book is that this category has been infiltrated, colonised and weaponised.
But those such as myself who have quietly integrated and assimilated into society, and contributed to it, should not be punished retrospectively for what we did which was accepted by society at the time and even passed into law (although the 2004 Act is greatly flawed) now that the situation has been abused.
Acceptance of what has passed into cultural custom is part of common law. We seem to be facing a pushback at the abuses of this acceptance which could amount to a purge, a pogrom against those of us who have been accepted in society for decades.
Thanks for a great and sane article. I am gender critical but what Claire says is known by me...but hard to say in the midst of all the shouting and nastiness. We're all human beings.
I must read her book. But what isn't talked about here is the sexual fetishism and agp aspect. I read Conundrum but felt there was a lot unsaid and I thinkJan Morris was rather more complex and perhaps less honest/ nice than s/he wanted people to see.
I send Claire love.
Thankyou Lyn.
I'm planning to write about AGP at some point in my own Substack, but one thing I would like to say beforehand is that AGP as described by Blanchard is an acquired sexual paraphilia. So wanting to be a girl from one's earliest memories can hardly be considered as such. However, repressing one's wish can certainly leave someone seriously bent out of shape by having to go through a male puberty. My body was at war with me and itself.
So, Claire's story (“I was someone who, from the earliest memory, felt that their body was wrong, and however much I tried to correct myself, it was completely irreversible,”) seems to vindicate the trans activists and trans allies, including parents, who say to listen to the children because they know. There really is such a thing as a trans kid!
This presents a conceptual and strategic dilemma for sex realists. It means trans isn't just a social construct. There may be children who would actually benefit from social transition. Some of them might not even experience body dysphoria or suffer from comorbidities.
Sex realists will point to Claire and others like Claire to call for more stringent gatekeeping to separate the so-called "trans kids" who are actually future gays or lesbians or victims of virtue signaling parents trying to score points from the little boys and girls who are correct when they say they feel their body is wrong. Trans activists, on the other hand, will want to use Claire to finish bashing down the few gatekeeping functions that exist.
Then there's the quagmire the adolescent gender mess. How are we supposed to distinguish the Claires among the gender distressed from the trans trenders (you know they're out there) and the unfortunate teens who've gotten their wires very badly crossed?
I don't pretend to have answers except that giving in to the trans lobby would betray the majority of the gender questioning for whom transitioning would likely be a terrible and irreversible mistake.
The main problem we face at present is the politicising of 'trans' and the propaganda contagion experienced by young people. I was sui generis back in my day because there were no outside influences. I don't know what the answer is except to exercise more discernment. And take time. Don't jump to conclusions.
I'm just very worried that we are close to 'morally mandating transsexualism out of existence' as Janice Raymond argued 45 years ago.
It's not a 'moral' question in the sense that she meant.
Thank you Claire for sharing your story. May you continue to have a good life.
Thankyou Polly. It's people like you who will help us get through this in one piece.
Interesting read, but in the end Claire and the sympathetic transexual cohort falls short of what is needed to escape judgment unscathed. Instead of a meek assertIon that "I have deep reservations about these things" a solid "NO" is required.
You just want me to put things in your words. I doubt that I could say anything that would satisfy you.
War on gender?
Kinda like the vast majority of us standing against this whole gender bullshit fad?
I think you've missed my point. The title of my book refers to the ideological war that has been waged on gender in the last couple of decades, which is surely the case?
Thank you for sharing this story. I hope to read your book and hope you might read mine as well. (The Trans Train: A Parent's Perspective on Transgender Ideology and Medicalizaton). I appreciate this respectful discussion of complex issues.
Thankyou Eyes. I'll have a look for your book. I'm guessing at what some of it may be about and I hope things haven't been too awful in that respect.
Sounds like a confused person from his narratives. No judgement there, many of us are, but not much insight to be had.
The latent features I picked up that I got were a persistent dysphoria that has been the focus of his life, AGP type desires (wanted to be the women during sex) and ambivalent outcomes. This is from a pretty skeptical stance admittedly but one of the systemic problems of this issue since it's onset is taking first-person narratives at face value and neglecting the unreliable narrator and motivated reasoning that is really the first learning of practical psychology.
I mean I'm assuming there are other boys with feminine tastes, features and elevated estrogen that don't experience dysphoria, so what is it that makes people dysphoric? Early negative experiences or parental failures are often dismissed by people who have actually dismal childhoods. I'm not saying I know more about the narrators life than he does but I don't need to take it as gospel either. I think in terms of a normative human psychology we have to accept something abnormal like dysphoria is pathological, ie results from a condition.
From my uneducated speculation, it sits more within identity formation with layers of gendered content, perhaps because of underlying effeminacy- but the condition itself relates to identity alongside other conditions of the experiential self like dissociation, depersonalisation. There's also something about confusing the narrative self with Being.
But I don't think true trans exists and I can't see it as healthy outcome for someone to manage a psychological condition by acting as if they are someone they are not. Even starlets like Christine Jorgensen, one of the original true transexuals, seems on my admittedly limited reading to have had an ambivalent existence.
Most likely of all we need to appreciate the culture bound layer that makes ideas available (ie through influential books, Jorgensen had a copy of The Male Hormone which influenced her). A subset of transexuals are adamant (don't you find so many to be adamant?) their story runs different to the new generation of 'transgenderists', but both narratives were provided by the culture for the autobiographical self to take up. Now we are seeing a confused consumer gender medicine, cosmetic surgery narrative that is about embodiment goals and there is rearguard action here because the transexuals know they have the most palatable/believable version of the trans narrative.
Yes, it comes from a condition, that condition being neurodevelopmental.
You seem to have come to this conversation with your own firm conclusions before you began.
Claire is so based! She’s a great example of how so many trans people are just trying to figure out what’s best for their lives and happiness. It’s the loudest, most upsetting people who get the most attention
Thankyou Hyggieia! I wish people would take your view instead of accusing us unjustly of all sorts of things. If the crazy activists weren't causing so much trouble I never would have needed to write my book. I saw this coming ten years ago when I started writing it.
I’ve been thinking recently that similar to the civil right movement in the 60s, we’ll see a middle ground common sense movement come about that most people will support. In the 60s, we had extremists on either side with people like Malcom X and then hateful segregationists. MLKs movement was a peaceful middle ground and his version of civil rights is what found success. Right now with trans rights we have trans activists with unrealistic and unpopular demands like early childhood medical interventions and trans women in female sports, then fully exclusionary GC people on the other side. Whereas when you poll everyday Americans, they support trans rights for access to trans healthcare for adults, anti discrimination laws, but oppose things like pediatric medical interventions and want common sense regulations for fairness in sport. There’s no large movement to speak to that middle ground, and I think we’ll see more peace in the gender debates once we have a movement that arises from the middle.
Very much what I am hoping for myself Hyggieia.
We need to pull down the extreme rights activists and their propaganda while at the same time getting the gencrits to accept that transsexualism *does* exist but needs firm triage and gatekeeping to avoid serious abuses of all sorts.
Well written. Nice to see an article about an old school AGP that isn’t some creepy person wanting in. Lesbian dating app which seems to be so many of the AGP males these days.
I am not "AGP". To suggest this is to believe that a child of four can acquire a sexual paraphilia. Nonsense! Read my book to find out about the neurodevelopmental background to this.
It has nothing to do with AGP.
Thankyou Mitja, I'm glad that some like you are willing to lend a listening ear.
Follow my blog on Substack. Thanks!
https://substack.com/@cosmicclaire