When Gender Theorists Attack

There is coming a profound change in identity affirmation politics. Prepare yourself to beat it off with an unlubed stick

From my Substack yesterday, ICYMI:

If ‘gender’ is a social construct, then each person’s gender can be determined by that person’s self-perception as it interacts with the outside world. Since there is no limiting factor on what potential experiences can make up a self perception — and no rule dictating the precise ratio of feelings and experiences that create the constructed identity — it follows that “gender identity” has no coherent limits: there can potentially exist as many gender identities as there are people.

So congrats, queer theorists: you’ve spent countless years and spilled millions of words to create a verbally-larded and intellectually pretentious synonym for ‘individual.’

Next time save yourself the time and effort and just ask a conservative.

Today I’d like to expand on this a bit, because — while most academics are parrots for the current trendy “orthodoxy” — some are clever enough to recognize when they’ve been backed into an intellectual corner and need an escape hatch that extricates them from the immolation of their prior suppositions, often as such suppositions begin falling prey to opposing arguments that increasingly gain social and intellectual purchase.

To that end, there are some gender theorists who are pivoting away from the idea that gender is a social construct, claiming instead it is a behavioral condition impelled by brain chemistry that then outwardly manifests. Thus, it is part of a person’s biology — and as such, denying that person’s gender is a form of physical annihilation.

Leaving aside the depressing determinism and fatalism inherent in such a thesis — you are but a collection of your brain chemistry — the question becomes how we treat the body or “gender” dysmorphia that results from what is now framed as a neuro-chemical precondition.

LGBTQI+ activists argue that such a condition must be affirmed; that a person’s truth is his or her own and cannot be challenged without denying that person’s humanity. And yet which disorders come to count as needing affirmation are entirely capricious; most activists, academics, or medical doctors wouldn’t argue, for instance, that anorexia or xenomelia should be treated similarly.

Which creates a bind for gender theorists: Either we are able to help people with rare brain chemistry disorders — and your brain telling your body that it doesn’t coincide with the body’s chromosomal makeup is a disordering of the male / female design — or we are not; and if we are not, psychology and psychiatry dissolve into pleasing fantasy. But I would argue that having not yet found a “cure” for every disorder is not an invitation to embrace those disorders as forms of liberation. I know a cop-out when I see one.

The fact is, we have been able to treat neuro-chemical brain disorders — not all, not yet, but many — both with behavioral therapy and / or medication. So why would we treat “gender” dysmorphia — which is now being posited as a biological malady — so differently? Why the impulse to affirm some disorders and fret over others?

I’ve heard it argued that something like anorexia manifests itself physically in a way so-called gender dysphoria does not. That is, that the neuro-chemical disorder produces obvious signifiers of outward physical distress easily recognizable to both the clinician and even a lay interpreter. How this is different from dysmorphia, the argument goes, is that gender confusion does not always manifest physically and obviously — that people keep bottled in their real neuro-chemical gender identities to avoid social stigma and to keep from giving expression to their own bodily self loathing. And this they conclude is the proximate cause for such high rates of suicide among transgendered people. Therefore, affirming the person is, it follows— while in one sense a reinforcement of a neuro-chemical disorder — in a strictly therapeutic sense, the best way to treat the underlying condition.

The main problem with such a conclusion is that the data simply don’t support such an approach (though you’ll often be assured otherwise) — and more, that there is little attempt to differentiate between those exceedingly rare instances of actual body dysmorphia (0.58% of the US population in 2016), and the exponentially-increasing cases of a social contagion — “gender dysphoria” — that drafts off the disorder and is used as justification to begin transitioning children.

The incentive structure, both financially and socially, thanks to the adoption of intersectionality to rank the various identity groups in a political and social hierarchy of claimed grievance, is toward affirmation. The medical industry gets rich and is able to virtue signal, while academic departments get rich churning out activists who provide the pseudo-intellectual justifications for mutilation and an end to the primacy of parent-child relationships. In exchange, they offer us hormone blockers, the removal of healthy body parts, risky surgeries, and the therapeutic “expertise” of the anointed, enlightened cultural relativists posing as sober creators and caretakers of the New Man. The nuclear family is oppressive. The kindergarten teacher with the rainbow hair and the cat eye glasses is the liberator.

But the burgeoning argument that, in the case of “dysphoria,” the neuro-chemical condition doesn’t necessarily physically manifest, is a dubious one: to the person with the disorder, having the sexual organs and hormone combinations of his birth sex would seemingly qualify as an outward manifestation of the disorder: my brain tells me I’m not a male; my junk offers a compelling retort. Hence, body dysmorphia. But because “interpreters” of sexual signifiers may not be aware of or privy to that physical manifestation doesn’t mean there isn’t one; and yet those who are trying to save the linguistic category of gender from its own inherent failings as a useful identity category pretend they don’t exist.

Being confused about your sex is a disorder. Being anorexic is a disorder. Becoming a serial killer potentially has less to do with free will than it does with an array of neuro-chemical disorders. This is why I reference dysmorphia rather than the more benign and popularized “gender dysphoria,” which carries with it the presupposition that sex and gender are indeed separable — though only when separating them helps justify inconsistencies in treatment for neuro-chemical disorders, it would seem. Which is to say, the very descriptor begs the question.

We don’t affirm anorexics as trans-obese, as Matt Walsh has reminded us. Similarly, we shouldn’t treat serial killers as trans-party planners who “identify” as ligatures, plastic garbage bags, duct tape, reciprocating saws, and shallow graves.

Either we recognize and treat brain disorders or we humor them. In the case of the anorexic, to affirm her would be to help precipitate her death. In the case of a psychopath with a history of head trauma, to affirm his self-identity would be to help strangle and dismember innocents, rendering them the collateral damage of an empowering identity affirmation.

The term “gender” itself has been appropriated from linguistics and given a place of social and academic privilege it hasn’t earned. It is a poorly-constructed extended metaphor attempting to pass for a scientific or social truth — even as its founder’s own theses proved both wrongheaded and, ultimately, deadly. We don’t need it outside of linguistics, where it’s used as an indicator in a second-order system of signification in certain languages.

We used to know all of this.

That we’ve learned to pretend otherwise is merely a symptom of the attempt by would-be authoritarians to make us concede, with absolute belief, that 2+2 = 5.

Reject such obvious conditioning.