The text following the asterisks is Appendix 2 of the second edition of my book, Masculine Power, Feminine Beauty: The Volitional, Objective Basis for Heterosexuality in Romantic Love and Marriage. References appear at the end. Some of this content was published on this blog in 2015.
This content appears in an appendix, not the main body of the book, for two reasons. First, the book is about romantic love and sexual orientation, not sexual impersonation. Second, the book is primarily normative. As I have repeatedly emphasized, it is far more to important to discover, understand, and articulate the good than to expose the evil.
Nevertheless, transgenderism is part of the LGBTQ movement, and has the same ideological roots as the rest of the movement. Exposing the evil of transgenderism can sound an alarm. But if you want to read good stuff about the good stuff, that is what the book is for.
* * *
APPENDIX 2: TRANSGENDERISM
Several recent books and articles express common sense, backed by evidence, in opposition to the transgender craze. (See, for example, Littman 2018 and Evans and Evans 2021. See Kay 2019 for attempts by transgender activists to suppress Littman’s research. See also Anderson 2019, banned by Amazon, and Shrier 2020, banned by Target.) The following brief discussion identifies the fundamental of the matter.
The “Medical Clinical Policy Bulletin” on “Gender Affirming Surgery” published by the Aetna (2021) insurance company, states the following:
Aetna considers gender affirming surgery medically necessary when all of the following criteria are met:
I. Requirements for breast removal:
A. Single letter of referral from a qualified mental health professional (see Appendix); and
B. Persistent, well-documented gender dysphoria (see Appendix); and
C. Capacity to make a fully informed decision and to consent for treatment; and
D. For members less than 18 years of age, completion of one year of testosterone treatment; and
E. If significant medical or mental health concerns are present, they must be reasonably well controlled.
The document specifies similar “requirements” for “breast augmentation,” “gonadectomy,” and “genital reconstructive surgery.”
The afore-referenced Appendix states the following:
DSM 5 Criteria for Gender Dysphoria in Adults and Adolescents
I. A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, of at least 6 months duration, as manifested by two or more of the following:
A. A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and primary and/or secondary sex characteristics (or, in young adolescents, the anticipated secondary sex characteristics)
B. A strong desire to be rid of one’s primary and/or secondary sex characteristics because of a marked incongruence with one’s experienced/expressed gender (or, in young adolescents, a desire to prevent the development of the anticipated secondary sex characteristics)
C. A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics of the other gender
D. A strong desire to be of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)
E. A strong desire to be treated as the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)
F. A strong conviction that one has the typical feelings and reactions of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)
II. The condition is associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
Observe that the essential requirement for this major insurance company to pay for irreversible surgical alteration of sex organs is “a strong desire” that persists for six months. There is no requirement for any kind of objective, scientific evidence—no genetic evidence, no physical evidence of any kind—that the individual is anything other than his obvious biological sex. Other major insurance companies Anthem(2021), Cigna (2021), and Humana (2021) have similar policies (although the required duration of gender dysphoria may vary to as much as two years instead of six months).
Everyone who has ever been a parent or child knows that many, if not most, if not all, children experience uncertainty or fear about being a worthy and desirable exemplar of their biological sex. It is very common for a child to feel the desire to escape the fundamental human test of being worthy of one’s sex. Most children ultimately face their fear, recast their fear as excitement, and embrace their immutable identity as a man or woman. Transgenderism is a pandering to the fear, offering ignorant children a false escape from their immutable sexuality, feeding them a lifelong course of chemicals that put their body at war with itself, mutilating their sex organs, turning potential men and women into disintegrated monstrosities.
As with homosexuality, I am using stern language—for the same reason. It is one thing for an adult to mutilate his own body (using his own money, not socialized medicine). But to mutilate the body of a child? No language can be stern enough.
Evens and Evans 2021 would be worth quoting in its entirety, but here is one particularly poignant passage:
Moreover, in our experience, we have found that children wishing to transition subconsciously often hope that a parental figure will step in and help to identify and understand the part of the self that they are trying to discard. Some detransitioners mention, after the fact, that they were disappointed by doctors’ and therapists’ inability to stand up to their insistent demands for transition action.
The Human Rights Campaign is an organization that describes itself as “Leading the fight for LGBTQ rights.” It’s corporate “Platinum Partners” include American Airlines, Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Target, and UPS (https://www.hrc.org/about/corporate-partners). The organization’s website defines “cisgender” as follows:
Cisgender | A term used to describe a person whose gender identity aligns with those typically associated with the sex assigned to them at birth.
(https://www.hrc.org/resources/glossary-of-terms)
Note the phrase, “assigned to them at birth.” This phrase implies a status that is distinct from something identified as true or real. This thinking goes beyond “a strong desire” to be the opposite sex. The transgender people claim that they actually are the opposite sex. (This claim often is mediated by an invented term, “gender,” that is used as a surrogate for sex.) As the Aetna bulletin illustrates, this claim is based on feelings—not fact, not science, not reasoning.
But no one feels that he is a man, and no one feels that he is a woman. A man knows that he is a man, as a boy knows that he is a boy, by a combination of perceptual observation and conceptual thought. A boy observes perceptual differences between men and women, boys and girls, and thereby forms the concepts “man,” “woman,” “boy,” and “girl.” A boy also perceives physical characteristics of himself, and conceptually identifies himself as a boy who will grow into a man.
A man may feel emotions about his being a man, or about his not being a woman. For instance, he may feel happy that he is a man, or he may feel fear about being a man; or he may feel a desire to be a woman, or he may feel a kind of comfort or relief or excitement when imagining that he were a woman. But no man can feel that he is a woman, or a man, or anything else for that matter. Emotions are responses, not identifications. A man’s claim that he feels that he is a woman is a claim of revelation: it is a claim that some consciousness other than his own has attached an identification to his emotion.
To see a clear example of this mystical form of thinking, consider this pair of statements made by Bruce Jenner to Diane Sawyer during the famous 2015 interview (Sawyer 2015) in which Jenner claimed that he is a woman. Early in the interview, Jenner states,
My brain is much more female than it is male. It is hard for people to understand that, but that is what my soul is.
…
It’s just the way I am, the way I was born.
Later in the interview, Jenner states,
I had this feeling, kind of a revelation, that maybe this is my cause in life. This is why God put me on this Earth, to deal with this issue. That was a very powerful moment. It certainly gave me a lot of courage.
The epistemological status of these two statements by Jenner is the same. Both statements are claims of mystical revelation based on feelings.
To understand the ruining of young lives by the transgender movement, consider this dialogue, from the same television episode (Sawyer 2015), between Sawyer and Dr. Johanna Olson, MD, “of Children’s Hospital, Los Angeles, a pediatrician who now directs the largest treatment program for transgender youth in the country.” (Olson is now Olson-Kennedy, having “married” a transgender individual.) Sawyer is asking Olson to explain how (quoting Sawyer) “thousands and thousands of people know with certainty that their real gender is not the same as their anatomy.”
Sawyer: You say, born this way.
Olson: Yes. Just made this way. Made this way.
Cut to a video with Sawyer’s voiceover: And Dr. Olson says above all, being transgender is not a mental illness.
…Olson: Genitals don’t equal gender.
Sawyer (voiceover): Our gender, she believes, is not really what we’re seeing in the mirror.
Olson: More and more, we’re looking at [the theory that] it lives in the brain.
Cut to a graphic with Sawyer’s voiceover explaining Olson’s theory: … parts of the brain somehow receive different [hormonal] information than the rest of the body.
Olson: The youngest kid that I have ever heard talking about their gender is eighteen months.
…
Sawyer: What kind of word can you use at eighteen months for this?Dr. Olson: “I a boy.”
Children think conceptually when they are eighteen months old. That is how they are able to speak words and simple sentences. But neither conceptual knowledge nor values nor emotional evaluations are deposited into a passive mind by hormones. A human mind—at every age, including at eighteen months—makes conceptual identifications and conceptual evaluations by acts of volition. Furthermore, such conceptualizations can be mistaken, or even absurd.
This assumption—that a girl can have passively-acquired, not-to-be questioned, highly abstract conceptual knowledge that she is somehow a boy—is as mystical as believing that the child is the messiah.
Many of the “thousands and thousands of people” who allegedly “know with certainty that their real gender is not the same as their anatomy” are children who have been reassigned to the opposite sex based on thoughts and feelings described by the children themselves.
Transgender activists claim that “gender,” or what is rationally understood as sex, “lives in the brain,” that individuals are born with a brain that is either male or female. But what does such a notion mean? Consider these questions:
– What are the criteria for classifying a brain as male or female, or some combination of the two, at birth?
– How does the sex of the brain affect its functioning?
– How does the sex of the brain affect the thoughts, values, and emotions that the mind will eventually have?
– Do these affected emotions include sexual orientation? If not, why is this particular category of emotions not affected?
– How does the sex of the brain affect a person’s epistemology?
– How does having a penis, and not a vagina, impair the mental functioning of a man with a female brain?
– How does slicing his penis and reshaping it into a dysfunctional vagina, along with making other physical changes such as taking female hormones, improve the mental functioning of a man with a female brain?
There are no reasonable answers to these questions that are consistent with transgenderism. Knowledge of one’s sex, like all human knowledge, comes from perceptual experience and conceptualization of that experience, not by innate ideas, and not by mystically intuiting the sex of one’s brain. Individual abilities to perceive and conceptualize differ in degree, and undoubtedly differ in degree by sex (at least roughly). But whatever the degree of these abilities, any reasoning mind can make the most of—instead of rejecting—one’s physical endowments.
And remember, children are having their genitals mutilated without first having their brains tested somehow for physical maleness or femaleness. The children merely express “a strong desire” lasting six months. This notion of male and female brains is a red herring.
The basis of transgenderism is not science or medicine. The basis is Leftist ideology. Recall the words, quoted at greater length in Chapter 5, from R.W. Connell (1987), a transgender professor with more than 95,000 citations on Google Scholar:
Connell, 1987, 183:
There is an ordering of versions of femininity and masculinity at the level of the whole society … Their interrelation is centered on a single structural fact, the global dominance of men over women.
Connell, 1987, 287:
If the abolition of gender is a worthwhile goal, then it must be the abolition of gender as a social structure that is at issue. … Difference between sexes would be simply a complementarity of function in reproduction, not a cosmic division or a social fate. There would be no reason for this to structure emotional relationships, so the categories heterosexual and homosexual would become insignificant. There would be no reason for it to structure character, so femininity and masculinity would depart.
Connell 1987, 288:
The logical consequence of deconstruction is open-ended variety. Marcuse’s discussion of ‘polymorphous perversity’ in Eros and Civilization is not a bad summary of this conception, though with rules dismantled nothing can be defined as normative and hence nothing as ‘perverse’.
Connell 1987, 292:
As a matter of fact, the core institutions of the contemporary structure of gender power cannot be torn down without a class politics, because those institutions fuse gender and class domination. As a matter of practice, equality is difficult to contain; the origins of modern feminist radicalism in the New Left show that. The historic association between socialism and feminism, however tense and ragged it has been, expresses a basic truth about the global structure of inequality and what social forces might dismantle it.
Transgenderism—the “T” in “LGBT”—lays bare that the LGBT movement is the most evil ideological movement in the history of the English-speaking world, because this movement advocates and practices the purest form of mindless indulgence of emotion—in the service of destroying Western civilization, poisoning the sexual potential of children, and mutilating their bodies.
References
Aetna (2021), “Gender Affirming Surgery”, Medical Clinical Policy Bulletins, Number 0615. Accessed on January 21, 2021 at http://www.aetna.com/cpb/medical/data/600_699/0615.html.
Anderson, Ryan T. (2019), When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. New York: Encounter Books.
Anthem (2021), “Gender Reassignment Surgery”, Clinical UM Guideline, # CG-SURG-27. Accessed on March 21, 2021 at https://www.anthem.com/dam/medpolicies/abcbs/active/guidelines/gl_pw_a051166.html.
Cigna (2021), “Treatment of Gender Dysphoria”, Medical Coverage Policy, Number 0266. Accessed on March 21, 2021 at https://static.cigna.com/assets/chcp/pdf/coveragePolicies/medical/mm_0266_coveragepositioncriteria_gender_reassignment_surgery.pdf.
Connell, R. W. (1987), Gender and Power: Society, The Person, and Sexual Politics. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Evans, Susan and Marcus Evans (2021), “First, Do No Harm: A New Model for Treating Trans-Identified Children”, Quillette, 4 February. Accessed on February 15, 2021 at https://quillette.com/2021/02/04/first-do-no-harm-a-new-model-for-treating-trans-identified-children/.
Human Rights Campaign. Website accessed on February 27, 2021 at https://www.hrc.org.
Humana (2021), “Gender Reassignment Surgery”, Medical Coverage Policy, Number HCS-0518-016. Accessed on March 21, 20201 at http://apps.humana.com/tad/Tad_New/Search.aspx?docbegin=G&policyType=medical&searchtype=beginswith.
Kay, Jonathan (2019), “An Interview With Lisa Littman, Who Coined the Term ‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria’”, Quillette, 19 March. Accessed on February 27, 2021 at https://quillette.com/2019/03/19/an-interview-with-lisa-littman-who-coined-the-term-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria/.
Littman, Lisa (2018), “Parent Reports of Adolescents and Young Adults Perceived to Show Signs of a Rapid Onset of Gender Dysphoria”, PLOS ONE 13(8): e0202330. Accessed on January 25, 2021 at https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202330.
Sawyer, Diane (2015), “Bruce Jenner The Interview”, 20/20, 24 April. ABC News. Partial transcript published by Us Weekly, accessed on March 28, 2021 at https://www.usmagazine.com/entertainment/news/bruce-jenner-interview-with-diane-sawyer-read-us-weeklys-live-blog-2015244/.
Shrier, Abigail (2020), Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Washington: Regnery Publishing.