The Rise of the Dream-State: Trans Agendas, Gender Confusion, Identity & Desire (Part 1 of 3)


All 3 parts as PDF

“In this fascinating exploration of the cultural models of manhood, When Men Are Women examines the unique world of the nomadic Gabra people, a camel-herding society in northern Kenya. Gabra men denigrate women and feminine things, yet regard their most prestigious men as women. As they grow older, all Gabra men become d’abella, or ritual experts, who have feminine identities. Wood’s study draws from structuralism, psychoanalytic theory, and anthropology to probe the meaning of opposition and ambivalence in Gabra society. When Men Are Women provides a multifaceted view of gender as a cultural construction independent of sex, but nevertheless fundamentally related to it. By turning men into women, the Gabra confront the dilemmas and ambiguities of social life. Wood demonstrates that the Gabra can provide illuminating insight into our own culture’s understanding of gender and its function in society.”
–Publisher’s description

The transgender question spans the whole spectrum of human interest, from psychological to biological, social to cultural, religious to technological, political to spiritual. It would be hard to conceive of a hotter topic–or button–than the question of when–or if –a man becomes a woman, and vice versa. Wrapped up inside this question is a still deeper one of what makes a human being a human being, what constitutes personal identity, and how much identity is or can be made subject to our desire, and vice versa. Among the countless lesser questions which the subject raises, here are a sample few, some (though probably not all) of which I will address in the following exploration.

1) The question of biological sex and social gender roles
2) The question of possible causes for transgenderism or gender confusion
3) The question of what possible outside interests the “trans agenda” may be serving, whether corporate, military, governmental, ideological, or otherwise
4) The question of how transgenderism affects women and their position in society
5) The question of how it affects men and their position in society
6) The question of how transgenderism overlaps with/is compatible with transhumanism
7) The question of how children are being affected and possibly endangered by transgenderism as a social trend
8) The question of how transgender individuals are being discriminated against and abused in society
9) The question of class and privilege, and how transgender individuals may be themselves practicing discrimination and abuse
10) The question of whether ideology can be seen as a counter-measure or corrective to biology and psychology
11) The question of whether identity has any actual validity outside of group think and social constructs designed to control us and suppress our life force
12) The question of social and possibly biological anomalies within a community or species
13) The question of group identity and scapegoating

And so on.

Before we get into some of these questions, a few examples of the repercussions and manifestations of “transgenderism” in western society, in the 21st century, are necessary to set the scene. This is from “Rise in transgender children puts British primary schools under pressure,” 13 Jul, 2016:

“UK primary schools are attempting to enforce ‘trans-inclusive environments and curricula’ as the number of British children who want to change their gender is at an all-time high. British demand for sex change procedures booming. England’s only center for trans children and adolescents, the Tavistock Clinic, says the number of British children who want to change their gender has doubled in six months. According to the Guardian, the clinic says it is under huge pressure, with many of the referrals involving children under the age of 10, including one three-year-old and 12 four-year-olds, the Guardian reports. Schools are responding to the increasing numbers by creating ‘new gender neutral environments’ and holding ‘transgender days’ to encourage pupils to think about gender fluidity.”

This is from the UK Daily Mail, 30 July 2016, “March of the male mums”:

“Women having sex changes on the NHS are being given free fertility treatment so they can have babies after they become men. At least three British men who were born female are ‘on the brink’ of becoming parents using IVF techniques, according to a top doctor. And dozens more are now having their eggs frozen at NHS clinics before undergoing surgery or hormone therapy to switch sex.”

Trans individuals meanwhile are surprisingly well-represented (media-wise at least) in the military: “Abi Austen became the first British Army officer to transition from a man to a woman and is now the world’s first transgender foreign correspondent, featuring in a new documentary this week which sees her return to old territory in Afghanistan.” According to a Wikipedia page “Transgender people and military service,” “It is estimated as of 2014 that there are approximately 15,500 transgender individuals either serving on active duty or in the National Guard or Army Reserve forces within the U.S. Military. … A current issue for the transgender population is the use of military medical insurance to transition from one gender to another.”
The most significant social subset for a budding new identity movement is of course children. Here are few examples of how rapidly this new-old social phenomenon is being incorporated into the ideological, educational, and medical framework. From “Children could be taught about transgender issues using penguin story books”:

“The Gender Identity and Research and Education Society has called on schools to teach their children about trans issues by using the Penguin Land stories, which feature adult penguins reassuring younger penguins about transitioning. . . . In evidence to the committee, the society said: ‘The numbers of very young children transitioning in primary school are increasing rapidly, so information and reassurance needs to be given at the earliest stage. . . . The Gender Identity Research and Education Society also accused the Department for Education of not doing enough to promote transgender issues, and claimed that the concept of gender transitioning should be ‘included at all levels of the syllabus.’”


From the Daily Mail, Dec 2015:

“An eight-year-old pupil who was born female is locked in a battle with a primary school where staff are refusing to accept the child’s request to be treated as a boy. The school is one of more than a dozen across Britain facing a potential legal challenge for stopping pupils from changing their gender. Another pupil, aged 13, is at an all-girls school but now identifies as a boy, yet staff insist that wearing a skirt is obligatory as uniform policy.”

And from January 2017:

“Don’t call pregnant patients ‘mothers’: Doctors are banned from using the word over fears it will upset those who are transgender. Official guidelines issued by the British Medical Association says mothers-to-be-should be referred to as ‘pregnant people.’ The move aims to avoid offending and alienating transgender parents. The advice came in a 14-page booklet titled A Guide To Effective Communication: Inclusive Language In The Workplace.”

Also from the Mail, April 2017:

“Students lose marks for using ‘he’: Universities penalise undergraduates for ‘offensive’ gender phrases in essays and exams. Institutions are cracking down on the use of ‘offensive’ gender phrases. The terms ‘mankind,’ ‘manpower’ and ‘manmade’ are frowned upon. Now University of Hull is saying use of such language can impact marks.”

The following comes from an article written in November 2015, “7-year-old ‘trans activist’ used in campaign by Transgender Europe, a German NGO partially funded by US State Department”:

“President Obama issued a directive in December 2011 to heads of executive branch agencies (which would include the US Department of State): ‘I am deeply concerned by the violence and discrimination targeting LGBT persons around the world whether it is passing laws that criminalize LGBT status, beating citizens simply for joining peaceful LGBT pride celebrations, or killing men, women, and children for their perceived sexual orientation.’. . .  Pursuant to the memorandum, the Global Equality Fund was established as a funding mechanism, ‘a collaborative effort led by the U.S. Department of State, bridging government, companies and NGOs with the objective of empowering LGBT persons to live freely and without discrimination.’”

As part of this humanitarian agenda, a seven-year-old boy was selected as a figurehead and presented in a 90 second video:

From the same article:

“What is the 7-year-old trans activist being used to promote? The ‘depathologisation’ of trans people. On its website, TGEU ‘calls on the World Health Organisation and governments to ensure that gender variant children are not labelled as sick.’. . . The Depathologisation Resources page links to this proposal by the GATE working group, which argues for abolishing the ‘gender incongruence’ diagnosis being considered for the next version of the international diagnosis codes (ICD-11). . . .  depathologizing appears to mean dumping any ‘disorder’ diagnosis and just giving trans-identified people whatever they want. . . . Yet the very document TGEU uses in their depathologisation campaign states that the majority of these kids will desist and perhaps grow up to be gay or lesbian adults. That there should not be a ‘presumption’ that they are transgender.

“In addition, there is a body of evidence, originating with and continuing to this day, from the Dutch team who pioneered pediatric transition, indicating that social transition can be harmful. It can lock a child into a transgender identity and make it more difficult for a child to ‘desist.’ Not only that: Being a social media star and receiving plaudits from parents and other important adults for conforming to gender stereotypes is a powerful incentive and reward. And this particular child has had a law dedicated to him. Can anyone think it would be possible for him to change his mind, after all that? . . . . Transgender Europe operates campaigns—partially funded by me and other Americans–that promote the idea that a boy who plays with fairy dolls and wears pink dresses is actually a girl who should be ‘socially transitioned’ before the world on YouTube and Facebook, defined as transgender, and who, at puberty, will be ready for all the medical services that money (and the taxpayer) can provide.”

Lastly, this is from Business Insider December 2016, “Demand for transgender medical care is exploding”:

“The youngest patients receive no medical interventions, just counseling. Olson-Kennedy describes one 18-month-old, born a girl, who understood her gender before her grammar. ‘I a boy,’ she repeatedly told her parents. Many young children who experiment with gender roles end up reverting to their birth gender. But when the gender discomfort persists into adolescence, said Olson-Kennedy, it’s usually there to stay. And puberty, when secondary sex characteristics develop, can be a dangerous trigger. ‘I’ve had mothers call me who say their child tries to kill themselves every time they have their period,’ Olson-Kennedy said. ‘Parents come in saying, “My kid tried to cut off his penis with dental floss.”’ Olson-Kennedy’s first line of treatment for adolescents is stopping puberty so children and their parents can buy time to sort out what they want to do. Puberty blockers, GnRh agonists like the injectable Lupron [*Lupron is being used on autistic children and causes sterility, among other things. It may have been used by eugenicists in the past] or the implant Supprelin, suppress puberty by modifying hormone release. Such drugs have been used off-label safely for more than 30 years to stop early puberty. Trans doctors say it’s critical to stop puberty before the body morphs in ways that are difficult to change—the broadening of shoulders for men, for example, or the rounded hips of women. ‘Even 14 or 15 is too late,’ said Dr. Norman Spack, an endocrinologist who founded the country’s first transgender youth clinic at Boston Children’s Hospital.”

*

Roman Polanski in The Tenant

What all this points to is not so much a budding new development within the species as an ideological battleground. Many progressives see this as a war of the new against the old, of enlightened values struggling against outmoded beliefs and prejudices. But if looked at with a less “cultured” or ideologically entrenched eye, it appears to be more of a war of culture against nature, or mind against body. (In passing, it’s worth noting that the high culture phase of societies are often characterized by an interference with child development to make “properly” socialized adult bodies, as in the case of foot-binding in China.) As the opening quote shows, men aspiring to become women may be as old as culture itself (though not as old as human existence–we only have records of cultural history, for obvious reasons). Perhaps there is even a direct correlation between culture and the drive to transcend biology, and therefore death?
Though it may seem an unlikely source to turn to, Carlos Castaneda’s Art of Dreaming–the ninth in his famous series of anthropological novels about Toltec sorcery–provides a curious echo of this same basic drive, complete with a metaphysical rationale as deep and archetypal as the religious drive to escape damnation–or attain eternal life:

“‘I’ve said to you that the inorganic beings don’t pursue females; they only go after males. But I’ve also said to you that the inorganic beings are female, and that the entire universe is female to a large degree. So draw your own conclusions.’ Don Juan explained to me that sorceresses, in theory, come and go as they please in that world because of their enhanced awareness and their femaleness. ‘The first part of the dreaming lesson in question is that maleness and femaleness are not final states but are the result of a specific act of positioning the assemblage point. . . . And this act is, naturally, a matter of volition and training. Since it was a subject close to the old sorcerers’ hearts, they are the only ones who can shed light on it.’”

Castaneda’s don Juan goes further still, in claiming something trans activists would wholeheartedly get behind: that sorcery is powerful not only to change one’s gender but retroactively correct what gender one was born as:

“I have already said to you that to be a natural man or a natural woman is a matter of positioning the assemblage point. . . . By natural I mean someone who was born either male or female. To a seer, the shiniest part of the assemblage point faces outward, in the case of females and inward, in the case of males. The tenant’s assemblage point was originally facing inward, but he changed it by twisting it around and making his egglike energy shape look like a shell that has curled up on itself.”

Ergo, the self-transitioned sorcerer who makes the shift from male to female can legitimately claim to have been born that way.

Leaving aside the possible value of Castaneda’s accounts as anything but wild metaphors, within the narrative he spins, the final truth about the Tenant is that, via his-her elaborate manipulations of energy and identity, in an attempt to escape the clutches of inorganic beings, s/he ended up trapped by that very same identity. “She was the closest thing to permanent,” Castaneda writes, “while I was temporary. That was my advantage. The death defier had worked herself into a corner, and I was free.”

The neoliberal sorcery of identity politics revolves around an unquestionable belief in the sanctity of identity. Its aims have to do with endless ideological renovations, technological extensions, and cosmetic furnishings of the cage. What they never address is the possibility or desirability of leaving the cage behind entirely.

*


In the simplest psychological and social terminology, gender confusion that leads to a decision to “transition” from one gender to another is a question of a strong preference or desire being acted upon with or without the sanction of society. The question of whether or not society sanctions such desires or their fulfillment, and where the desires come from in the first place, are two separate questions. Ideologically, when it comes to sexual preferences (with one notable exception), it is today only really permissible to address the first question.

When it becomes socially unacceptable to talk about any sort of preference in terms of unconscious drives, neurosis, or pathology (unless it’s a crime, and even then, the law may change to suit the new preferences), then pathology, neurosis, and the unconscious cease to exist as categories of meaning. Yet as psychological phenomena they continue and, logically, can only proliferate for not being identified.

The notion that suffering is something that needs to be alleviated by fixing the externals is central to the transgender movement, as well as to neoliberalism, identity politics, and all modern Western values that elevate personal preference over every other factor. This turning away from internal states of suffering to external pseudo-solutions (which are often really distractions) creates the sort of messed up culture of exploitation we are living in. It is a world where no one wants to just sit in the distress of being poisoned by generations of abuse, but instead rushes to surgically remove the offending parts, or worse, take them out on–or put them into–someone else. The Trans Agenda does both, because as well as altering the individual’s externals (and internals) as a way to alleviate their distress, it also imposes this “choice” on others by forbidding all questioning of it. A man with a penis can legally oblige others to identify him as a woman–and gain access to women’s bathrooms–because he insists that this is how he identifies, and that for his belief not to be affirmed by others, will only cause him more distress.

My own sense, as I turn fifty, is that individuation–the quest for self-knowing–is a journey inward that eventually dis-identifies with everything but the Soul. It begins with your family, as the song goes, but soon it comes down to race, sex, even species. So the idea that we can be whatever we feel like being, biologically, through a mixture of desire and technology, is a literalization and hence an inversion of the truth that we are infinitely more than our biology. It is a way of insisting that what we are is not something we have to discover, but something we get to choose. This leaves out the rather obvious problem that, if we do not know who or what we are, our choices are going to be influenced, and severely compromised, by that same lack of awareness.
To erase the biological difference of the other–as trans ideology does–in this quest for identity is to eradicate the other’s identity while claiming it for one’s own. It’s psychic cuckoo-land. It is also the absolute inverse of self-discovery.

Not a joke.

On the other hand, I recognize the need to be careful when using words like pathology or, its inverse, well-adjusted, because, in an exploitative culture, adjustment isn’t itself necessarily such a great sign, and “pathology” can be a necessary response to an unhealthy environment. But on the other other hand, when someone responds to confusion about their bodily identification with a literalized bid for transformation, it’s essential to recognize that this may be an unconscious cry for help, rather than a true, conscious step towards wholeness. Simply providing such people with the justification and means to act on their desire may not be the most compassionate or healthy way to address such a complex unknown as this.

The notion that people know what they need and ought to be allowed to have it is a central principal and value in the consumer capitalist mosh-pit of human exploitation which we live in today. Ironically, this same culture works 24-7, using every known form of technology and psychological manipulation to tell people what they need and give it to them. It thereby proves highly effective at preventing most people from ever discovering their true orientation.

The truth is we don’t know what we need: we have been cultured and conditioned to want all the wrong things and to turn to the ruling power structures to get them. We are given (or sold) anything and everything but what will allow us to move our attention inward, where what is of true value is to be found. All these solutions that are offered, as means to autonomy and self-empowerment, in fact lead to the opposite: increased dependency on the Dream State that is selling us its manufactured imago of being.

*


The following is from “Exiles in their own flesh: A psychotherapist speaks” by Lane Anderson (a pseudonym), “a practicing psychotherapist who has worked extensively with ‘trans teens’ and their families”:

“When I am suddenly and without warning discouraged from exploring the underlying causes and conditions of certain of my patients’ distress (as I was trained to do), and instead forced to put my professional stamp of approval upon a prefab, one-size-fits-all narrative intended to explain the complexity of my patient’s troubles, I feel confused. It’s as if I am being held hostage. No longer encouraged or permitted to question, consider or discuss the full spectrum of my patient’s mental health concerns, it has occurred to me that I am being used, my meager professional authority commandeered to legitimize a new narrative I may or may not wish to corroborate. It’s been perilous to simply admit to not fully understanding it all–let alone disagree with the trans narrative. There was no training or teaching. I was just suddenly told that some of my patients thought they were trapped in the wrong body and that was that.”
….
“There are so many complex forces, from many different realms, coming into play with this trans wave. Most people are completely unaware of these intersecting interests. Unfortunately the culture war has done a number on the concept of critical thinking. I have considered myself liberal my entire adult life, and I still am. But for a long time I couldn’t find anyone questioning this trans explosion who wasn’t on the far right. It made me feel like only conservatives were allowed to think, to consider this issue, but ultimately their thoughts were rendered meaningless due to their branding by the culture war. It’s essential that left-leaning people model critical thinking for the masses in this regard.
“It’s important to link people like us together, who have been silenced, so we can resume contact with our critical thinking skills and reduce our growing sense of self doubt. Divide and conquer is best accomplished through silencing, through calling into question those who speak out. There is so much of this attached to the trans movement. Even just wondering about a profound concept such as transgender is labeled transphobic. What I think has happened is that people are now phobic about their own gut responses to life. We are being systematically separated from our own intuition. This is fatal for a civilization, I think. Not that our intuition always tells the truth with a capital T, but it is a critical piece of who we are. Without it, we remain profoundly directionless, and more susceptible to coercion of all types. [Emphasis added.]
“What frightens me most about the trans movement is that the establishment has gotten involved and is leading it. I think that’s really weird. Clearly they are benefiting from it financially. So sad. It disturbs me to see how giddy my former medical director is to be part of this growing craze. We used to treat kids with mental health problems, but now it’s all about validating their emergent and shifting identities. As professionals, if we don’t loudly prioritize their identities as being the most important thing about them (and identities do shift constantly in kids and teens), we risk coming across as unsupportive and even immoral.

Identity development has always been a teen task, but in the past it wasn’t necessarily supposed to become a lifestyle, or colonize the entirety of your existence. . . . What saddens me the most is the way children are being trained to think their parents do not love them if mom and dad don’t jump aboard the trans train. To me, this is a brutal aspect of a near-dictatorship being foisted on everyone.”
….

“One common trait I’ve noticed in nearly all the trans kids I’ve met has been their profound sense of being different, and too alone. They often have had little success with making friends, or what I would call contact with ‘the other.’ Because of their psychic isolation, they are prime targets for group think narratives. But in addition to looking for a way to belong, they are also craving protection and the stamp of legitimacy, perhaps because they feel a profound lack of it.

“Now that the government and medical communities are involved in the creation of who trans folks are, this class of individuals have finally found their safe havens. Now, rather than being merely invisible and awkward, they have been transformed into veritable leaders of a revolution. Now, rather than cower in the shadows, they have commandeered the narratives of others into a similar dark and brooding place where they once were. The tables, as they lived and viewed them, have now turned.”
….
“A large part of the problem comes with the revolution in health care. More and more, we are giving people the power to define their own treatments. This is good in many ways, but the trans movement is using this moment, and is actively recruiting young, psychologically undefined and frightened people to push their agenda through the medical community. It’s clearly not that difficult to do. These kids are just pawns. That’s how it looks to me anyway. The trans community needs more converts so that the narrative becomes more cohesive. I’m guessing the push for this comes from a need to further cohere so they will have more members to fully cement a fragile, constructed reality.”

From the comments section, the therapist responds to a question from a transitioning-gender person, as to how she would approach someone wishing to make the change:

“This development of the self would be a process whereby a client is assisted in the difficult task of creating a kind of consolidated sense of who they are. Personally, I think these core parts of us should function, or ideally function best when they are functionally somewhat autonomous, yet healthfully interdependent with others. I guess what I’m saying is, if a person doesn’t really yet know who they are independently, if they have a sort of ‘empty center looking to be filled from without,’ I would work with them until they were able to find some weight within their own psychic core before they engaged in any sort of drastic changes. Signs that this consolidation is happening would be the individual not requiring others to excessively validate who they are. Ideally the individual should not be excessively too dependent upon the thoughts and opinions of others to maintain their sense of self.

“. . .  Unstable folks are neurologically incapable of observing others outside of how these others can fulfill their immediate needs (think narcissism, which is basically a sign a person is too dependent upon external others to construct the self. In being overly dependent in this way, the empty person uses others to create an image of themselves, they use others to literally ” feel” who they are. Obviously, this is all unconscious. Most people with a lack of a cohesive self are not aware they are using others in this way, but they will feel the effects of this habit and often not understand why they continue to have poor interpersonal and disrupted relationships with others).

“So, for me, to get back to your question, I would work to look at whether or not a person has accomplished basic psychological developmental tasks before I would encourage their transitioning. However, this is all a bit of a mute point [sic], for my exploring such with people who come to me saying they seek to transition will now classify me as transphobic and out of compliance if I explain what I’ve here explained to you. The fact is, not one of the kids I met with who wanted to transition was manifesting psychological health. They were very hurt individuals and had attributed their very real pain to the theory that their bodies and gender brains were misaligned. The vast majority of them had severe deficits interpersonally, experienced profound social anxiety, suicidality, to name just a few of the issues I saw emerging. These were souls fearing psychic extinction, living with the terror of being too different, too alone. They nearly all found their new identities, along with a whole new slew of friends, in others who experienced similar or equal psychic terror. How could I take seriously their sudden belief that they were trapped in the wrong body? How could I not see that they had stumbled upon a very viable and critical path to locating themselves amongst similar others. [Emphasis added.]

“Of course, I could not say this to any of them as they would claim, as they had been schooled online, that I too didn’t understand and was transphobic.”

 Part Two 

95 thoughts on “The Rise of the Dream-State: Trans Agendas, Gender Confusion, Identity & Desire (Part 1 of 3)”

  1. Some of your best work mate , ultimately , the more messed up we are , the better for the system.
    Keep thinking of Prometheus , Covenant .
    The Alien is a bio weapon , metaphor or meme , emerging from the Luciferan , hyper-rational levels of the unconscious . It is a critter that needs to incubate , feed off a host for a while before maturation . It is also capable of killing the host outright . In the absence of new hosts , it can lay dormant as a spore , for millennia if necessary , until the unwary explorer this way again comes . Could be an old one , the tribes know all about it.

    Reply
  2. Have you considered that maybe cause and effect work in the opposite direction to what you think?
    The loss of contact with the intuitive sense is real, but is an effect not a cause.
    It’s not caused by culture, changing culture is caused by changing bodies and minds.
    Changing bodies and minds in this generation that are in turn caused by the effects of the culture of previous generations.
    I broadly agree with a lot of what you are saying, pushing trans as a ‘born in the wrong body’ narrative and getting young people to jump on board so forcefully is indeed dangerous, on the other hand enforcing gender behaviours onto someone that are diametrically opposed to their natural inclinations is just as dangerous in terms of causing lifelong psychological and social communication problems. If you are in fact born thinking like one sex that is in opposition to the perception others hold of you, and of your internal states and intentions, everything you experience is coloured by that confusion, why don’t you react in the expected ways, why don’t you seem to experience the emotions that others of your supposed gender so clearly do in the same situations? You can develop a self-perception of some kind of an innate brokenness, one that was never really necessary in the first place, if only you could have made yourself properly understood when you were still young enough to be helped..
    So, the question to answer is, are the children really confused about themselves, or are the adults confused about the children, and the true nature of brains and behaviours. Do we have natural emotions and behaviours built into our brains and limbic systems, or do we learn all of this stuff through cultural osmosis? Why do some people clearly pick up on this much sooner and more adeptly than others? Why do some clearly exhibit very strong opposing instincts and behaviours, from a very young age, which they then feel they must suppress or redirect for the sake of parental approval or social acceptability?
    Where do we draw the line? What is ‘*phobic’. All boys are naturally like this.. All boys learn to be like this by socialising with other boys.. All boys should be like this.. All boys can learn to be like this.. Boys should at least try to learn to be like this.. Any boy who doesn’t learn to be like this is a social failure and probably a sexual deviant and must be punished.. If your child turns out LGBT you must have done something wrong as a parent… People only turn out homosexual as adults because they must have been abused as a child.. You must have done something very badly wrong in a previous life and now you are being justly punished for it..
    Is it really better to change who you are, to ‘desist’ in your external behaviour and maybe after struggling with yourself for another 20-30 years, just turn out gay? Better for who? Is it still better when you are 15, 25, 35, or 55?
    If you do last till you are 55 and yet still can’t seem to shake it, wouldn’t you feel like it would have been far better had there been someone giving you the opportunity to really come to a self-understanding when you were still young enough to make the physical things you wanted before puberty stole those chances from you?
    Are the old perverts now corrupting the young, or are the older more experienced people giving the younger ones with the same inclinations the opportunities that they never had back in the 50s and 60s?

    Reply
    • Lots of good questions. Addressing the first, loss of intuitive sense, is there any need to posit the question as either/or, or is it a case of being both an effect and a cause?
      It’s easy enough to to see what kinds of effects the loss of intuitive/common/body sense would have; not so easy to posit the original cause of it. Same with culture: insofar as it is antithetical to life, humanness, and wholeness, how did such a culture come about except via such a loss of wholeness and harmony within the individuals who created it?
      This is the source of all scapegoating, the need to find an original cause that can be excised to restore harmony. The solution paradoxically would seem to be to relinquish the need to scapegoat/cast the first stone, see that ugliness is in the eye that observes, and resist the urge to pluck it out for offending us so.

      Reply
      • Right, but if you want the people who claim to be transgender to stop calling people ‘transphobic’, you also want the people who claim that those people are simply ‘deluded’ about themselves and their emotions and desires to stop doing that.
        Who cast the first stone? When? Haven’t we been locking people up for centuries for having sex with the wrong people, or lately listing their innate behaviours in statistical manuals of mental disorders etc?
        How do we break the stalemate? What kind of evidence would you consider sufficient?

        Reply
          • Well I guess evidence that some people really are born with a mismatch between what their brain tells them their body should look like, and what their body actually does look like, or what they actually feel and what they are taught they are ‘supposed’ to feel.
            Live and let live and all that,, but I guess that some people feel like some children need to be rescued from their parents and peers, and now they are in a position where they have the power to do it, in a way that no one was around to rescue them when they were younger.
            I hate identity politics too, I want to be defined by the work that I do, not what I wear or who I do or do not have sex with.
            But I don’t want to be seen as just somehow deluded or broken either. Religion itself is nothing but a weaponised meme used against a vulnerable fraction of the human population.
            Maybe having an intuitive sense of being the opposite sex is better than having no intuitive sense at all..

          • Born with it? It’s my impression that no one is born with any sense of identity at all. Self-image takes time to develop.
            Body dysmorphia – which I think is related to the dissonance between how a person feels and how they see their body – takes many forms, tho what all of them seem to have in common is self-rejection (taking body as self).
            If you can show me some evidence of a self that exists prior to the constructed identity and self/body image then we could discuss whether such a self might have gender and somehow end up in the wrong body. Until then isn’t it premature to talk about whether there’s any evidence for a 100% biological basis for gender confusion?
            I am reminded of an account about a child who expressed identification with a blue grasshopper and was given a diagnosis of schizophrenia. The argument raised was that in a different culture, such a boy would have been seen as a shaman in the making and the identification with a blue grasshopper would not be seen as a pathology. Yet in neither culture would there be an attempt to surgically transform the child into a blue grasshopper. Do you think that should be an option too? There are people who believe they are born the wrong species, or with too many limbs, and so forth. Do they also have the right to surgery or should we see this as a delusion?
            The question of delusion enters into the picture when a vision or impression or intuition becomes overly literalized. I think it’s fair to question whether the need for self-mutilation and chemical re-modification in order to externalize and concretize an internal sense of other-ness constitutes over-literalization.
            A shaman doesn’t literally transform into a blue grasshopper (of if he does it is not done through surgery and it is not permanent rejection of his humanness). Isn’t the opportunity presented by a dis-identification with the body one is born as (or into) that of experiencing consciousness as transcending the limits of flesh? Or is it simply trading one set of limits for another, and thereby reinforcing our need to identify with/as body image?

      • If the trans lobby were to be able to distinguish between neurological transsexualism and socially acquired transgenderism then we might be able to make some progress in understanding this, but so long as we are trapped in the Cultural Marxist belief that all these things are simply a choice then we shall get nowhere and achieve nothing but messing up some children who have been misled.
        But as I have said elsewhere, the *Fake Trans* lobby resists any form of taxonomy, which should ring alarm bells, bigly.

        Reply
  3. If everyone minds their own business , live and let live , stop defining ourselves by our interaction with each other and the newsfeeds , by turning inwards , which is instantly labelled “narcissim” by the relativitists .
    Of course , you can be a narcissist by turning exclusively inward OR outward . Of course theres nithing wrong with being gay/ trans if thatswhat floats your boat , the point it is being usedas a weaponised meme , within that nuance there is the difference .

    Reply
  4. Yes , religion is a weaponised meme when in the hands of clergy , relativism is the new religion and it too has clergy . Conversely , both transcendent and relativist religions are worthy metaphors whose subscribers need to abolish the clergy .

    Reply
  5. I went to a psychic once who claimed that I have a “feminine soul” ie that in most of my previous lifetimes I was born a woman. I’m male and never even contemplated become a transgender. I have to admit though that I am somewhat on the more feminine side and I am more in touch with intuition, into yoga, and tarot and stuff that mostly attracts women. But the main issue I wanted to raise is this notion of “feminine soul” vs “masculine soul” based on previous lifetimes. It may or may not have validity and there really isn’t any way to prove or disprove it. But it aligns with the notion that these people genuinely believe they are women trapped in men’s bodies. ie their souls are more feminine …. any thoughts on this?

    Reply
    • I go into this a bit in part two. I don’t see any logical basis for it, even within the logic of metaphysics.
      The premise of transitioning is that the cosmic order is screwed up and we need human technology, ingenuity and will to fix it.
      Think about that for a while.
      If it were true, how did the cosmic order get screwed up, and what’s the basis for thinking that we have the wisdom, along with these other things, to correct it?
      I realize this can be taken to extremes of rejecting all technology & medicine whatsoever. But currently we seem to be at the other extreme.

      Reply
      • My transition was never based on the idea that the ‘Cosmic Order is screwed up’, merely that I had a developmental irregularity which was irreversible. There’s plenty of work been done on this question. Gouren and Zhou in the early 2000s, or Ramachandran are both to be highly recommended.
        The child abuser John Money is responsible for a lot of this mess, even though is own work demonstrated that he was completely wrong about ‘learning acquired gender’. I cite the infamous David Reimer case, which should really dismiss all ‘Socially Acquired Gender’ models forthwith, but is sadly ignored by most.

        Reply
    • Well I don’t believe in souls or past lives or any of that ethereal rubbish, but I do believe for a certain fact that some people born with penises think and feel very strongly like they are women and some people born with vaginas think and feel equally strongly like they are men, it’s just a matter of biology or sexual dimorphism of the brain.
      Since the brain can’t be remedied we remedy the body to match the brain, it’s not that big a deal really.

      Reply
      • Isn’t this circular logic?
        Also isn’t it just replacing the “ethereal rubbish” of a soul-self with reductionist rubbish of a brain self?
        It’s not that big a deal to mutilate and chop parts off the body and fill it with chemicals, because it isn’t in line with the brain?
        How does a brain somehow wind up with the wrong-gendered body (or vice versa) and how is this “not a big deal”?

        Reply
        • The ethereal rubbish of an immortal soul is a relatively recent human invention, it’s essentially how you condition a large populace to behave, to pull together as a community, have a collective hope for the future etc. It’s a very successful social memeplex, but not a thing..
          The non-ethereal side of that is the substrate that the social memeplex system is built on, humans are essentially very intricate machines for reproducing themselves, and you build a strong culture or complex civilisation by using social pressures and selective rewards to enforce ‘good’ social behaviour and punish ‘bad’ social behaviour, for the good of the community as a whole.
          The biggest social reward available ideally being essentially who gets to reproduce with who. Everything else that the brain does is essentially sub-goals, little chemical reward circuits for finding food, thermal regulation, security, privacy, social self-esteem, working up towards hopefully finding an appropriate partner to pair-bond with and raise a family.
          Healthy sexually dimorphic kids would essentially be at it like rabbits as soon as they hit puberty, were it not for the older generations telling the younger generations how they should and should not behave. For boys “We know you really really want to have sex but, if you get a girl pregnant you are going to be held responsible for the offspring”, for girls “we know you really really want a boyfriend but, if you lose your virginity too young or to the wrong person then you will end up living in poverty raising a child on your own without support”, etc. etc.
          If you lose that essential drive, then you kind of lose all real purpose, why do this instead of that activity today?
          For what end goal?
          For the money, for the prestige, for the security? For the narcissism of small differences.., I have a later model mobile phone, a bigger car, a much more expensive house, my kids go to a better school or university, my son is a doctor, a professor of applied metaphysics, I’m less racist, less homophobic, a better driver and less evil than my neighbour. etc etc, etc.
          Really complex intellectual human behaviours like designing cars and computers and writing software are also built on the basic substrate of reproduction, abstracted away a million degrees. Generally speaking the people that actually produce the babies are the ones best psychologically equipped to take care of them, and the people who are the ones to get someone pregnant are those designed to beat the competition to the goal and big themselves up to make them the most attractive proposition. That essential subconscious psychological programming drives our every thought and approach to life, in every activity, simple or complex, whether we are consciously aware of it or not. We call that set of drives ‘gender’, and everyone is equipped with a slightly different blend of traits, from extreme masculinity to extreme feminity, with the vast majority of people currently occupying a point roughly slightly to one or other side of the middle of the bell curve, depending on their sexual organs.
          How do those traits get into the brain? Well every fetus starts off essentially androgynous, and depending on the presence or absence of the SRY gene on the Y chromosome a chain of biochemical events is kicked off, proto-gonads become testes or ovaries, or in rare cases some mishmash of the two, the gonads themselves then secrete hormones which transform the internal reproductive organs or external genitalia in a male or female direction, and various timed hormonal surges direct the brain to have chemical reward circuits for various behaviours and sub-goals, be they masculine or feminine.
          It feels good to beat the other guy to the prize, it feels good to wear pretty clothes, it feels good to seek out lots of knowledge, it feels good to decorate my nails, it feels good to groom my or someone else’s hair, it feels good to build up lots of muscles, it feels good to make and tend for things, it feels good to decorate my environment, it feels good to be seen as tough, it feels good to be soft and cute and pretty, it feels very good to find a partner, it feels extremely good to get laid.
          Well those prenatal hormonal surges can go awry, you can be born as a person with a penis who has a very strong emotional reward circuit for hair grooming, and no reward circuit for having lots of muscles, and not much reward circuit for beating the other guy, some reward circuit for looking pretty, and a strong reward circuit for finding men attractive and being sexually penetrated by other people, but none for penetrating them yourself.
          If your culture says boys mustn’t act like that on pain of being ridiculed, ostracised or sexually assaulted, well you are going to have a pretty shitty time of it, especially while you are young. You can choose not to play to your strengths and take up accountancy rather than hairdressing for a career, but you cannot fundamentally learn to be something you are not.
          If your culture also says, well despite what you may feel like doing, we still expect that you will one day have a wife and two kids, well you may choose to comply for the sake of your parents social standing, for the sake of not losing your job, or any number of myriad reasons, but chances are you won’t be truly happy or fulfilled. You’ll find ways of dragging your heels. You won’t get married till you are thirty, and only then to please other people.
          A culture filled with a bunch of people who feel they are forced to do the opposite of what they actually want to be doing just to keep other people happy, quickly devolves. Or consider a culture that splits in two, where one bunch that are really sexually dimorphic, men with masculine reward circuits and women with feminine reward circuits, are being financially exploited and kept impoverished by a sub-culture of men with psychologically suppressed and redirected feminine reward circuits and women with psychologically suppressed and redirected masculine reward circuits. Maybe those people falling at completely the opposite end of the bell curve, or the fabled 1% psychopaths…

          Reply
      • emmajoey. the brain can indeed be remedied. It is called “therapy”, and usually works.
        By contrast, the body cannot be remedied. No matter how many bits you chop off or add on,
        a male body will remain male – a brute fact encoded in every cell of that body – and a female
        body will remain female. Transgender surgery is a cruel hoax, and of course one seized on
        by the US medical profession because it is a very profitable cruel hoax.

        Reply
        • No, the brain cannot be remedied, never had been, never will be, it’s only really plastic in terms of information content, not in terms of emotions and behaviour, all you can do is make people feel so guilty that they never act on their impulses, but you can’t change the way they think. Not when they are 15, and still not when they are 50.
          The surgery itself may currently be a ‘cruel hoax’, in terms of ‘becoming a woman’, or in terms of appearance and tactile sensation and so forth, but the emotional ‘need’ for it, for some people, has always existed and always will.
          The relationship between chromosomes, genitals, sexual motor instincts and personality is far from a direct mapping, so it doesn’t always work the way people expect. There are plenty of people walking around looking like they are male or female but with opposite chromosomes, and a lot of them don’t even know it, that’s just how biology works, it’s an analogue not a digital process.
          Similarly there are people who would dearly like to have sex in the opposite role from the genitals they posses, and how they have been socially classified, a lot of them just class themselves as homosexual, but for some that isn’t enough, and the hormones really do help.
          Look, they used to castrate the monks for centuries, and that is a very primitive way of fixing the excess of testosterone that drives female minded but male bodied people totally crazy.
          Nowadays we have anti-androgens that do the job chemically, but in practice it’s the same thing for the same reason, with a different label.

          Reply
          • With respect, Emmajoey, your statement “but you can’t change the way they think” and “all you can do is make people feel so guilty that they never act on their impulses” is simply not true! Isn’t that what we are doing here, being open to reading other people’s input and then forming different opinions or changes of thought?…..I am genuinely curious to know where you picked up such beliefs/world view and whether you have tested them for yourself in your own life experience?…..there is a myriad of therapies, eg NLP, mind altering methods…hypnotherapy…for a start , not to mention an endless list of other practices such as deep meditation, body work, CBT,energy work, tapping, etc etc…… And of course what about social engineering itself…the whole point is to change mass thinking. You have probably seen this brilliant famous BBC documentary by Adam Curtis,”The Century of the Self” but if not, you will soon see how chillingly easy it is to manipulate the thinking of mass populations……
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s

          • You know about ‘Century of the self’, then you know about Edward Bernays, the guy who took his uncle freuds theories of the workings of the unconscious, and sold them to corporate America, unleashing Madison Avenue and all that, ‘torches of freedom’ stuff selling people magical sticks that they could stick in their mouths and give themselves cancer. Who created the conditions we are smothered in 100 years later.
            Well, sure, you can use what you know about other people’s unconscious minds, and very effectively too, you can tell them that what they feel is wrong, you can make them feel really important, you can tell them they are unique special individuals with minor neurological differences, spiritual seekers, separated from the norm, you can teach them to reframe their beliefs, stop take a breath and calm down, do what is right by their family, by their religion, by their god, or take these magical pills, eat this diet, go to this retreat, block out all their natural emotions, all of that, but you can’t make someone with the brain of one sex actually learn to think like they are the other, you can’t change people’s personalities or sexualities, no matter how much money you spend on them, you can only get them to kid themselves, and only for so long.
            It might take till they are 30, maybe till they are 45, maybe even till they are in their sixties, but they will not be able to get through a whole lifespan without coming to terms with who and what they really are, and most likely acting on it, and not necessarily in a safe way, for themselves or for others younger and weaker than them.
            Look, I’ve seen enough people try to live this way, try to pretend that it doesn’t exist, hold it together for their family, for their community, believe me, it doesn’t end well. What they don’t process consciously and emotionally continually escapes in other forms, be it nervous habits, smoking, drinking, overeating, moving from one relationship to another, buying that Ferrari, that next bigger house. People don’t really change, they just get older and more and more stressed out, then get Alzheimer’s or cancer and have to be cared for. So maybe they do get though life without actually doing the dreadful ‘deed’, but at what cost to everyone else?
            When you have enough experience understanding people, you can just look at someone and know what their natural sexuality is likely to be, even if they don’t know it themselves. It maybe means you know who is likely to be a soft touch, or is easy to manipulate, someone maybe already wracked with repressed guilt and trauma, someone working themselves to the bone trying to escape from themselves and keep on being the person they think they ought to be, have to be, and yeah sure, lots of people out there are taking advantage of that. But those who are honest, well they know these people need real help, and for some that real help actually involves hormones, even if they change nothing else about their external appearance or life situation. It’s just biology, not heaven or hell, not spirits or demons, just how mammalian brains work, as they have worked for millions of years.
            If you are born with no arms or legs because your mother was given a drug while she was pregnant with you, well you might blame god, or genetics, natural selection or cosmic rays rather than blaming the specific drug company, but you don’t blame yourself.
            If you are born neurologically queer and everyone tells you that it’s because you were abused, or your parents didn’t raise you properly, or you are just weak, or really narcissistic, or not trying hard enough, or are not taking the protein supplements, or don’t have the right qualifications yet, or countless other things, then maybe you’ll believe them, maybe you’ll repress, deflect, project, go on the homophobic warpath yourself, but you won’t be able to change it, and you won’t ever escape from how you really feel, and nothing anyone can sell you or tell you will really change you deep down inside, and you’ll probably know it too. That is just how it actually works, take it or leave it.

  6. Well, actually, when you take synthetic hormone replacement, you are “fixing the brain” too. Hormones act directly *on* the brain. If they truly did “think” they were male and not female or vice versa then the hormones would not be necessary. The brain would already be sexed appropriately and the body would just need to aesthetically match. The idea that it’s “not a big deal” is absurd, it has massive consequences when you start saying there are no mothers, only “pregnant people” and that we should remove sex from birth certificates. There are two things going on here – adults deciding to transition and yes, in a sense, they can do whatever they want. Then there’s children being transitioned by parents and healthcare practitioners – children cannot consent and the consequences are longterm.

    Reply
    • Yes, I know, I hate the stupid extremes that people take these things to too, personally I don’t think trans men should be getting pregnant anyway, if they want to be seen as men they should be prepared to sacrifice their reproductive capabilities, and indeed a lot of them can’t wait to do that, opting for hysterectomies.
      The hormones fix both the brain and the body, for the brain it actually provides necessary relief from mental and emotional dysfunction, for that loss of intuitive/common sense, and for the body it provides the secondary sexual characteristics that the person actually desires anyway.
      No child is being transitioned by their parents against their will, usually the child has to be pretty insistent for several years before the parents will even eventually relent and take them to see a doctor. The parents feeling they have far more to lose in terms of their relationships with other ‘right-thinking’ adults than the child has to gain by simply going to school in different clothes for a while to see how they feel and find out if they actually can socialise better.
      If it’s only at most something like 1 in 100 people, why is it a point of such concern or contention?
      It’s that scary that maybe 1 in 100 children in a school might have something different in their underwear?

      Reply
      • If it’s only at most something like 1 in 100 people, why is it a point of such concern or contention?
        This question is an odd one in light of the post it’s attached to. I’m puzzled why you would choose to share my essay as you did, or what merit you find in it, if this is your viewpoint? You’ve made some bizarre statements followed by a dirge of socio-scientific “data” meant to back up the argument that surgically and chemically altering one’s gender is “no big deal” and that it’s no one’s business but those who choose it (including children, apparently).
        Of course I understand that if someone is invested in a belief that changing their sex is going to resolve some or all of their personal issues, then the questions I am raising here are going to be unwelcome and difficult to think about. But that’s exactly my intention, to raise questions that are unwelcome but necessary, and so broaden the discussion. Your comments seem meant to drag it back into the same old framework.
        It’s ironic if you think that belief in the soul is being used to control people, while belief that human beings are essentially machines run by chemical processes and can be tinkered with any which way we like until we get them to run the way we want them to, that this sort of belief is somehow going to set us free. It’s scientism, and however you slice it, the idea of a self that inhabits the body, or the brain, and whose whims need to be served is every bit as ephemeral as any religious notion of a soul. I don’t personally believe in a reincarnation model of human existence, but the psyche is real and “soul” is as good a synonym for it as any.
        I’m also puzzled that anyone can think of the Trans agenda as offering any kind of a solution to social oppression, when it is so demonstrably a continuation, unbroken, of the same control memes that have oppressed and enslaved human beings for so long. And when the same powers and interests are so provably involved.

        Reply
        • The idea that transition will ‘alleviate oppression’ is just some batshit crazy weird idea that some social justice warrior had way back.
          Genuine transsexuals seek congruence with the sex that they feel they should inhabit. This has nothing to do with social issues around ‘oppression’ (which is mostly just an application of Marxist ideology which is totally inappropriate)
          Yeah, if my principle concern was how society treats each sex, then that might influence my decisions. But it wasn’t. It was a soul destroying sense of alienation from my own body that eventually led to my seeking sex reassignment, and the status or form of treatment that women or men get was entirely irrelevant.
          If I may say, to suggest that this is in any way relevant to transsexuals or transsexualism would demonstrate a complete failure to understand the phenomenon.

          Reply
      • Even less than 1 in 100, Lynn Conway did a report on this in 2001 and while the figures are a lot higher than the out of date assumptions of previous decades, ‘strong gender dysphoria’ still only comes out at around 0.2%
        http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TSprevalence.html
        Dr Jordan B Peterson points out that a 99.8% correlation is way above the statistical correlation to be satisfied that there is a natural association between physical sex and gender identity.
        To suggest, as some trans activists try to, that gender identity is ‘learnt’ and that it’s just some kind of chance and good luck that most people born with a penis see themselves as male and most with a vagina as female, is utterly ludicrous and against all scientific thinking. But that would be nothing new with social constructionists.
        We need a proper taxonomy of trans types, something that Harry Benjamin instituted with his 6 category spectrum, but I can’t even find that online now, it’s probably considered politically incorrect to actually have categories.

        Reply
      • That’s curious. A child’s “will” to transition. I do not think a child can even comprehend of the consequences of that beyond how it will impact them immediately. A child does not have the capacity to grasp what puberty blockers will do – how sterilization might impact them later in life – or how they might feel when they’re a teen as opposed to how they feel now. A child wants a lot of things – my nieces spent a year needing to pretend to be dogs for some portion of each day or they would get very annoyed and upset. They don’t want to pretend to be dogs anymore.
        What I see again and again is the narrative of – my son likes dolls, wears pink, and wants to only play with girls – therefore he must be a girl. Not a boy that doesn’t fit my beliefs about how a boy should be, but actually the wrong sex. When a child says “I want to be a girl” – do they mean, I want to take puberty blockers to prevent becoming an adult male or are they saying I want to wear a dress to school?

        Reply
        • Well, I don’t know, I agree it’s difficult, and becomes more difficult as they get older. I don’t think people should get so hung up on the very few percent who eventually have surgery, and I don’t think that anyone should have surgery until they are at least 18.
          That said, a child does know what their interests are, a child does know when they are not fitting in with those they are expected to associate with because of some invisible impenetrable barrier of constant miscommunication, a child will form plans for their future, albeit unrealistic ones like being an astronaut, or overly ambitious ones like being a millionaire popstar, but they will figure out who they are like and not like, and what they enjoy doing vs what makes them really stressed out, and a child or at lest an early teenager does figure out stuff about their body, like what turns them on, who they are sexually/romatically attracted to, and how they actually want to have sex, even if they are not exactly clear on how that can be arranged, or emotionally ready for it.
          There’s a lot of people telling you the ‘I knew when I was 3/4’, and maybe there were, or maybe that’s a rationalisation and a personal narrative rewriting from someone so desperate to be taken seriously and to meet the diagnostic criteria as an adult that they will spin the required story to get the treatment they want and need.
          For my case I knew for sure when I was 15, back in 1997 or so, that I was not like other boys because I really really wanted/needed to have sex like a girl. That was a fact I discovered about my body/psyche, one that I couldn’t shake, and one that sent me into a spiral of hiding, and suppression leading to depression, and generally going downhill in all kinds of ways, like not having any kind of social life at all, and being too mentally distracted all the time to get much of any homework done through my GCSE and A Level years.
          I also soon figured out from watching TV that while there were other people like me, we were pretty rare, or at least most people usually pretended/assumed we were pretty rare, and most of the time we weren’t mentioned at all except as the butt of horrible jokes and pranks done against heterosexual guys, making them throw up, and attack us or kill us to protect their precious egos, and that while a lot of liberals might be supportive of our existence in theory, it wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted happening in your own family, etc. It’s really complicated, dangerous, takes a very long time, is very embarrassing for everyone concerned, and limits your future prospects in lots of ways afterwards even if you are super-intelligent and also considered ‘passable’ enough to go relatively unnoticed on the street. Most people you know seem to think that being a transsexual means you are just destined for life as a sex worker of some description, or will end up being disowned by your family and dying alone in some ghetto of AIDs. Which is altogether a terrifying prospect for a rather immature teenager.
          So you have a choice, do you tell anyone or just try to hide it, and maybe hope it will just go away.
          You’re maybe still hoping it will just go away at 17, and at 19, and at 21, and at 25, as you gradually try to put all the pieces of your life back together, and figure out what you are actually good for. Then maybe when you have a little bit more maturity, you gradually figure out that it isn’t really so bad, there are far worse things one could be, like a rapist or murderer, or one could have happen to you, like lose your arms and legs in a car accident, or have all skin on your face disfigured in a fire, and that other people just like you are often actually considered ‘geniuses’, and even do really high-end technical work for all kinds of software companies and defense contractors, and so on and so forth, and it isn’t actually the end of the world after all. http://www.jamiefaye.com/newsjamiegamer.html
          There are many many biologically trans people all around you, either totally repressed and fragmented and unaware of what they are, or self-aware and deeply in the closet, or maybe even ‘happily’ married to a heterosexual partner, except for that one weekend a month at a hotel where they let their hair down with or without their partners knowledge, or far fewer in various stages taking hormones, which actually help keep them emotionally ticking over nicely, or fewer still living part-time or full-time in the opposite role with the identity documents like driving licenses to match, and only the tiniest fraction of them have made it all the way past the blocks imposed by medical community to eventually having genital surgery, and the vast majority of those that have, MTFs at least, are really really pleased with the results, but really wish they had been able to do so much sooner, and wish that they had been able to skip going though the ‘wrong’ puberty, and all that anxiety and shame and confusions of their teens, so that they wouldn’t have needed to spend so much time and money and endure so much pain having electrolysis to remove their body hair, or complicated facial reshaping surgery to remove your testosterone-induced brow ridge, and wish their voice hadn’t broken, and they hadn’t grown so big that they couldn’t blend in or buy regular clothes off the shelf.
          https://the-orbit.net/splainyouathing/2016/09/05/trans-autistic-weird-common/
          So what’s ‘wrong’ for my especially vulnerable child when he/she is too young to possibly make that kind of decision, may not actually be ‘wrong’ for them in the long term, and they might really thank you for it later if you can help spare them for the worst of the years of trauma and self-denial, because chances are they are not going to just make it through another 50-70 years of life without having to act on their sexuality, in one way or another, and the worse you make them feel about themselves when they are young, the longer it will take them to unravel all the layers of denial they have wrapped themselves up in. Then you know, you have a bunch of those ‘ugly’ socially immature ‘crazy’ people in their 30s or later, who never went though the psycho-emotional side of puberty properly as a teenager, and who still feel like they have to hide most everything about themselves, and who you now want to protect your vulnerable child from sharing a public bathroom with.
          1997 was only just over 20 years ago, I know, but it’s kind of a long time to be kept in limbo waiting for your life to ‘begin’, while it seems like everyone else is just racing ahead of you, and you can’t figure out exactly where you went wrong.
          ‘Why does it always rain on me? Is it because I lied when I was 17?’

          Reply
    • I recall someone, not sure if it was you, saying a while back that the notion of male & female brains has a very shaky scientific basis, at best. Do you know anything more about this?

      Reply
  7. “Sex Change” Surgery: What Bruce Jenner, Diane Sawyer, and You Should Know
    by Walt Heyer
    April 27th, 2015
    Bruce Jenner and Diane Sawyer could benefit from a history lesson. I know, because I suffered through “sex change” surgery and lived as a woman for eight years. The surgery fixed nothing—it only masked and exacerbated deeper psychological problems.
    The beginnings of the transgender movement have gotten lost today in the push for transgender rights, acceptance, and tolerance. If more people were aware of the dark and troubled history of sex-reassignment surgery, perhaps we wouldn’t be so quick to push people toward it.
    The setting for the first transgender surgeries (mostly male-to-female) was in university-based clinics, starting in the 1950s and progressing through the 1960s and the 1970s. When the researchers tallied the results and found no objective proof that it was successful—and, in fact, evidence that it was harmful—the universities stopped offering sex-reassignment surgery.
    Since then, private surgeons have stepped in to take their place. Without any scrutiny or accountability for their results, their practices have grown, leaving shame, regret, and suicide in their wake.
    The Founding Fathers of the Transgender Movement
    The transgender movement began as the brainchild of three men who shared a common bond: all three were pedophilia activists.
    Continued here: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/04/14905/
    Also:
    I Was a Transgender Woman
    by Walt Heyer
    The reprieve provided by surgery and life as a woman was only temporary. Hidden deep underneath the make-up and female clothing was the little boy hurt by childhood trauma, and he was making himself known.
    It was a pivotal scene. A mom was brushing a boy’s long hair, the boy slowly turned his head to look at her. In a tentative voice, he asked, “Would you love me if I were a boy?” The mom was raising her boy to become a trans-girl.
    In that split second, I was transported back to my childhood. I remembered my grandmother standing over me, guiding me, dressing me in a purple chiffon dress. The boy in that glowing documentary about parents raising transgender kids dared to voice a question I always wanted to ask. Why didn’t she love me the way I was?
    I am haunted by that boy and his question. What will the trans-kids of 2015 be like sixty years from now? Documentaries and news stories only give us a snapshot in time. They are edited to romanticize and normalize the notion of changing genders and to convince us that enlightened parents should help their children realize their dreams of being the opposite gender.
    I want to tell you my story. I want you to have the opportunity to see the life of a trans-kid, not in a polished television special, but across more than seven decades of life, with all of its confusion, pain, and redemption.
    Continued here: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/04/14688/
    See also:
    77 to 94 percent of gender dysphoric children do not become adults with gender dysphoria
    Ethical issues raised by the treatment of gender-variant prepubescent children.
    Drescher J, Pula J.
    Abstract
    Transgender issues and transgender rights have become increasingly a matter of media attention and public policy debates. Reflecting changes in psychiatric perspectives, the diagnosis of “trans-sexualism” first appeared in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems in 1975 and shortly thereafter, in 1980, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Since that time, international standards of care have been developed, and today those standards are followed by clinicians across diverse cultures. In many instances, treatment of older adolescents and adults is covered by national health care systems and, in some cases, by private health insurance. Most recently, the Medicare ban on coverage for gender reassignment surgery was lifted in 2014. In contrast to the relative lack of controversy about treating adolescents and adults, there is no expert clinical consensus regarding the treatment of prepubescent children who meet diagnostic criteria for what was referred to in both DSM-IV-TR and ICD-10 as gender identity disorder in children and now in DSM-5 as gender dysphoria. One reason for the differing attitudes has to do with the pervasive nature of gender dysphoria in older adolescents and adults: it rarely desists, and so the treatment of choice is gender or sex reassignment. On the subject of treating children, however, as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health notes in their latest Standards of Care, gender dysphoria in childhood does not inevitably continue into adulthood, and only 6 to 23 percent of boys and 12 to 27 percent of girls treated in gender clinics showed persistence of their gender dysphoria into adulthood. Further, most of the boys’ gender dysphoria desisted, and in adulthood, they identified as gay rather than as transgender. In an effort to clarify best treatment practices for transgender individuals, a recent American Psychiatric Association Task Force on the Treatment of Gender Identity outlined three differing approaches to treating prepubescent gender dysphoric children.
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25231780

    Reply
    • I wouldn’t contend any of this evidence you present, but there are several points you miss.
      Firstly, transsexuals existed before these people exploited it.
      Secondly, there are some genuine transsexuals who genuinely do make a successful transition and have no regrets about surgical reassignment. I cite myself as evidence.
      My sense of your view on this is that you are addressing the *Fake Trans* lobby who are responsible for the promotion of ‘gender questioning’ in children and so forth. But you are throwing out the baby with the bath water, if I may be so bold.

      Reply
  8. A very thoughtful article. To me, it seems that for a man to claim womanhood and even go so far as to carry a child is a direct attack on the actual feminine. Where are all the feminists now? Too busy upholding the rights of men who want to claim to be female I suppose.

    Reply
    • I agree with this. As far back as perhaps a decade or so, when stuff like this first started hitting the news, I posted on some group that if this person felt like they were a man, and presumably wanted a male body, wtf were they doing carrying a child inside themselves for nine months? Not to even mention the probable disruption of the child’s own normal development with the cocktail of hormones this person will have been on, but it seems that to do this contradicts the very identity they claim to have.
      I got roundly attacked for questioning in this way, but I still haven’t changed my view. If people want to do this stuff, I can’t stop them, but they shouldn’t expect it ever to be thought of as ‘normal’.

      Reply
  9. My first thoughts on completing reading this is that Jasun seems to be conflating all trans identities into one box.
    This is most definitely not the case. I have known gay men who tried to transition and then de-transitioned to be a man again when they realised they were only gay. I think there are a lot of people who are like this, and giving medical, even surgical treatment to children before they have worked this out is tantamount to child abuse.
    On the other hand, there are people such as myself who had a strong sense of dysphoria about our bodies since the earliest recollection, eventually transitioned because all attempts to fix this failed, had complete medico/surgical treatment, pass sufficiently to function in society and have never, ever, regretted it.
    It seems to me that the attitude represented by this article is naive and imagines that there is one problem, one solution, that all trans people are mistaken and so forth.
    We need a better approach to this. People who successfully completed transition decades ago and have never looked back should not be conflated with long term CDs (Can’t Decide) folks such as Jenner, who built their life around a male identity and then at the age of 62 or something decide to go for it, despite the fact that previous attempts were abandoned.
    I’m very sorry to say Jasun that you don’t really seem to understand the nuance and depth of the subject. Also, there is no real addressing of the possible organic/developmental/neurological issues and the taxonomy of the different manifestations. But the trans agenda activists will attack anyone who seeks to build a taxonomy of differences, like the recent article in Spiked which argued that all gender differences in language should be left behind and only ‘they’ should be used. I utterly resist this as much as I resist the Heinz 57 varieties of different gender identities, and welcome Dr Jordan B Peterson’s brave position against such nonsense.
    Simply put, I don’t really agree with the terms of the discussion, which seem to have been set by the trans lobby, many of whom aren’t trans to start with and just want to exploit the term so that they can destroy natural concepts of gender.
    Here’s another interview I have given on the subject.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG68my_zI6Y&t=1s

    Reply
  10. I don’t seem to be able to find a comment I made in the moderation queue so I’ll repeat it.
    The so far as I can see there is a complete absence of the term Transsexual, which is quite a big problem for me with this article.
    I have applied this term to myself since I was a child. I never even heard the term ‘Transgender’ until about 2002 and yet people force this term upon me. On the one occasion when I used it applied to myself it was assumed I meant that I was non-medically reassigned, so like basically what I knew as a ‘Transvestite’ back in the ’70s, although that term is now unacceptable to some. People thinking this about me really freaks me out, so I won’t use it.
    I don’t like the term TG, and I repudiate it entirely, at least for myself. It is a catch all conflation of a wide variety of conditions and behaviours and has little practical application because of its vagueness and over arching inclusion of everything.
    A proper taxonomy of ‘Trans’ conditions needs to be created, and then there may be some chance of getting to grips with it. Otherwise the mass conflation that we are currently having to put up with will continue to make this subject both a quagmire and a minefield at the same time.
    I’ll just add this link to the interview I did with Lana Lokteff on Radio 3Fourteen of the Red Ice Network, where I lay out the scientific basis for the subject, which is completely ignored by trans activists and gender studies wonks.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuapKYGi710&t=2s

    Reply
  11. Thanks for the many comments. There is of course a difference between the Trans Agenda and the countless individuals throughout cultural history who might be described as transsexuals. I am not ruling out the possibility for some form of transsexual drive that has nothing to do with adverse cultural factors, parenting, and early trauma, I just have yet to hear any really persuasive case for that. I am not sure what you mean when you say that you don’t believe that the cosmic order was screwed up while at the same time saying that you were born in the wrong body.
    I don’t believe infants are born blank slates, because I believe we are all born with ancestral patterns, psychic as well as a genetic, imprinted into us. But that is very different from an identity or what we tend to mean by that term today. It is rather the inverse, as infants we are an extension of a collective gene pool and I suspect this is true of adults also, except for the false identity we have constructed to isolate ourselves from that awareness and the responsibility to the collective which it brings.
    In your work, do you address trauma and psychic fragmentation?

    Reply
    • > trauma and psychic fragmentation
      What exactly is your point about this please Jasun? It seems you may be suggesting that trans is a result of this perhaps?
      Yes, and doubtless some pseudo-trans people suffer from these, I’ve known one or two likely cases. But this is not the point. If one genuine transsexual person exists who is transsexual because of neuro-developmental issues, then my case is proven.
      You seem to have some kind of problem with our very existence. Look at the Lynn Conway research. It’s an existential experience which it is pointless to deny.

      Reply
  12. Firstly, have you watched/listened to any of my three interviews on YouTube on this subject?
    You say you haven’t seen any convincing evidence for the existence of genuine transsexualism, so I’m assuming that at the time of writing you hadn’t listened to the interviews.
    Secondly, I would ask what kind of evidence you would consider to be satisfactory? Personally I consider my own life experience evidence enough.
    Interestingly, only a couple of days ago, I had a conversation with a good friend about this.
    She had previously expressed reserve about the phenomenon of transsexualism, but I didn’t disclose as it didn’t seem prudent at the time. Then she listened to some of my interviews and came back to me and said she had never guessed that I might be transsexual and that knowing me had shown her that there was a difference between different types of trans people.
    I’ve had this problem you express from the other side, when Gender Studies people tell me I only had this condition because I misidentified with my mother or somesuch. Apart from the fact that saying that is condescending and breaks the conditions that the kind of therapists I would accept would respect (they were only Sociologists, not Therapists, but I make that point concerning respect towards imputing motives towards people you don’t really know) they were entirely ignorant of the sort of evidence I was familiar with as far back as the ’70s in neuro-developmental psychology and they have a complete absence of information about me or my life, so it is just projected speculation.
    About this ‘Cosmic Order’ thing. I think we must have different ideas about this. In my reality it is possible for biological processes to be carried out imperfectly. If you have listened to my interviews by now you will have the information to understand this. Something went wrong and a part of my neurology didn’t develop the way it should have done optimally and I was left with this sense of wrongness. Why is that so hard to understand?
    I would return to the question of your questioning the existence of this phenomenon as a real thing. I would suggest that are approaching this from the wrong direction. The phenomenon exists, and if you take the time to read Lynn Conway’s excellent piece of research I linked, then you will see that it is far more widespread than anyone really imagines.
    You critique this, but this is just someone on the outside saying ‘I don’t understand this, therefore it shouldn’t exist. Ergo, anyone who is part of it is ‘wrong’ [whatever that means] and I feel I have the right to correct them and tell them they are imagining this’. This is like the kind of behaviour we see from leftists (I don’t know if you consider yourself a leftist or not) who just want to socially control all those people doing things they don’t like or understand.
    About the identity thing, you won’t accept this, but as a believer in reincarnation, it seems clear to me that we definitely bring stuff with us into the world from our past experiences of other lives. However, there is quite a lot of empirical evidence for it.
    As there is for transsexualism. The big issue is to shut down the SJW exploitation of a genuine phenomenon which is potentially damaging many young people with reckless behaviour on this matter, not to existentially question whether people like me should have to justify our existence. What do you want me to do? I’ve passed in female morphology with a female identity for 30 years and now even have legal recognition with the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (although that is a flawed piece of legislation).
    If you want to dig into this seriously then you have to talk to someone like me about this in your podcast. Saying you require proof or something is not the way to go. Anyway, I’ve cited Gooren and Zhou and Ramachandran. If you can’t integrate their empirical findings then you need to go back and reconsider the whole issue.

    Reply
    • I have listened to the Red Ice interview twice now and while I found it interesting and your perspective enjoyable & insightful, I didn’t hear anything like a scientific argument for the reality of a neuorogical basis for transsexual identity, or what I call gender confusion.
      I find it easy to accept there IS a neurological correlation with this phenomenon, but correlation is not causation, and it’s possible, likely even, that the brain reflects all kinds of psychic and psychological anomalies without actually causing them. In my view, when there is a biological anomaly, there is always an imperative to seek out some external causal factor, for otherwise we end up with a tautological conundrum, that Nature sometimes gets its wired crossed because that’s just what Nature does (and so external factors are needed to uncross them).
      I don’t accept the presumption that a neurological correlation with gender confusion automatically rules out all environmental factors and I can’t imagine any rational argument that it does. You say in your interview that you “tried everything” before opting for gender reassignment. Maybe you can share what sort of therapy you underwent, and for how long? And whether you were able to retrieve anything of what happened in those first four years, or about conditions in the womb? These are all relevant factors.
      There are a number of assumptions in your last post that suggest to me that you are reading my thoughts from a very personal position (as you say in the interview, you have “positionality”), and that this is leading you to re-interpret things I write as specifically directed at you. You think that, by writing this piece, I have a problem with you personally. I guess this has to do with my not agreeing that your life experience is evidence of anything besides someone who had gender reassignation and didn’t regret it. Naturally, you find it condescending if someone suggests that your gender confusion relates to mother identification or to early trauma, but on the other hand, I find it likewise condescending if someone tells me I don’t know what I am talking about when I cite these as essential factors in understanding sexual identity confusion, and all because I didn’t have gender reassignation, or ever believe I was born into the wrong body. Somehow that makes my experience and knowledge of these other causal factors irrelevant or “presumptuous.”
      You believe that gender reassignment was not only the right but the only choice open to you, and you have found the scientific evidence you needed to confirm you in that belief. But of course for everyone else, it’s the evidence that counts, not your belief in it. Isn’t it a little too “easy” to comment here that I need to integrate that evidence right now (without sharing it) or admit that I don’t know enough to write about it? This is an easy, but somewhat unfair, way to signal to readers not to trust what I say (especially due to your positionality), without making solid, tangible arguments for me to respond to. Meanwhile, many of the points I am trying to make are being ignored, or dismissed as irrelevant, because I am not addressing the evidence you want me to address, evidence which you aren’t actually sharing here except my naming names of “experts.” (Not that I don’t mean to follow some of these leads, only that this isn’t the best way to allow for a dialogue.)
      Having said all that, the evidence you bring to the conversation is that, at the age of four, you experienced something that led you to identify as being the opposite gender and eventually led to gender reassignation. And that now, some decades later, you fully identify as a woman and consider that, for whatever reason, nature got it wrong and surgery corrected the error? That you were always really female, or meant to be female, but that you were somehow given the wrong biological container? If so, this is no different than what present transgender spokespeople are claiming (for themselves or for others); the only difference I can see is that you reject the ideological framework and the word transgender, and want to make it a 100% neurological issue. (From what I’ve seen, many trans advocates DO cite the neurology all the time, and insist that it is NOT a choice but biology; which is all very confusing, since if it is biological then it is a disorder, but it is inadmissible to suggest that trans relates to a disorder. But if it’s a choice then it’s a little too close to being seen as a whim, and certainly likely to lead to regret.)
      >If one genuine transsexual person exists who is transsexual because of neuro-developmental issues, then my case is proven.
      If it were proven, I suppose. But we have a fundamental disagreement about neuro-development happening in a vacuum and being independent from trauma and psychological fragmentation. Anyway, didn’t you just write that to search for proof was futile?
      As for me having a problem that such people exist, that may be at least partially projection. It does seem as though you have a problem with me writing about the subject in ways you find disturbing, and that you want to educate me so that I represent your own experience more to your satisfaction. Do I really need to state that I’m not here to represent your experience but mine, and that this is it? Is it possible to start by accepting my own experience, before trying to adjust my viewpoint to better reinforce your own? That never leads to agreement only, at best, to resignation, at worst resentment.
      If I may be frank, you are coming across as someone with an axe to grind, and the doubtless many good points you do have to bring to the discussion are in danger of getting lost in the sparks.

      Reply
      • There’s a lot there so I’ll just reply to one point and then think about the rest.
        You say that you think I’m taking this personally.
        Well, in a way, you may have something there, which I was just thinking about before I read your reply.
        Last year we were going to do a podcast in amongst which I think this was a subject on the menu.
        You had a personal loss and unbooked our arrangement. It’s now been more than a year since I heard from you, and this blog pops up. You express quite strong views in it which I’ve come back on strongly in my turn, but you seem surprised.
        I’m an academic who has had lifelong experience of the transsexual phenomenon, and have now done several formal interviews on the subject, but I don’t agree with the new trend in Gender Studies which asserts that gender is ‘merely a construct’ and in my contacts with Gender Studies academics this is the total belief system, so yes, I do have an axe to grind. I think the entire context of terms in which the discussion has been taking place is entirely wrong, and it needs to be properly reconsidered and taken back to nature.
        I also take a strong position against the propagandising of this view that gender is merely a socially programmed construct as I believe it is potentially capable of wreaking havoc amongst impressionable people who pick this up as a contagion rather than something endogenous to themselves. So I am very much going against the tide of politically correct thinking on this subject and take every opportunity to press what I consider to be a more correct understanding.
        You went ahead and published your material without pursuing your research leads, or at least it seems you didn’t want to follow up what I thought on the subject. So yeah, there would seem to be something going on here with you keeping me at a distance.
        I’ll get back on the rest later.

        Reply
        • This is interesting to read because I agree with you 100%, as I assumed would be obvious from this post and anything else I write, that the notion of gender as a social construct is absurd, especially since it is made by people who generally aren’t willing to look at the possibility that identity itself is a social construct, making gender/biology far more real than (almost) anything about us. IMO.
          Regarding me not getting back to you, apologies if that seemed rude. I am very intuitive about the podcast, some might say whimsical, and at the same time very wary of the danger of it providing a forum for people to push their agendas. Hence i rarely invite people on who “do the rounds” (appear on other podcasts, etc) as they tend to have a message they want to get out there, and the podcast for me is an opportunity to leave that aside and share a space with someone to explore together what it is to be human. I don’t do them as research, and I wasn’t choosing not to consult with you before writing this piece; this piece came about rapidly and organically over a period of two days, due to an exchange with a mutual friend whose name begins with V. Our tentative plan to do a podcast fell through when my cat died, and then I just didn’t feel a strong “pull” to pick up that thread again.
          There is SO MUCH research that can be cited on this subject, a fraction of which I even know, that to try and be comprehensive would be futile. What I strive for is to be accurate to my own perception and experience and to refrain from making too many categorical statements that aren’t personal, and let evidence speak for itself. Part two of this piece (which does touch on the “brain stuff”) will have more autobiographical info and also deeper context for why this interests me and why I perhaps have an axe of my own to grind here (which I suspect is of similar cast as yours).
          Is it possible that, if you are unfamiliar with my own output, you might have thought I was basing some of my arguments on the same ideological insanity that you are battling with? It might help to be very precise & specific about any points you disagree with, to see if there’s a breakdown in communication due to expectations.

          Reply
        • BTW, for some reason your comments are still being held in moderation, even tho normally it is only the first time someone comments that this happens. I have no idea why the blog is making an exception for you!

          Reply
      • I’m not an activist or a social constructivist. I believe gender identification is a psychological consequence of a physical/biological/neurological structure, not a ‘cosmic ordering’ or divine mis-allocation of souls to bodies.
        We now have some fairly strong evidence that a lot of the children of mothers given the anti-miscarriage drug DES, from the 1950s to 1970s, both male and female, have some fairly messed up internal reproductive systems, and other bodily skeletal abnormalities, and also problems of gender identification, from the relatively mild to the full-on transsexual.
        It’s a situation like that with thalidomide only usually much less obvious immediately after birth, with problems that only increase over the course of the lifespan.
        https://youtu.be/92GOtFyFNrs
        These people growing up in the 50s and 60s often had no conception of what was really going on with them, and no one they could turn to for any help, to the simple-minded religious folks it’s a ‘sin’ to even dress as a member of the opposite sex occasionally, much less to live as one full-time, to the supposedly highly educated psychologists it’s a problem of early trauma or over-identification with the mother figure, and the best you can do is just try to keep your emotions under wraps, resist the temptation to act naturally, put up and shut up. Many people tried that for decades, and some even got married and had children, and others gradually succumbed to drink or drugs or suicide, and we’ll probably never know how many people suffered in silence, or just eventually identified as gay, or felt so guilty they worked themselves into an early grave by 60.
        The downstream effects of this drug can even spread to the next generation.

        Reply
  13. The mainstream media is manipulating the masses by making it seem as though the transgender phenomenon is something new, when in fact it has been around since ancient times.
    I would like to add to the discussion by drawing attention to the beliefs of Native Americans regarding this issue, which may seem like “ethereal rubbish” to some, but here it is anyway:
    https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/oct/11/two-spirit-people-north-america
    The ‘two-spirit’ people of indigenous North Americans
    Native Americans have often held intersex, androgynous people, feminine males and masculine females in high respect. The most common term to define such persons today is to refer to them as “two-spirit” people …
    Rather than emphasising the homosexuality of these persons, however, many Native Americans focused on their spiritual gifts. American Indian traditionalists, even today, tend to see a person’s basic character as a reflection of their spirit. Since everything that exists is thought to come from the spirit world, androgynous or transgender persons are seen as doubly blessed, having both the spirit of a man and the spirit of a woman. Thus, they are honoured for having two spirits, and are seen as more spiritually gifted than the typical masculine male or feminine female.
    Therefore, many Native American religions, rather than stigmatising such persons, often looked to them as religious leaders and teachers. Quite similar religious traditions existed among the native peoples of Siberia and many parts of Central and southeast Asia. Since the ancestors of Native Americans migrated from Siberia over 20,000 years ago, and since reports of highly respected androgynous persons have been noted among indigenous Americans from Alaska to Chile, androgyny seems to be quite ancient among humans.

    Reply
  14. Re: Lynn Conway:

    In the early 1980s, Conway left Xerox to join DARPA, where she was a key architect of the Defense Department’s Strategic Computing Initiative, a research program studying high-performance computing, autonomous systems technology, and intelligent weapons technology.[14][40]
    In a USA Today article about Conway’s joining DARPA, Mark Stefik, a Xerox scientist who worked with her, said “Lynn would like to live five lives in the course of one life” and that she’s “charismatic and very energetic”.[41] Douglas Fairbairn, a former Xerox associate, said “She figures out a way so that everybody wins.”[41]
    As sociologist Thomas Streeter discusses in The Net Effect:[42][43] “By taking this job, Conway was demonstrating that she was no antiwar liberal. (In response to critics, she has said, ‘if you have to fight, and sometimes you must in order to deal with bad people, history tells us that it really helps to have the best weapons available)”.[13] But Conway carried a sense of computers as tools for horizontal communications that she had absorbed at PARC right into DARPA – at one of the hottest moments of the cold war.”
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway

    Conway on transgender:

    Hidden away and seldom talked about is the fact that some apparently normal boys aren’t boys at all, but should have been girls. Although they have normal XY genes, normal male genitalia, and are raised as boys, they nevertheless have the gender feelings, body feelings and gender identity of girls. Similarly, some girls aren’t girls at all, but should have been boys. It doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen. And it’s always been that way.
    Perhaps once in every 200 to 400 births something must go amiss in the early stages of pregnancy so that sex hormones do not have the usual action on the integration of the fetus’s brain. In these cases, children are born having a brain-sex (neurological sex) and innate gender identity opposite to that indicated both by their genes and their genitalia. Since these infants look normal, they will be raised in the wrong gender for their brain-sex (neurological sex). Being raised in the wrong gender causes them profound gender dysphoria and mental anguish as they grow up. These are the “transsexuals” (TS), the most intensely affected of the “transgendered” (TG).
    In many more cases, perhaps as many as one out of every 50 children, it appears that the “transgendering effect” is less pronounced but still present to some degree – and this occurs in both boys and girls. We can estimate these numbers from the numbers of gender-variant people who have always coalesced in and around the gay community. Although a small fraction of that community, they are perhaps as much 1% to 2% of the overall population. This group of children presents a wide range of variations in cross-gender feelings (just as the group of intersex children present a wide range of genital configurations). Many of these transgender children will have major adjustment problems if forced into too strict a gender role.
    http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TS.html#anchor322586

    I imagine she goes into more depth elsewhere, but so far this isn’t exactly hard science. Maybe she saves her big guns for DARPA?

    Reply
    • The statistical evidence I cited is extracted from the work which Lynn Conway published in the link I gave.
      This is just raw data on the prevalence of gender dysphoria in the population, nothing to do with aetiology. However, the point I was making is that this is a fact of people’s behaviour and short of going after them with hounds you can’t stop it.
      My major point on the thread is that people are being suggested and encouraged into things that they would not otherwise be doing through the influence of cultural Marxist attitudes, and this should be challenged at every possible opportunity by those who know about the subject. The idea that this should be considered ‘normal’ is bizarre.
      My citing of Lynn Conway’s Prevalence piece is to demonstrate that this was already a mass phenomenon 15 or more years ago, but it was low key and not being pushed in the way that it is now. It is the pushing I wish to address, which is wrong, and it should stop. Children should not be ‘encouraged to question their gender identity’ at the age of three or some nonsense like that.

      Reply
  15. Good on you Cosmic Claire , if you are as you present yourself at face value , hats off. You seem to be divorcing yourself from much of the leftie transhumanist ideological agenda. I have not looked into your previous online postings or any of that so have not formed a view if you are some kind of operative . You seem a very different kettle of fish to EmmaJoey who is right there in the “mainstream” on this .
    If you are not what you seem , well , i feel sorry for you.
    Hope this makes sense !

    Reply
  16. I may be having a stoner moment, but has Crucial Fictions been removed from auticulture? I want to link a friend to it.

    Reply
  17. Here’s the information on the empirical evidence.
    Principally the Ramachandran study: Journal of Consciousness Studies 15, no 1, 2008, pp 5-16
    VS Ramachandran is Professor of NeuroPsychology at San Diego University.
    The study looks at phantom penises experienced by female to male transsexuals and found that this phenomenon did not appear with control female subjects. Similar evidence was found in reverse for male to female transsexuals. Statistically significant results.
    Professor Ramachandran is a world leader in neurological mapping.
    So this contests the hypothesis that transsexualism has a psychodynamic aetiology.
    The Gooren and Zhou evidence relates to the Striate nucleus which is a totally different part of the brain to the neurological mapping that is implicated in the Ramachandran work. In this case it seems to relate to the ‘Fight or flight’ response, which is significantly different between controls of women and men. Men fight, women flee, (statistically) which has survival adaptation value.
    Lastly it is well known that the hypothalamus is largely involved in sexual drive, and it has been demonstrated that pheromones are involved with sexual attraction. The ‘sweaty teeshirt’ experiment evidence.
    So the implications are that there are more than one part of the brain involved.
    This would provide explanatory evidence as to why it is that there are differing degrees of transsexualism, I referred to the 6 levels or categories which Harry Benjamin introduced but which are now ignored or downplayed.
    It is my own hypothesis that there are more than one system involved in transsexualism
    So this presents the basic neurological systems involved in
    1) Sexual body image
    2) Gendered survival drives
    3) Sexual attraction drives.
    There may also be other brain systems involved, but these are certainly major ones that are going on, and for which there is extensive experimental evidence.
    It is my further hypothesis that promoting transgender identities on the basis of the flawed concepts of modern Gender Studies Gender Theory encourages pseudo-transsexualism because they encourage the sort of behaviours which can cause quasi-transsexualism. Examples of this would be dressing boys in dresses and treating them as girls as a young child which would confuse their natural development.
    I will say briefly that I never experienced anything like this and had an entirely orthodox gender expectation upbringing as would be expected in the late fifties.
    Absence of evidence in the direction of psychodynamic aetiology but a persistent and unrelenting body image instead indicates a high probability to me that the hypothesis which Ramachandran proposes has greater explanatory value.

    Reply
      • I can only suggest that you search for it, I cited the reference, the actual paper itself will not be online but there should be an abstract.
        I read it first hand in the Brotherton Library at Leeds University, but it would breach copyright to post my photocopies.

        Reply
          • Also this:
            Transsexuals and the phantom penis
            Transsexuals usually want sexual reassignment surgery. A typical remark from a male is they feel like a woman trapped in a male body and their penis doesn’t belong. V.S. Ramachandran wonders what is going on the brains of transsexuals. He notes that if the penis is removed due to cancer, the patient feels a phantom penis. If the penis of a transsexual is removed, there is no phantom penis. What does this say about the hardwiring of the brain? Ramachandran says we have a brain-based body image detailed down to the fine anatomy of the genitals.
            V. S. Ramachandran also discusses consciousness, self-awareness, reflection and introspection.

            Transcript

            Robyn Williams: Further south in California is one of the great centres of research in America at San Diego and that’s where Professor V. S. Ramachandran studies the brain and the people who have unusual ones. Rama, as he’s called, has written about phantom limbs, given the Reith Lectures for the BBC and studied the psychological origins of art. Now he’s on the track of the phantom penis.
            V. S. Ramachandran: Yes, it’s part of the whole nature-nurture debate, which is really a spurious debate because it’s always a complex interaction between the two. One striking example of this we’ve seen recently is some work I’ve done talking to transsexuals; these are people who want sexual reassignment surgery. A typical remark from a transsexual male-to-female would be, ‘I feel like a woman trapped in a male body, and this appendage, this penis, doesn’t really belong to me and I want to get rid of it and I want to become a woman.’ People always thought this was just psychological mumbo-jumbo but there is a significant number of people who experience this, and we started wondering about this and said: why? What’s going on in their brain?
            Now, it turns out that if ‘normal people’…and I put it in quotes because it’s important to emphasise that there’s nothing wrong or abnormal about being a transsexual, it’s part of the whole spectrum of human sexuality and sexual behaviour. But it is curious that most normal people who have carcinoma of the penis, which is not rare, and they have an amputation of the penis as a life saving measure, a majority of them, maybe about 80%, 85% of them, experience a phantom penis, including phantom erections. This is well known. Since this chap is saying his penis doesn’t belong to him in the first place, what if his penis is amputated because he wants to become a woman, what happens then?
            The answer is the majority of them don’t experience a phantom penis. What’s amazing is that your body image, which includes your genitals, is at least in part programmed by genes and your brain is hard-wired to incorporate the genitals as part of your body image. Even more amazing is the observation that women who undergo transgender sexual surgery who acquired an artificial penis, a majority of them since early childhood have experienced a phantom penis. This is absolutely extraordinary because it means that each of us has a brain-based body image which is detailed down to the fine anatomy, including your genitals.
            If your brain body image does not match…normally your brain body image and your external morphology are synchronised in early development through hormones, through genetic mechanisms. If this gets uncoupled and they aren’t in synchrony you end up with a body image that’s morphologically male, so they experience a phantom penis. What’s amazing is that all these years of culture being raised as a woman, as a girl, and even seeing that they don’t have a penis does not correct this body image. This shows that even though your body image is extremely malleable, as we have shown with phantom limbs and mirrors and that sort of thing, it also turns out that there’s a strong genetic contribution to your body image. This has, of course, great implications for understanding how your brain represents sexual behaviour and constructs body image.
            Robyn Williams: How do you know that the information that you’ve been given is not unreliable but not wishful thinking? Because the women may say this and you might believe them but how do you know it’s necessarily as profoundly genetic as you imply?
            V. S. Ramachandran: We don’t know for sure except for remarks such as when they were first given testosterone therapy (this is sometimes done prior to surgery) the phantom becomes much more vivid. They also said things like they have phantom erections, which men do even after carcinoma. But even more amazingly they’ll say things like they get erections even with non-erotic situations, suddenly it becomes erect and this is very embarrassing. Now, for somebody to make up a story like that is quite unusual and you hear the same thing again and again in different women who have not talked to each other.
            The other thing is they’ll give you precise descriptions of its length, they’ll say sometimes it’s leaning to the left primarily, or they’ll say its angle between the pubic bone and the penis is such-and-such. The precision of the descriptions often gives somebody who has experience with clinical neurology the idea that this is probably not confabulatory. Of course you can’t be absolutely sure. And the other thing is some of them also after breasts are removed, which is often the case, they don’t have phantom breasts, whereas when breasts are removed for carcinoma then the majority of women experience phantom breasts. So there’s that observation as well which is consistent. So this suggests strongly that this is a hard-wired body image thing and not just a confabulation.
            Robyn Williams: Of course it would make sense that we have such an image of our bodies because we run them without thinking, we know roughly where they should be and what they should be doing without looking around all the time, and we actually walk through rooms in the dark without falling over. So this is more or less the necessity of it, is it?
            V. S. Ramachandran: That’s true, but on the other hand one could equally argue why such a high degree of precision? After all, you can fashion aspects of your body image using visual input, so why do you need to hard-wire it? And that’s a difficult to answer. Another striking example I’ve seen in India, and this has been described in the older literature, it’s not our discovery, is that people with leprosy progressively lose their fingers until the arm becomes shorter and shorter, the forearm, but these people never experience a phantom hand.
            The standard argument is that it’s because they’ve gradually seen it shrink, so their body image is able to accommodate the changing appearance of the hand. But now if there’s a little gangrene in the stump and you go and mess around with it, try to treat it, make it heal, what happens is the entire phantom gets resurrected. So it’s as though the phantom hasn’t really gone, the internal body image, it has somehow been inhibited temporarily, and when you go and mess around with it, it gets resurrected. So that’s another example of how it’s not just genetic or just environmental but a complex interaction between the two.
            Robyn Williams: It’s amazing. How are you following up this work so that you get a more global picture of what it means?
            V. S. Ramachandran: We are following it up by…the usual tactic is to do brain imaging, which is what we did with the phantom limb experiments. For example, what happens when you put a mirror and you have a phantom and you animate the phantom using a mirror image and it starts moving, what happens in your brain? (?Hertefler43:34), who has been working on this in Finland, has done it, repeating our experiments with mirrors and showing that in many of them, about half of them, the phantom just disappears and the pain disappears, but now she’s following this doing brain imaging to show what happens to your body image in the brain. So that will be the obvious next step.
            But let me add here, when you think about body image it’s hard not to think of you being a person anchored in a body, and this takes you to the question of consciousness and self-awareness, and this is of course a hot topic. Crick and Koch have talked about it, the Churchlands have talked about it, Damasio has talked about it, and every magazine you pick up there’s a chapter on consciousness. I’ll give you my take on it, for what it’s worth. Self-awareness; I’m aware of red but I’m also aware of me, and I’m aware of me being aware of red. It’s this somewhat solipsistic aspect of self that has remained completely mysterious and continues to remain mysterious. It’s probably the greatest challenge to science. In fact, one could argue it’s the most important problem of all; who am I? What is the self?
            (solipsism solipsist, noun. /’soluhpsizuhm/
            noun the theory that the self is the only object of verifiable knowledge, or that nothing but the self exists. [sol(i)-1 + L ips(e) self + -ism]) (Inserted by Vickers)
            I think the answer comes from (?Ritselati’s44:41) discovery of motor neurons. It turns out there are neurons in the front of your brain and the neuron will fire when you reach out and grab something, another neuron when you grab a peanut, another neurone when you remove your spectacles, another neuron when you put something in your mouth, another neuron when you push something or pull something, different neurons for different complex skilled actions. This has been known for 30 or 40 years, but what is amazing is that some of these neurons will fire when a monkey watches another monkey doing the same thing, or another human watches another person doing the same thing. So you call these neurons ‘mirror neurons’ which fire when somebody else is performing the same action. So it’s as though the monkey or person is performing a virtual reality simulation, putting yourself in the other person’s shoes and viewing the world from the person’s vantage point. This is extremely important because you’re constructing a theory of other minds, and to do that you use your mirror neurons. In other words, it’s not merely to predict that person’s actions but to predict their intentions, to infer what’s going on their minds.
            All I’m saying is what you’re doing now…take the same mirror neurons which were evolved to generate a theory of other minds and to make predictions about their behaviour. That’s what evolved first. Turn it inwards and…see, when you think about yourself, I don’t think of self as one thing, it’s several things like being anchored in your body, a sense of planning for the future, a sense of willing actions, doing things. So there are many components to will, but one of the things I notice when I introspect…introspection is not fashionable but I think it’s a good thing to do…when you introspect you have a sense of yourself watching yourself from above; I’m doing things and I’m watching myself doing things. It’s obvious that mirror neurons might be involved there because just as you’re imagining the other person’s point of view looking at a peanut, you can imagine the other person’s point of view looking at yourself.
            I think even things like reflecting on yourself, things like introspection may involve this very same neural system, and being able to turn inwards to create representations of what’s going on in your own brain, creating what’s called introspection or your sense of self. I think this is why we use words like ‘I reflect’, or we use words like ‘I’m self-conscious’. What you really mean is not that I’m self-conscious, you mean I’m conscious of somebody else being conscious of me, and that’s why you get embarrassed. So why do you say self-conscious? So all of these indirect bits of evidence and evidence from clinical neurology, work we have done, suggest strongly that in fact self-awareness may depend on other awareness, or other awareness evolved first and then that same algorithm was applied to yourself.
            So how do you test this? Well, we’re looking at patients, for example, with denial, anosognosia, and these patients deny that their left arm is paralysed and this is because there’s additional damage to parts of the parietal lobe concerned with body image. The extraordinary thing is that some of these patients will deny that another patient is paralysed, even though the other patient is paralysed. So you can see how mirror neurons dissolve the barrier between you and other people and I call them empathy neurons, the Dalai Lama neurons, okay? In fact there are mirror neurons in the anterior singular which will fire when I poke you with a needle, so people used to think of these as pain neurons. Amazingly some of them will fire if you poke somebody else with a needle. So that’s why I call them empathy neurons.
            And mind you, one isn’t just being metaphorical here; that neuron simply doesn’t know the difference between you being poked and another human being poked. So I think that mirror neurons are going to be very important in thinking about some of these very enigmatic aspects of the self. I don’t think anybody has talked about its relevance to self-awareness and introspection, and I think that’s where some new experiments can be done to explore this.
            Robyn Williams: Very interesting. I have to ask a naïve question about mirrors, not mirror neurons but mirrors. There are various animals who recognise themselves in the mirror, apes being an example and of course elephants more recently surprisingly seem to be able to do this. Is that connected at all, this recognition of yourself in the mirror with the mirror neuron that you describe?
            V. S. Ramachandran: I don’t know but I don’t think so because I think what’s going on in a mirror…let me tell you about a patient again because it’s what I do for a living. We had a patient who had some kind of dementia but her IQ was maybe around 90, she was not mentally retarded or anything. This woman had a problem and when she looks at a mirror she says, ‘That woman is not me. Who is that strange woman in the mirror? She’s following me. She’s haunting me.’ She’ll even say when somebody else, her husband is standing next to her, ‘That’s my husband’s brother, it’s not my husband.’ She looks in the mirror and says, ‘That’s not me.’
            But now you do the famous Gallop test. What you do is when she was asleep I put a splotch of ink on her forehead. She gets up, looks in the mirror, immediately wipes off the splotch of ink. And then she says, ‘Who is that woman?’ So this means that the Gallop test is not really an adequate test for inferring that merely identifying the person in the mirror as you implies any type of self-awareness. I think it’s not an adequate test. So the implication of the Gallop test is a bit dubious. I think it’s a very ingenious experiment, but to say just from the Gallop test that somebody has introspection, some creature has awareness of self, is a little bit premature I think.
            Robyn Williams: In fact the experiment was involving a gorilla and various other animals who had, indeed, that mark on the forehead which they then studiously wiped off because they recognised that it shouldn’t be there.
            V. S. Ramachandran: Yes, this implies that they have some sense of parts of their body and they can reflexly remove something, just as if there’s a fly or something they might reflexly remove that, and with frequent practice with a mirror they somehow infer that this is their own body. To that extent they have self-awareness but not in the sense that humans do of introspective self-awareness, of me being a person anchored in the body, having a sense of future and past, being able to unite diverse sensory experiences and memories and all of that, which is what you and I mean by being aware of self. That kind of self-awareness is not proved by the mirror test.
            Robyn Williams: Professor V. S. Ramachandran at the University of California San Diego. He gave the Reith Lectures three years ago.
            V. S. Ramachandran Director Center for Brain and Cognition University of California San Diego La Jolla California USA http://psy.ucsd.edu/chip/CBC2.html
            Source (download doc)

          • Reading this causes me to wonder if there could be a correlation between a male infant with a female body image, mirror neurons, and the infant’s relationship to its mother?

          • My sense here is that you wish to impose the ‘mirror neurone’ explanation as one more piece of resistance to any actual innate developmental condition.
            The obvious reply has to be ‘Why?’ Why should one exposure to something cause such a profound and enduring sense of misidentification? Is it not more likely that it merely activated a recognition of something that was already there, at least in some latent form?
            And why is it not more common?

  18. It’s possible in some cases, just as dressing a child in cross gender clothes can cause pseudo-transsexualism, or transvestism as it used to be known.
    But that by no means demonstrates that all transsexuals who have the kind of body image described have acquired it in this manner. A basic point of scientific methodology, surely?
    Also, I would suggest that it is likely that such a condition would be less resistant to extinction than the kind of hard wiring suggested by the neural mapping model.
    Since most infants have intimate contact with their mothers, why wouldn’t this be more common, and how would this hypothesis account for female to male transsexuals who have intimate contact with their mothers but not their fathers?
    It rather seems to me that you are clutching at straws trying to find some way to discredit the experience of transsexuals.

    Reply
    • I don’t know if anyone is clutching at straws here but I know that I prefer not to leave stones unturned just because someone tells me there is nothing under them. Perhaps it’s reasonable to ask who here is more likely to be invested in a belief about transsexuals?

      Reply
      • I have made it abundantly clear that I consider it most likely that there are multiple taxonomic groups, and these are all conflated under ‘transgender’ when there will be different causes for each group.
        Secondly, my main point above was the scientific methodology of suggesting that the mirror neurone hypothesis might be the only cause of any of this.
        So please quit with the ad hominems.

        Reply
    • Also, I am curious why you consider it a “credit” to transsexuals if they are caused entirely by dissociated brain chemistry, and a “discredit” to them if there is allowed an element of mother-identification or some other kind of “psychodynamic aetiology”? What is is that you believe transsexuals to be that such interpretative models would strip them of?

      Reply
      • I don’t think I suggested any such thing. I certainly never used those words ‘credit’ or ‘discredit’. You seem to project a lot of your own assumptions and interpretations into what I say.
        I do however think there are taxonomic groups within the ‘Transgender’ umbrella terms who have acquired their syndrome through psychodynamics, and those who are bound to this self concept by innate neurological brain structures.
        This generalised umbrella which denies taxonomy is a real problem, and will lead people to grief. At least in my view. That is my principle concern. And it would help if people understood the taxonomy, because then they might make better decisions.
        While we’re at it, I’ll deal with a criticism you made above. No, I don’t think I have some special status above the hoi poloi. But I do have a vastly wider knowledge base of both academic information and a lifetime of experience. It would obviously be presumptuous of me to dare to suggest that this might be of use in helping others to avoid mistakes, tragedies even, that I have come across in the long years during which I dwelt on this subject.
        Except that some of these detransition, and if so probably regret surgeries etc not to mention the social problems that are likely to accrue. And there are those who transition, pass, work, have a life etc and don’t look back, don’t detransition, don’t regret it all.
        Is there any difference? Would someone from the second category have anything to say that might help prevent people from the former, who have an unsuitable profile from going ahead and ruining their lives?
        I should hope that it is becoming clear by now that my view of this subject involves allowing multiple different things to be going on in different people, and in a nutshell, what I want to impress on people that this is the case, and not the absolute conflation of everything to the point of loss of distinction and so arrive at the bizarre conclusion that anyone can decide to have a sex change or change their ‘social gender’ just because it takes their whim.
        Look at nature. Gender identity is not ‘acquired’ through social learning or psychodynamics. It’s expression is modified culturally but that is an entirely different thing. It is instinctual.

        Reply
      • >What is is that you believe transsexuals to be that such interpretative models would strip them of?
        You see this is exactly the kind of projection that I have referred to elsewhere. It is your projection that you impute to me such a position. I only want the truth about this. I have offered a well elaborated theoretical structure for how this works with a taxonomy based on evidence from multiple sources.
        While all you seem to be interested in is trying to impute unconscious, or at least unacknowledged motivations to me for why it is that I hold a particular view, which must (in your view) be held because of these unconscious motives. Have you been brushing up on your Saul Alinsky tactics? Undermine, discredit, cause self doubt. I’ve been through all that and come out the other side.
        Can you allow that I might hold these views on the basis of evidence, which is congruent with my own experience and quit trying to sow doubt in my mind about things I worked out many decades ago?

        Reply
        • I’m sorry you feel that way and that this thread has been upsetting for you. I’m not going to respond anymore than that, because anything I say only seems to make it worse. Peace Be upon You.

          Reply
          • I know it’s a while since this was posted, but going over it again I do find the suggestion
            >that this thread has been upsetting for you
            rather condescending. It’s profoundly concerning that people are taking views which I think are so off the wall, but I’m used to it and I’m not upset. I was met with hostility by the Radical Feminists in the 70s and 80s, and more recently by the SJW Transgender lobby. When you’ve been in this game as long as I have you don’t get surprised by people who don’t understand and want to make attacks on your right to exist in the way you do, you just want to take it down.
            Standing up against something you disagree with doesn’t mean you are ‘upset’. It means you are standing up for what you believe in, and if everyone who did that was ‘upset’ then the world would be an even bigger mess than it already is!

  19. I will make one brief comment here about a question you asked earlier up the thread Jasun.
    You asked me to detail the therapies or whatever that I went through in coming to my acceptance about my self perception.
    I’m not going to tell you for two reasons.
    Firstly, it is intrusive to inquire about material of this nature and extremely disrespectful.
    But, secondly, I’m not prepared to offer this up to your judgement. ‘Oh well, five years of classical psychoanalysis is just blah blah, I don’t accept that method’ and so on. I don’t know what you would accept, and I might might well not accept that back.
    After describing the laws of optics, Newton spent decades studying alchemy and biblical prophecy and many thought he had gone round the twist. Then he makes one of the biggest comebacks in history and describes the laws of motion and predicts the motions of the planets and publishes the Principia.
    How was this related to all his alchemical studies? You can only appreciate that if you understand alchemy.
    But I will let on that my alchemical process culminated in my winning professional qualification as an Art Therapist through taking a course of full time graduate study. So I am a qualified therapist in my own right.

    Reply
    • >I don’t think I suggested any such thing. I certainly never used those words ‘credit’ or ‘discredit’. You seem to project a lot of your own assumptions and interpretations into what I say.
      From your earlier comment:
      >It rather seems to me that you are clutching at straws trying to find some way to discredit the experience of transsexuals.
      >So please quit with the ad hominems.
      Isn’t that what you just did above, and then denied? I am not wishing to be combative. But nor can I just ignore blatant contradictions.
      > it is intrusive to inquire about material of this nature and extremely disrespectful.
      I fail to see how it is disrespectful to ask what therapy you underwent before transitioning when you are publicly claiming to have “tried everything”before making the decision. Of course you don’t have to answer & I respect your desire not to. But then you will have to respect my continued skepticism about your claims to have tried everything.
      For the record (to be clear), I am not interested in challenging your decision to have a sex change or trying to bring it under scrutiny. It may well have been the best choice for you to make personally. All I am questioning is that this counts as evidence that you were born in the wrong body or that there was no psychological cause for your decision that you are unaware of. Apparently you find this insulting or disrespectful but I can’t help that except by assuring you that’s not my intention. I am trying to get to the bottom of a mystery and appreciate your participation so far. I just can’t show my appreciation in the way you seem to want me to, by agreeing with you or following all of your cues.

      Reply
      • The use of the word ‘discredit’ in this instance is an entirely different context to what I took to be meant when you said about the terms ‘credit’ and ‘discredit’ above. I simply don’t accept your point.
        And the same with the second point. This is getting extremely judgemental on your part and is frankly, coming across to me as seeking to discredit me. If you’ll pardon the use of that term again.
        I’m not actually surprised by your approach because I have come across it countless times before. You seem to think that you have the right to dissect my psyche as if I am some insect under a slide in the lab. I really don’t need to prove anything about my inner dynamics to you, and I don’t give a **** if you aren’t satisfied. I’m not a lab rat.
        Your pre-occupation with whether I ‘really’ ‘tried everything’ is so presumptuous. By that I mean I looked into my soul. I did it to my complete satisfaction that I could not change it. Okay? Is that good enough for you? Your preoccupation with approving of what ‘method’ or ‘school of therapy’ or somesuch is autistic. And yet you still want that ‘maybe’ I could or should have found some other way. I had this from the Radical Feminists in the eighties. People have always tried to tell me how I should deal with this, and really, you’re no different, just the latest in a long line of control freaks who want to critique my life.
        I have given the empirical evidence supporting my position for some taxonomic types, which you questioned.
        I have given a fair amount of personal detail in this thread and on several fairly explicit podcasts. I know very, very little about you in contrast to this. Or why I should allow myself to be vulnerable to your inquisition.
        It seems to me that what you want to do is what the cultural marxists and culture of critique seek to do with everything, and that is not only ruthlessly criticise and refuse to accept the position of another, but to undermine that other by continually suggesting doubts and infiltrating suggestions that perhaps I might be wrong, or mistaken in my assessment of my own psychology.
        I respond to behaviours that I see. You, as you acknowledged some way back up thread, have been quite condescending to me. You have misrepresented or at least heavily misunderstood points I have made ~ ‘credit’ ‘discredit’ etc.
        Your refusal to accept my own personal inner dynamics demonstrates my point. What could I do to persuade you? I’m not convinced that I could, and since you aren’t my medical gatekeeper to treatment I’m not going to divulge anything more than the fairly considerable amount I have already disclosed.
        And yet you make no acknowledgement of the fact that I am a qualified therapist, or any of the clearly defined data and positions I have stated. You’re only interested in finding out things that you can use to undermine my position on this, even my own life decisions.
        Your perpetual aggression and attempts to discredit my life makes it very difficult for me to take this discussion seriously. And in pre-emptive mode I will point out that your earlier comment that you thought I was coming on too strong or somesuch has to elicit the response from me that this is the behaviour of a cry-bully. That’s the kind of behaviour where you can hammer away at something and then when you find that there is push back you cry ‘Bully!’ when all that has happened is that someone has challenged your position.

        Reply
        • WHOAH NEDDY!, slow down a bit, hold back the horses!…. I have just read this last thread and I can feel buttons are being pressed ……!….this is getting rather reactive and it would be a shame to see a so far interesting and intelligent discussion go to ruin because of  egos getting triggered?……..I can see how mis-understandings are arising here.
          CosmicClaire, you may not be aware that Jasun’s interviews and blogs are not “information seeking” interviews in the traditional sense. I don’t often listen to them all I must admit, but it appears to me at least, that what you are reading and receiving as intrusive and personal is rather his particular  (and yes,maybe be a bit odd if you are not used to his style! )way of wanting to get to the bottom of things, investigate, and relate to the personal “inner” territory and “story” as much /as well and with equal interest to the external manifestation/science side……and when you said it was “autistic” behaviour , (“Your preoccupation with approving of what ‘method’ or ‘school of therapy’ or somesuch is autistic. “.)…have you noticed the title of the website and who it reaches out to as part of its main audience?
          In a way I was a trigger for this thread because I was sent a link last week about a well known spiritual teacher “on the circuit” called Francis Bennett who for many years was a catholic monk. Last year, during a medical test, he discovered his chromosomes supported an inner feeling he had always had relating to his identity. He is now in life as “a woman.”
          The reason I found this information shocking was that I had listened to him as “a man” on various links and talking with Adyashanti and with Rick Archer on BATGAP. The whole purpose of his spiritual teaching (as with most authentic teachings)being to awaken people into the understanding that they are pure consciousness/pure awareness not this body/mind construct or what we call the ego/false self…….So it seemed strange to me that he should choose to put himself under the medical knife and receive a mix of Big Pharma hormones to remove his sacred penis when he knows he is not either of the identities he was, or is now becoming. But he says consciousness wanted to experience itself as both genders. But I am left wondering whether his Catholic programming was more of an influence than he might care to admit. But, anyway…..this discussion is not only personal to you CosmicClaire, it is a subject, which,as you know only too well, touches us all on a deep level, and leads to greater understanding of the expression of consciousness in its myriad of forms. ……and where, more importantly we are still caught up in distortion and a belief in a bogus self……I guess all I am wanting to say here is ,lets treat each other with tender loving respect because there has been enough pain, enough trauma, within all our hearts, and enough wounding of our collective sexuality . I know Jasun would certainly not want to Bully or hurt you intentionally but I also know that he, like you, finds this a sensitive subject…..I would also like to add how much I appreciate what you have shared and I have certainly learned a lot about this subject which I would otherwise been “in the dark” about still. thanks.

          Reply
  20. I’m seeing a lot of conflation of the terms “gender” and “sex” – they’re not the same.
    It’s interesting to me, though, because since moving to the US I’ve noticed that in many, many “official” contexts the word gender is used when the correct word would be sex. Like when a doctor’s form asks my gender, or when I apply for something online….what they really mean is sex. Whether I’m female or male. I feel like this longstanding misunderstanding is somehow at the crux of our inability to discuss this topic with clarity at times.
    And I have to wonder, why is it this way? Is it because we’re so repressed by….(so many things)…that we don’t even like to use the word “sex” in this context? Was it a deliberate choice?

    Reply
  21. As to the question of the Gabra, I would cite Probabilistic Functionalism.
    What’s that? you say. It’s what is most likely to work, and the basis of perception. No other group is cited as having anything similar in terms of beliefs about masculinity or maleness etc. So they are, as far as we can tell, entirely unique.
    Thus they are probably an even smaller proportion of the human population than the 0.2% who have severe gender dysphoria that Lynn Conway cites in her ‘Prevalence’ piece.
    Jordan Peterson points out that a 99.8% correlation of gender identity with physical sex is way beyond the statistical probability normally required to establish the existence of a formal correlation.
    The Gabra, whose beliefs are anomalous to the rest of human society, have developed a system of thought which somehow they manage to maintain within their own society, but which is nigh on incomprehensible to the other (at least) 99.8% or more of the human world population and society. Convergent evolution has led most societies to have some commonality in their beliefs because they have Probabilistic Function ~ They are the systems which have been found to be the most likely to work.
    Thus all the Gabra have is a belief system which all other societies do not consider functional and have never adopted even if they have lived nearby and been exposed to it. Whilst this is not sufficient to falsify the hypothesis, (although it might be argued that what they believe is logically incoherent) there is a complete absence of any evidence to support its wider validity either.
    Thus all we can say about the Gabra is that they have an anomalous belief system which is incongruent with virtually all other known societies, and thus should not be used as an example.

    Reply
  22. Perhaps the reason that so many people are born of indeterminate gender identity, and have non-heterosexual proclivities, is because American diets are almost devoid of nutrition. Mothers who used to recognise their role as being the person who is mostly responsible for the health of their off-spring, no longer see themselves in this critical role. Instead society has socialised them to see themselves as employees, actors, politicians, CEOs, Corporate Drones, Nurses, doctors, and anything other than their biological imperative as the Womb(an) who encases, nourishes, and cares for, the infant child. Instead they eat whatever their personal tastes prefer, and thus at the critical stage of the infant’s gestation, their brain is missing a key nutrient, that determines the size and complexity of the brain element, that determines whether they will be attracted to males, females, both, or neither. The amount of minerals in the oil fertilized soils of American agriculture, has robbed those same soils of 57 of the 60+ minerals that are ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL for we humans to develop as we should. Read “Epigenetics by Drs, Wallach, Lan and A.N. Other – whose name I forget, but you can see Dr. Wallach giving a lecture on youtube: (Here he begins his discussion of gender dysmorphia, – https://youtu.be/UmwBB22_maY?t=5697)

    Reply
  23. I am a transgender (transsexual) female who would love to talk with this author. For the truth I lived through rang in this peace. But I also believe it is far deeper. Intertwining with illegal drug cartels, government social engineering, and an economic machine for blue states here in the United States. Ever have time for a interesting phone call, I would like to talk about these issues, esp meth distribution, the sex industry, and harvesting of further victims. Please link me to more of your work. Truly brilliant work.

    Reply
    • Hi Kirsty, this person isn’t so lovely as you might think. You should look at some of the responses he gave to me a little while back and then you’ll see that he will project all kinds of stuff onto you about how you shouldn’t have had reassignment and you are only acting out the traumas of your ancestors, apparently. I was invited to have a skype with him for a podcast a while back and then he didn’t want to do it, which I thought was strange.
      Then, after I got back to him on it I realised that he was extremely hostile to transsexuals and I found him really quite disrespectful and generally unpleasant to me, so I decided that I wouldn’t go on with it. For example, he said things like he didn’t have any position on this, and then pushed really hard on it being some kind of mental illness. He was extremely inconsistent and it seemed to me that he was basically lying in order to gain my confidence, and then did a 180 and attacked my position. Not a good person.
      Good luck, but if he’s nice to you then I have to ask what his game is because he was really unpleasant to me for merely asserting that there was a genuine condition here arising from neurodevelopmental causes. He’s got a serious axe to grind against us, so look out. Just saying.

      Reply
      • Kristy didn’t say I was lovely.
        Kristy, my casual diagnosis of Cosmic Claire is that they demonstrate qualities of runaway narcissism, something I refused to cater to because, admittedly, I do have a bit of an axe to grind when narcissistic personalities try to take over this space. This is regardless of their gender or orientation, tho I think CC’s behavior here does strengthen my case for the need to look at “transgender” phenomena through the lens of what we know of as narcissistic personalities.
        I don’t consider this a mental illness, however, that’s a term I never use as it evokes pharmaceutical remedies in lieu of self-awareness. Narcissism can usually be traced back to an attachment disorder with a narcissistic parent, of which there are probably a lot more than we suspect, since we live in a narcissistic culture in which being a parent is a high-value social currency.
        I second CC’s suggestion to read the exchanges and decide for yourself.

        Reply
  24. Jasun, once again your adopted country of Canada puts my home country of the USA to shame over the issue of teaching gender and sexual orientation sensitivity in the lower school grades.
    https://pjmedia.com/trending/teachers-attend-lggbdtttiqqaap-sensitivity-training-wtf/
    After reading all your postings here about the subject of genderism — of transgenderism, especially — I am duly moved to recommend you to your local Vancouver Chapter of the Canadian Elementary Teachers Federation and plead that they hire you to teach LGGBDTTTIQQAAPP Sensitivity Training seminars to the faculty so that they in turn will “teach the children well.”
    On second thought, perhaps I should appeal to your real strength as a testosteronish writer and podcast maven. Maybe you could collaborate with the more estrogenic (and probably more photogenic) Claire here to publish a book with podcast called:
    The Idiot’s Guide to LGGBDTTTIQQAAPP by Scruffy Jasun and Cosmic Claire.

    Reply
  25. Leaders are all a joke. Philosopher Kings need to take the helm or we’re all doomed.
    >> I don’t consider this a mental illness, however, that’s a term I never use as it evokes pharmaceutical remedies in lieu of self-awareness.
    Great comment! Fully agree with this.

    Reply
  26. I’ve read and skimmed through most of the comments, looking to see if someone has raised a subject related to formal cause or the idea that human consciousness shapes its tools and then the tools reshape us. There seems to be a lot of discussion about “social construction (phenomenology),” drug experiences, and/or the effects of chemicals, but the primary engine in reforming consciousness and in remapping the plastic human brain is technology, and especially communications technology. McLuhan’s theory deals almost exclusively with the way that technologies remix the external senses, and while this is probably true it doesn’t really explain the vast changes that we see in human populations and their essential “qualia,” or the ability to experience different illusions. Understanding this dimension of “social construction” requires a theory that includes what Aristotle and Aquinas called the “interior senses.” Identity is like a thin veneer that covers the soul, but it’s not the soul. The primary effect of electrical mass communication is to enhance the inner sense of imagination, which retrieves experiences and habits of man’s pre-literate oral past. So the fascination with the occult, which begins to really ramp up in the mid-19th Century, should not come as a surprise. The concept that “identities” are floating around out there in the matrix (another term for womb) which make us humans, in our discarnate media-induced state, vulnerable to such suggestions or hallucinations (or qualia) should also not surprise. But we really must begin to recognize that this has all gone too far, and that with the introduction and ascendance of *digital* media we now have an unprecedented opportunity to escape from these qualia, and begin to achieve some balance between the inner senses of imagination and memory… to remember, reality. Digital is a memory-enhancing medium, so is utterly unlike anything we’ve experienced for several hundred years. It will not retrieve the occult, but the era of manuscript literacy. Profoundly different deal.
    Incidentally, I once rode my motorcycle out to Oxnard to visit Carlos Castenada. It was a pretty conventional looking ranch-house with a back yard and everything.

    Reply
  27. All “sexual confusion” is due to child molestation/rape. The root of all evil is “child molestation/rape!! Address and eradicate this root and make this earth a better place.

    Reply
  28. I just read the whole 39 pages on a day when I did not think I had time for such things, because I have been craving some rational explanation of the trans “bandwagon”. This article is brave and excellent and true and I am grateful to you for it. I was born a girl and am very happily a 47 year old woman. We live in a time when it is acceptable to express your womanhood in SO many ways throughout the course of a lifetime. Why mutilate yourself when you could just wear overalls and helmet and get a welding certificate (for example)? Carry on, good strong and brave humans and let the confused ones go (but don’t follow)!

    Reply
  29. This is the discussion the entire civilization should be openly having. But it’s being actively stifled. You can’t discuss politics today and say, “I would not want to live in the Spain of Franco, but fascism contains ideas within the greater structure that might be attractive to many people.” – Or that many Marxist economic ideas might be useful.

    Reply
  30. Regarding: “My own sense, as I turn fifty, is that individuation–the quest for self-knowing–is a journey inward that eventually dis-identifies with everything but the Soul. It begins with your family, as the song goes, but soon it comes down to race, sex, even species. So the idea that we can be whatever we feel like being, biologically, through a mixture of desire and technology, is a literalization and hence an inversion of the truth that we are infinitely more than our biology. It is a way of insisting that what we are is not something we have to discover, but something we get to choose. This leaves out the rather obvious problem that, if we do not know who or what we are, our choices are going to be influenced, and severely compromised, by that same lack of awareness.
    To erase the biological difference of the other–as trans ideology does–in this quest for identity is to eradicate the other’s identity while claiming it for one’s own. It’s psychic cuckoo-land. It is also the absolute inverse of self-discovery.“

    As I am an advocate for people being free to express themselves however they wish, but at the same time very troubled by the insistence on chosen pronouns and the complete dismissal of the significance of biological sex, your characterization of the quest for identity being the difference between “choice” and “discovery” comes as a relief to me, for It gives me insight into my own discomfort with certain aspects of trans politics. I have explored the problems with the “choice” side, characterizing it as a form of avatar creation, as people become so accustomed to being audience to their own avatars, looking at and constantly refining their profiles on computer screens. This leads to a sense that identity is totally a matter of choice and invention. But I hadn’t considered “discovery” as the natural and obvious antidote – thank you for that.
    I think people should take on whatever identity they choose – whether gender or cosplay or cargo cult – but do so in a spirit of lightness and exploration and celebration and theater, realizing that all identity is meaningless – or at least just part of the process of discovery.

    Reply
    • agreed; and it seems to me it would be pretty rash to take on hormone treatments, double mastectomies, castration and sterilization in a spirit of lightness or theater.

      Reply

Leave a Comment