In the news: transgenderism

Last updated on: September 4, 2015 at 9:37 am by Jane the Actuary

In the news: transgenderism 2015-09-04T09:37:34-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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First item: Lila Perry, the “transgirl” whose decision to begin changing for gym class in the girls’ locker room rather than the private room provided for him/her sparked a walkout of classmates, and ultimately ended in him/her dropping the gym class, but not before saying: “they are claiming that they’re uncomfortable. I don’t believe for a second that they are. I think this is pure and simple bigotry.”

This is now being reported all over, but the first report I saw this in was Gawker, which links to a news item from the local station.

First observation: Perry’s defenders are legion, and, indeed, claim that teenage girls have no reasonable grounds to object to a, let’s say, penis-person in their changing room with them. When pushed on the fact, in multiple comment sections I’ve read, they claim that in such a changing room, everyone huddles in corners and changes as quickly as possible, with as much effort as possible to ensure that they remove as little clothing as possible, as invisibly as possible, or even they suggest that everyone changes in stalls anyway.

This is not the gym locker room I remember. Separate individual stalls? So many “corners” that each person is afforded privacy?

At the local pool, sure, there are a couple separate changing stalls in the women’s locker room; some people use them, others don’t. (I do.) The pool was also recently remodeled and includes private “family” changing rooms. But is this the case at the gym that you work out at? And with the minimal amount of changing time before and after gym class at a high school, you’d need enough stalls to accommodate every kid at once, which is patently unrealistic.

It is appallingly callous to say that girls must be required to change alongside an individual who, when all clothes are off, is physically a boy.

Second observation: there are some still photographs of Perry at the Daily Mail. (The article speaks of bathrooms – but prior reporting indicated that this is a locker room issue; perhaps the notion of changing in a locker room for gym class didn’t translate well to the UK so the distinction was missed?) Perry reportedly “has identified as female since age 13 and came out as trans last school year,” according to Gawker. One thing that many people have commented on is the wig, which really looks like a costume, and makes the “female identity” look like role-playing. If Perry had “identified as female” at age 13, even prior to asking for formal recognition at the school last year, one would have expected him/her to have begun to grow his/her hair (heck, many boys have long hair).

But, more than that, Perry is rail-thin. This could simply be a matter of a body type, but it’s also possible that it’s a body-image issue, whether clinically anorexia or not.

Third observation: remember back when the whole issue was spoken of as a “sex-change”? A man would announce that after years of silent suffering, he was going to become a “she”; protocols required wearing drag for a fixed length of time, and then the requisite body parts would be reshaped. The need to admit a “man into a woman’s bathroom” was spoken of as temporary, for this transition period, prior to surgery; after the surgery, we’re told, this is a non-issue as the individual simply looks like a very large and masculine woman.

Now this notion of a “transition” and a “sex change” is out. Get with the program! The instant a man declares himself to be a woman, we’re told, he is one. Whether his body conforms is entirely beside the point, and to reject somone’s claimed status because their genitals don’t match up, is unacceptable bigotry. Whereas one of the grounds for transsexualism had been that a “transwoman” finds having a penis to be unbearable and horrifying, we’re now told that it’s wholly optional and none of our business for a “transwoman” to have it removed.

Which sounds quite a bit like “I am what I say I am,” which ultimately becomes a declaration that sex and gender are irrelevant, which then means — why change? Why, if you’re a man who wants to wear dresses, do you need to announce that you are a woman? Or, if you’re a woman who finds breasts to be burdensome, why not just have a reduction surgery?

Oh, I know that the rejoinder is that it’s not simply a desire to announce a different identity, but that the transgender community would say that the desire is so deep-seated that it surely reflects something inherently “female” (or “male”) about the brain itself. But why (with due regard for the particular issues of intersex individuals) should “brain-orientation” (to the extent this is the case) win out over chromosomes and even anatomy in determining, as far as law and demands for social treatment are concerned, who is male and who is female?

Second item: testosterone. It’s now been reported in multiple places (e.g., Slate), and even made its way into Megan McArdle’s blog, that researchers have now documented the effect of testosterone on the brain. Per the Slate description:

For the study, researchers scanned the brains of 18 individuals receiving high doses of testosterone as part of female-to-male gender reassignment surgery before and after hormone treatment. After just four weeks of receiving testosterone, participants had lost gray matter (which mainly processes information) in the regions of the brain that are used for language processing.

Robert Stacy McCain also references the experience of another individual with testosterone treatment:

Just read the testimony of a lesbian feminist who spent 18 months on testosterone as a female-to-male transsexual before changing her mind. Why? Because she “never knew anger like this until going on testosterone,” experiencing psychological disturbances that included “a lower frustration threshold . . . burning rage” that was ultimately “unbearable.” Even after quitting testosterone, she found that her moods and attitudes seemed to have been permanently affected by this artificial masculinization of her brain.

So this is my (totally ignorant, go ahead and shoot me down) question: rather than treating a male-to-female with a large dose of estrogen to “feminize” the body, what if that individual received a large dose of testosterone instead? Or, conversely, what if a woman who “felt like” a man were to receive, not testosterone to produce body hair, but estrogen?

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