Written by Steven Gussman.
The reason that “transgender healthcare” — from “social transition” (in which the people in your life pretend that you are the opposite sex by using the wrong pronouns) to surgery — was always doomed to failure is that “gender dysphoria” doesn’t exist. And “gender dysphoria” doesn’t exist because “gender” doesn’t exist. It is worth peeling back this onion of confusion one layer at a time to understand just how we got here. As with so much of postmodernism, which accords language an almost supernatural role in worldly causation, the story of “transgenderism” begins with etymology.
Whereas ‘sex’ had always denoted the biologically immutable reality of males and females, and was eventually understood to be defined by gametes (many small, mobile sperm versus few large, sedentary ova), “gender” began as a grammatical offshoot. Early on (around the 14th century), ‘gender’ at some times and places was a non-specific categorical term meaning something like ‘genre’, though it appears to have rapidly acquired connotations of sex. We’re all familiar with the fact that Romance languages (deriving from Latin) are heavily gendered, but we tend to ignore that the English language also makes use of this concept. Originally, ‘gender’ was to words what ‘sex’ was to people. For example, while ‘comedian’ is technically masculine, a female comic would be referred to as a ‘comedienne’. While a ‘cigar’ was masculine, a ‘cigarette’ was feminine. And, yes, while ‘he’ referred to people of the male sex, ‘she’ referred to those of the female sex. There was no divorce between sex and gender: the latter simply meant the language used to describe the former.
It wasn’t until the 20th century, as ‘sex’ came to mean intercourse that ‘gender’ generally began to take its place in describing the sex (male or female) to which an individual belonged. I expect that this is the sense most English speakers had of the word until about 2013 — as a synonym for sex which perhaps sounded less crass. But starting mid-century, a more technical meaning began to take shape among the more academically inclined: “gender” was to socio-culture as ‘sex’ was to biology.
By this point, if the project was not already underway, the stage had been set for radical gender ideology. As with so many of our political woes, the postmodernists of the 1960s would come to use their substantial academic power to launder into “gender” all manner of cultural Marxist ideas under the guise of “scholarship” or even “science” (this appears to be the project of the field of so-called Gender Studies, which holds as axiomatic that “gender” is a “social construct” and therefore infinitely malleable to redefinition). Using the term “gender” for this job served a particular purpose.
By founding entirely new academic departments, sequestered away from Biology departments, Gender Studies’ scholars solved two related problems. First, they rendered themselves safe from biological peer review. And second, they rendered themselves safe from meritocracy more generally (few would doubt that the standards for biologists are much higher than for Gender Studies scholars). What has further served the mission of the Gender Studies scholars is the likely increasing left-wing bias of the biologists themselves, who are amenable to the gender-sex dualism idea. (Even such anti-woke biologists as Heather Heying have expressed support for it).
Finally, the program was complete with the move to re-conflate “gender” and ‘sex’ but by now making the latter word synonymous with the radical new ideas that had incubated within the former. All of this was presaged by Judith Butler (who “socially transitioned” to “they/them” pronouns post-menopause) when she wrote in 2006, “Perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as socially constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.” We are back to using these terms interchangeably, but many people now view this whole business of “male and female” as suspicious, if not “socially constructed”. This is evident in the opening up of bathrooms to both sexes, the opening up of females’ sports to males who identify as females, and the introduction of all manner of extra “genders” and “pronouns”.
Today’s Gender Studies scholars follow in the footsteps of people such as philosopher Michel Foucault, who viewed scientific knowledge as a kind of modern mythology, and John Money, who applied the “social construct” model by having a male child raised as female after his botched circumcision in infancy. Ironically, Money’s failed experiment suggested that sex is not a social construct. The boy, who had XY chromosomes, showed natural signs of maleness throughout his life despite having been “socially transitioned” by everyone he knew (including his parents) from birth. He didn’t even learn of his own origin story — that he really was male — until he was an adult. Tragically, he committed suicide when he was only 38. Unfortunately, it’s little surprise that Money had also been molesting him at check-ups. Curiously, Foucault (who lies accused of raping young Tunisian boys), along with fellow French postmodernists Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Jean Paul Sartre, signed a petition to remove “age of consent” laws entirely in France. In the contemporary academy, postmodernists write of “eroticism that transgresses generational boundaries” and support “Drag Queen Story Hour,” the purpose of which is to expose young children to obscure sexual fetishes.
From a philosophical standpoint, it is very straightforward to prove that the term, “gender” is extraneous when used for people. If one thinks that sex can only be used for binary differences, whereas gender is more appropriate for statistical differences, one could not be more mistaken. The only true binary is the gametes, though reproductive organs such as genitalia come exceedingly close. Today’s intelligentsia are apt to call females’ greater interest in people (or males’ greater interest in things) a “gender difference”, due to the overlapping bell curves that illustrate these differences, but no one would call males’ greater height a “gender difference”. Everyone sane enough to recognize the phenomenon calls greater male height a “sex difference”, and like most sex differences, it too is represented by overlapping bell curves.
Like many animals, human beings are either of the male sex, or the female sex, and with this nature comes a few binary differences such as gametes and genitalia, as well as a ton of statistical differences. (And while a given individual male, say, might be more female-typical on a given trait, he will tend to correspond to the male pattern when integrating across all traits). Still others contend that “gender” is of the mind. But implicit in the splitting of “gender” for the mind and “sex” for the body is of course the kind of mind-body dualism denied by modern biology. The mind evolved by natural selection and, somehow, emerges from the brain — a piece of “brute morphology” to be perhaps unkind to the most complex object in the known universe.
At an even simpler level, consider the following scenario. Someone from the Humanities founds a new department called, Zenergy Studies. “Zenergy” is purported to be a totally new thing, completely distinct from the concept of energy known well in Physics departments. Nonetheless, a measurement of “zenergy” is made in the same units as energy, and furthermore the specific value of an object’s “zenergy” correlates with the magnitude of its energy at almost 1. Within Zenergy Studies departments, and the popular culture they influence, these massive correlations are held to be mere coincidences: energy, it is said, does not have much, if any, causal influence over “zenergy”. Can you imagine such a concept catching on generally, let alone in Physics departments? Yet that is exactly the reality we face when it comes to “gender”.
Of course, “dysphoria” is itself a strange term, when ‘dysmorphia’ and, specifically, ‘body dysmorphia’ are so readily available for both linguistic and psychiatric analogy. Again, mind-body dualism can explain the difference. “Dysphoria” refers to an aspect of one’s mental state, whereas ‘dysmorphia’ is one’s unhappiness with their physical state. Of course, both are mental delusions about one’s perfectly normal physical body, but by placing the emphasis on the person’s mental state, the Gender Studies scholars argue that the malady can be offloaded onto the intolerant masses. In their view, while the body dysmorphic suffer from their own delusions, the “gender dysphoric” suffer from the converse delusion of the masses. (The Fat Studies scholars are working to import this state of affairs into body dysmorphia as well, through their “body positivity” movement in which they purport to have falsified the usefulness of BMI and discovered “health at every size”.)
So while “gender dysphoria” has come to be understood as an identity disorder (seemingly suffered by the rest of society that stubbornly doesn’t perceive the individual properly), all other delusions are seen in the exact opposite light. From schizophrenia to phantom limbs to obsessive compulsive disorder: a person whose beliefs do not accord with basic external reality, and whose delusions are causing them personal distress, is understood to be in need of exposure therapy. Furthermore, whereas the classic “gender dysphoria” case was a boy (often an autogynephile), the new cases are teenage girls (the group most at risk of disorders such as body dysmorphia and mass hysteria, going through the difficult period of developing secondary sex characteristics).
Adopting the alternative term ‘sex dysmorphia’ has several benefits. First of all, it severs this nonsense about “gendered” people and plainly states that the variable at play is sex. Secondly, it demystifies by borrowing the term ‘dysmorphia’ from ‘body dysmorphia’, and hopefully along with it the understanding that these individuals are suffering from a delusion that must be treated by exposure to reality (or some other effective treatment that seeks to minimize the patient’s delusion).
Furthermore, because everyone is already familiar with the social-media fuelled social contagion of body dysmorphia in young girls, sex dysmorphia can be understood as having a similar etiology. A reform in how we think about sex and the human mind can help return thousands of children — future homosexuals, tomboys, and, yes, “cis-normative heterosexuals” — to their normal developmental pathways. Even if exposure therapy will not work for the old-school, rare, genuine cases of the mental disorder, it will almost certainly work for the new crop of young people suffering from the effects of gender ideology.
Steven Gussman is a scientist and video game developer on the East Coast of the United States. He authored and self-published The Philosophy Of Science.
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This piece is okay and directionally correct, but the word 'gender' does have a legitimate use: a lifestyle choice loosely connected to masculinity and femininity. It's a little misleading to say it doesn't exist, although the gender ideological account is, as he pointed out, nonsense.
This was a great post. Your Philosophy of Science book looks interesting.