On The Trans Question

are trans people heckin valid or mentally ill?

From age 15 to 26 I had a best friend that was a lesbian.

At the time, to me and all our friends, she was just “one of the boyz”. She’d come skating, drink beers, try to get chicks, build things, and all the rest (and she was a lot better at it than most of the men). The thought of her having bobs and vagine rarely ever crossed my mind and, when it did, it made as little sense as if it were any of my other broz.

So it wasn’t much of a surprise in our twenties when she said she had gender dysphoria (ie was trans), and has started seeing a transition therapist and taking HRT.

We talked for a few hours and she told me that she’d felt like an alien in her own skin for as long as she could remember (as far back as elementary school), and all the suffering and internal turmoil she’d gone through for over a decade about it.

So, fast forward to today (5+ years after this conversation) when I saw this thread about the above screencap with a caption of “[this thread] is more evil than I thought”, and I had almost the opposite response as others on “my team” (ie reactionaries) did. My thought when reading this screencap was “Well, that’s actually a pretty decent argument. I could see how avoiding female puberty could have prevented a lot of trauma for my friend”.

While it should be no surprise to anyone that I am a defective reactionary: I’m not saying “and therefore we should do it”. Such a position assumes that the feeling—or even conviction—that one is a man trapped in a woman’s body (or vice versa) is proof that it’s innate and immutable—and that, if it were, the solution is to “transition”—none of which seems self evident to me.

In my friend’s case, for example, he also told me a few years before this that he believed he had repressed childhood sexual abuse by a family member. It was so old (<age 5) that he wasn’t even quite sure it happened, but the amount of turmoil he (she at the time) was having about it suggested to me that it probably did. As far as I know, he has to this day not dealt with this likely trauma.

Who knows what impact this experience, if true, could have had on his perception of his own gender. And further, if this perception would be reversed had he received treatment for sexual abuse instead of gender dysphoria (has anyone studied this? Not that I'm aware of. And I have spent functionally no time studying transgenderism or the transgender “community” so cant even speculate).

My hunch, based on my own 5 years of therapy myself and learning and working in the field of psychology for a decade though, is that: no, even if it were causal, it would not reverse his transsexuality. Many personality traits form in childhood due to environment but become quickly immutable, and this is particularly the case for sexual experience (eg adult sexual fetishes). Also, I can say with certainty that everyone who knows him, including his family, (and even you if you met him) would be way more shocked to see him grow out his hair and “act like a girl” than to see him grow a beard even as far back as when we were 15.

So… does that mean that he should transition and that transgenderism is “valid”?

Well, even if it were truly immutable and transitioning would be the best solution in an ideal world: reality is not an ideal world. Regardless of why he may want to acquire a male body, modern medicine still cannot give him a true male experience. Thus, the question is not “should he stay a man in a women’s body or transition to a man in a man’s body” but instead “should he stay a man in a women’s body or transition to a man in a mutilated woman’s body.”

We could debate about how even in two hundred years when gender reassignment surgery is perfected it’s still technically a “mutilated woman’s body” in the eyes of God or something but today it is a mutilated woman to the eyes of anyone with eyes.

Even in the best-case scenario, bottom surgery is a sad approximation of a “reassignment” (and in an unfortunately high number of cases, a botched disaster).

Given this, let’s revisit the psychology aspect.

I think we can reasonably assume that, like most psychological manifestations, gender dysphoria is multivariate.

Even if we want to put it in the category of mental illness (itself an, in my opinion, insufficiently-precise-to-the-point-of-causing-more-harm-than-good category but that’s for another time), and compare it to depression:

Take one hundred different depressed people and you will find one hundred different reasons, spanning a dozen different categories, why they are depressed.

Maybe they’re depressed due to a genetic trait that makes their dopamine and serotonin function differently than most. Maybe because they have a temperamental disposition toward pessimism that causes them to misperceive their success, value, or status in the social hierarchy (the serotonergic system is regulated primarily by this). Maybe their temperamental disposition towards pessimism is due to adverse childhood experience. Maybe it’s genetic. Or maybe they’re depressed due to chronic inflammation. Maybe that inflammation is due to inflammation of the gut from an inflammatory diet full of seed oils and refined carbohydrates. Or maybe it’s due to chronic stress. Or maybe they’re depressed because of some big life trauma like that their mom died, or they haven’t had sex in a year (or probably ever if they are reading this blog), or because they have fallen in a bad habit loop of taking the easy way out to all their problems and now their life is a disaster. I could go on for paragraphs, but I think you get the point: while depression can often be helped by artificially changing neurotransmitter levels with exogenous chemicals, the root causes of these “chemical imbalances” are almost as numerous, and often multivariate, as there are people diagnosed.

(And this is not even getting into the fact that we only try to correct “bad chemical imbalances” when “bad” and “imbalance” is literally defined against one’s ability to function at or above average by a culture’s existing standard, which is hardly an objectively valid yardstick. No one is calling Elon Musk ill for his neurochemical make up, which is certainly far more abnormal than anyone with depression, but we certainly would be if it was any time before the 19th century, assuming his turbo-thinky self survived childhood (which is unlikely)).

Similarly, In the case of Gender Dysphoria, or even just non-binary gender identification: it could be a product of genetics, or epigenetics, or trauma, or attention seeking, or status signaling, could have completely different causes when f-to-m vs m-to-f, or could be some combo of all these or more.

We really have very little data to make any claims of certainty on this topic. There are however pretty compelling arguments for the evolutionary utility of non-standard sexuality. For example:

The “all women are bisexual” meme is actually largely borne out by data (according to this CDC study, one in four sexually active women admitted to a same sex experience by college and in reality it’s probably much higher). Evolutionary biologists have long posited that bisexuality in women is an adaptive trait developed due to the fact that, while you need a man and a woman to make a baby, the genders of who raises it are far less important than the fact that there are two parents (at least when you have well-established cultural practices for providing healthy masculine influence, which we currently don’t in the west, but that’s another conversation).

So, in the event that the father went off and died in battle against some other tribe (likely), the tribes where widows paired up to care for children out-competed tribes where widows didn’t pair up. And obviously feelings of love and sexual attraction are the primary glue which hold non-blood-related relationships together. So, would it really surprise you to find that many if not most if not all women have latent code for bisexuality?

And if this is the case, the propensity for modern women to eXPerImEnT iN CoLLeGe en masse shouldn’t surprise us in the slightest (nor should many men finding female-on-female-action attractive, given that it would signal to men that even if they died in war their children would be cared for and survive).

I base the following on zero data but I bet you 1M sats that one day some studies will come out suggesting that early childhood experience of low stability environments (which mimic war like conditions of low male availability) is linked to lesbianism in women (and that this is epigenetic or at least immutable beyond childhood).

There have also been arguments made for the selective advantage of men being straight af or gay af with functionally no in between (functionally zero men go gay as a result of too many failed relationships with women, however past poor relationships with men influencing their decision is common and perhaps even majority occurrence in women who become lesbians).

First, the “men away at war” hypothesis (I can’t find if it has a real name but it’s a common theory) where homosexuality evolved because men spent so much time away from women off with other men, usually for weeks or months at a time, that there may have been some selective advantage to getting your rocks off with the dudes (just look at prison if you need evidence for the fact that men will put their dicks in anything if there are no women available, and that having some subset of men actually enjoy giving or receiving of it could have plausibly increased tribal fitness).

There is also the “gay uncle” hypothesis. This is partly based on the observations that the likelihood of having a gay son increases with each birth and that the testosterone levels in the womb decrease with each child (apparently, her immune system sees the testosterone as a literal invader and attacks it).

The evolutionary hypothesis for this “gay uncle” factor is that there may have been a selective advantage toward “sacrificing” later birthed men to aid in the raising of a sibling’s children, rather than having more children of his own who will compete for the tribe’s limited resources (of which female sexuality is a subset). One could see how a tribe with lots of asexual or gay uncles helping to raise less children better may out compete a tribe with only straight men having far more children but with far less investment (which likely have all the problems that come from too much competition amongst men for access to resources including female sexuality).

Whether either of these, or the likely many other, hypotheses are true is open to debate. As is whether they are instantiated via genetics, prenatal environment, epigenetics, childhood experience or some combination. As is at what point in a person’s life they could be reversed, if at all… as is, if they could be, whether they should be. That’s a lot of things open to question!

It seems the only thing that isn’t open to question is to say that we for sure know that homosexuality is “all in people’s heads” or “all bad” (or, as the other side may claim, “all innate and all good”). So, given the pretty reasonable case for the complexity of homosexuality, coupled with our pretty much complete lack of evidence for any causal explanations, is it not also reasonable to assume the same for the only-a-few-ticks-further of transgenderism?

That’s pretty reasonable is it not? You might even say that this is the obviously most reasonable position by far, would you not?

So why then does literally no one hold it (or at least no one is expressing it)?

That, my friends, is for another day.

— Max

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