Gender Identity Ideology
What are its ideas and ideals? Is perception of our identity immutable, arriving fait accompli?
What is gender identity ideology?
Many a critical thinker has been chastised for use of the phrase “gender identity ideology”. Supposedly, much like cancel culture, there’s no such thing. And yet, the dictionary—with its inconvenient definitions of woman and female, also—tells me an ideology is simply a system of ideas and ideals.
Ideas
Terms like “trans” and “cis-gendered” clearly indicate what the underlying ideas are: that we each possess an innate and immutable gender identity, independent of our body. This gender identity determines whether we are a man or a woman, even though these are words used to describe the material realities of being a particular constellation of age, sex, and species. Male versus female is an important distinction to make, given that we are a sexually dimorphic species—male and female people with sex-specific disorders of sexual development notwithstanding. Humans aren’t clownfish or fungi; sex is binary, immutable, and important.
Not only does this innate sense—arriving fait accompli for us to discover—tell us whether we are male or female (like America’s first “female” four-star admiral or this “female” sex offender), but it supposedly determines who is physically attracted to us.
Neither opposite nor same-sex attraction exists, rather, we are enchanted by the unquantifiable and unverifiable. Gendered souls are to be understood through declarations, or deduced—hopefully correctly—from the manner of dress or an affectation of voice. So much for love at first sight!
When a person is not physically attracted to people of your sex, you get to brand them a “bigot” and a “genital fetishist” so long as they’re attracted to the sex you wish to be validated as. If your partner comes out as transgender, you are now bisexual even if you were not before. Such are the reality-warping, all re-defining powers of gender identity ideology, which respects neither the realities of sex nor of sexual orientation.
Ideals
Gender identity ideology is a supplanting of the realities of sex for wishful thinking—those are its ideals. It demands we ignore sex and its physiological implications and statistical regularities, both at the individual and public policy levels. We ought to pretend a man placing his nipple in an infant’s mouth is the same as a breastfeeding mother doing so, and that a rapist is no different to the women he’d like to be housed with in prison.
Proponents of gender identity ideology would have us pretend that strength and stamina, sexual assault risk and risk of perpetration are equal between the sexes, or somehow ameliorated by self-perception. The rate of violent and sexual offending among trans-identified men certainly does not substantiate any such notion. Nor do studies on the effects of cross-sex hormones on sporting performance.
(Though even if exogenous oestrogens did strip men of their physical advantage, it is unclear why the deleterious consequences of this one particular choice should allow men to compete against women rather than accepting their athletic mediocrity. In my opinion, sports should be dominated by the best competitors, competing in the correct age, sex, and weight class, and without the use of steroids. Women’s sports is not a place for mediocre or enfeebled men to shine.)
Linguistic manipulation
Not even Orwell could have predicted a world where men are women, and women are “non-men”. Or worse: reduced to body parts and bodily functions. Girls and women are now referred to as bleeders, menstruators, uterus-havers, birthing people, wombs, and even cadaver-like “bodies with vaginas” courtesy of the Woke set, sorry, The Lancet.
Acknowledging that a particular human being is female doesn’t reduce her to mere body parts; referring to her as a singular body part or function dehumanises her and reduces her to just that one body part or function.
Increasingly, in the media, women are only referred to as such where their experiences can be emulated by men. (Mind you, some of these men try to imitate periods and stillbirths the way a ghoulish fetishist would and a woman with reproductive issues would not. Some men claim to actually have periods—redefined as male malaise rather than the shedding of the uterine lining experienced by female people, of course.)
Dehumanising, reductive terms for girls and women
"Woman" (adult female human) and “girl” (a female child) are absurdly verboten when discussing female physiology lest a minority of men with special identities feel excluded from a label (and its underlying biological reality) that excludes every male human. (I recently read that “60% of people” feel period shame, so clearly, “people” and “women” are not interchangeable terms. Unless male humans have suddenly started menstruating?)
Men are not referred to as prostate-havers, penis-possessors, sperm-producers, or ejaculating people by the very same organisations constantly dehumanising women. Rather than acknowledging that “trans men”—and therefore by extension men—do not have a prostate but “prostate-havers” do, clear communication is preferred when disseminating health-related information to men.
This asymmetry reveals that so-called “gender-inclusive” terms for sex-exclusive issues are used to denigrate only the female sex—and not for the sake of the tiny minority of women who don’t like being referred to as such. Men are always allowed to call themselves women, but women are only women when they aren’t discussing the realities of being female.
Trans-identified women are free to call themselves whatever they please—whether it’s “transman”, “genderqueer”, “non-binary” or “agender”—without stripping other women of their one and only descriptor. Doctors should be expected to refer to pregnant women as men as much, or rather as little, as they are beholden to “politely” call anorexics “underweight”.
This bastardisation of the language is transparently to benefit the men hellbent on denying being a woman requires one to be female, and that being female may come with a set of experiences and struggles as inaccessible to them as female-only provisions ought to be.
“Trans” is not an adjective
It’s also striking to note that “transsexual” morphed over time into “transgender”, with gender identity a state of mind rather than an embodied existence. “Trans” once referred to “medically transition”—itself a misnomer for cosmetic surgery which in no way changes your sex. Now we are to pretend “trans” borrows from “cis–trans isomerism”, so desperate are these ideologues for a scientific/Latin veneer of credibility.
Thereafter, “transwoman” was misleadingly split into two words “trans” and “woman” as though referring to a subset of women and not a subset of men. It would be akin to me putting a space in the word hotdog to pretend that “hot” was intended as an adjective, to be omitted at will, and then serving you canine meat.
“Transwomen” are men who “identify as” women; saying so often results in being deplatformed. Trans-identified men claim to perceive themselves as women. (And so?) More specifically, they claim to feel the way they imagine is the feeling of feeling like a woman. The sheer hubris of it is astounding. The fact that women themselves do not report any such feeling is apparently immaterial; “woman” is whatever vague, media-inspired (and often porn-addled) notions swirl around in a man’s head.
Some trans-identified men are genuine, and some of them are lying about their subjective perceptions. (I do not distinguish between men pretending to be women and men pretending to be men-pretending-to-be-women when it comes to female-only facilities and sports.) Some of these men continue “presenting” as a man; some have feminised their appearance. None are women.
By the same token, only women can be “transmen”. If you’ve wondered why I don’t focus on trans-identified women as much, it’s because women en masse in men’s hospital wards, prisons, sports, or bathrooms would only disadvantage and endanger the former. The case of a female prison guard demanding a male prisoner strip in front of her to validate her gender identity, however, proves that gender ideology leaves no slice of the population unscathed. This ideology is an affront to truth and reason.
Gender “affirming” surgery is merely bodily conversion
While I’m glad surgeons are no longer referring to cosmetic surgery (amputations, implants, and inversions) to “enhance” appearance as a “sex change”, I find terms such as “gender confirmation” and “gender affirmation” disturbing. How can body conversion possibly serve to affirm or confirm a perception which presupposes it?
You have a sex, stop pretending to possess a “cis” gender identity for paraphiliacs/mentally ill people to share in
The term “gender identity” is often shortened to “gender” because it’s ingrained into us that sex and how we are treated based on our sex (the real meaning of the word gender) are distinct, though not separable, concepts. Thus, the ideologue can tap into this sense of separateness while conflating sex and gender identity in every single instance after this distinction is first invoked. The absurdity of substituting sex with gender identity fantasy in legal documentation is beyond words—and has some potentially harrowing consequences.
(The first link is to an article regarding an increase in female “male circumcision”; at best a coding error inexplicably geographically clustered, at worst: female genital mutilation funded by the taxpayer and enabled by Medicare’s “gender-neutral” language. If you read my second link, the reporter suggests men ought to be asked if they are pregnant as a part of routine practice to avoid stillbirth—I suggest we stop permitting reality-obscuring paperwork instead.)
Gender identity ideology boils down to nothing more than tedious word games. Imagine a small child pouting that their tallness identity, if not their height, allows them to ride a roller-coaster. Or someone in their twenties arguing that their oldness identity entitles them to a pension. If you think you’re 80 years old, as does Gladys, why should society treat you any differently? You share an innate and immutable chronological identity, do you not?
Identify “with” not “as”
“Identify as” seems an ungrammatical outgrowth of the “my truth” phenomenon. The phrase is “identity with” i.e. have an affinity with sex stereotypes or a certain desired personal image. There is no need to “identify as” something you are—that’s redundant. There is no need to “identity as” someone you’re not—that is called being delusion and/or a liar.
Age is just a number, you can’t tell someone’s age merely by looking at them, some people have a cellular age that corresponds with the average of someone five years younger, chronological age is not the same thing as biological age, some people are young at heart, et cetera. Every material reality has a social overlay, but we are living in the real world and not the world of simulacra and simulations. Women are not social constructs, costumes, or male identities.
Sex is observed, not assigned
The other recent change to our language is the phrase “sex assigned at birth”. Your sex was observed at birth, and I dare say, observed correctly. It can be ascertained in the womb before you are born and after you die from your skeletal remains (irrespective of what accoutrements are buried beside you).
Sex is expressed down to the molecular level, it cannot be changed with implants or amputations. (The linked article discusses how “sex differences at the molecular level of cell signalling and protein trafficking are [implicated in] neuropsychiatric disease”—these are profound differences that persist regardless of whether a man gets a boob-job or a teenage girl gets a double-mastectomy.)
Various other sex-distancing euphemisms have sprung up to describe men claiming to be women, such as “male-bodied” (perhaps to emphasise the rarity of cosmetic surgery) and “born a man” to describe someone who will die a man but was born a baby boy. Similarly, people feel compelled to refer to women as “biological” or “natal” women—as though there were any other type of woman. Or as “cis” women, as though women are a subset of their own sex. (I am no more cisgendered than cisheighted.)
Mental illness is not a dirty word
Gender identity disorder has been rebranded as gender dysphoria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), with some changes to the criteria. However, it’s the removal of the word “disorder” which pleases activists. Society is moving away from “pathologising identity”, as one article on body integrity dysphoria put it, and instead, elevating flawed and maladaptive self-perceptions above the reality they misrepresent. (At this rate, we’ll be issuing multiple passports for the one dissociative identity disorder afflicted person.)
The thing about mental illness (and kinks you think should be unshamed) is that despite your compassionate nature you can only humour it to a point. Elaborate games of make-belief lead male “lesbians” to lament the “cotton ceiling” (a play on “glass ceiling”, referring to women’s underwear rather than penetrating an invisible barrier en route to your very own corner office) and heterosexual men to lambast other heterosexual men for not finding them attractive.
Gender identity is a misperception that requires complicity from others in the form of constant compelled affirmation of an idiosyncratic perception and the patently false belief which crystallises around it. It also requires the dismantling of safeguards for women and children for the sake of a minority’s emotional validation. Feelings of disconnect from or dissatisfaction with one’s sexed body are real, however, the interpretation of those feelings is a delusion. Delusions are rationalisations of bizarre experiences, but they are not accurate appraisals of the situation.
Trans activists emphasise that not all transgender people have gender dysphoria. Perhaps this will awaken the bleeding hearts out there to the fact that they are, in some cases, merely pandering to entitled narcissists who think womanhood is a costume or opt-in identity rather than expressing sympathy for genuinely distraught people who, at any rate, need therapy and not mindless affirmation.
Neither innate nor immutable
Not innate, but constructed with reference to the body
While identity refers to the fact of your being (thanks again, dictionary), how you perceive your identity is, well, a perception. And perception is a constructive process rather than some exact, one-to-one mapping of reality. Perceptions are subjective, sometimes to the extent that they are wholly dissociated from reality. Sometimes perceptions are wrong.
Consider all the times you’ve been fooled by an optical illusion, heard your name in the wind, or were startled by a hatstand that you mistook for an assailant in the dark. Misperceptions and even hallucinations (each time your dream) are merely part and parcel of your brain attempting to make sense of complexity.
There are many mental conditions characterised by inaccurate self-perception. When a patient says “I eat and breathe, yet I am dead” we don’t suggest he change his legal status to deceased. (Like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s obscenely wealthy rock-star Hotblack Desiato who’s staying dead for tax reasons.) And we certainly wouldn’t force people to refer to him as the “late” Arthur Dent—insert your own “deadnaming” joke here—or to treat him as though he were actually decomposing. (Though if he wants to acquire some necrotic tissue, gender-affirmative surgery is an option.)
Clinicians are well aware that Cotard’s delusion patients are experiencing something highly unusual: that of feeling no emotional connection to the world and the people in it. The acquired neurological damage responsible is known and understood to come with the consequences of severing the limbic system from the recognition process. A sense of dissociation, depersonalisation and derealisation is inevitable, being that the bodily states of heart-pounding and stomach-squeezing fear, anger, and elation are what ground us in the physical world.
We know such a person, though having no deficits in judgement, will interpret this usual perception as proof they are a corpse rotting away or non-existent. (Interestingly, some are convinced it’s the world that has ceased to exist—the egotists!) We don’t pretend their “lived experience” of this misperception has any bearing on the fact that they are alive and every human being correctly perceives them as such. Nor do we pretend such a person needs to chill out in a morgue—“I just want to rest!” could complement the trans-identified man’s “I just want to pee!”—for the sake of validating a metaphysical identity.
This raises a question: how does one typically develop an identity when said identity relates to an embodied existence? Of course, at first, it’s up to the people around you to inform you that you are a boy or girl. You may mistake a girl who’s opted for short hair for a boy, such are the limits of your understanding. This parallels the way toddlers sometimes over-generalise all four-legged animals as “dogs”.
Such an error isn’t due to the epistemic privilege of alone discerning a horse’s “true” nature but rather a result of that all-important ability to extract the statistical regularities of our environment and use it to make judgements. Why descriptions of external objects can be in error but all self-descriptions are taken as gospel by proponents of this ideology is unclear.
So, how do you typically integrate information about your whole and hale and/or sexed body into a sense of self? You construct something known as a body schema, an adaptive sensorimotor mental representation of your body that functions below the level of conscious awareness. Body schema is not to be confused with higher-level body awareness (conscious knowledge of your body) or body image (the set of attitudes you hold toward your body), as it can be impaired without affecting the latter.
Weak activation in the neural networks responsible for creating a body schema is associated with gender dysphoria. A woman’s body schema may not incorporate breasts leading her to feel they are “wrong” and somehow extraneous. It is this incongruity, this “subjective disconnection between the perception of body and self-identification” which causes unease in people with childhood-onset gender dysphoria.
Similarly, if your body schema did not contain one of your legs, you’d have body integrity dysphoria instead, and you’d spend a lot of time pretending to be physically disabled through the use of props like wheelchairs—when not at home or using your legs to hike and snowboard, naturally—so that other people’s perceptions would comfortingly mirror your own. Perhaps you might even feel that you ought to be included in the Special Olympics or allowed to avail yourself of bathrooms designed to accommodate people with an actual rather than imagined physical disability. Society will not humour you in this, at least.
You would also covet an amputation to embody “your authentic self” that the medical community would deny you whilst being only too happy to perform double-mastectomies on trans-identified teenage girls. This is despite the fact that one can become an amputee, whereas changing one’s sex is impossible. One can only achieve a non-functional simulacrum of an opposite-sex body. In treating body integrity dysphoria, clinicians focus on reuniting mind with body by utilising “therapy to integrate the alien limb into the (disrupted) body image [schema]” instead of mutilating the body as though it were at fault.
There are two shared pathways for developing gender dysphoria and body integrity dysphoria: an intense sexual preoccupation with becoming the object of attraction, or the aforementioned own-body perception deficit. (A friend said this was a good analogy, however, I think given the rarity and overlap of the two conditions, rather than being analogous, they are merely different manifestations of the same issues.)
Social contagion, internet culture, and indoctrination
Nowadays, the ideology formed around the disorder is itself responsible for a fresh new demographic believing their bodies are “wrong”. In a scant few years, we’ve witnessed an astounding increase in girls disavowing their sex and presenting to gender clinics, reversing a sex ratio that once skewed heavily male. (If this is, as trans activists claim, the result of greater visibility and acceptance, why is this only true for trans-identified girls, many of whom are gay or on the spectrum?)
Rapid-onset gender dysphoria is likely attributable to internet culture, social contagion, and indoctrination. We are creating a generation of children alienated from their bodies simply because they’re told it’s abnormal for one’s preferences and personality to deviate from the stereotypes associated with one’s sexed body. These children are then put on a conveyor belt of bodily conversion, that is, lifelong medicalisation and acquired disability. For some parents, social media cred or being able to “trans the gay away” is worth it.
Through the mere act of ageing, ~80% of dysphoric children grow out of these fleeting feelings, with many growing up to be homosexual. A child put on puberty blockers risks cognitive impairment, bone demineralisation, and sexual and reproductive dysfunction. Coupled with scant evidence that this improves a child's mental health rather than worsens it with the harsh realities of acquired disability, certain countries are moving away from the Dutch Protocol.
In light of this, Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Bill 2020 is an ironic name, particularly when it is referred to by mainstream media as an “Anti-Gay Conversion Therapy” bill (in a country with no such practices). It’s as though the body were less important than protecting one’s alienation from it. Suppressing puberty and converting the body is apparently perfectly kosher. On the other hand, questioning why a child has disavowed their sex, even by a therapist, is punishable by Draconian fines and imprisonment terms. I wonder, who ultimately profits from this?
Autogynephilia: a male fetish for embodying the female
Gender dysphoria does not have just one causal pathway. In terms of internet culture, exposure to “sissy hypno” and “forced feminisation” pornography and communities of like-minded men seem to be helping autogynephilia/ a humiliation fetish blossom into delusions of titillating “inferiority” by dint of “womanness”. Meanwhile, the violence and degradation characteristic of modern-day pornography are pushing girls to attempt to opt out of their sex for a “cooler” (and less fraught) gender identity.
Late-onset gender dysphoria is related to fetishism—studies of penile tumescence do not lie even when self-report is subject to social desirability bias. Trans activists either deny the phenomenon of autogynephilia or take the tact that “a male’s propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman” is somehow further proof of his “femaleness”.
After all, sometimes a woman is elated to note that she looks like an attractive woman in the mirror, much like a man is elated to see he looks like an “attractive” “woman” through the use of cosmetics, clothing, rubber masks, and even cosmetic surgery. In sexual fantasies, women, just like a small percentage of men, picture themselves as women rather than as giant squids or the opposite sex. Men sometimes masturbate using women’s underwear, and women sometimes masturbate while wearing underwear designed to fit their bodies. Exactly the same, bravo gender scholars.
Gender ideologues will be quick to tell you this person is a little girl dressing older because she’s keen to grow up rather than a man who dresses as both a toddler and “sexy” Catholic schoolgirl for reasons of sexual arousal. Perhaps you respect his choices and perceptions: but do you think this entitles him to participate in a swimming contest for girls? And use their change rooms after? If you believe in gender identification—then you do. There’s no picking and choosing whose identity feelings declarations you accept or the whole house of cards collapses.
There are no lady brains trapped in male bodies
The present data do not support the notion that brains of MtF-TR are feminized. The observed changes in MtF-TR bring attention to the networks inferred in processing of body perception. (Savic & Arver, 2011)
Homosexual orientation was found to be associated with less pronounced cerebral sex dimorphism, a finding that appeared more prominent among men than women. Although a less pronounced cerebral sex dimorphism was detected in transgender persons compared with heterosexual cisgender controls, this seems primarily due to the higher proportion of homosexual persons in the GD groups, and does not seem to be the signature of GD. We suggest that GD is, instead, specifically linked to cerebral networks mediating self–body perception, possibly due to certain developmental and acquired changes. (Manzouri & Savic, 2019)
Consider the circular absurdity of having to define male and female without regard to gender identity to be able to calculate these structural and functional averages in the first place. Are gay people the opposite sex because they have atypicalities in cerebral sex dimorphism of the brain? Of course not. Being closer to the opposite-sex average on some measure doesn’t make you the opposite sex. Of all the stupid things I’ve ever heard, this is by far the stupidest.
Not immutable, rather, extremely malleable
Attempting to suppress or change someone’s gender identity is a crime in some jurisdictions, suggesting that gender identity is immutable and that therefore such an endeavour would be as cruel as it is futile. This assertion is ironically undercut by proponents of the ideology, some of whom wear colour-coded bracelets to let you know if they are in boy or girl mode, to use Izzard’s charming turn of phrase.
If someone can identify as “genderfluid”, in what sense is their gender identity a stable one? If gender identity is merely a self-evaluation of your masculinity vis-à-vis your femininity, your level of adherence to regressive sex stereotypes, or your caprices, then it is indeed changeable by the minute. However, this raises the question: why does a personality label, or a succession of personality/mood labels, require us to scrape and bow before it?
Further, every perception, including that of self, can be manipulated. In a virtual reality experiment, participants watched as their opposite-sex digital avatars were stroked while receiving congruent tactile input to their real, out-of-sight bodies. (Given the correct cues, we can embody everything from a rubber hand to a mannequin to a mirror reflection—but that’s the subject of a future article.)
This gender-bending virtual experience led participants to rate themselves higher in affinity with the opposite sex, underscoring, to quote the authors, that “perception of one’s own body affects the sense of one’s own gender [identity] in a dynamic, robust, and automatic manner”. (You don’t say?)
Can you live with it?
Subscribing to gender identity ideology is one thing, but can you support it? After all, those who pretend to believe in absurdities will have to make peace with the ensuing atrocities. The mutilated children with their lifelong dependence on Big Pharma, the male MMA fighters bragging about fracturing women’s skulls, the male sex offenders and femicidal serial killers glorying in having their crimes ascribed to women and infiltrating their prisons—that’s all on you if you think a “woman” is merely who he says he is.
Gender Identity Ideology
Dear Angela,
Great work! It has been too long since I've beheld another's thoughts that mirror my own. Your insight into the parallels of body dysmorphia and gender dysmorphia is precise. Your understanding of this collective psychosis and its idiosyncrasies is limpid and distinguished. And yet your prose is pleasantly mordant too. I have also been thinking and writing on this subject (for years). I'm new (but not young) to this world online and I just made my first 'posts' on Substack. Here is a link to my site:
https://tyndall.substack.com/p/reclaiming-common-sense?r=11etpp
This is the first part of a very long essay. I posted the second part last night and will be strategically posting subsequent sections for the next 6 weeks or so.
I hope we might establish some correspondence (maybe feedback?) on this topic. I'd be happy to parse yours, if you'd like to parse mine. I look forward to reading more of your work.
Warmly,
Ty Kun
Hi Angela,
Pardon the delay; I have good excuses but no need to enumerate them. I have since read your articles on the capgras and cotard delusions (interesting stuff) and the one on BID. My concern centers on the one-factor model of delusion as a whole, not in relation to specific syndromes like C & C, but in a broader, more general sense. The model you mentioned proceeds from an epistemic presupposition that could be summarized as 'perceptions proceed conceptions', From the temporal framework of learning and experiencing reality as a child to an adult, this progression is fairly straightforward. You might say it's the 'cobblestone patchwork' (I believe this was how you put it) of many perceptions over a period of time that form beliefs, false ones included. But I wonder when this relationship starts to become inverted? After years of studying and learning, it seems to me that an adult perceives the world a certain way. This 'way' refers to the beliefs and convictions they have about the world and the way they learn subsequent information . In other words, at some point, it seems that our perceptions are colored (for better or worse) by our beliefs and therefore the one-model theory is not exhaustive.
Sure, as children, empiricism is preeminent, but then I think this paradigm begins to break down. Delusions in normal (I agree that one can be both more or less rational and deluded, and that delusions are not malfunctions) adults also emerge from more fundamental criteria; namely, ideas. So in contrast to the temporal framework, I think it's the ontological framework that should (but doesn't for most people) replace it for the purpose of graduating the mind. It is the essence of thinking a certain way (again, for better or worse) that slowly begins to the eclipse the empirical paradigm. This seems to be a better explanation for why adults cannot shake certain idiotic (and idiosyncratic) world views, to say little of 'bizarre intellectual fetishes' :) My latest post (part 3 of the aforementioned essay) address some these fetishes, if you'd like to read further.
As to your final bit on schizophrenia, I had a dear friend from college who became as schizophrenic as they come. His case would be a fascinating study...But we'll table that.
I look forward to future correspondence,
Ty