What Is Gender Ideology?

I have long asserted that Gender Ideology is fundamentally a "straw man" construct that the political right has co-opted and turned into a bucket that they fill with all of their fears about transgender people (in much the same way that the word "transgenderism" is another term they love to throw around to invalidate transgender people).  

This morning, I went to Google and asked its AI to define "Gender Ideology", here's what it came back with: 

"Gender ideology" is a term primarily used by conservative, religious, and anti-LGBTQ+ groups to describe, and criticize, a set of beliefs regarding gender identity, sexual orientation, and reproductive rights. It is largely employed as a pejorative, catch-all phrase to frame modern understandings of gender—particularly those that decouple gender from biological sex—as a dangerous, artificial, or fabricated construct. 

Core Beliefs Criticized as "Gender Ideology"
Those who use the term "gender ideology" often argue it encompasses the following ideas: 

• Social Construction of Gender: The belief that gender roles and identities are not fixed by nature or biology, but are constructed by society and culture.
• Gender Identity over Biology: The assertion that a person's internal sense of their gender ("gender identity") is more definitive than their assigned sex at birth.
• Gender Fluidity: The concept that gender can be fluid, non-binary, or chosen, rather than strictly male or female.
• Separation of Sex and Gender: The distinction between biological sex (chromosomes/anatomy) and gender (socially constructed roles), which is foundational to gender studies.

Unsurprisingly, GLAAD notes that this is a term which is used not by either academic researchers in the area, nor by actual transgender people.  It is used primarily by the same actors who used the term "gay agenda" (similarly devoid of meaning for the people it is intended to attack).  

Looking closer at the broad ideas that "Gender Ideology" is charitably intended to encompass, we see a pattern that in domains like psychology and sociology we call "biopsychosocial" (BPS), where the concepts involved encompass the domains of biology (the physical), psychology (the individual), and sociological (the social) dimensions in a manner where they intersect with each other.  

Wherein Colin Wright Takes A Victory Lap

Over in The Wall Street Journal, author Colin Wright takes a victory lap declaring that transgender youth are in fact the result of "social contagion".  

As you might expect, he's fallen all the way down the Gender Critical rabbit hole, making some of the most ridiculous claims possible, and citing material from the "Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine" (SEGM) - a notoriously anti-transgender group which is more a collection of cranks than practitioners of legitimate science.  

The dominant counterargument to the social-contagion theory, repeated endlessly by the media and activists, is that the sharp rise in transgender identification over the past decade simply reflects liberation: People today are more comfortable expressing their authentic selves. The favored analogy compares this rise to the historic increase in left-handedness once schools stopped discouraging it. As transgender activist and biologist Julia Serano put it in a 2017 article, “there wasn’t really a rise in left-handedness so much as there was a rise in left-handed acceptance” that allowed its true natural prevalence to emerge. John Oliver popularized this analogy on “Last Week Tonight” in 2022, insisting that the surge in trans identification was simply a sign that “people were free to be who they f— were.”

If transgender identity were an innate trait, like left-handedness, we would expect identification rates to rise at first when it became socially acceptable, then plateau and remain stable at a fixed level. If the phenomenon were instead driven by social contagion, we might expect a boom-and-bust pattern: a spike followed by a rapid decline once the social forces driving it weaken.

As both a transgender person and a left-handed person, I cannot tell you how completely misguided this really is.  In order for Wright's hypothesis to stand up, we have to turn a blind eye to the last 5 years or more of increasingly hate-filled anti-transgender _LEGISLATION_ and rhetoric coming from the political right, especially in the US and UK.  These laws are draconian, they are hurtful, and yes, they are profoundly damaging. 

If Mr. Wright thinks that transgender youth identities are "just social contagion", he is implying strongly that those youth are too stupid to understand the world around them - that they only follow the lead of others.  Reality is quite different.  Youth are in fact very sensitive to the social signals in their environment, and it would be hard for transgender youth not to be aware of the increasingly hostile legislative environment.  Nor can they ignore the hostility that they hear on a daily basis coming from religious leaders in church, or even their families.  

Mr. Wright has engaged in one of the most serious errors in research and analysis:  Correlation Fallacy.  He is assuming that the reduction being observed indicates a "reduction" in the number of transgender people.  This is, in my experience, likely false in the long run.  Transgender youth are clever - they know the signals they are receiving and will decide to transition later when they feel it's safer to do so.  That may mean getting out from the family home, or given current circumstances, may mean emigrating to another country where being transgender isn't being actively criminalized.  To claim as he does, without serious evidence, is sloppy at best.

Such as it is, the "evidence" for "social contagion" theory regarding gender identity is at best sparse, and most of it is so methodologically flawed as to qualify as junk science.  As an example, many "Gender Critical" arguments reference Littman's 2017 paper proposing "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria".  It was pure junk science.  Methodologically flawed, it proceeded to draw conclusions about transgender youth without even talking to a single transgender youth!  Learn to recognize junk science, people. 

Now, who the heck is Colin Wright?  The byline for him posted with his article reads:  "Mr. Wright is an evolutionary biologist and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute."

The Manhattan Institute? Oh - another conservative "think tank" - you'll pardon me while I ignore that - partisan think tanks are at best disinformation sources, and being affiliated with one doesn't help.  Being affiliated with SEGM is in my view another strike - SEGM is a key purveyor of junk science and misinformation about transgender people.

Doing a brief search on Google Scholar, I see no evidence that Mr. Wright has ever engaged in significant study of transgender people, either as a primary researcher, or as a contributor.  So, basically, we have another case of "I have a PhD, therefore, I can opine on any subject, regardless of whether I know anything about it".  This is sadly, an all too common state of affairs.  People with no actual background or study in the area manage to acquire an audience, and presto, they are "experts".  

There's a reason we don't go to a mechanic to diagnose medical issues, and we don't ask our physicians to repair our cars.  They are very different domains with different training and knowledge.  It would be nice if Mr. Wright had some actual expertise in the area of gender identity, but aside from writing opinion articles in newspapers, he has none.

Bailey’s Baaaack … and He’s Pissed

Apparently, J. Michael Bailey is “back”, and he wants to make himself out as another Jordan Peterson - beset by the onslaught of “woke” attacking his work.  Bailey’s the same researcher who tried to define transgender people based mostly on his interviews of drag queens in a book titled “The Man Who Would Be Queen”.  

Now he’s gotten all hot and bothered about “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” (ROGD).  A “diagnosis” proposed by Lisa Littman, and has about the same amount of intellectual validity as “Autogynephilia” (AGP) - a diagnosis proposed by Ray Blanchard years ago.  (If you’re interested in the background here, I’ve written a few pieces on Bailey’s work here)

His latest piece (it’s an editorial article, not actual academic research) is titled “My Research on Gender Dysphoria Was Censored, But I Won’t Be”.  Apparently, he’s upset that a paper he co-authored was retracted. 

What was that paper about, again, Michael?  ROGD you say?  So that would be the bizarre concept that Lisa Littman dreamed up after talking to a bunch of Gender Critical parents, and not a single transgender youth?  That concept?  

Yup, sure sounds like it.  Littman’s 2018 paper was trash too - for the fundamental reason that it failed to actually explore what was happening with transgender youth, and for massive sampling bias.  What answers did you think you were going to get when the primary avenues of soliciting responses was through web forums full of Gender Critical parents?  

The Littman paper also made the assumption that “social contagion” was a valid construct when talking about gender identity, but never even made so much as an effort to look at it and validate the construct either through other literature, or as part of the research.  No, Littman just assumed it was valid the same way that Blanchard decided that transgender women “get aroused by the idea of having a vagina”, and that’s why they transition. 

Uh - no, Michael - that wasn’t “activist outrage”.  That was plain bad science, and anyone with a reasonable amount of understanding of the fundamentals of study design would pick up on.  It was striking that Littman’s paper was based on information from the parents, and not once did Littman talk to the teens being described.  Further, did Littman go to websites where people were trying to figure out how to support their children? No - she went to some of the most rancid websites on the internet and posted it there.  I can’t imagine how that would turn out (snark).  

I don’t know the full story behind the parting of ways between Littman and Brown University. I can only presume that when actual experts weighed in on the 2018 paper, and Littman’s refusal to do more than publish a minor revision to the title that perhaps things didn’t exactly go in Littman’s favour.  Universities are more than a little sensitive to having their names associated with Junk Science.

Here we also get a hint as to where Bailey is going.  Note the use of the word “progressive community”.  Now, I don’t know exactly what he means here, but it sounds a lot like he’s basically saying “OMG, look what’s happening over there!”, while he tries to claim some moral higher ground.  The problem is that he’s trying to imply some kind of “social contagion” is going on with groups of adolescent girls.  

Now we start getting into the particulars of this latest paper.  We have an “anonymous” author who just happens to have a transgender child that they think is experiencing ROGD.  At that point, didn’t it occur to you Michael that you have all sorts of problems with bias in the fundamental design of the study?  Did it not come to mind that perhaps this was repeating the mistakes that Littman has made in her study? You, of all people, with decades of academic experience should know how to identify flaws in the study design and approach that this person was taking.  

Oh wait - so not only did you repeat the fundamental error of the original Littman study (only talking to parents of transgender youth), you repeated the second error of recruiting only from sources where parents already believed the idea of ROGD?  That doesn’t “limit the research”, it all but invalidates it.  Those are such fundamental flaws that any objective review of the study design should have resulted in it being thrown in the wastebin. 

Which is exactly what other researchers demanded be done a range of concerns:

Here’s a link to the open letter.  Yes, it’s as bad as you might expect at this point, and the authors of the letter point out additional aspects of the “research” that are enormously problematic, not only for the paper itself, but for the general issue of ethics in research.  

Bailey goes on in his tirade to extoll the great wisdom of Ken Zucker, but let’s also remember that he has long acted as a skeptic of transgender youth in particular.  Ultimately, he was pushed out of Toronto’s CAMH gender clinic for using therapeutic strategies that were looking increasingly like conversion therapy techniques.  Zucker unquestionably made significant contributions to research on transgender people - in the 80s and 90s.  That’s a long time ago now.  For the last number of years, he has been part of  an increasingly isolated group that continue to promote constructs like AGP and now ROGD, while being considerably out of step with where the bulk of the literature has been pointing. 

Wrapping up his tirade, Bailey swears that he’s going to launch this huge, long term study.  Until such times as he publishes the study’s design, I’m going to assume he’s going to repeat the same errors.  His past track record doesn’t give me much reason to believe otherwise, and frankly collaborating with both Littman and Zucker on this study is hardly making me optimistic.  

Just to put my $0.02 in on study design, I don’t see one study here, I see a need for several studies that need to be done, and a lot of deep, detailed research in order to make it all fit together. 

First, a study needs to be undertaken to explore the notion of “social contagion” and to validate whether or not it is even applicable to gender identity.  I’ll be quite blunt, as it has been used to this point, the construct comes across as very similar to “tabula rasa” (blank slate) theory which led John Money to advocate that David Reimer be raised as a girl.  The outcome of that experiment was tragic indeed, but it’s also indicative that gender identity is not some easily mutable trait that is going to be influenced by peer pressure in school. Just about every transgender adult’s story seems to back that up - the peer pressure to conform with social expectations was crushing, and still they ended up transitioning. 

Second, once you have some sense that “social contagion” has a reasonable degree of validity, then you can set about designing a study that examines the distinction between “onset” of gender dysphoria (e.g.  when a person starts talking about it) and the actual experience of gender in the individual.  This applies just as much to adults as it does to youth.  Developmental psychology research shows quite clearly that children have a working understanding of gender somewhere between the ages of 3 and 5.  Such a study will help you design tools to assess the experience of the person. 

Third, once you have designed your tools for assessing traits, you will need to execute studies to demonstrate that they have appropriate levels of construct validity (that is to say that they assess what they’re supposed to), and that they are reasonably reliable.  

Then, and only then, do you have the fundamental materials you need to execute your longer term study.  Any reasonable version of such a study will need to:  

Recruit participants broadly. Recruiting participants solely from websites with specific biases isn’t anywhere near acceptable. 

Researchers will need to do more than just talk to the parents of transgender youth.  You MUST talk to the youth directly

Researchers will also need to assess the dynamics within the families, as well as those within the social circles of the youth.  In other words, are the youth reporting what they think they want their parents to hear; are they being given certain messages at home; etc.

The concept of “desistance” is going to come up here.  It will need to be carefully defined for the purposes of the study, because it has been grossly misused in the past, and if not carefully considered will become a serious problem in the analysis of any data gathered. 

If, after all of that analysis, you can find a considerable pattern of “peer influence” resulting in gender dysphoria being expressed, then you might have a credible basis for proposing an explanation like ROGD.  

I do not expect Bailey’s proposed study to be anywhere near this level of complexity and clarity.  He, along with Littman, have already demonstrated that they have an axe to grind.  I fully expect to see a repetition of the same errors that launched so much criticism of Littman’s original paper. 

Untangling Sex

The discourse around transgender people often breaks into two sides screaming at each other, one arguing that 'gender is a social construct', and the other stamping their feet and yelling that such an argument denies the biological realities of women.  Both positions are correct from certain perspectives, but the "biological" argument fails to recognize the deconstruction of "sex" that many transgender people find themselves forced to engage in, and that deconstruction forms the basis for a much more nuanced discussion of both the social and physical issues involved. 

In this essay, I will endeavour to walk the reader through the concepts involved in the deconstruction of sex that transgender people often use as they are coming to an understanding of their own experience which is so different from that of their peers.  I will then start to explore how this deconstruction opens doors to much more complete discussions of the issues faced not just by transgender people, but by all of us as we navigate our way through society. 

About That 40% Suicide Attempt Rate

Over at a rabidly anti-transgender blog called "4th Wave Now" we find the following article which attempts to debunk the 40% suicide rate that several iterations of the US Transgender Survey have found.  The argument largely seems to be that the US Transgender Survey is "flawed", and therefore we shouldn't consider its findings legitimate.

Let's be clear, measuring suicidality isn't the primary focus of the US Transgender Survey's design.  In fact the question is incidental, primarily intended to give some insight into the consequences of stigma, discrimination and minority stress rather than to evaluate the overall risk of suicidal behaviour within the community.

Radical Feminism Versus Reality

The New Yorker decided to publish an exposé about the ongoing war of words between Transsexual Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) and transsexuals.

Sadly, the author spent most of their time talking about what TERFs have written about transsexuals and failed entirely to present the transsexual side of the discussion in any depth.  In fact, the entire article came across as if the transsexual community's reactions to various TERF proclamations about transsexuals were simply an overreaction.

While I have no doubt that there are those whose fury over the acts of various TERFs towards the transsexual community is such that they have made threats or been otherwise unpleasant about things.  The transsexual community is hardly uniform in its sensibility or willingness to discuss topics when they feel they have been slighted.

Such views are shared by few feminists now, but they still have a foothold among some self-described radical feminists, who have found themselves in an acrimonious battle with trans people and their allies. Trans women say that they are women because they feel female—that, as some put it, they have women’s brains in men’s bodies. Radical feminists reject the notion of a “female brain.” They believe that if women think and act differently from men it’s because society forces them to, requiring them to be sexually attractive, nurturing, and deferential. In the words of Lierre Keith, a speaker at Radfems Respond, femininity is “ritualized submission.”

One might wonder just what room for dialogue there might be when the TERF argument starts with absolute erasure of the lived experience of transsexuals.   Perhaps even more troubling is that the TERF position clearly ignores a large and growing body of evidence that does show that masculinized and feminized brains are objectively different (and that transsexuals reflect brain structures that tend towards female typical).

In many respects, it isn't the TERF's denial of the reality of transsexuals that gets people wound up.  I think if it were merely a disagreement over philosophical points of worldviews, it would be far less contentious than it is.

Unfortunately, TERF writers going back to Janice Raymond, author of a treatise entitled "The Transsexual Empire" have done their level best to erase the narrative of transsexuals.  Quite frankly, Jeffrey's latest work is really just another volley in an ongoing war where transsexuals are concerned. There is very little in it which is new, revolutionary or even evolutionary.

Whether or not "Radical Feminist" theory has any legitimate criticism of the social roles assigned to our male and female citizens is unfortunately lost in the core assumption that denies transsexuals the right to their own stories.  Jeffreys, along with the other TERF writers are blinding themselves to the growing evidence of biology and how it influences the expression of gender.  The rigidity of the TERF position is also its brittleness.  Feminism needs a new direction to evolve.  The work started so many years in the past has not been finished yet, and yet it cannot move forward without including the diversity of gender identities and roles that have emerged in the last 25 years.  I firmly believe that the TERFs like others with rigid, inflexible belief systems will become the intellectual dinosaurs in the coming years.

Oh The Dumbf ...

Over at "Crosswalk.com" (no, it's not a site about crossing roads), we find a Dr. White going off on gender identity in the wake of Time's June 9 article "America's Transition"  (hiding behind a paywall, a copy has appeared on Scribd here).

It's a somewhat appalling excuse for writing, especially considering that Dr. White holds a PhD.

Not surprisingly for Time, the author’s bias was thinly veiled:  “Almost one year after the Supreme court ruled that Americans were free to marry the person they loved, no matter their sex, another civil rights movement is poised to challenge long-held cultural norms and beliefs.” 

That certainly sets a tone. 

But she’s right.  Mainstream acceptance of homosexuality and the legalization of gay marriage virtually demand the acceptance of almost any other lifestyle. 

Why yes, being trans is something that people wake up and decide to be one morning for giggles.

In 1980 the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association listed transsexualism as a mental disorder. That entry was later replaced by what psychiatrists called “gender identity disorder. In 2013, it was later modified to mere “gender dysphoria,” which is simply discomfort with the gender a person is living in. Quite a progression in just over three decades, moving from something to be cured to something to be enabled.

Wow... just wow.  In one paragraph, Mr. White has completely misunderstood the DSM, the purpose of it and the evolution of the diagnostic categories in it with respect to transgender people.  First, one has to recognize that the DSM is a descriptive document.  It describes a series of recognizable psychological conditions.  It does not provide any kind of statement as to what objectives treatment should pursue.

Second, Mr. White quite ignoring the work of WPATH over that time, which has evolved considerably from dealing with the polar extremities of masculine and feminine identities, having learned that a simple "transsexual / not transsexual" model simply did not describe the breadth and depth of this tiny community of people.

However, White's argument rests quite firmly on a more serious misunderstanding, and one which depends on a particular understanding of gender identity.

All seemed to be well. 

Time magazine called the case “strong support” for the view that masculine and feminine behavior can be altered.  A 1979 textbook used the case to discuss how human gender identity was flexible and plastic, and how being male or female was the product of social learning and conditioning.  Numerous psychology and sociology texts cited the case as proof that sex roles are basically learned. 

But people didn’t follow the case through to the end.  

Even with the injection of female hormones, the absence of male hormones coming from testicles, and being raised as a female, Brenda did not turn out as Brenda.  In the early 1990’s, a team of researchers caught up with the boy who had been turned into a girl to see how “she” was doing.They found that “she” was no longer Brenda.  “She” was now David – working in a slaughterhouse, married to a woman, and the adoptive father of three children. 

At the age of 14, Brenda decided to start living as a male, and at 15, was told that was indeed what “she” had been born as.  She then announced that “she” had always felt like a male and wanted to become one again.  Brenda was given a mastectomy, male hormones, and constructed genitalia.When researchers dug further, they found that the first time Brenda had been put in a dress, he pulled it off.  

When given a jump rope, he wanted to tie people up with it or whip them with it. 

At nine, he bought a toy machine gun when he was supposed to buy an umbrella. 

His toy sewing machine went untouched because he preferred to build forts and play with dump-trucks. 

He was never interested in make-up, but instead wanted to shave with his father. 

On a trip to New York, he found himself attracted to the Rockettes. 

He even felt the urge to urinate standing up. 

From this, researchers at Johns Hopkins felt they should go back and study other children who had undergone similar operations; boys who, for whatever reason, were born without full male organs, had then been fully castrated, and raised as girls.  Of the twenty-five they were able to locate, ranging in age from five to 16, every single one exhibited the rough-and-tumble play more characteristic of boys than girls. 

Every single one. 

Even at their early age, fourteen of them had already declared themselves to be, in fact, boys – against everything in how they had been raised.  

From this, and scores of other studies, Rhoads concludes that instead of thinking that the difference between the sexes is something learned, or imposed by society, it is rather something larger, something deeply rooted, in our very nature.  It’s part of who we are. It’s not a role that we take on; it’s the very nature of our being.

I get quite angry when I see these people attempting exploit the tragedy of John Reimer's life story to make claims that the case simply does not represent.  Reimer's story is a tragedy on many levels, not just its conclusions, and it offends me deeply that the religious right wing keep dredging it up to imply that transgender people are "deluded" or outright "wrong" in their self-perception.  I have addressed this in considerable detail in past posts here and here.

What the argument Dr. White is making fails to recognize is that during development, the differentiation of the body between male and female physiologies is not a singular event.  We know that genital differentiation takes place quite early in gestation but the brain differentiates takes place at a different time.

However, since sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy and sexual differentiation of the brain starts in the second half of pregnancy, these two processes can be influenced independently, which may result in transsexuality. This also means that in the event of ambiguous sex at birth, the degree of masculinization of the genitals may not reflect the degree of masculinization of the brain. There is no proof that social environment after birth has an effect on gender identity or sexual orientation.

Knowing this well established fact, the wrap-up of Mr. White's argument is almost laughably sloppy reasoning:

This isn’t about what might truly be, to use the term no longer in vogue, true Gender Identity Disorder.  That would be something to be treated.  It is about maintaining that gender and sex, in a healthy psychology, is not something simply between our ears, but between our legs.  Sexuality is not like a favorite color – something to be chosen, or a preference – it is hardwired into our being.  

But that is precisely what our culture wishes to ignore. 

One of the great questions in all of human thought is “who am I?”  The answer is fast becoming, “I don’t know.”  It is as if our embrace of plastic surgery has led to a sense of being plastic ourselves, stripped of any sense of innate worth or identity.  If human beings have no fixed or permanent essence, if we are “plastic” – subject through technology to alteration, enhancement, mutation, control - then we may do what we will with ourselves. 

It's funny that with all of the evidence we have that White fails to see that it is entirely conceivable that someone may well be born with a feminized brain even if their genitalia appears to be perfectly normal.   In fact, I would go so far as to argue that in fact the transsexual is doing everything possible to maintain a healthy psychological state.

Generalize Much, Feminists?

This isn't really directed at all feminists, just the arrogant, obnoxious varieties like "Miss Andrea", keeper of the Feminazi blog. (I've written about her before here)

Her most recent anti-trans tirade is here.

It isn’t their existence which is in doubt, but strategy-wise, it’s beneficial for them to continually refocus attention away from their various inconsistencies and towards some sleight of hand poppycock while overly dramatizing their feelings. They embody, pardon moi’s crudeness, the worst stereotypes ever of hysterical effeminate dandies. They are literally acting out a caricature of something which exists only in their imaginations, because not even effeminate dandies (if any actually existed) are that fucking hysterical.

Generalize much, "Miss Andrea"? Or is it merely that your argument can't stand up to actual scrutiny without using such broad brush to describe others?

I'd love to know what these alleged "inconsistencies" you claim transfolk in general are responsible for. If I had to make a wild guess, I'd suspect that you were trying to put together a convenient straw-man to knock down.

More seriously, if you try to treat the broad spectrum of people that are transgender as if they represent some coherent unified whole, you are in for a world of difficulty. At best the broad term transgender can be considered descriptive, and does not describe a singular, coherent group that share the same goals. For example, attributing to transsexuals behaviours seen among drag queens is simply going to show that you have little or no idea of understanding of the people you are writing about.

They claim that any objections to transgenderism or any nagging requests that they clarify their own inconsistencies, are merely impertinent impositions on their valuable time and energy, and of course, an insult to their existence.

Ummm...not really. If you engage with people intelligently, you might actually get intelligent discourse. Unfortunately, far too many "radical feminists" start off with an argument position that attempts to erase the experiences that transsexuals very consistently express. (and, "Miss Andrea", you have a track record of attempting precisely that kind of erasure before - and I've shredded your argument in some detail)

Validating our humanity, and especially validating our neutrality – by that I mean constantly reaffirming that our status is non-whore and non-madonna — are two tasks which occupies the vast majority of a feminist’s time and energy. Validating our entitlement to civil rights, usually comes dead last.

Erm ... so? and this gives you some blanket right to trash on transpeople in general how? I hate to point this out, but the "victimhood" status that you like to whine and whinge about transpeople using is precisely what you are adopting here as a feminist ... and by some weird leap of logic, you seem to think that cross-gender identity is inherently misogynistic.

I'd like to think you are capable of actual informed discourse, but until you are prepared to actually deal with the groups that are loosely understood to be 'transgender' as individual populations, I doubt that any reasoned discourse is likely.

A First Look At The DSM V Proposals

The American Psychiatric Association has released the proposals for the DSM V revisions for review and comment today.

There has been considerable concern voiced within the transgender community around both who has been involved in the Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders working groups and some of the pet theories that some of those people may have tried to insert into the DSM V.

I'm very pleased to note that those fears seem to have been allayed in the committee process. Nowhere in there did I find the language of 'Autogynephilia', and in the revisions proposed for Gender Identity Disorder - in fact in this paper by Peggy Cohen-Kettenis, it seems fairly clear why the language of Autogynephilia wasn't adopted.

Overall, I like the proposed changes. They head in the direction of supporting the notion of gender as a spectrum rather than hard categories. Some of Kelly Winters' advocacy for "an exit clause" has also been adopted. Also, a clearer approach to dealing with cases where Gender Identity issues intersect with Intersex conditions has been added.

The term 'Gender Identity Disorder' is to be replaced with 'Gender Incongruity' - an interesting change that addresses the stigmatization criticism that has been levelled at the old terminology.

302.6 Gender Identity Disorder in Children
302.85 Gender Identity Disorder in Adolescents or Adults
302.6 Gender Identity Disorder Not Otherwise Specified

*Note: The really interesting discussions are in the Rationale tabs, which discusses the implications of the changes proposed, as well as what is still under discussion.

**Note: There is still an ongoing discussion as to whether the Gender Incongruity section should remain in the same section of the DSM as the various sexual paraphilias.

Given much of the uproar in the transgender community over the involvement of Blanchard and Zucker in particular on the overarching committee, I think that a collective sigh of relief is in order. It appears that the "pet theories" that both men are associated with that so many find deeply offensive have not been railroaded into place, and in fact the collective wisdom of all the participants has prevailed.

Revisiting Anne Fausto-Sterling's 'Sexing The Body'

I read this book a couple of years ago, but recently some of her writing has come up in various discussions I've been having. I'll admit that when I reviewed my notes from a few years ago that I didn't entirely agree with her arguments when I read Sexing the Body at the time.

However, it was in reading this response to the book, I found myself re-examining my notes and re-evaluating things in the light of what I know and understand today.

At the time I read "Sexing the Body" a couple of years ago, I was well immersed in reading a bunch of somewhat unrelated work by Judith Butler, and my disagreements with Butler appear to have significantly coloured my understanding of Fausto-Sterling's work at the time.

However, looking at it today, I find myself thinking that there's a fundamental point that I agree with Fausto-Sterling on - namely that the current models for describing physical gender are far too limited for the realities that we are gradually, but persistently uncovering. Gender is about the only part of medicine which is absolute - we are categorized as "male" or "female" at birth and so it must remain for all time.

The clinician's response is to suggest that a model of gender that is a continuum removes any meaning from the term Intersex, rendering it unusable for diagnostic purposes. I agree that this will be a significant problem for clinicians - when an entire spectrum of variation arguably describes the notion of Intersex, the term Intersex ceases to be terribly meaningful.

But, this is hardly a new phenomenon in the world of diagnostics. The concept of gender identity has changed dramatically in the psychiatric literature since Harry Benjamin started researching transsexuality in the 1940s. Over 3 editions of the DSM, we have seen the concept evolve from describing fetishistic crossdressing, eventually to include transsexuals, and in the DSM IV, the GID diagnosis is surprisingly broad - providing diagnosis covering a wide range of cross-gender experiences.

However, Fausto-Sterling is not entirely arguing from a clinical, or biological standpoint. She is integrating in significant amounts of social and political discourse into her position. While the clinical categorization of someone's gender may become significantly complicated by a model which describes physical gender as a spectrum, we must also recognize the social and political aspects of gender, and that is where a spectrum is a much more important and powerful tool.

What a spectrum model does to clinicians is force the use of objectively correct language for each individual case. Someone who has Klinefelter's Syndrome, and someone who has Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia cannot simply be categorized as "Intersex". This means that a more precise level of diagnosis and tracking will have to be undertaken - not a bad thing in the least.

Socially, however, this presents a much stronger foundation upon which to rest the conversations about the social and political aspects of gender that are ongoing parts of our cultural evolution. First of all, it takes the notion of biological determinism out of the picture. It removes the weapons of exclusion from all of the interested parties in gender discussion. The radical feminist that argues that MtF transsexuals aren't really women because they cannot bear children (I'm vastly oversimplifying the argument here, but I do find it ironic that the RadFem argument against transwomen boils down to the same biological determinism that feminism has fought for decades) Fundamentally, biology is then recognized as sufficiently plastic to accommodate a wide range of gender experiences and behaviours - and none of those should be seen as erasing anyone else's experience.

By taking biology somewhat out of the discussion, we can then move into a world of discussion social gender in its own right without the noise in the background of the internecine warfare that goes on between the various factions. It has always been clear to me that Feminist theory is on very solid ground when it is working from the context of the social constructs that are a significant part of our gendered life experiences - it has typically fallen apart quite badly when it has attempted to describe the underpinnings of gender at the level of biology and identity.

The real issues with gender in our society today exist as social issues - whether it is roles, expectations or demands placed on members of either sex. Feminism as a movement was born out of the recognition that our society had developed along patriarchal lines for centuries, and how that evolution was marginalizing half the population.

The treatment of both Intersex and transgender people in our society has arisen in part on the heels of feminism, and in part out of a recognition that there are groups where the imposition of "normal" as it applies to most of the population doesn't work so well. Marginalization and discrimination are rampant, and ill-informed treatment at the hands of medical professionals is all too common for both of these groups.

Appropriate treatment remains a problem for both IS and Trans communities. A more precise sense of diagnosis and classification will in fact work to the advantage of both groups. A more broadly based model of gender should permit greater individual autonomy with respect to treatment decisions, since each case must be examined individually. Hopefully, this will also have the benefit of making it easier for parents to move beyond the often panic/worry related treatment decisions that are so often made before an IS child is ready to make their own decisions.

I've argued before that when we are talking about humanity, it is important to view our attributes along the lines of spectrums - primarily because absolutes inevitably seem to encounter problems with exceptions. Where I disagree with Fausto-Sterling is in the interaction between mind and body. I am not at all convinced by the two constitute an "indivisible whole", which implies that they are distinct, but intertwined entities. Somehow, I'd rather leave this particular conversation open ended until we have a better understanding of how DNA and the complex chemistry that we all carry within us interact - to assume that mind is distinct from body feels a little too "pat" an answer, especially in light of the growing body of evidence that has raised the whole notion of transsexualism as being a subset of IS - a concept that a mere few years in the past would have seemed quite laughable. Then again, I haven't seen the bulk of neuroscience in the last decade or two that might lead towards a clearer understanding of the interaction of the body and the mind (or the intersection of). There is no doubt in my own experience that the chemistry of the body influences our minds in surprising and unique ways that should not be overlooked.

A Transgender Critique of Butler's Notion of Gender

[Preface Note September 2025]:  This essay is about Butler's conceptualization of gender as expressed in her book "Gender Trouble".  Since that time, Judith Butler has substantially changed her position and understandings of the subject.  What follows is relevant in the context of what Butler wrote in the past, but does not reflect where they are today.  

This essay is a response to the the following question raised here:

I think I might grasp what you're alluding to here -- especially with regard to the social dimension of gender, and the interaction between biochemical input and gender realization -- but I'd very much like to hear what I assume will be your much more articulate assessment of what the Butlerian gender model leaves out.

I draw my understanding of Butler's view of gender primarily from her book "Gender Trouble" (available as an e-book), and "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution". (and yes, I have read her more recent book "Undoing Gender" as well)

In Performative Acts and Gender Constitution, Butler argues as follows:

Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.

(* an aside - this will not be a detailed dissection of Butler's paper *)

This is significant to me because it foreshadows Butler's view of gender as primarily existing as a social construct, to some extent influenced by biology.

Significantly, if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief. If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style.

There is a surprising irony in Butler's position. On the one hand, she dances around the concept of Gender Identity as having an individual reality, and then settles in a place where she ultimately ends up rejecting the concept, subsuming it under the social and biological aspects of gender.

Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis.

The problem I have with Butler's model is that it fails to successfully encompass a few key aspects of cross-gender (and in particular transsexual narratives).

First, there is a common dimension to many transsexual narratives (not all, but enough to be significant) that includes an awareness of being "built wrong" from an exceedingly early age - often before any socialization or 'gendered behaviour' is evident.

Second, is the dyssonance that transsexuals express with regard to their lives in their pre-transition gender roles. If gender were solely a matter of social construct informed by physical biology to some degree, it becomes extremely difficult to square the model with the expressed dyssonance. In Butler's model, there is no room for dyssonance. In some respects, Butler appears to try addressing the issue as one of 'discontinuity', but she fails to appreciate that while a transsexual's pre-transition identity may be externally continuous, that is not the internal experience.

Third is the situation of David Reimer. I do not claim that Reimer was a transsexual - such was unquestionably not the case, but his case is important and revealing of some key aspects of transsexual narrative.

It is very significant that when John was being raised as Brenda, he fought against being treated as a girl at every turn. Physically, and to the best of his knowledge, John had always been Brenda - and yet refused to be Brenda - not just in respect to social aspects of gender, but was also horrified by what puberty would bring. (artificially induced or not)

From a transsexual's perspective, Reimer's narrative is undeniably consistent with the 'built wrong' narrative so common among the transsexual population. There is no doubt in my mind that this should be seen as independently validating the notion that gender identity may exist and is not fully informed by either social or physical cues. (as an aside, I suspect that where there are some interesting phenotype variations that are being identified among transsexuals in more recent years.

If, as Butler proposes, gender is defined primarily in the context of social and physical cues, then one might imagine that the John Reimer story would have had a much different outcome. As it is, eventually Brenda learned the truth of her history and chose quite consciously to transition to living as John. A train of events that substantially calls into question a model of gender which is based solely upon social and physical factors. (* Butler attempts to address John Reimer's story in Undoing Gender, however my reading of her on that matter leads me to believe that she fails to understand some key aspects of the situation. *)

Similarly, I do not believe that Butler's model explains the dissonance that so many transsexuals describe as overwhelming their pre-transition lives. Butler's model suggests strongly that if one's body is physically of one gender, and the social signals received are consistent with that gender, then everything should be good, right? So why is that transsexuals so consistently report something dramatically different? Further, why is it that therapists have found that transsexuals are generally not responsive to the kinds of corrective therapy techniques that work well in other situations where cognitive dissonance is reported?

Where I fundamentally disagree with Butler is in her rejection of the notion of an abstract, but essential attribute of 'gender identity' as distinct from our physical and social gender behaviours. The problem that Butler's model faces is in the narratives of thousands of transsexuals - and those narratives reveal a significant incompleteness which leads many radical feminist thinkers to engage in tactics such as erasure in order to sustain the perceived validity of Butler's model in the dimensions where it has greater strengths - namely in the understanding of the socially constructed aspects of gender.

Proving (or Disproving) Gender Identity

One of the complaints that are often levelled at transsexuals (and other transgender people) is that the claim of cross-gender identity is not verifiable (or falsifiable).

Superficially, there is a considerable amount of truth to this. Gender identity, like any other form of identity is essentially expressed only in the form of what an individual can articulate. This is particularly thorny when transsexuals assert an essentialism to their identity, and separate that essential aspect from the social and physical aspects of gender.

As a line of reasoning, it's not a bad tactic - in large part because it is hard to refute with the kind of absolute observation that it implies. But, we can also draw a few interesting lessons from the science of physics. Almost every subatomic particle we know about is understood not from direct observation, but from inference. Observations that confirm larger particles contain small anomalies that aren't quite predicted by the original model. Eventually someone comes along and comes up with a model which describes a new subparticle and the mathematics of that describe the anomalies seen previously.

I will take as a given that there is at least some agreement that gender itself contains multiple axis which intersect with each other. The three that are fairly obvious to me are as follows:

- Physical Gender: This is nothing more than physical sex characteristics - primary and secondary - the contribution of biology.

- Social Gender: The social context in which we each live. Some of us live as men, others as women; and a few live their lives somewhere in between - often adopting the label 'genderqueer'.

- Gender Identity: This is what is between our ears. It is about how we experience the physical and social aspects of gender, and ultimately our emotional response to that treatment.

Clearly, none of these three exists in a vacuum with respect to the others. Social gender is driven by how others perceive us - and first impressions are often the result of observed physical gender. Lastly, Gender Identity impacts how an individual responds to the physical and social aspects of gender.

So, on what basis do we infer the existence of gender identity as distinct from the physical and social aspects of gender?

First, allow me to point out that there is no precise definition of 'man' and 'woman' in our society. There are women who are drawn to behaviours we would often consider to be masculine; and there are men whose behaviours are surprisingly feminine. In other words, their behaviours do not fit what is considered "typical" for someone of their physical gender. This is the first point of anomalous data.

The second aspect of gender that is surprisingly diverse is the physical. As we are learning, just because someone is born with a penis and testes, they aren't necessarily male with respect to chromosomal sex; and a vulva and vagina similarly don't guarantee that the individual is explicitly female when chromosomes are examined.

The third piece of the picture is the very existence of cross-gender identified people - whether we are talking about crossdressers, genderqueer people or transsexuals is quite irrelevant. The fact is that we have a small but significant number of people whose personal narratives fall outside of the man/woman binary even if they are otherwise male (or female) with respect to their physical and social genders.

These three dimensions are key to my argument, for the represent the kind of anomalies in experimental data that led scientists studying physics to suspect that the particles which make up atoms were themselves made up of other, smaller particles. We have a small, but significant group of people who claim identities which do not align with what their physical and social gender experiences would suggest.

In the spirit of other branches of science, we can't just discard evidence because it is inconvenient. This evidence in part leads me to infer that there is a dimension to gender that exists outside of the observable physical and social aspects of the topic. If there wasn't, it's hard to effectively describe the existence of cross-gender identity. The existence of people who fall outside of the binary in the physical and social dimensions further suggests that these attributes exist along a continuum.

For the purposes of this discussion, I will assert that gender identity as an axis of human experience that interacts with the physical and social aspects of gender provides an interesting and significant completion of the model.

The problem of verifying this attribute is non-trivial. Until we take a look at the experience of successful transsexuals (by successful, I mean those who transition and live a balanced, healthy life in their chosen gender).

That I know of, there is no objective test that can be applied that will unequivocally show someone to be transgender. But then again, there is no objective test that proves that someone is innately homosexual, heterosexual or for that matter any other attribute of our personalities really.

So, to understand it, we must use inference, and in particular I turn to the narratives of transsexuals who transition successfully. A reasonably common feature of many transsexual narratives is a lengthy struggle with a crushing sense of dissonance resulting from the disjoin between their physical, social gender experiences and their identity.

As they progress through the process of therapy, hormones and real life experience (RLE), most transsexuals report significant improvements in their experience of the world as the dissonance that they had previously experienced is alleviated. Many describe a state of euphoria once they cease experiencing the dissonance that has been a part of their lives for as long as they can remember. (and it is not uncommon for cross-gender identity to be known and understood by the individual among their earliest memories)

If we can take these narratives at face value, then the experimental evidence is before us - namely that by taking steps to address the dissonance experienced on a daily basis, the dissonance is gradually relieved.

Again, applying a little bit of inductive logic, we can infer the existence of an unseen, but all too real, attribute that is influencing the individual's experience of the social and physical aspects of their gender. Not only is there evidence of an attribute having an impact on the person's experience of the world, but we can alter the nature of that impact for the individual.

Remember, that because we are dealing with an attribute that is not subject to objective examination, it is necessary to do examine it through subjective and inductive means. Consequently, the standards of care that WPATH publishes recommend a cautious, measured approach to treating people who present with gender identity related symptoms. For many transsexuals, transition periods of a decade or more are not unusual. This length of time speaks to a persistence and sense of purpose that cannot be overlooked, for it gives the therapists a great deal of time to evaluate the integration of the person throughout the process. There is research out there that makes it quite clear that for transsexuals, there is great benefit in transitioning.

The strongest evidence for the existence of gender identity comes in the form of how well transsexuals adapt to life in their chosen gender. While it may be true that a few are simply highly adaptable people, it is hard to believe that this would apply to all. Further, the fact that some people approach the notion of transition and then back away leads me to suspect that gender identity occurs along a spectrum, just like most other aspects of being human. (which is why I cited Intersex conditions earlier on in this essay - to make the point that even "absolutes" like male and female aren't necessarily as concrete as we might initially hope)

Further, if gender had purely social and physical attributes, then the tragic story of David Reimer would never have happened. Unfortunately it did, and in doing so, more or less destroyed the validity of any model that addresses gender purely as a social construct. The fact that David refused to be a girl, even when all of the social cues provided said otherwise, tells us a great deal about the persistence of underlying gender identity in individuals.

Have I demonstrated the existence of Gender Identity as an attribute separate and distinct from the physical and social aspects of gender? Not completely. What I have done is described the shape of the theoretical hole that gender identity fills, and pointed out that there is consistent - if somewhat subjective - evidence that the attribute's impact on an individual can be altered, although the attribute itself seems surprisingly difficult to alter.

It Was A Matter Of Time

I figured sooner or later someone from the right wing would start commenting about Mike Penner (fka Christine Daniels) suicide.

Sure enough, someone over at "Opine Editorials" took up the cause.

Even if we were to all agree that "gender reassignment" was generally a good and legitimate thing, could it ever be possible... possible... that every so often, a person who seeks such a change could be doing so out of some problem that could be addressed in some way other than gender reassignment?

What an opening argument. It starts off with a bad assumption and goes downhill from there.

What's the bad assumption here? That people who pursue gender transition do so on a whim, and the treatment professionals involved just say "yeah sure, go ahead". Even the tiniest smidgen of research would have turned up this Wikipedia overview Sex Reassignment Therapy, and Standards of Care for Gender Identity Disorders which links to an online PDF copy of the WPATH SOC which most North American practitioners follow.

In other words, the treatment community is already aware that only a small fraction of transsexuals need to transition. This why steps like Real Life Experience (RLE) are an essential part of the process. I'll come back to this in a few moments, after I address the next bit of flawed logic in the argument.

I'll choose a less politicized situation as an analogy. A guy goes to a doctor and says, "I have back pain. I need pain pills." But maybe that specific patient doesn't need pain pills. Maybe the patient just needs a massage, or a chiropractic treatment. Maybe the patient is sleeping in a chair and should be sleeping in a certain kind of bed, instead. Even though the pain pills may dull the pain, would it be good to the doctor to continually write the patient prescriptions for the pain pills and not address the other things?

Providing treatment for Gender Identity issues is a little more complex than treating back pain. Among the myriad issues is the difficulty in confirming someone's stated gender identity in an objective sense. This is why it is very important that the treatment team and the client work very closely together as each step is taken.

Then the logic train comes completely off the rails:

... If any of them took Penner aside and implied that perhaps his identity as a male or female wasn't the heart of what was ailing him, and reassignment wasn't the way to go and that he should get some other help, that could have easily been the end of their career.

The fact is that very few people would know what was going on in Mike Penner's head. I would imagine that Mike/Christine had a lot going on, and it would have been difficult if not impossible for anyone except for a trained professional to pick up on some of the themes in his mind. Certainly, if any of my peers tried to play "armchair psychologist" with me, I can imagine I might be tempted to tell them exactly where to go and what to do when they got there.

Gender transition is no trifling matter, and certainly not something that should be taken lightly.

Clearly, Penner wasn't happy. Happy people do not kill themselves. I didn't know the guy, but perhaps that unhappiness has been there a long time, and Penner thought he'd be happier as "Christine". Apparently, he wasn't happy as Christine, since he reverted back to Mike. The gender confusion activists will want to deny that the "gender reassignment" trial was a symptom of something that was wrong with Penner.

There are so many things that this paragraph misses about this story that it more or less negates its own meaningfulness. Among the questions that it fails to ask - was Mike Penner socially isolated after transitioning from being Christine? What kind of support was his treatment team providing him? What other comorbid symptoms did Mike/Christine exhibit in therapy? Was he receiving treatment for those conditions?

The reality is that from several perspectives, Mike's decisions to transition not once but twice represent a key reason why the RLE aspect of the SOC are in place. Not everybody who experiences cross-gender identity needs to transition fully, and not everybody who explores the idea of transition stays there. Mike walked a long distance down the path of transition, and for reasons I don't know, decided that he was in the wrong place living as Christine.

It is a shame he didn't get whatever help he really needed. This could very well have been a death by political correctness.

Around about this point, I find myself getting quite angry with the false inference here that Mike's suicide is the fault of his attempt to transition and the support that he received as Christine.

Identity is a tricky thing to pin down. Many transsexuals spend decades of their lives trying to understand themselves - a fortunate few seek help . Transition itself is a path fraught with peril - both external and internal. It is critical at every step of the way that the client be as aware of their circumstances as possible, and that their treatment team be working with them every step of the way - precisely to avoid the unfortunate outcome that Mike Penner arrived at.

The author of the column over at "Opine Editorials" has really demonstrated much of the misinformation and ignorance that embody much of the public understanding of transsexualism and how it is treated.

Mike Penner's death is a tragedy, and every transsexual who has heard about it must feel the loss all the more poignantly for having walked through their own dark places to get to where they need to be. To infer that Mike's suicide has anything at all to do with the support of those around him when he transitioned to living as Christine and back to Mike is disingenuous, and ultimately disrespectful to both Mike and those around him.

Why "My Genes Made Me Do It" Misses The Point

One of NARTH's favourite writers is a fellow by the name of Dr. Neil Whitehead. He has published a book entitled My Genes Made Me Do It which attempts to dispel the notion that there are genetic factors at play in the existence of homosexuality.

Not unlike Michael Behe's book "Darwin's Black Box", one doesn't need to be a specialist in the domain to recognize the logical errors in the arguments presented - no matter how hard the authors attempt to substantiate their position with diagrams, and serious looking statistical analysis.

In many ways, Dr. Whitehead falls into precisely the same trap that Behe did - he's so convinced of the rightness of his argument that he cannot see or recognize the glaring holes in his interpretation of the data.

Consider the following assertion in Chapter 1:

The implications of “many genes” for homosexuality would reflect what happened with the mice, or fruitflies: the typical genetic pattern would be a gradual change in the family over about 30 generations from heterosexuality through bisexuality toward homosexuality - a few percent with each generation. Similarly,homosexuality would only slowly disappear in the descendants (if any) of a homosexual person. Any other proposed mechanism is highly speculative and runs against the known evidence.

The flaws in this argument are many. First of all, it makes the incorrect assumption that evolution would have to progress through bisexual variations to arrive at a homosexual variation. There is absolutely no reason to suspect that this is the case at all, in fact the evidence overall could easily be read as implying that heterosexuality, bisexuality and homosexuality occur naturally and concurrently. This claim implies a determinism that in fact evolutionary theory does not actually reflect.

Similarly, Whitehead asserts that in such a scenario, homosexuality should die out, and yet it clearly does not. Therefore, argues Whitehead, homosexuality could not possibly be rooted in genetics. Again, this makes the false supposition that evolution is deterministic, and further that because a homosexual is less likely to pass their genes on to offspring, that it should die out - more of the "evolution is deterministic" line of thinking. However, it fails to take into account that there may be other reasons why the patterns that result in homosexuality persisting through many generations.

Further, even though we have sequenced the human genome, we should not be so naive as to believe that we have anywhere near a complete understanding of how the genetic attributes we can now describe respond to the surprisingly complex organic chemistry that fills our bodies and makes us tick. We have but begun to explore those very questions.

I'll skip ahead to Chapter 3 for now. Chapter 3 is where the author's bias and agenda is clearly stated:

We all tend to take our heterosexuality for granted as if it just happens. But it seems to develop slowly and steadily and to consolidate over about two decades - through clearly defined and documented stages. Psychologists are in broad agreement about the general stages of heterosexual development and unanimous about one thing: heterosexual orientation is not genetically determined.

This is a strange assertion, and one that seems to be quite at odds with the consensus statements from the APA on homosexuality:

What causes a person to have a particular sexual orientation?

There is no consensus among scientists about the exact reasons that an individual develops a heterosexual, bisexual, gay, or lesbian orientation. Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social, and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors. Many think that nature and nurture both play complex roles; most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation.

This is subtly different from what Whitehead states. Whitehead conveniently leaves out is that the research is inconclusive with respect to causality. The lack of concrete evidence either way should not be interpreted as negation of the idea that there are biological factors involved.

In Chapter 5 (no I'm not deliberately skipping even numbered chapters, but Chapters 2 and 4 really don't say anything significant), Whitehead takes a stab at trying to explain the gender and sexual orientation of Intersex people.

Ironically, his interpretation of Money et. al. falls into almost exactly the same error that Money himself made - namely he confuses gender identity with social gender.

Social gender is largely learned through experience. It builds on gender identity to some degree. If we didn't learn it through experiences, then by what purpose would the natural segregation of male and female children in school years serve? Further, if gender was purely socialization, then the outcome of Money's experiment involving John Reimer would have been dramatically different.

Money's work with John Reimer actually can be understood as validating the narrative of many transsexuals, who almost universally claim that they felt "like the opposite sex" from a very young age (often well before any sense of gender is supposed to be understood by the child) - and transsexuals move towards transition with a surprising degree of persistence - seemingly without swerving once they start to understand themselves.

Whitehead, however, goes on to argue that because many Intersex people choose to remain in the gender role that they were raised in, that gender identity, and correspondingly sexual identity are in fact primarily learned.

Unfortunately, Whitehead has made a serious error in his theoretical construct in making such an argument. Instead of expanding his interpretation to encompass the percentage of Intersex people who do choose to transition to a different gender role as adults, he effectively argues that their story is not relevant and discards that evidence.

There is a fundamental construct out of Mathematics that Whitehead has clearly ignored or misunderstood - namely that of completeness. Mathematical completeness has a strong definition, but the principle applies to scientific theory as well. A theory that fails to encompass the breadth of the available evidence is either in need of revision, or it suffers from logical inconsistencies, and this is where Whitehead's arguments begins to fall apart.

Whitehead wants his reader to be convinced that in the absence of concrete proof of biological causality that sexual identity and behaviour are therefore learned. If something can be learned, it can obviously be "unlearned" or changed, right?

Well ... perhaps that is the case - after all transsexuals learn the social aspects of their chosen gender, often in the face of having transitioned later in life.

However, that does not explain in the least their stated motives for choosing to transition (or, in the case of some, making the choice not to transition).

For much of the rest of his book, Whitehead spends his time expounding on how various lines of investigation have "not turned up any conclusive evidence" in building his argument that sexual orientation is primarily learned behaviour.

Right now, based on much of what Zoe Brain keeps digging up, I think the interesting work is not going on in the causality of sexual identity, but in understanding gender.

The more of this evidence that gets published, the more convinced I become that to assume that we must all try to be heterosexual is deeply flawed. In no other respect to we expect people to fit into absolute categories. Even handedness is mixed - few people are absolutely left or right handed. I'm strongly left-handed myself, but even there, I find that there are things that I do right handed. There's no absolutes in life, and it seems to me that where we are talking about sexual or gender identity, we should not be attempting to impose some kind of absolute models either.

I think that the notion of gender, and sexual identities as occurring along a spectrum of behaviour, as discussed in this essay series is a more reasonable notion than looking at it as if it is all learned, or all innate. It is far more likely that it is actually a mix of factors, and none of us should assume that there is an absolute of any sort at play.

Whitehead's book is essentially a piece of apologetics for the ex-gay lobby. It depends on the classic logical fallacy that the absence of conclusive evidence is equivalent to negation. This is no different than the classic "gaps in the fossil record" arguments against evolution theory - it fails to prove anything, and does not acknowledge that the evidence is gradually getting filled in. Further, because it requires us to discard information in order to hold together, Whitehead's work is clearly based on a weak foundation.

What Happens When You Confront Religion With Evidence?

Over at No Apologies, things got even more interesting in the discussion of Mr. Buterman's firing after my last look at the thread.

One of my favourite bloggers, Zoe Brain came along and tried to present the denizens of No Apologies with actual science around transsexualism and Intersex conditions here, here, here, here and here.

Which commenter "RRC" tries desperately to dismiss in his comments - first by stating:

Your Matthew 19:12 citation is not about being intersexed. And, respectfully, you need to understand that a sovereign Creator created and governs the field of biology and is not in a separate realm from God’s creation of morality. That is philospher Immanuel Kant’s unproven assumption.

Nice attempt at a dismissal - he doesn't even bother to answer to anything that Zoe has raised in her first post. His second post attempts to dismiss Zoe by arguing that she has violated his notion of hermeneutics.

It's this attempt at a rejection that actually makes me laugh:

Zoe,
Anyone has a “fraudulent agenda” who doesn’t start with the Creator God and his ethical system, his “Law” as I’ve said. I already made a defense for the intelligible pre-conditions of evidence. Zoe, you can’t have raw evidence devoid of a worldview foundation. God-less presuppositions in evidence always end up in futility. That is the fraud. So I’m way thru all your researchers.
If you don’t accept my opinions I guess we’ll have to go our separate ways.
Good day.

This boils down to one thing - he's rejecting the evidence that Zoe has thoughtfully cited in her posts on the basis that he disagrees with the worldview that scientific inquiry is based on.

This isn't a lot different than the three year old having a temper tantrum because their parents won't give them the candy they've decided that they want. RRC hasn't actually refuted anything - he's just said that he can't be bothered to examine the evidence because it might make him re-examine his assumptions about the world.

The G&M Does Some Real Journalism

Mainstream media has an unfortunate habit of getting their facts wrong, or even outright failing to do their research when it comes to talking about transgender - and in particular transsexual - issues.

So, it was with some trepidation that I opened this article on The Globe and Mail: Mourning a Daughter, Celebrating a Son.

To my relief, the writers at the Globe and Mail actually took the time to do some research:

Transgender facts

Although social acceptance for transgender people is growing, parents continue to abandon youth with gender-identity issues when their children need them most, advocates say.

49 per cent of transgender people attempt suicide.

Transgender youth account for 18 per cent of homeless people in cities such as Chicago, but researchers estimate fewer than 1 in 1,000 people is transgender.

1 in 12 transgender people in America is murdered.

Transgender youth whose parents pressure them to conform to their anatomical gender report higher levels of depression, illegal drug use, suicide attempts and unsafe sex than peers who receive little or no pressure from parents.

Less than 1 to 1.5 per cent of individuals experience persistent regret after sex-reassignment surgery.

Sources: Guidelines for Transgender Care (2006), Gender Spectrum Education and Training, Families in TRANSition (2008)

The article is genuine and sympathetic to what is often a difficult change for families to accept - especially with teens. It talks quite reasonably about the struggles that parents face in such matters, and describes the results of being supportive.

TransBashing Matt Barber Speaks On HRT For Inmates

Sometimes, looking over the fence into the cesspool of neoChristianist media is a frustrating horror show - especially when they start bashing GLBT people.

Being transgender in a prison can't be a pleasant experience - especially if one has not had surgery yet. It's particularly nasty if the adminstrators won't even provide access to treatment.

So ... two inmates sued. That's good news. In fact, the revised policies that Idaho is implementing are quite interesting:

The new policy says inmates must be given information about available treatment for gender identity disorder, that inmates can't be harassed by staffers for having been evaluated for the disorder, and that they must be moved to appropriate housing units while they are evaluated. It also spells out that outside consultants may assist in the diagnosis and that a recommendation for treatment must be completed within two months of a gender identity disorder diagnosis.

Also under the new policy, if an inmate is taking cross-sex hormones when they enter prison, they will be allowed to continue unless another medical condition makes it unsafe or inadvisable to continue.

Then there is what comes out of neoChristian wingnuttia:

Barber believes prison officials are doing transgendered inmates a disservice. "The American Psychological Association still considers gender confusion -- GID, gender identity disorder -- a disorder. It is a mental disorder," he contends.

According to Barber, prisons throughout the U.S. should help suffering inmates to overcome their gender delusions.

Barber...Barber?...That sounds familiar... oh right, that Matt Barber.

Ironically, what Mr. Barber ignores is that the WPATH Standards of Care actually recommend the very treatment he is opposing:

After the diagnosis of GID is made the
therapeutic approach usually includes three elements or phases (sometimes labeled triadic therapy): a real-life experience in the desired role, hormones of the desired gender, and surgery to change the genitalia and other sex characteristics.
...
Typically, triadic therapy takes place in the
order of hormones = = > real-life experience = = > surgery

Additionally, Barber doesn't seem to understand that a GID diagnosis bears no resemblance whatsoever to either clinical delusion or other disorders. In fact, those other conditions would explicitly preclude a GID diagnosis until dealt with adequately from a clinical perspective.