Brilliant article: Trans Is Something We Made Up

You think the menopause is ‘made up’? A cultural concept?

I've just written and deleted a long but erratic bit about neurodiversity as a medicalised cultural concept. I wonder what kind of cancelling I might get for that.

As someone with an ADHD diagnosis, I think you are both right to we wary of the ‘cancelling’ but also completely right. They’re is some kind of ‘human universal’ in the differences we currently express as neurodiversity or any of the conditions we group under ghat heading. Or potentially several different human universals.

I’m quite ambivalent about my diagnosis and the cultural siting of it. It’s useful (to me) in some ways. But I’m not entirely convinced that medication is the answer. It might be an answer, but to the wrong question. There are some quite good arguments around the idea that ND emerges as a ‘problem’ or ‘condition’ because of how society is organised and the prevailing cultural norms.

On the other hand, I find the ADHD is fake and you’re just making it up narrative deeply problematic. As that article describes, it is real; there is some aspect of the human condition that occurs across societies and it does cause significant problems for people in the 21st century western world.

But it becomes difficult to separate out questions about the cultural framing from the generally dismissive attitude to the underlying issue and the people experiencing it. which is true of trans and many other contemporary phenomena too. So people get defensive and feel their experience or even their very existence is being ‘invalidation’ or denied.

But, in a society that wasn’t obsessed with ensuring gender conformity (and controlling non-conformity), ‘trans’ wouldn’t exist in the ways it has emerged in the 21st century. It simply didn’t exist in this way even quite recently.

Apparently the behaviours and characteristics we define as ADHD are pretty benign, even desirable, in hunter-gatherer communities. They still exist and can be distinguished from other traits that may be more common in people. These characteristics become a problem because of how we live and what we expect from people here and now. We view and describe them as pathologies and impairments, where under other circumstances they’d just be neutral differences. Or we start celebrating them and clinging on to the ‘identity’ as how we define ourselves.

The trans thing really worries me from this exact perspective because I was a gender non-conforming little girl. In the 80s people around me used the cultural category ‘tom boy’ and largely left me to it. I grew up to be a feminist 🤣. If I were 30 or so years younger, I really fear for how my gender nonconformity would have been shaped by the cultural narrative around trans. It’s not that people were right or somehow more enlightened in the 80s; but the ‘Just a Tom boy’ narrative did give much more space without intervention.

@Meadowfly I find your posts quite hard to read.

I'm in a similar position to those parents.

You don't know how that child is at home. Have you heard of masking?

Do you really think that those of us filling in the endless endless forms for EHCP, having to take our local authorities to tribunals etc, being doubted not just by professionals but sometimes our own families, are making it all up? Do you think anyone would choose that?

I enjoyed the article and re autism and ADHD, I'm quite prepared to believe that human brain variation is universal and the (not sure how to put this) "autism is a superpower" thing is something we made up. Certainly my daughter would be happy as Larry in a world involving no formal education and a lot more slime and cartwheels.

But the misery and difficulties with education in particular, are real too.

I’ve also read discussions that suggest that the act of naming a disorder does increase the number of people with it - they used bulimia as an example. A small number of people may have had it but they would have been unaware that anyone else did. Once named it became ‘a thing’.
The same with self/harm and cutting. I don’t remember anyone doing this at school. If the had we’d have said ‘x keeps cutting their arm’, we weren’t aware of ‘self-harm’ and ‘cutting’ as named conditions, but now all the kids are, so it exists and is a possibility.

I have to thank the plopper for reviving this thread as I hadn't seen it before.

A lot of people can remember when anorexia and bulimia just weren’t a thing—nor was cutting—but now those are entrenched Western conditions which have spread to other places in the world, each with their own mythologies of meaning. To the sufferers they feel genuine. They are genuine. But they are also culturally created. They are made up.

While - however tempting it is to do so - one cannot with any certainty state that what Bell, Bynum et al refer to as “Holy Anorexia” is anorexia nervosa; Richard Morton is generally agreed to have given the first medical description of anorexia nervosa in 1689. In 1873 both Gull & Lasègue published on the subject, but it was Gull’s name for the condition (rather than Lasègue’s “hysterical anorexia”) that was adopted. Bulimia wasn’t considered a disorder in its own right until the 1970s, entering the DSM in 1980; but historians of medicine have noted clear descriptions of it in patient notes from the turn of the C20, though case numbers greatly increases from the 1970s onwards. There are known to be multiple genetic factors at play when it comes to anorexia (& the same is suspected of other EDs with a pattern of heritability, but research is ongoing there).

Of course responses to illness are culturally (& temporally) moderated. Windigo sounds like a form of POCD, but with cannibalism rather than paedophilia as the intrusive thought. Bulimia developing - or rather, exploding - how & when it did is worth looking at in terms of intergenerational trauma compounded by socio-cultural change making binging & purging possible; & the latter aspect would help determine when & where (& to whom) it spread.

Anorexia Nervosa is still subject to gross mischaracterisations that harm those with it & those who care about & for them - all the shallow stuff about just wanting to look like models, & horrendous stuff about being manipulative liars trying to remain children forever & force people to care for them. So the author claiming it’s all a modern Western creation rather grates. Just as Harvey discovering the circulation of the blood in 1628 doesn’t mean it wasn’t circulating before that; Gull’s 1873 coining of the term “anorexia nervosa” didn’t suddenly bring the disease into being.

T2 diabetes was (truly, not as might be someone’s subjective experience with AN) unheard of in children & adolescents in the UK until this century - over 20 years after the first paeds case was identified in the US - but there are now cases worldwide. Would the author count those as culturally created, I wonder? If not, why?

(Trying to write this literally took all night because MN kept falling over & I kept microsleeping - with some bonus myoclonic jerks that made me very glad I’ve a sturdy case on my phone & I think it is all in reasonable enough order to be readable but apologise if I’ve messed up a link; left a phrase unfinished; or repeated myself. I don’t dare try leaving it to post later because of the links & falling-over but my brain is jangling about inflicting something so inadequate-insufficient so I thought I should apologise-explain.)

Not that it's a malady as such, but in Japan they don't know what "manspreading" is because.....it's simply not done.

And having typed that I now realise this is an old thread 🙄

On the plus side the resuscitation of this thread has drawn attention to the original very interesting article and subsequent discussion, which I for one missed, so thank you, Mr. Post and Run.

I mean nearly the same list was plopped on a thread this week.

Along with several significant women in history being transitioned retrospectively and certainly with no basis except to falsely add to the narrative of ‘there was always trans people’. There may have been, but forcing James Barry into being a trans person is just lying.

Sorry to have to point it out to you @kayrayhunter, but this particular 'party' ended over 2 months ago so you aren't exactly ruining it.

How patronising of you tell us what we don't know. Most of us here will know at least some of the stuff you've so kindly taken the trouble to explain to us, although we'd put a very different spin on it.

And what happened to number 2? I'm all ears.

This 100%!

Gender nonconformity being the underlying cause and "trans" the expression:

I'm not sure I totally buy that. Even with the recent move back towards certain more gendered things like fashion in places like the UK, the fact is that western society today is extremely liberal in terms of social sex roles compared to many others, and compared to the west pre-1960. Women can do pretty much any career a man can, they dominate in some important areas like medicine, they can have a fulfilling career, can choose not to have kids, do not need to marry, can have sex without commitments, can be Prime Minister, and a thousand other things. And even if fashions are now somewhat more gendered than they were 20 years ago, let's not exaggerate - there are tons of well known gender non-conforming men and women out there, women who have short hair, never put on a dress, don't wear make-up, whatever. Being gay or lesbian is probably more acceptable than it's ever been, or at least it was until 5 minutes ago.

Why would this sudden extreme reaction happen now if it's mainly about being gender non-conforming?

That list is a shocking appropriation of culture and also fails to see what gc means. All of that list are gc! Eddie fucking traitor Izzard used to be gc, these are my clothes. Bowie was gc not trans. Joan of arc was oppressed as a woman not trans. Personality is not determined by biology or a gendered soul, you are just you with either a penis or vagina. Ffs.

I'm sure that exact list was plopped here just a couple of weeks ago.

It's also difficult to draw conclusions from much earlier civilisations about a concept that has been only recently invented, and in the case of women most deeply hierarchical cultures would have allowed women to do certain things only if they could be perceived to be men (such as going to war), which means that we can't simply assume that women who lived as men would not have 'identified' as women (whatever that ambiguous concept might mean), because there were other reasons for that choice.

But suppose we ignore that one:

It would still be the case that none of the cases apply the idea of being trans to the general population of all people living their ordinary lives. So it might have existed for very specific roles (such as male priests for goddesses identifying as female) or for individuals set apart in some way from the rest of the community, but it wasn't the case that a man could become a woman without such changes by simply stating so.

In any case, I don't have any idea what 'gender identity' even means anymore for those who believe in it.

But I suspect most people don't even have one, unless it's based on the fact of living in a sexed body and how that affects us both directly and indirectly. More likely is that for most of us we are women or men based on our bodies in the same sense that our ages etc. work, i.e., just facts about us, not anything that should restrict us from being fully human beings.

I would appreciate less cultural appropriation when you're attempting to gaslight us.
Most of your example are cultures dealing with gender non-comforming or same-sex attracted individuals..

I’m wondering what a “gender-expansive identity” is.

How utterly ridiculous. Engage brain before copying and pasting stuff like this FGS.

Would you like to point out which of these cultures were 100% accepting of homosexuality please? Since you have done so much work on researching them.

Sorry to ruin the party/ ego but you/ we didn’t invent trans 😂

Here are seven things you didn’t know about transgender people:

1. Around 5000 to 3000 B.C., Gala, described as androgynous or trans priests of the Sumerian goddess Inanna, spoke their own dialect and took on feminine names.
3. Sometime from 200 to 300 B.C., in ancient Greece, some gods were worshiped by galli priests who wore feminine attire, identified as women and have therefore been identified by scholars as early transgender figures.
4. In the fourth century, Anastasia the Patrician fled life in Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire, to spend the remainder of life dressed masculinely as a monk, and has become viewed by some scholars as transgender.
5. In South Asia, at least eight-known gender-expansive identities have historically been present in the subcontinent, the most well-known being hijra - third gender people of historical, spiritual, and cultural significance in South Asian society. Hijra and individuals of diverse gender identities have been well-documented in religious and cultural texts and legends. These individuals often form intentional communities for community as well as survival.
6. Around the 18th century, the Itelmens of Siberia recognized a “third gender” called “koekchuch” to describe individuals who were assigned male at birth, but expressed themselves as women.
7. The oldest Western institute studying LGBTQ+ identities was started in Germany in 1919. Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sex Research) performed some of the earliest contemporary affirming medical services. It was eventually destroyed in the rise of German fascism under the Nazi party.
8. In Turtle Island (an Indigenous name for North America), Indigenous communities use the term two-spirit as a , pan-Indigenous umbrella identifier for people of another societal and ceremonial gender identity. This term was established in 1990 as a modern, collective term for a historical gender identity describing individuals not considered men or women in most, if not all Indigenous cultures of Turtle Island

Entire books could be written on this topic, right? It's all very interesting.

To my mind, simply realizing this is a cultural creation and not a medical condition changes the terms of the discussion quite a bit. It provides answers to a lot of the most contentious questions, such as

"When is it appropriate to give puberty blockers and hormones to children with no endocrinological conditions? When it is appropriate to cut off children's healthy breasts?"

Never.

This is such a great question! If you're interested, I wrote a companion piece to address the possible origins of the trans-identified people who are not gender nonconforming:

bprice.substack.com/p/tiktok-tics-and-mass-sociogenic-illness

"TikTok Tics and Mass Sociogenic Illness
Or: Things We Made Up, Part 2"