Gender Dysphoria, Embodiment, and the Political Creation of the “Trans Child”

Excellent essay with very good points.

Thanks, a interesting read, I've watched a lot of the shorts she posts on YT, she always makes sense.

"Children rely on adults to help orient them toward reality.

When adults instead present embodiment as optional or uncertain, they may unintentionally encourage confusion rather than resolve it."

This should be said to every 'trans' parent, you're causing your childs problem not solving it.

"Children rely on adults to help orient them toward reality.

When adults instead present embodiment as optional or uncertain, they may unintentionally encourage confusion rather than resolve it."

This needs to pinned on every page.

Allowing children to think that sex is categorised on anything but the materially real and provable reproductive role their bodies are formed around performing (even if their bodies don’t in the future produce the gametes their body type was formed to do) has a destabilising impact.

Excellent essay. I also think the idea of the 'trans community' is really harmful. What kind of community consists primarily of middle-aged men and indoctrinated young people?

One that is ripe for grooming and sexual exploitation of predominantly autistic children. It has the bonus observed in religious cults - that detransitioners face shunning for 'breaching the faith', after having been encouraged to cut off the original family and friend group.

A very good read. The undermining of safeguarding children by the trans mob is one of the most shameful aspects of all this. We now have countless young people harmed and continuing to be harmed as a result of their trusted adult's refusal or inability to safeguard them.

"Historically, cross-sex identification associated with fetishism was largely understood as an adult phenomenon emerging after puberty. Today’s cultural framework introduces children to the possibility that they may possess an invisible identity fundamentally different from their bodies."

That was an excellent article, thank you for posting.

Thank you for linking to this, it's very clear and well-structured, and I like that it sticks very much to deep ideas of experience and embodiment and so on.
A valuable approach to the topic.

I really like the focus on embodiment, maybe because I grew up in a church where there was an attempted complete separation between the body and the soul, which had very deleterious effects on my self-esteem in particular and psyche in general.

No, we're not a soul piloting a body. No, the soul cannot control the body (if it did, I wouldn't be short-sighted, for example). That belief, that I was a pure soul incarnated into an imperfect body, did so much harm to me, that I guess I'm particularly sensitive to the reality that I am absolutely embodied, and I cannot separate some essence that would be the True Me from my body.

This analysis fails to acknowledge evolved personality traits like femininity & masculinity that drive gender identification. But let's not let biology get in the way of pathologising anything you don't like.

Sorry but that makes no sense, can you clarify what point you're trying to make. 🤔

Ain't no such things as femininity or masculinity personality traits. There's only the adoption of various gender stereotypes, which is a behaviour as discussed in the article.

Also worth noting how desperately transactivists try to stop anyone speaking about the myth of the trans child and the need to safeguard children. Their whole shtick depends on it.

This is so very true.

There are personality traits which society defines as masculine or feminine. However what is defined as masculine or feminine through history and across different cultures is not universal or static.

30 years ago suggesting that a female was not a woman because she exhibited personality traits or preferences that society deemed masculine would have been considered deeply sexist and regressive.

Can you give some examples of feminine and masculine personality traits?

Personality traits are unreliable and therefore irelevant with regards to categorising sex categories in humans.

Of course, there are commonalities between the two sexes in observed behaviour and personality traits, neither behaviour, nor personality traits can provide definable boundaries for the categorisation of human sex classes.

Single sex provisions are not segregated by personality traits and behaviours.

Posters trying to make personality traits relevant have failed to present and link any evidence that supports personality types being accurately measured outside of self reported questionnaire style data collection tools.

They have never addressed the significance issue of how those self reported questionnaires have filtered out aspirational answers about how the respondents wish to be perceived versus those character traits are observed. Until that can be done, the large polling studies of this particular field of study are not going to be useful for the purpose you attempt to use them for.

The reliability of this evidence is low. It will not be used to legally define which single sex provision a human will be able access. It fails because as a tool, because it misses a very large % of the population. If a huge % of female people are said to have an overall high rating of typical ‘male’ personality traits, it is meaningless for who lawfully accesses a single sex provision. So too any person who sits in the middle zone.

And if people are trying to also then rely on using personality traits for ‘gender’, the issues are the same.

Not only that, but defining gender by personality traits then seeks to enforce conformity.

Knock yourself out.

https://quillette.com/2026/07/30/sex-differences-above-the-neck-steve-stewart-williams/

The part of the article that you can read without subscribing doesn't include the words masculine or feminine even once. The article is about sex differences and uses the phrase "sex differences" multiple times

On the contrary there's more than enough evidence below to dispense with the OP's article's claim that sex differentiations in behaviour are learned.

''The first notion Stewart-Williams dispels is the blank-slatist claim that there are no average differences between the sexes. In a useful appendix, he summarises research on the behaviours and personality traits that have shown large and repeated differences between males and females. Some of these are obvious but not often recognised as innate sex differences. One is the strong difference in sexual attraction: most—but not all—men seek women as sexual partners, and most women seek men.

Psychological research indicates that men and women also differ strongly in how they seek mates. On average, women prefer older partners with high status, while men are more drawn to youth and physical attractiveness. Men have a higher sex drive and are more willing to seek casual sex. And once in a relationship, men show far more sexual jealousy than women, being preoccupied with a partner’s sexual infidelity, while women’s jealousy is more emotional than sexual, focusing on a partner’s commitment to the relationship.
Another difference we know well: in every country surveyed, men commit vastly more crimes of violence than women, including roughly 90 percent of all homicides in America.

One of <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.md/o/cbCEc/link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-01624-7?ref=quillette.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">the largest and most repeatable differences between the sexes is <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.md/o/cbCEc/onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/icd.2064?ref=quillette.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">the toy preferences of children. On average, young boys prefer male-typical toys like trucks, blocks, and toy soldiers, while young girls prefer dolls and kitchen equipment. This difference shows up very early in childhood and holds across societies worldwide.
The list goes on, but I’ll end by mentioning differences in preference that seem to translate into professional inequities. On average, women have more interest in people than things, which partly explains why occupations like computer science and engineering are dominated by men while the health and social sciences harbour far more women. Related to this are observations that men are better than women at “systematising”, defined as “understanding and reasoning about systems, including natural systems like atoms and galaxies, abstract systems like logic and maths, and human-made system like machines and computer programs”. Women, in contrast, are better at “empathising”: putting themselves in other people’s shoes and understanding their feelings and motivations.

You can see this last difference in <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.md/o/cbCEc/jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2839314?ref=quillette.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">a compilation of sex differences among young American doctors in different branches of medicine. Fields involving less contact with patients regularly show higher proportions of men: anaesthesiology (62 percent), radiology (71 percent), neurological surgery (73 percent), and orthopaedic surgery (76 percent). Fields demanding more contact with patients, and presumably requiring more empathy, show a preponderance of women: hospice and palliative care (63 percent), dermatology (66 percent), and paediatrics (75 percent). Yet across all fields of medicine, the proportion of women among young doctors is precisely 50 percent, suggesting little bias against women entering medicine.

Stewart-Williams notes that such differences could reflect sociocultural pressures like socialisation or bias rather than innate preferences, but we have some data against purely social explanations. <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.md/o/cbCEc/psycnet.apa.org/record/1991-15054-001?ref=quillette.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Two big <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.md/o/cbCEc/pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4945059/?ref=quillette.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">meta-analyses, for instance, show little evidence for the differential socialisation of boys and girls—and, anecdotally, we all know of despairing parents who tried to give their children gender-neutral upbringings, only to see them revert to behaviours characteristic of their sex.

In some areas there is also evidence against systemic bigotry. <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.md/o/cbCEc/journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/15291006231163179?ref=quillette.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">A recent study of sex bias in STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—examined six metrics of professional success: grant funding, papers accepted, strength of letters of recommendation, hiring, teaching ratings, and salaries. The data showed parity between the sexes in the first three areas, a preference for hiring women, and an advantage for men in teaching ratings and salaries."

You have just posted about stereotypes.

Again, these are not reliable at all for categorising sex in humans or even defining ‘genders’ if gender identity exists. There is always going to be people who will have a mixture of these traits mentioned.

This is not evidence that someone who has a tick list of traits that are associated more with male people have a male gender identity or sex. Of course, I would also say feminists have been fighting against such categorisations for decades. Isn’t this the very foundational belief of feminists critical of gender stereotypes?

You have just posted about stereotypes.

Average differences aren't stereotypes. Stereotypes are expectations.

Again, these are not reliable at all for categorising sex in humans or even defining ‘genders’ if gender identity exists. There is always going to be people who will have a mixture of these traits mentioned.

There doesn't have to be a reliable way to categorise humans when it comes to self declared identity because that is a personal subjective determination based on values & beliefs not facts or objective truths….just like it is for sex realists.

This is not evidence that someone who has a tick list of traits that are associated more with male people have a male gender identity or sex.

Again this is a personally subjective determination only an individual can decide for themselves based on how they understand the world as it applies to them. Its in no way saying one size fits all.

Of course, I would also say feminists have been fighting against such categorisations for decades. Isn’t this the very foundational belief of feminists critical of gender stereotypes?

But the point you are missing is trans people aren't saying gendered behavioural averages apply to all people in a group but only to themselves as individuals. They are simply saying they as an individual have more in common with average behaviours of one group more than the other & as such consider themselves as part of that group for this reason.

It's not sexist to state the fact that group commonalities exist & an individual might have more in common with one group despite not having other commonalties.

What exactly is a gender identity again?

What exactly is being diagnosed as incongruent that isn’t simply not conforming to sexist stereotypes ?

what is bioessentialism?

“It's not sexist to state the fact that group commonalities exist & an individual might have more in common with one group despite not having other commonalties.”

It is the epitome of sexism to make statements about having a checklist of behaviours that define sex categories which then propagate through to gender identities.

What exactly is a gender identity again?

It's a person's internal, deeply held sense of their own gender.

What exactly is being diagnosed as incongruent that isn’t simply not conforming to sexist stereotypes ?

Its not conforming to typical behaviours associated to one's sex.

Bio essentialism is the belief that a person's behaviour, personality, and social roles are completely determined by their biology and genetics rather than by social, cultural, or environmental factors. Not sure why this is relevant to the discussion of self identification.

It is the epitome of sexism to make statements about having a checklist of behaviours that define sex categories which then propagate through to gender identities.

Strawman. Sexed behaviours are averages so literally noone is saying they apply exclusive to one sex….expect maybe incels & gender critical feminists.