An interesting essay on transexuality, by a transexual woman

[DistanceCall]

nplusonemag.com/on-liking-women/

I am being tendentious, dear reader, because I am trying to tell you something that few of us dare to talk about, especially in public, especially when we are trying to feel political: not the fact, boringly obvious to those of us living it, that many trans women wish they were cis women, but the darker, more difficult fact that many trans women wish they were women, period. This is most emphatically not something trans women are supposed to want. The grammar of contemporary trans activism does not brook the subjunctive. Trans women are women, we are chided with silky condescension, as if we have all confused ourselves with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as if we were all simply trapped in the wrong politics, as if the cure for dysphoria were wokeness. How can you want to be something you already are? Desire implies deficiency; want implies want. To admit that what makes women like me transsexual is not identity but desire is to admit just how much of transition takes place in the waiting rooms of wanting things, to admit that your breasts may never come in, your voice may never pass, your parents may never call back.

Worth a read, I think.

I've tried to read that twice now but got a bit lost in the waffle. Is he saying "just being told that you're a woman isn't good enough, because you'll never really be one and that hurts"?

Possibly. Or possibly the implication is that even if they're making it all up about their gender identity we are still expected to respect and centre their desire to be us.

I think he’s saying that transsexuals (MTF) want to be women. But he finds he can’t say this to transwomen, because transwomen literally are women, and it makes no sense to yearn to be something you (supposedly) are.

Will read the article later.

I think this touches on something that I really struggle with in all the trans stuff: the fact that while I have huge sympathy for the feeling of wish you were different and wishing the world treated you differently: this is actually the human condition. It isn't abusive to treat someone slightly differently from how they would like to be treated. I am 46 and I have made my peace with the fact that I'm not sultry or glamorous and it would be very difficult for someone with my (lack of) height and colouring to be so. It has definitely limited my actual material opportunities that I'm not perceived a certain way; and it has stung hard at times when I'm sort of thoughtlessly treated as not-quite-a-real-woman compared to someone taller, slimmer, with proper eyelashes and eyebrows. HOWEVER. this is part of who I am and making my peace with it is a huge part of me having grown up. It's nothing compared with being the only black kid in a mostly white class in Hertfordshire in the 70s, of course, or having an actual disability, but this is my tiny little plastic cross that I relatively effortlessly bear and it's all part of life's rich pattern. BUT. I sometimes feel as if trans people want all yearning, all desire, all lack of fulfilment to go away; as if they are the only people who have it; as if it is damaging them, when in fact, to yearn - to yearn painfully - is completing us.

Not sure why it is ok to undermine the rights of the gender you yearn to be.
It should be blinking obvious why women want safe spaces without a person with a penis nearby. Apparently it has become transphobic to say this.
The article just emphasises why a medical professional needs to be a key part of formal transition.

many trans women wish they were women, period.

Does this mean "many trans women wish that they could have women's period pains"?

That's an interesting article, yes, thanks. Albeit that it could do with some severe editing, overall I enjoyed reading it. The author establishes his personal and public credentials via personal history and a conventional 'trans' take on some particular parts of recent feminist history, before undercutting the narrative he has set up with 'The grammar of contemporary trans activism does not brook the subjunctive'. Neatly (though prolixly) done. Good point.

Trans ideology cannot allow subjunctives. Why? Because of the implied counterfactuals.

I recall when I first came across this trans stuff (I lead a somewhat sheltered life, without much online presence); like a lot of people, I guess, it took me a while to register how the language is supposed to work. A man who transitions, I thought at first, was to be called a 'transman'. But no, it turns out, such a person is a 'transwoman '. Oh, OK then. So, think of explaining to a newcomer: a transwoman is ... what? Easy: a transwoman is a man who would have liked to have been a woman.

English is sufficiently expressive for this, as for most aspects of human life and personality. But, as we know, this won't do for some transpeople, because, as the author of this piece acknowledges, the subjunctive, 'would have liked to have been' tacitly presupposes '... but is not'. As he intended to say, 'desire implies deficiency, want implies lack'. ('want implies want', surely a typo.)

So what, for transactivists and their theories? They want to deny the deficiency, and hence are required to deny even the subjunctive expression of the trans condition. So, not 'a man who wants to be a woman', or even 'a man who would have liked to have been a woman'... maybe try 'a transwoman is ... a man who is a woman'? No, that can't be right. What's left? Oh, yes, 'a transwoman is a woman'. But that, as we know, leads via the redefinition of 'woman' to the emptiness of self-ID. So it all disppears up its own fundament (or arsehole, thinking again of the expressiveness of English).

Our solution? Back to the subjunctive. What is a transwoman, grandad? It's a man who would have liked to have been a woman.

Should men who would have liked to have been women be allowed on all-women shortlists? Hmmm.

Is describing a transwoman as a man who would have liked to have been a woman transphobic? Quite possibly. Tant pis, je m'en fous. (Other languages, sometimes more appropriately expressive.)

great post 9

the para straight after the one quoted here is on desire and is very close to what I was attempting to say
"Call this the romance of disappointment. You want something. You have found an object that will give you what you want. This object is a person, or a politics, or an art form, or a blouse that fits. You attach yourself to this object, follow it around, carry it with you, watch it on TV. One day, you tell yourself, it will give you what you want. Then, one day, it doesn’t. Now it dawns on you that your object will probably never give you what you want. But this is not what’s disappointing, not really. What’s disappointing is what happens next: nothing. You keep your object. You continue to follow it around, stash it in a drawer, water it, tweet at it. It still doesn’t give you what you want—but you knew that. You have had another realization: not getting what you want has very little to do with wanting it. Knowing better usually doesn’t make it better. You don’t want something because wanting it will lead to getting it. You want it because you want it. This is the zero-order disappointment that structures all desire and makes it possible. After all, if you could only want things you were guaranteed to get, you would never be able to want anything at all."

the bit right before is really important too

"Now I’m not saying I think that this woman transitioned to get rich quick. What I am saying is, So what if she had? I doubt that any of us transition simply because we want to “be” women, in some abstract, academic way. I certainly didn’t. I transitioned for gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies, for being someone’s girlfriend, for letting her pay the check or carry my bags, for the benevolent chauvinism of bank tellers and cable guys, for the telephonic intimacy of long-distance female friendship, for fixing my makeup in the bathroom flanked like Christ by a sinner on each side, for sex toys, for feeling hot, for getting hit on by butches, for that secret knowledge of which dykes to watch out for, for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts. But now you begin to see the problem with desire: we rarely want the things we should. Any TERF will tell you that most of these items are just the traditional trappings of patriarchal femininity. She won’t be wrong, either. Let’s be clear: TERFs are gender abolitionists, even if that abolitionism is a shell corporation for garden-variety moral disgust. When it comes to the question of feminist revolution, TERFs leave trans girls like me in the dust, primping. In this respect, someone like Ti-Grace Atkinson, a self-described radical feminist committed to the revolutionary dismantling of gender as a system of oppression, is not the dinosaur; I, who get my eyebrows threaded every two weeks, am.

Perhaps my consciousness needs raising. I muster a shrug. When the airline loses your luggage, you are not making a principled political statement about the tyranny of private property; you just want your goddamn luggage back. This is most painfully evident in the case of bottom surgery, which continues to baffle a clique of queer theorists who, on the strength and happenstance of a shared prefix, have been all too ready to take transgender people as mascots for their politics of transgression. These days, the belief that getting a vagina will make you into a real woman is retrograde in the extreme. Many good feminists still only manage to understand bottom surgery by qualifying it as a personal aesthetic choice: If that’s what makes you feel more comfortable in your body, that’s great. This is as wrongheaded as it is condescending. To be sure, gender confirmation surgeries are aesthetic practices, continuous with rather than distinct from the so-called cosmetic surgeries. (No one goes into the operating room asking for an ugly cooch.) So it’s not that these aren’t aesthetic decisions; it’s that they’re not personal. That’s the basic paradox of aesthetic judgments: they are, simultaneously, subjective and universal. Transsexual women don’t want bottom surgery because their personal opinion is that a vagina would look or feel better than a penis. Transsexual women want bottom surgery because most women have vaginas. Call that transphobic if you like—that’s not going to keep me from Chili’s-Awesome-Blossoming my dick."

There is something so incredibly childish about picking a thing - any thing - and saying "when that thing is fixed, I will be fixed." In the first place. And then - expecting everyone to pander to that!

It has suddenly occurred to me that it would be so so so much better to just GIVE MONEY to women who don't have enough than dick about with nonsense like this. If you cry every day because there is black mould on the walls and your baby has croup and the money lender keeps banging on the door and you just DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO then a few £k could literally transform that person's life. Literally and honestly: a deposit for a decent flat, pay off the loan shark, get a supply of decent furniture and clothes etc and that person is in a completely different position. Why don't we help these women when this would actually SOLVE THEIR PROBLEMS?

Actually that is really heartless because I sincerely with that mental health provision was better and it isn't in any way less important than other things that some people need. but when you have teachers going on the radio talking about how the school holidays / lack of school meals are making children lose dangerous amounts of weight: how are we picking our priorities, as a country?

Does this mean "many trans women wish that they could have women's period pains"?

Imagine if they could. The de-transition rate would be through the roof.

But seriously, this looks like an interesting piece. Will definitely have a read later.

Anti grinch you have made a very good point about growing up and coming to terms with not being what or who you want to be and accepting that. We all have to grow up and accept that in life. I feel that narcissism or at least a really inflated sense of self importance underlies a lot of trans activists negative behaviour. It seems so terribly spoiled to intimidate people into saying you are something you are not in case you get upset by this.

I couldn't read the whole thing.

Antigrinch I agree with your analysis here:

"BUT. I sometimes feel as if trans people want all yearning, all desire, all lack of fulfilment to go away; as if they are the only people who have it; as if it is damaging them, when in fact, to yearn - to yearn painfully - is completing us"

I found the article interesting because I had long suspected that what drives (many) trans activists is desire: the desire to be women. But once that desire is partially fulfilled (because any desire is always partially fulfilled: you can never get exactly what you want, exactly in your terms, among other reasons because you don't even know what those terms are, and they change all the time), they need to keep insisting, it's never enough, they need to claim more and more.

It will never be enough, because it can never be enough. And that's OK - as a PP said, that's the human condition. You need to co-exist with the openness, the incompletude of desire (and actually, I think that's a good thing).

But it seems that (many) trans activists are really unable or unwillling to grasp this.

And yes, I agree that the article is pretty waffly and would have benefited from severe editing