I’m talking about hidden conditions. There is so much about the human body and mind that we haven’t even begun exploring, I don’t know how it can be shut down with a blasé attitude.
I’m perfectly willing to accept that trans people are suffering a mental illness or an intersection of fragile mental health and a toxic social context created by porn, inequality and anxiety about climate change.
But the idea that there is some innate sense of being a man or being a woman based on some amorphous gender essence is nonsense.
I am a woman because I am biologically female. Had I been born in a male body, I would be a man. It’s really that simple. Beyond biology is how your personality interests with your social environment.
The thing is, humans are binary in biological terms, we are sexually dimorphic because we are mammals. That’s material reality.
I believe the idea that if you don’t feel like a man, you must be a woman is a failure of logic. Since the only other category available is the other sex, the assumption is that this “not this sex” feeling must mean the individual experiencing the crisis is of the other sex.
The categories of masculine and feminine are socially constructed. Fluttering eyelashes or a loud voice are not intrinsically male or female; it’s just in this cultural context they are considered female or male. There is no biological reality intrinsic to pink or blue or skirts and trousers, that’s about culture.
A more rational approach, which is what radfems argue, is the deconstruction of those gendered categories.
It’s instructive that so many of the TRAs are middle-aged, white men with some resources. That is the group who have the most to lose by deconstructing gender categories, (and hence male privilege). It’s why they are enabled by other men. Men wearing dresses and pretending to be women are no threat to the patriarchy. Men questioning the cultural construction of masculinity; yeah, dangerous that.
In any event, constructing public policy on the shaky theory that there might be some unknown and unmeasurable hidden condition, seems foolish at best and at worst a threat to reality.