Where did gender identity theory come from?

[SmallSoupcon]

And why has it caught on like wildfire? I keep coming back to this question but can't find an answer.

Would love to know this too. Feels all very orchestrated. And what’s the end game?

Same here. I remember listening to radio shows about the subject 10, 20 years ago but it was about one ir two individuals, people who has spent years in therapy and changing gender was the only solution for them and it always seemed to be men wanting to be women. Suddenly it's you just utter the magic words and everyone has to accept and behave as this is always the way its been.

Many things have fed into it, but this is one significant strand:

www.healthyplace.com/gender/inside-intersexuality/the-true-story-of-john-joan

Originally, it derives from a popular theory in the early decades of the twentieth century that was advanced by “sexologists”
like Havelock Ellis - “inversion theory”. This originally explained homosexuality as part of a “born in the wrong body” trope - ie, gay men and women were actually the other sex trapped in the wrong body.

It fell very much out of favour - especially amongst gay men and lesbians - during the mid/later twentieth century; but it always retained some traction around ideas of the “transsexual”, which was an “identity” that started to be created and medicated by medical doctors working in clinics at John’s Hopkins from the 50s onwards. These were the clinics that started creating modern “sex change” operations.

“Inversion theory” was considered hugely offensive amongst the LGB community in the later twentieth century (also because Havelock Ellis turned out to be a rather unsavoury type - a fervent eugenicist who wrote about “breeding out” undesirable characteristics from the population, and was also a fetishist who could only ejaculate to women urinating on him).

Weirdly, it started to reappear in the guise of “transgender” (rather than “transsexual”) very late in the 20th century and early in the 21st, for a variety of social reasons - including the incorporation of the “T” into “LGBT” and the huge upsurge in popularity of cosmetic surgery and availability of hormones. (Some might say the medical and surgical industry in the US has had a lot to do with this - it’s estimated to be a lucrative and growing market! - but I couldn’t possibly comment….)

You may also find this detailed essay from 2000 very informative. It starts out by discussing other psychiatric conditions, and then moves on to the history of transgenderism. A long read, but hugely insightful and will tell you a lot about how the idea of transgender has changed between 2000 and today:

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/

Not sure where it came from, but this is a useful thread on how its spread:

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4059873-Deep-Dive-on-the-Dentons-document

From the Atlantic article linked above:

“Fifty years ago the suggestion that tens of thousands of people would someday want their genitals surgically altered so that they could change their sex would have been ludicrous. But it has happened. The question is why. One answer would have it that this is an ancient condition, that there have always been people who fall outside the traditional sex classifications, but that only during the past forty years or so have we developed the surgical and endocrinological tools to fix the problem.

But it is possible to imagine another story: that our cultural and historical conditions have not just revealed transsexuals but created them. That is, once "transsexual" and "gender-identity disorder" and "sex-reassignment surgery" became common linguistic currency, more people began conceptualizing and interpreting their experience in these terms. They began to make sense of their lives in a way that hadn't been available to them before, and to some degree they actually became the kinds of people described by these terms.

I don't want to take a stand on whether either of these accounts is right. It may be that neither is. It may be that there are elements of truth in both. But let us suppose that there is some truth to the idea that sex-reassignment surgery and diagnoses of gender-identity disorder have helped to create the growing number of cases we are seeing. Would this mean that there is no biological basis for gender-identity disorder? No. Would it mean that the term is a sham? Again, no. Would it mean that these people are faking their dissatisfaction with their sex? No. What it would mean is that certain social and structural conditions—diagnostic categories, medical clinics, reimbursement schedules, a common language to describe the experience, and, recently, a large body of academic work and transgender activism—have made this way of interpreting an experience not only possible but more likely.”

Thanks for the links and quotes. I'm baffled how intelligent people I know are completely captured, beyond all common sense. They simply don't see the contradiction in saying TWAW and advocating for VWAG services, abortion rights etc. The doublethink required is just baffling. Or maybe they're all just pootling along, not thinking that deeply about anything. Then again, they are campaigning hard for T privileges all the same, so that doesnt fit either...

Judith Butler explained with cats this will definitely clear it up for you.

I would guess it’s because you have to believe in gender identity and that you can be “born in the wrong body” to believe in transgenderism, which has “existed” for quite a while but under different names like transsexual. As it has started to become more accepted lately and not classified as a mental illness gender identity as a valid belief or theory spread from there really.

Add in a lot of young people wanting to be different and unique and you get a whole host of different gender identities. I personally think a lot of it is just a trend and when these people get older they will look back and cringe.

Ray Blanchard has written extensively on the topic of transgenderism.

John Money was one of the first to posit the idea of 'gender identity'.

I won't write more on here, I would suggest a bit of research/googling. Talking about the work of Blanchard or Money tends to get one deleted.

Gender identity as a term comes from psychology and child development. Initially, it was just a term for when a child starts to realise their sex- to notice the differences between boys and girls. It's no different from lots of other milestones about understanding themselves and the world.

From there it quite reasonably got used to talk more widely in social science about how children absorb sex stereotypes as part of their development and to discuss people's sense of themselves in relation to sex stereotypes and gendered presentation.

Where it really got toxic was two things:

First Queer Theory picked it up. I believe Judith Butler was the first person to argue GI has an objective real existance (in as much as critical theory believes anything really exists). Butler's work is really the intellectual driver for this movement.

Then, on a very practical level, a small number of anglosphere trans activists decided to alter the terminology they used when lobbying governments to muddy the waters about what Transsexualism actually is with the goal of applying . The current language was used for a long time in briefing and training materials before it hit the public realm and probably before it became associated with ideas from Butler with which it's now become inseparable.

with the goal of applying should continue ...much more broadly than they were originally legislated for and convincing politicians that 'trans' people were a much larger constituency than the medical profession described at the time.

First Queer Theory picked it up. I believe Judith Butler was the first person to argue GI has an objective real existance (in as much as critical theory believes anything really exists). Butler's work is really the intellectual driver for this movement.

Weirdly, Butler’s work - which isn’t really queer theory at all - actually argues the opposite! Her work on gender and sex (in “Gender Trouble”), originally argued that gender was the mere performance of tropes and gestures, and that “gender performativity” is a way of destabilising gender stereotypes. Her original work actually tries to undermine the very idea that gender is fixed or innate.

But it was taken up in a very reductive and simplified way, largely in an enthusiasm for the idea that drag and cross-dressing somehow subverts and liberates people from gender (rather than just remaining a performance). She herself has gone along with the TRA enthusiasm for her work by deliberately backtracking on what she originally wrote.

“Queer theory” is a bit of a misnomer, as most of the original “queer theory” texts of the 90s were nothing like today’s transgender or gender ideology, and largely were exclusively about the history of the gay male experience and “queer” as a gay male identifier (eg. in Eve Sedgwick’s famous Epistemology of the Closet). The kind of gender theory stuff that began circulating on social media like Tumblr and Twitter in the early 2010s bears very little resemblance to “queer theory” at all, and is more like just bad identity politics for teenagers. Moreover, it gets any gender studies or queer theory it does reference invariably totally wrong and backwards.

So I tend to think of the transgender ideological juggernaut as something which has actually co-opted the idea of queer theory and gender studies, and warped it, rather than the reverse. Because when you actually read the works that were part of that 1990s judith of queer theory, they actually tend to argue the reverse to current gender ideology rather than be aligned with it!

@Ablababla
That just made it worse.
😩

@nightwakingmoon that is such a brilliant post, thank you. I've been trying to write a short piece along similar lines about my own academic subject and it's going to much better for having read your post!

Weirdly, Butler’s work - which isn’t really queer theory at all - actually argues the opposite! Her work on gender and sex (in “Gender Trouble”), originally argued that gender was the mere performance of tropes and gestures, and that “gender performativity” is a way of destabilising gender stereotypes. Her original work actually tries to undermine the very idea that gender is fixed or innate.

But it was taken up in a very reductive and simplified way, largely in an enthusiasm for the idea that drag and cross-dressing somehow subverts and liberates people from gender (rather than just remaining a performance). She herself has gone along with the TRA enthusiasm for her work by deliberately backtracking on what she originally wrote.

I think her early work lays the foundations for the current version of this drivel.

She doesn't just undermine gender stereotypes- lots of people did that before her. She argues that Gender is the real thing, even if it results from 'performativity' and that it's mistaken to think there is a real thing called sex underlying it.

The main difference between her work and the current version is that she was explicit you couldn't create your own GI- it was more of an interinsic thing. You are dead right that she rarely mentions that anymore because it's not what her acolytes want to hear.

I do agree that her early arguments are about pulling stereotypes apart because that was the fashion at the time. As social science has become more identity-politics driven and feminism has declined, she's jumped on that bandwagon but I don't think she could have done that as easily if there was more substance to her core thesis.

So I tend to think of the transgender ideological juggernaut as something which has actually co-opted the idea of queer theory and gender studies, and warped it, rather than the reverse.

I completely agree (and would say that actually postmodernism generally is a long way from it's very useful roots) but queer theory is, these days, largely synonomous with Butlerian ideas so I feel it's the clearest label.

Historically it is an interesting question. It harks back to the enlightenment, when Descartes asked “but how do we really know?” And when no one gave him a swift kick in the balls and asked “do you know if that hurts?” The problem began.

What came out of Descartes was a shift in philosophy, where the main subject was no longer how is it than things can be, to how do we really know? This leads to (broadly) two schools of thought: rationalism and empiricism.

Then a very very clever fellow called Immanuel Kant (pronounced with ‘u’ not ‘a’ for all those undergrads who have to battle through the critique of pure reason) came up with a shocking conclusion. Thinking that both rationalism and empiricism were wrong, that they should not be at odds with each other (but really was a rationalist) he came up with what is referred to as the “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy.

his revolution was this: always before we have assumed that reality was there, and we have access to it. Instead, what if we don’t? We have instead a manifold of rational faculties that impose categories and criteria on reality that make it intelligible? Space and time are not out there, they’re in your mind man!

So Kant was attempting to come
up with a unified theory of being- that solved the Cartesian problem of knowledge by answering: we know through the structures of rationality (more or less, it’s more complicated than that but w/e).

the problem with this is he had overcome the rationalist/empiricist divide but created another analogous divide: the subject/object.

we are all “noumenal” objects (objects in reality as we are) but can only know other objects through the phenomena (things as they appear). But the interior reality of what things are, their essence, is closed to us. Phenomenology attempts to overcome this by treating the subject as an object we can know noumenally but it has issues.

On the basis of this, you have post Kantian philosophers who argue that reality is constituted in all sorts of ways. Foucault argues that it is in power structures. Derrida in the subjectivity of the person, etc etc.

all of this though comes down to: reality, certainly the reality of others and probably the reality of ourselves is not known, and worse, cannot be known. Therefore the subject cannot be categorised. The subject is constituted in themself. Their authentic self is realised only by the (journey, drugs, w/e bs you like). Which means things like “sex” are arbitrary categories imposed. Worse, as Foucault suggested, (this is called post structuralism) structures of the elite are maintained by control over language. Therefore language is power. It gets weird. The TRA claim that calling a trans woman a man is LITERAL violence suggests to me that at least one of them was a student of post modern philosophy.

this is basically it: by insisting on your own use of language, or insisting that you have access to the reality of that person, you are inflicting upon them your own subjectivity, which is after all no more valid than theirs. Because we can’t know reality. So identity politics is simply the latest incarnation of the same thing.

Someone really needed to kick Descartes in the nuts.

Well, it’s definitely the case that gender ideology looks like a revived model of religious dualism - but probably more Platonic than Cartesian, since it seems to rely on the idea of an imagined gendered soul as presumably part of the ideal world of the Forms. (Whereas, our bodies remain miserably mired in the degraded material world, longing to be perfected so that they can match our Gender Identities glittering in the eternal realm of the Ideal 🤣)

by insisting on your own use of language, or insisting that you have access to the reality of that person, you are inflicting upon them your own subjectivity

It's noticeable it only works one way

Tumblr.

Yeah - I’m on Tumblr for a different hobby, and it’s quite well known that a lot of the current manifestation of this stuff originated there in the 2010s.

It still circulates everywhere there, but cheerfully at least, because like here it’s anonymous, there’s also a fair amount of radical feminism going on (“Radblr”), pushing back against a lot of it.

@Hiddenmnetter I'm happy to join you kicking Descartes in the nuts as long as Heidegger gets a slapping as well.