Brilliant article: Trans Is Something We Made Up

[pattihews]

I thought this was really refreshing. A new angle on trans.

bprice.substack.com/p/trans-is-something-we-made-up

Yes! Stimulating, thought-provoking and rings true. Thanks for the link.

Glad you enjoyed it. I thought the way B Price reframed it was an eye-opener.

Why don't we have Koro, for example, in our society?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koro_(medicine)

It's basically what I think but expressed much more articulately expressed.

Yes great article! Thanks.

I've been thinking about how some people have commented on the rise if bulimia which was shown to be socially, which could be seen as culturally, contagious.

Eating disorders are often caused by social stress and anxiety.

Trans is also far more celebrated which is possibly the difference between some of the conditions described.

Brain scans have shown that the areas associated with self perception are key in trans people, which would fit with some of the listed conditions

That is a brilliant article, and framing trans as a culture-based psychological syndrome is really helpful.

Good article. I seem to remember Helen Joyce makes pretty much the same argument - and uses the same examples - in Trans.

I've got nothing to say right now but I keep opening new threads and getting distracted and then I lose them again for 100 posts or so. (Yes! Yes I'm lovemaking. Hell no autocorrect! That is most definitely NOT what I'm doing right now! I'm, types very carefully, place marking I'll be back later with something thread related to say.)

Really enjoyed some of it. But it stops short of some exploration imo.

Of course culture-bound syndromes exist, and culture exists, and gender identity with all its rules and etiquette is a cultural concept.

So then what? Cultural concepts are important, and they're real, as it says. Every culture has them, as it says. How do we embrace our culture including the culture of gender identity when the culture is disputed? How does a cultural concept arise and get disseminated and what is this one doing for us?

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.

Speaking sense - gender nonconformity is normal, pathologizing it turns it into something else.

But what about the increasingly numerous trans people who aren't gender nonconforming at all? Transwomen who are classic (male) geeks, quite a lot of transmen who mainly seem to enjoy playing with kittens and upcycling clothes. Of course these things don't make them male or female but the total conformity is a bit odd!

Fascinating. Thanks OP.

Having finally managed to come back round to this it was an interesting read. This was the end bit of it:

"It's Time to Reassess
If gender nonconformity is the human universal and being trans is the cultural baggage, it’s time to reassess a cultural approach that is based on human misery, suicidality, and expensive, irreversible medical treatments.

In absence of medical evidence that anything is wrong with any gender-nonconforming person’s body or behavior, let’s reassess our cultural view that it’s appropriate to treat trans people medically. Instead of raising kids in a culture that’s so hostile to gender nonconformity that they think transition is the key to being happy and fulfilled, let’s work on building a culture where we deeply believe that gender-nonconforming people are as awesome as anyone else and can express themselves freely.

Just as there are no tall people trapped in short bodies, no Asian people trapped in white bodies, no hazel-eyed people trapped in blue-eyed bodies, there are no people trapped in wrong-sex bodies. That’s something we made up. Our bodies, our personalities, our hobbies, our ways of adorning ourselves just are what they are.

Trans is something we made up. We can make up something much better"

The internet is a channel for social contagion.

A great article:

If gender nonconformity is the human universal and being trans is the cultural baggage, it’s time to reassess a cultural approach that is based on human misery, suicidality, and expensive, irreversible medical treatments.

In absence of medical evidence that anything is wrong with any gender-nonconforming person’s body or behavior, let’s reassess our cultural view that it’s appropriate to treat trans people medically. Instead of raising kids in a culture that’s so hostile to gender nonconformity that they think transition is the key to being happy and fulfilled, let’s work on building a culture where we deeply believe that gender-nonconforming people are as awesome as anyone else and can express themselves freely.

Excellent article. I've just shared it with my daughter (who disagrees with me massively on gender ideology) who is doing a phd in psychology. We do enjoy discussing topics other than trans stuff, and there's enough in that article for us to discuss and get our teeth stuck into. It's very frustrating for me, that we can really talk at length about any other topic associated with mental health and she'll listen to me and value my opinion, but the second I mention anything at all to do with trans ideology "you're a terf mum, I'm not going there we'll have to agree to disagree".

I do have more than a passing interest in psychology too as I did half a degree in it before going back to boring accountancy. We can talk for hours about literally any other subject. Just not this one.

Your last paragraph got my attention as this has been on my mind recently. Is 'neurotypical' really typical/optimum or has it been considered so because it's the one pattern of brain function (among many!) that best fits our societal construct? And as such anything outside of it is considered a 'condition' needing 'treatment'. As we move into an increasingly technological age, I wonder if (far) in the future there will be a societal shift that impacts this view.

Sorry, massive derail. Haven't spoken about it in real life incase it upsets people so was interesting to see your post.

Another culturally specific medical conditions:

Correct me if I am wrong, but have you ever heard a British person complain they are suffering from "heavy legs"?

Fascinated by a malady to which British people appear immune, I went to my local pharmacy and asked the smiling young chemist if she could advise me on remedies for heavy legs.

"Oh, bad luck," she said indicating two entire shelves of pills and potions. "Do you get heavy legs in the winter too? I only suffer from them in the summer," and she handed me a cream with "real grape seeds", assuring me it was very effective when rubbed vigorously twice daily from the ankle to the knee.

[...]

Dr Auber confirms that British people simply do not suffer from this mysterious weightiness of the lower limbs, and adds that the French consume more than a third of the entire world's supply of heavy legs medicines.

Curiously though, he has noticed that since the French health insurance companies stopped paying for heavy legs remedies a couple of years ago, consumption of these products is now one-tenth what it used to be.

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7779126.stm

Let us know what she thinks Casilero?

Having first to come to all this from a psychological perspective, that so many people with a psychology or therapy training are so unquestioning has been the biggest shock to me.

I was just thinking that the strength of this article is it's fresh, big picture perspective, (and that it addresses so well the oft brought out 'trans has existed throughout time and cultures/ two spirit etc' argument).

I'm wondering if it has the potential to bypass the usual, immediate, political defensiveness to any questioning of gender ideology.

Would be great for this to have a wider audience.

I read some of the book mentioned ('Crazy Like Us') a while ago, but was so fascinated by it's explorations of how trauma and healing are framed and approached in different cultures, the impact of the western-centric tunnel vision of western NGOs rushing in to help with trauma in disaster zones, and the crazy world of pharmaceutical companies, that I didn't make the (obvious now I've read this) links this article has made. Meaty stuff- that book (although I didn't finish it for some reason), and this article.

I think Ethan Watters who wrote the book has a good summary lecture about it on YouTube if anyone I interested but doesn't fancy a whole book

Thanks so much for posting Patti.

Fantastic article, for me it brings to mind the Jurassic Park Dr Ian Malcolm quote for the medicalisation solution aspects of all this:

“I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here: it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!”

Really interesting OP, thanks for posting.

Great article thanks for sharing.

@TheBiologyStupid that made me laugh. I went my local (French) pharmacy yesterday for treatment for my piles. She sold me some tablets to cure heavy legs which in small text are also good for piles.

That's a great article. Empathetic yet analytical.

I found myself nodding along to so much in that article! I've often thought (and expressed) similar ideas.

I don't know whether it's my own complicated cultural background that made it so resonant. I'm an immigrant to the UK, from a multicultural country in which my ancestry was itself immigrant and then (due to intermarriage) formed its own community. At every level, I can see the historic layers of cultural accretions (like a coral reef) and within myself over that past 3 decades that I've lived here, the British cultural milieu that I've absorbed. And I can see how my country of origin has rapidly changed in my lifetime, layering modern Western values over the colonial ones, over the melting-pot immigration ones, over the ancient ones.

Basically, it's turtles all the way down... until you get to the bedrock of human universals.

The difference is that trans is now v acceptable and celebrated. they can form communities online.

Trans has snowballed beyond those culturally created psychological ailments into its own culture that spans geographic boundaries due to the internet.

There's also the very real impact of sexism and homophobia in the mix, and porn.

Re neurodiversity, I do think there's some pathologising of what could be seen as a broad ranges of brain skills.

The problem is that standardised education only meets the needs of one brain type. Eg phonics - there are a number of children who do not find phonics helpful when learning to read