"While it may be necessary to outline reasonable policies and laws for hard cases, we need not pretend we’re all hard cases." I support sports scientists and physiologists researching rare disorders such as CAIS to better understand what advantages or disadvantages one may have compared to an XX female. The case of Spanish runner Maria José Martínez-Patiño comes to mind. I empathize with her, but the males (with or without ambiguous genitalia) weaseling into female competitions, not so much.
Males who are DSD should not be in female category of sport. Due to pressure from freak groups, the Olympics is now seeing males win in the female boxing space. It's wrong.
My opinion is it would be fair to study the athletic ability of those born with XY chromosomes and androgen insensitivity, like the Spanish hurdler Maria. Her best time was 13.71, excellent and good enough to make it to the women's elite level, but not in the winner's circle, unlike the developed males with other disorders beating up on women. Androgen insensitivity is a tough one, since those with this disorder develop as a female.
You can study, or you can run fair athletic competitions. This is a live issue, but each case requires that a decision be made about a real athlete WHO DISPLACES OTHER ATHLETES. When a runner competes, that person takes a lane. No one else can be in the lane. If an XY person takes a lane in an XX competition, an XX runner is not there.
I oppose the ability of an XY person, regardless of their secondary sex characteristics, to compete with XX persons.
I get it and I agree with an immediate rule that only XX females who developed normally be allowed in female competition. Studying the athletic ability of those with XY/CAIS is not the same as allowing them in competition with XX females.
Also that CAIS is different from PAIS. XY individuals with undescended testicles producing testosterone should not be competing with XX individuals. Nor should XX individuals taking endogenous testosterone (for any reason) be in competition with XX individuals.
XY-CAIS people are not masculinized at all and have female-appearing genitalia so they won't frighten anyone in the locker room. World Athletics (which runs track and field) allows them to compete as long as they are completely insensitive to androgens. The partial form is an DQ.
No one would ever know they aren't typical normal feminine women and they "pass" without incident everywhere in society. I think allowing them to compete in women's events is fair and reasonable. They are neither a safety hazard nor a source of unfair competition to XX women.
Now, you could take the view that XY = male, which it does, and DQ them because they displace an XX woman. I can't argue with that. It's a question of values.
Frankly, XY-CAIS people are not competing in elite sports. Most humans can't. The only reason XY-PAIS individuals do so well is because they're competing in the wrong division. An XX individual doesn't get that kind of build or performance without a lifetime of anabolic steroids, which is also grounds for a DQ.
Agree. This is more of a theoretical concern that acknowledges there is such a thing as CAIS. There was a Spanish hurdler (~70 years ago?) who is said to have had CAIS and was good enough to get to the Olympics. Photos show her to be really lean and not muscular -- ectomorphs we used to call them --, as you'd expect for a hurdler. The usual story was that they ascribed their failure to get their first period to the intense training and dieting they were undergoing. The girls they were training with often didn't get their periods either. Many of them had also eating disorders -- not talked a lot back then but a real scourge in the women's sports (and ballet) where body fat is an obsession.
I have been looking a bit into the AIS disorder. They actually don't develop as female, as Dr. Wright has been defining "female." The males who have CAIS look like women and have "vaginas" that are often not complete, but they lack female reproductive organs. Dr. Wright has been teaching us that "female" means that the creature has the kind of body that produces large gametes. CAIS males actually have the kind of bodies that produce small gametes, they just don't have reproductive functionality because of a genetic problem.
It appears from what little I have read on the subject that CAIS people also have a number of medical problems due to their condition. Their estrogen production is in the male range, not the range found in functional females. They need hormone replacement to fully develop breasts at puberty, although some development happens without it, for reasons not fully understood (maybe absence of androgens, according to main theory).
There is one study that found CAIS males may be taller on average than normal females. The researchers found their participants to be "intermediate" in height between normal males and females. The number of subjects in this study was tiny and so results may be a chance finding. If it holds up with replication, CAIS people would have a competitive advantage in some sports.
Oh that's just Substack's premier gender troll. Steersman has some persistent ideas he can't let go of which would undermine his own continuity as a self were he to take them seriously. He is so fixated on this mistaken thinking it rules his behavior so he's a bit like the gender dysphorics in wanting something to be true that isn't and forming his identity around it.
You have to check comments. If you do not know who Steersman is I can only guess you're on the gender beat recently... He argues that sex is only defined for people in the window of fertility, ie men only exist post puberty and women stop being women on menopause. Additionally he slanders everyone who provides an alternative definition, such as Colin, who has banned him on this sub I believe.
“While activists are insistent in presenting the biology of sex as being so complex as to defy all categorization, and categorization itself as a social evil,“
I beg to differ that most of the activists you cite are insistent that categorization itself is a social evil.
The activist woke left is ALL. ABOUT. IDENTITY. POLITICS. Which of course itself is ENTIRELY. ABOUT. CATEGORIZATION!
Perhaps all you mean is that one of the arguments these particular trans activists make in trying to win this particular case is to mouth/write the words “categorization itself is evil”, but don’t think for a second that they actually believe this, because almost all of them have demonstrated exactly the opposite.
Would that we were so lucky that the woke left stopped all social categorization…
Exactly. The logical fallacy of stating that sex is ambiguous for everyone, and on a spectrum, and therefore meaningless, and then insisting that teenage girls and boys MUST be chemically and surgically altered in dangerously unhealthy ways to appear as (and “be”) the opposite sex, or the will die of depression, and men whom wish they were women must be treated as women, is too obvious to explain.
Yet somehow, activists argue both of these points as if they are consistent. Either there are males and females, and some people desperately wish they were the opposite sex, but are not the opposite sex, and we can discuss how to deal with those wishes, or there is no such a thing as a “sex” and nobody is really male or female, in which case all categories for male and female have to be gone. No women’s sports or bathrooms or changing rooms - just unisex everything. I don’t think too many trans activists want this. “Trans women” want to be treated as women, not as part of a unisex species. My trans identified daughter wants to be treated as a boy. Thus, these people assume the existence of “men” and “women” and “boys” and “girls.” They don’t believe sex is on a spectrum, but just argue it to muddy the waters and justify the right to claim to be the opposite sex - because sex is unclear. But again, if it’s so unclear, what makes a trans woman a woman or a trans man a man? Aren’t they just part of an ambiguous spectrum? None of it makes sense.
The trans-identified men who began seeking gender surgeries during the Nineties were generally very concrete, conventional thinkers regarding sex and femininity. If they liked feminine clothes and had a history of playing more with girls than with boys, they were inclined to think they must be women. These men were not typically very sophisticated or informed about postmodern ideas, and were in most cases not familiar with feminist theory or queer theory. Queer and trans theory was introduced later by trans activists, who found these ideas to be useful in confusing critics of the trans agenda. The fundamental problem of gender dysphoric people, however, continues to be concrete, rigidly binary, conventional conceptions about what it means to be a man or woman in terms of traditional sex role stereotypes.
“The fundamental problem of gender dysphoric people, however, continues to be concrete, rigidly binary, conventional conceptions about what it means to be a man or woman…”
Sorry, I disagree profoundly that this is the *fundamental* problem when we *now* see at least an order of magnitude more (especially biological females, but substantially more males as well) claiming gender dysphoria than even just 15 years ago.
The fundamental problem is clearly the miseducation of young people on this topic, combined with the willingness of leftists all over the medical and education professions to “affirm” such pronouncements by youth - and of course reinforced by leftist social media, where being LGBTQ++ is cool, while being straight white heteronormative is vilified.
If you persist in reducing the anti-realism of transgender activism to a left ideological conspiracy alone, then you will be wrong for two reasons. First, not all on the left or pro-IP, indeed many like me are highly critical of it for replacing the politics of redistribution with the politics of identity. Second, IP is completely compatible with consumer capitalism and neoliberalism. It is individualistic "cos you're worth it", taking the knee in sports as a cheap empty moralistic gesture etc., and it deflects attention from economic determinants of social injustice. Look how consumer marketing in divided into identity categories. Look at the funding of transgender activism. The list goes on about following the money. This woke left problem is aligned with US individualism post civil rights protests, and sadly has now infected many on the left in Europe. Many of us though are fighting back. This is both an ideological and an economic challenge, with anti-realism being at its centre. Scepticism about that anti-realism is not the preserve of socially conservative critics.
I am not condemning leftists who are not woke above or here.
And I don’t claim to understand UK/European politics sufficiently well to be sure that there is nothing else but woke leftism behind the denial of biology there.
And I don’t claim that all leftists in the U.S. today are woke, as that is not the case, in particular among older leftists.
But you are fooling yourself or denying the reality if you claim that anything other than woke left activism is the primary thing driving the push on trans issues in the U.S. today.
But none of that changes the reality that wokeism is objectively bad for humanity, nor that wokeism is a dominant force, if not *the* dominant force, in American leftist politics today, and that no one in power on the left today is pushing back against it. Some are actively pushing it, the rest simply don’t resist it and certainly do not denounce it. I defy you to show me *any* major U.S. politicians on the left who are denouncing wokeism.
That there is a bigger pushback against woke by European leftists is encouraging. I certainly have seen/heard it re: trans procedures on minors in the U.K. Bravo!
And I hope you are successful. Because until and unless you are, leftism becomes more and more il-liberal every day. The term “cultural Marxism” fits as label for the activist woke agenda is extremely well.
I think I know what you mean. And yet… some fraction - I know not what part - of these massive reported increases in gender dysphoria are actually experiencing “gender dysphoria” because they have convinced themselves that they are, no?
I think that the majority of adolescent and young adult females and perhaps also most of the young males presenting at gender clinics do not have the condition of gender dysphoria that was presented to gender therapists during the Nineties through more recent time. I think that most of the young gender clinic patients have other developmental and psych issues that are causing their symptoms. Outside of the gender clinics, I think that the young people, mostly girls, who are claiming to be various genders and sexual orientations are suffering from confusion induced by their own woke peer culture and its associated adolescent fads, as well as effects of indoctrination by their school systems, and by online trans influencers.
I actually don’t have all that strong an opinion about trans adults (except re: participation in women’s sports). But these activists are, at least, consistent.
They are consistent that what matters is being woke. The rights of the oppressed LQBTQ++ to do/have whatever is in *their* interest trump the rights of cishetero people, including girls’ and women’s ability to participate in sports.
More importantly, the “rights” of adults to be trans and be recognized as having rights trumps any sanity/circumspection/whatever in terms of what the proper thing to do is for children, including chemical and surgical alterations. Re: almost every other conceivable issue, children are the leftist justification for all sorts of restrictive laws. But in this case, since woke must triumph, we must do the opposite when it comes to children.
The creation of the trans child had to happen to make it more believable that trans is a thing. Now that there is a concept of a ‘trans child’ you have ‘trans adults’ and all these fetishy, AGP men running the world are getting what they want.
You are correct. The trans child is a reification created by activist clinicians. The Cass review in the UK inter alia drew attention to 'diagnostic over-shadowing' whereby gender questioning children from a wide range of biographical backgrounds (including abuse, autism, depression and being gay but with homophobic parents) are all lumped together in one reified grouping. This assumption flows from gender ideology invented by adults. See Moore, M. and Brunskell -Evans H. (eds) Inventing Transgender Children and Young People.
…if you believe the “rights” of the trans “oppressed” justify any means necessary to overcome their “oppressors”, then sure, it is a very acceptable price to sacrifice the health of children towards the goal.
This is what woke / DEI / intersectionality / Critical Race Theory teaches. This is what radicals believe. And this is what most leftists gladly go along with today, whether they understand it and truly believe it or not.
Dr. Wright is correct in saying that critical theory activists have argued that categorization is the source of oppression. I believe that Michel Foucault is the critical theorist who developed this idea. He was a French gay man, postmodern philosopher and psychologist. My understanding of Foucault's argument is that people who had sexual behaviors different from the majority were defined by the heterosexual majority as a different kind of person from themselves. The majority then assigned the sexual minority various labels, which concretized their classification as "different." Humans are often intolerant of people perceived as different, so then they devalued those who engaged in homosexual behaviors and created derogatory terms for them.
There is a lot of support for the above set of ideas in a body of social psychological research known as "attribution theory."
You are of course correct in your observation that woke activists are obsessed with categorization, to the extent that they ignore, deny or obfuscate individual differences among members of the groups they define. I think this behavior is completely contrary to Foucault's position, if I understand him correctly. The term "social justice fundamentalism" that is being used increasingly by critics of the woke activists captures the distortion being imposed on the critical theorists' highly abstract formulations.
'Critical theory' is now very elastic and often used by people who are ignorant of its history. (The term 'woke' also has history unaligned with its current usage.) Foucault's radical social constructivism was idealist in a philosophical sense, whereas those initiating critical theory (the Frankfurt School) were Marxist materialists. Only Axel Honneth in recent times as drifted towards the politics of recognition, and his excesses have been tempered by his mentor Jurgen Habermas. Re Foucault himself you are correct in your cautions about his writings. However, I tend to judge him as well by his actions, such as raping children at night in graveyards in his sex tourism to Morocco. Paedophilia and BDSM in his sexual life shaped his academic writings in part.
Thank you for the very interesting and informative post! I agree that most activists do not know the history of critical theory nor have they examined the component ideas critically. Your point about Foucault's philosophy being idealist and the Frankfurt school Marxist materialists is fascinating.
I wasn't interested in these people during the period when I was an activist (1960's through 1980's), even though the New Left was highly influenced by Marcuse. I am a psychologist and as a student I was very interested in Erich Fromm, who was affiliated with the Frankfurt school. I was also smitten with R.D. Laing, who theorized that schizophrenia was something like a construction by the families of such patients (he didn't use constructivist terminology), an idea that I later rejected.
Habermas's ideas have been incredibly popular among psychoanalysts in recent years, but I don't know much at all about him.
What you write about “critical theory activists” and Michael Foucault’s work is interesting. It might even be technically correct. I am much more familiar with “critical theory” from its use in black-white relations and its now expanded use as justification of all oppressor-oppressed theory and in particular the justification of the use of any means necessary for the oppressed to defeat the “oppressors”.
Dr. Wright didn’t specify only “critical theory” activists. And even if he did, my point still stands ~100%: every activist on this topic (I doubt there is even 1 *activist* who does not, but of course it is theoretically possible) is someone who seeks to divide people into identity groups and use those identity groups as justification for all of their political demands and authoritarian government actions.
The only source of the problem is psychiatry, it’s the only “science” which propagates the myth of trans, and it promotes the concept that removing healthy tissue is a treatment for brain possession of the spirit of the wrong sex, and that follow-on treatment should consists of the rest of the world complying with the patients delusion.
Psychiatry has a terrible track record of surgical intervention for mental illness going back to trepanning, forward to lobotomy. It’s medieval quackery masquerading as seriousness.
“Postmodernism”, trans, queer, wokeism, liberalism, Marxism, no ism maintains the concept of trans and gender, only psychiatry was given the legal and medical responsibility and it has failed abjectly, and measurably.
Actually, pediatricians and surgeons have taken the primary role in medically transitioning people. They used to be very onboard with getting at least 2 letters from mental health professionals before prescribing hormones or performing surgeries, but gender surgeons and gender clinics have been progressively pushing their own mental health staff out of the decision making process. Medicine used to be based on biological and medical science, but obviously in this case the science has been defeated by other influences (ideology and monetary interests).
The diagnosis is psychiatric in origin, not physiological; the term gender identity is psychiatric pseudoscience which has to basis in actual medicine or treatment.
Pediatricians and other physicians relying on the pseudoscience of psychiatric gender and trans just supports my observation that psychiatry is the origin and sustaining force behind all of this. The moment psychiatrists say “we were wrong”, it all stops.
I agree that the diagnoses of gender identity disorder and gender dysphoria are psychiatric in origin. "Gender incongruence" appears to have been coined by trans activists and was included in the International Classification of Diseases by WHO. They have listed it among the diagnoses of actual illnesses, but have also said they don't believe that people who are "gender incongruent" are in any way abnormal.
My point is that the psychiatric profession no longer has control over the trajectory of the medicalization of people who say they are "transgendered, nonbinary, gender incongruent," etc. The gender clinic whistleblowers who are mental health professionals have said that they were not listened to when they raised questions about patients' mental health issues and treatment, or more commonly lack thereof. Trans activists have focused a lot of energy on changing medical transitions into a series of aggressive cosmetic processes and procedures, and are succeeding in their efforts to end requirements of undergoing psych evals and psychotherapy prior to hormones and surgeries.
The one major change in which accelerated this phenomenon in the US in 2010 was not the iPhone or social media but but was the Affordable Care Act,
Section 1557 which made paying for the diagnosis and treatment of gender-related pseudoscience a condition of being able to offer insurance in the US.
No queer studies group lobbied for that. And I’d psychiatry didn’t support it, it wouldnt be a medical condition.
The delusional shouldn’t define their condition, and the requirement for the world to pretend to recognize the delusion is real. Psychiatrists mandate this.
Astonishing. And, they get paid by insurers to do so!
Yes, you are right about the role of insurance coverage. I didn't know about the role of the ACA coverage---thanks for posting that history! Trans activists made insurance coverage a central goal of their lobbying efforts immediately after the "sexual reassignment surgeries" started achieving good cosmetic outcomes for male patients.
The American Psychiatric Association has been very influenced by radical cultural trends when it revises the DSM, and now the WHO is even more radical. The ongoing revisions in the gender identity diagnoses, now non-diagnoses, are blatantly not based in science.
I agree-biomedicalization has been an inter-disciplinary enterprise. In the UK and Holland it has been driven actually by clinical psychology (my profession) and the catastrophe of the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Clinic in London was led by psychologists not psychiatrists. The discussion here though is broadly in agreement that functional psychiatric diagnoses are all logically flawed and that psychiatry has had it fair share of 'great and desperate cures' (from John Bunyan on medical arrogance) from ECT and psychosurgery to anti-depressants and major tranquillizers.
I accept your point that psychiatry is the *original* source of “the problem” as you describe it, but I respectfully strongly disagree that it is the *only* source of the problem.
DEI / intersectionality / woke / Critical race theory oppressor-oppressed ideology that states that evil rich male Christian (and Jewish, where applicable) white capitalists are responsible for all evil - and little good - in the world, and that the BiPoC and/or LGBTQ+++ “oppressed” are justified in using *any* means at all to overthrow their “oppressors” is a *major* source of the problem.
This immoral ideology is also, e.g. the cause of about 50% of 18-24 year olds in this country (and no doubt a FAR higher percentage on college campuses) choosing “Back Hamas” (even when given 3 choices, including one to stay out of it) in the wake of the baby-decapitating, rapist murder and hostage rampage in Israel Oct 7th - and think themselves “virtuous” in the process.
This ideology is immoral, it is wrong, and it is dangerous. And IMO it very much is contributing to the issues we face here.
All that said, please be clear that I applaud Dr. Wright for the stand he has taken. He is doing important work.
I view it as a problem when a pseudoscience captures children and surgically and chemically extirpates their sexual organs. Don’t you? Simply because in some instances the child is and effeminate gay male and the father can’t tolerate it, with full cooperation of medicine.
The moment psychiatry halts the pseudoscience, you can’t get paid to recognize it.
There are no insured treatments: genital mutilation (treatment) becomes genital mutilation (abomination) like circumcision (utterly unnecessary).
That’s because the center of gravity shifts to saying the people _advocating_ the concepts of trans and gender are delusional. Until then, the people who _refuse_ to accept the psychiatric concepts are delusional, since we must accept psychiatry as the last word on human emotional and cognitive health.
The idea that those who oppose are delusional, all others are consistent with “medical best practice”. It’s the classic Catch-22 - only delusional people can say the situation is that of a delusion.
Here’s an example of what I mean: one major change which accelerated the trans this phenomenon in the US in 2010 was not the iPhone or social media but but was the Affordable Care Act,
Section 1557 which made paying for the diagnosis and treatment of gender-related condition of being able to offer insurance in the US.
It wasn’t a course on critical theory at Columbia, or postmodernism in Berkeley; it wasn’t GLAAD or Queer theory, or even trans activists shouting down women.
It was simply a lobby which introduced the idea that trans was a legitimate condition, gender treatment was a legitimate _billable_ concept and there you go.
“I view it as a problem when a pseudoscience captures children and surgically and chemically extirpates their sexual organs. Don’t you? ”
Of course I do, as I’ve made clear.
The difference between us is that you seem certain that this - problem and solution - is solely about psychiatry, with a little bit about Obamacare laws, while I believe whatever the initial cause, it is now primarily about activist woke leftist politics.
Consider that psychiatric texts where taught “gender identity” throughout the US and Canada for decades - even after the principal pedagogical exponent Dr. John Money he was exposed as a scientific fraud in 2000, who committed surgical and psychological atrocities on children.
Decades of psychiatrists and other medical doctors are taught that gender is a real concept, that one can alter the sex of a child surgically and it will hold through life through based on a fraudulent “twin study” and “other studies” originated by at least one delusional physician.
All psychiatry has to do is
repudiate the concept of “gender identity” as a pseudoscience lacking any basis in reality
repudiate that sex can be changed surgically
Repudiate that children’s gendered behaviors can be altered through surgery or chemical castration
Repudiate that sex delusions can be treated by requiring that all other people globally accommodate the delusion
Repudiate the idea that surgical removal of sex organs for people who hate their organs is a legitimate treatment
That’s all.
Psychiatry hasn’t even unequivocally stated (well, meaningful American psychiatric groups) that homosexual sex behaviors cannot be extirpated.
Psychiatry going back 100 years or more preferred to “treat” homosexuals through castration and emasculation for them to “live as a woman”, and that was preferable to existing as a homosexual. Psychiatry in Nazi Germany, contemporary Iran, and those supporting “mermaids” and “Jazz Jennings” is fairly united.
The moment psychiatry grasps that the last 24 years have falsified the entire basis of their concepts suddenly the tide turns.
Delusional activists can howl all they want, but they don’t make medical diagnoses, treatments, and set laws.
Psychiatry lost all control when half the country’s states forbade psychiatric atrocities.
They can either get with the program or fold shop.
Again just for historical clarity, psychiatrists began the gatekeeping function for transsexualism in the 1970s but compassionate tolerance for the latter was mainly promoted initially in the 1960s by the sexologist and endocrinologist Harry Benjamin. His name went on the precursor of the WPATH guidelines. He was not a psychiatrist. Today the gate keeping role in the UK is ambiguous: it was from GPs and social workers but it keep shifting presumably it may vary from state to state in the USA. If you go on the CAN-SG website (a group I am member of) it contains many psychiatrists who are gender critical. I am glad that people on this blog are offering views on history, and in particular epistemology in its historical context. But to get that history correct the facts claimed need to be persuasive.
Critical Theory defines all categorization as a social construct. The idea of an objective physical category is completely rejected.
Queer Theory generally works to dismantle ANY category of "normal." Ironically, this is why they've gotten so homophobic lately: it's now normal and unremarkable to be in a same sex relationship.
Any "marginalized" category, of course, is sacred.
I use AIs to write books and one I came up with was the emergence of Satyrs and Maenads who celebrate pleasures of the flesh within their groups. A craze that spreads in the US and world.
The Maenads had to go underground because during the frenzied madness of their ecstatic journey they tended to rent the flesh and limbs off men to protect themselves. The Bacchae of Euripides.
Last few chapters are in the oven, one is a harvest festival in Sonoma, a naked Ted Talk, and a book tour by the founder.
Satyr and Maenad freedom!
Both were vigorously opposed by the rainies, the sad rainbow people who wished to sterilize everyone and deny everyone pleasure of the flesh, they wish to conform.
I sympathise with your frustration but for accuracy, identity politics is not only about the woke left. Many on the left are defying the absurdities of anti-realism and the ever elastic politics of recognition. For example most of the resistance to transgender ideology in the UK has come from second wave feminists and scientific realists who are left wing. Also the right expresses its own form of IP (Trumpism, Hindu nationalism, xenophobic Brexiteers etc). I have explored this ambiguity about the political spectrum presence of IP in my book 'Identity Politics: Where Did It All Go Wrong?'. Also note that key critics of the woke distortions on the left like Andrew Doyle still uphold values of the left. Nancy Fraser is another example from the USA.
“identity politics is not only about the woke left.”
As I am no expert about Europe, I will accept your assertion that THERE identity politics, and in particular what is going on re: trans “rights”, is not about the woke left. But your assertion is simply NOT true in the U.S.
Separately, Trumpism is NOT identity politics. I defy you to name the “identity” that is analogous to race, gender, religion, LGBTQ++ status to which it supposedly applies. You cannot do it. It is NOT. AT. ALL the same thing. And as you well know, a part of it - but only a part - is an explicit reaction to woke policies that seek to divide and create a spoils system based on identity.
And I do know enough about Europe to know that while there is zero doubt that *some* of the Brexiteers are just xenophobic white nationalists, most are not. So if your claim is that Brexiteers are an identity group (unclear from your comment, but very strongly implied), then I am forced to conclude that even for Europe your assertion is wrong, as there are very many Brexiteers who value freedom and are not white nationalists.
Re: your last point, yes there are indeed a precious few who identify as left (almost exclusively older people, most of whom either do not realize that they are voting for il-liberals when they continue to vote for the leftist Dem Party in the U.S., or do and undercut much of their own criticism when they do) who criticize woke. Bill Maher is another one. But their voices have been completely drowned out in the U.S., and in particular have zero influence in Dem party policy today.
It is so annoying that you, Colin, have to say this over and over and over again, and still there people who, for their own reasons, fail to understand this simple truth. Good job.
Intersex, Kleinfelter, other conditions are biological errors. They are not normal. They are failures of production. Freaks. Just need to get it out.
I've followed your work for years and am grateful for it. Clear, articulate, de-emotionalized (mostly). But sometimes I wish someone with your depth of knowledge would write a piece that is less defensive, less reactive to activists. I understand you need to argue against their flawed reasoning and faulty science. But most people who have come to me with sincere questions about this issue are neither scientists nor activists. They are people who want to demonstrate goodwill and support their communities in meaningful ways. I can point them to your work (and I do) or to Carole Hooven's work -- both a bit science-heavy but you can't avoid that, I think, and I can guide them through it. But your work is so focused on overcoming activist traps that unless the person seeking information is aware of the activist traps and has processed them, I don't think it helps them as much as it could.
At the risk of being presumptuous, I would love to see an essay that conveys exactly the above information, but more from the perspective of a genuine seeker in need of guidance who comes without some of the activist baggage. I could see it structured as: These are the things you might have thought or felt as you have seen discussions of gender issues in the news or in popular culture and I'm here to add the science to your thoughts so you can develop a helpful understanding of these things. The list might include things like: 1) You are worried about the mental health of the trans/queer/nonbinary kids in your community and have been told dire things about their outcomes if they aren't recognized and supported from an early age; 2) You know someone whose gender is biologically ambiguous and feel compelled to support trans rights movements in support of them; 3) You wonder whether the new gender curriculum at your kids school is really helpful or accurate but don't want to raise concerns you don't have the science background to support; 4) You have been told that puberty blockers and other medical interventions are completely reversible so you figure it's okay to err on the side of intervention since it can't hurt; 5) You feel it's hurtful to exclude any trans or trans-identifying or any gender-ambiguous person from competing in sports but also worry about what that does to girls and can't decide how to feel about it... And the list of conversations I've been party to goes on.
It's my experience that all of these questions can be sincerely motivated. People with these questions or concerns don't seem to have a reliable place to turn to disentangle their desire to be a good person from the few things they're hearing. Activists on both sides play to their desire to be good people but don't take the time to provide genuine information that could help. The number of times I've shared even basic facts with people and had them respond with, "Why have I never heard this?" saddens me, but I guess it's part of the general lack of informed discourse that will always be with us. Anyway, not really intending to tell you how to do what you do, you got it covered. But an amazing primer on how someone with questions like this can answer them would fill a gap in the discussion, imho.
Really excellent comment that clearly describes the position taken by all of the well-intentioned Democrats I talk to about "trans" issues. I second your request for Dr. Wright or someone with his expertise to come up with a manual to guide our conversations with the aforementioned people.
Thanks James-you have raised a really important question about the right to disagree running alongside the need to negotiate around strongly held differences of opinion. Beneath the stand off between gender critics and TRAs is a fundamental metaphysical gap. One side has a foundational commitment to ontological realism and the other does not but, instead, has conflated ontology and epistemology. Even beyond (or beneath)the challenge of scientific complexity, re the ontology of sex to get over to newcomers, is this gap. Foucault and Queer Theorists like Butler and Rubin, in the wake of Nietzsche, have left us with the politics and ethics of identity. Our challenge is to dissect the flaws in their anti-realism, while engaging with the good intentions of a generation genuinely hoping to be kind and tolerant to advance social progress and peaceful coexistence of all citizens. This is a tough strategic challenge given the incommensurability of realist and anti-realist arguments. I tend to start with engaging with them about the good sense of older deontological and utilitarian ethics to show that the ethics of recognition are not the only game in town, It works a bit sometimes.....
I'll say it again and again, the trans movement is rooted in homophobia and mysgiony. Move over gals, make room for the men. Thanks to Joe Biden and his leftward lurch Title IX has now been amended to include "gender identity". So basically men are now protected under the law to parade around as women naked in a women's spa/shower room/gym where biological women and children attend. Makes me sick.
Only in one sense does he have a point, which, as Churchill said about fanatics, causes him to redouble his efforts when he's forgotten his aim. "Body plan organized to produce gametes of one type or the other" does not strictly apply to some non-mammalian species that are undifferentiated as to body plan in early life and can morph into one sex or another depending on temperature of rearing or other social factors. (I'm not a fish biologist so forgive me any errors please and I have no idea how this works.) In these species, a pre-sexual body plan cannot be identified as to what gametes the individual could eventually make because it could make either, depending.
This obviously does not apply to mammals including people who have a recognizable body plan from long before birth that predicts with 100% accuracy *which type* of gamete that individual will eventually make. Of course not all individuals actually make gametes -- infertile males are legion but no *man* produces ova. No person who is XX makes spermatozoa and no person who is XY makes ova.
If we did decide to call pre-pubertal children and post-menopausal women sexless it would play havoc with vital statistics departments. This is not a trivial objection. Vital stats are really important. That transgender people can alter them is a scandal in itself. Children would be recorded as "U" at birth -- there would be no point in having the category because they would all be "U"-- and only when they became sex-competent could they go back and put a sex on their birth certificates. It would be a ritual of adolescence, like first communion, first drivers licence, first kiss, and the trip to the vital statistics registry to formally register your sex. And can you imagine? The kids would quickly catch on that all the functionaries behind the wickets know the reason they were here was because they'd had their first period or their first nocturnal emission....because how else can you tell if gametes are finally in play? Cringe if you've ever been 12 or 13.
And the poor woman in her 40s-50s would have to go in and whisper to the clerk: "I'm here to unsex myself because I'm in the change of life."
Steersman's shtick is that body plan is an arbitrary patch to make Colin's theory hold together and is not supported by standard biology textbooks. He thinks society would be better organized if these "U" people were all regarded as larval or senescent clownfish. I'm running with it to show how absurd the idea actually is.
We call a flying object an airplane when it’s not aloft, we call a car a car when it has no wheel. Pointing out that newborn females have all the eggs try will ever have stumped him, and similar for males. Not
Ovulating and not spermagenitatinf (is that a word)
Are no more disqualifications for sexual as grounded airplanes and cars. Not worth debating
Analogies aren’t arguments. All someone has to do is point out that cars and airplanes don’t have sex and the whole argument fails, so best not to use them. Since we can recognize differences in children that predict what their sex roles will be when they grow up — we can teach boys what it means *for them* when they become men, likewise with girls -> women — it is sensible to regard those anatomical differences as sex differences even though neither is making mature gametes. And post-gametic women continue to be women just because we say they are. I don’t think you have to invoke human dignity to say that. Even in cultures that treat women with very little dignity still know that a post-menopausal woman, or even a “barren” woman, is a woman.
Girls are of course born with oocytes that do not multiply during life, only ripen beginning at puberty. Boys not quite the same because they have to proliferate the precursor cells to make a new batch of spermatozoa each time and that doesn’t happen until puberty. But gamete precursor cells still count as gametes because they come from specialized cells found in only one type of organ, a gonad, which is different in the two sexes whether gametes are being made or not. I don’t care if not all life forms use the same system. All people do. It’s sophistry to argue otherwise.
(This isn’t directed at you as much as at Steersman.)
To whom you are attracted sexually is purely subjective and therefore cannot reasonably be contested by an outside observer.
Where you decide to live your life on a spectrum of superficial, stereotypical male to female attributes (and we all do) is also purely subjective and similarly cannot be questioned.
However, your biological sex reflects an objective reality which cannot be changed by your subjective personal view and futile attempts to do so can result in serious health impacts to you as well as harms to members of the sex you are impersonating (primarily women).
Others who are grounded in objective reality should never be forced to accept your subjective version of your actual biological sex.
Finally, it's past time for the LGB community to separate themselves from the trans activists who are trying to take away the rights of women to fairness in sports and to privacy and safety in their restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. They also advocate for the chemical and surgical mutilation of children many of whom would grow up gay.
Their actions are evil and the
understandable negative reaction to the harm they are causing is spilling over to innocent people who are just going about their business, marrying and leading their lives.
Thank you, I will keep this as a resource and re-read when needed. Seems like chromosomes- XY, or the presence of a Y chromosome- is the best single way we currently have to identify males. Birth certificates have been irreparably gamed and are no longer useful for this purpose.
The "intersex trap" is one of the best concepts I have read on this Substack, thank you, and I have found it helps enormously in discussions on gender. Now, when someone accuses, "What about intersex people?" I can just say, "What do they have to do with Lia Thomas?" Thows off the opposition every time because, at the end of the day, they don't really know what an intersex condition is.
Every person, one mother, one father, sex binary. Eight words. Prove me wrong.
That’s all I say now when the topic comes up - so I say when challenged that every living person is the product of a “sex binary” - exactly one woman who was the mother, and exactly one man who was the father - prove me wrong, show me someone who was not the product of one woman and one man.
Then they go bwa-bwa-bwa and stop arguing.
When I speak of ova and sperm, I can see the lights going off, or speaking of gametes. Too complicated.
How does the author classify the individuals embroiled in the boxing controversy? Which binary do they represent. If chromosomes can't be used to clarify/classify sex (outliers included) especially when it comes to pursuits like boxing, is there some other better determinant? It appears "looking up ones skirt" just doesn't cut it.
I will be dying on the hill that complete AIS are women. Female is default, and masculinization is the process of making females. Androgen receptor is necessary for this process. No receptor means female.
It is commonly assumed that sex has always been listed on birth certificates and passports, when in fact this is not the case. I recall my mother was annoyed for some reason that her birth certificate did not list her sex (she was born in Buffalo, NY in 1923; like most states, NYS did not list sex). At least in America and Britain, sex designation did not appear on passports until the last few decades. Other than as an aid to curious statisticians, it is not clear what objective purpose these designations serve, but they seem important emotionally to many people.
Excellent explanation and clarification..thank you.
"While it may be necessary to outline reasonable policies and laws for hard cases, we need not pretend we’re all hard cases." I support sports scientists and physiologists researching rare disorders such as CAIS to better understand what advantages or disadvantages one may have compared to an XX female. The case of Spanish runner Maria José Martínez-Patiño comes to mind. I empathize with her, but the males (with or without ambiguous genitalia) weaseling into female competitions, not so much.
Males who are DSD should not be in female category of sport. Due to pressure from freak groups, the Olympics is now seeing males win in the female boxing space. It's wrong.
My opinion is it would be fair to study the athletic ability of those born with XY chromosomes and androgen insensitivity, like the Spanish hurdler Maria. Her best time was 13.71, excellent and good enough to make it to the women's elite level, but not in the winner's circle, unlike the developed males with other disorders beating up on women. Androgen insensitivity is a tough one, since those with this disorder develop as a female.
You can study, or you can run fair athletic competitions. This is a live issue, but each case requires that a decision be made about a real athlete WHO DISPLACES OTHER ATHLETES. When a runner competes, that person takes a lane. No one else can be in the lane. If an XY person takes a lane in an XX competition, an XX runner is not there.
I oppose the ability of an XY person, regardless of their secondary sex characteristics, to compete with XX persons.
I get it and I agree with an immediate rule that only XX females who developed normally be allowed in female competition. Studying the athletic ability of those with XY/CAIS is not the same as allowing them in competition with XX females.
Also that CAIS is different from PAIS. XY individuals with undescended testicles producing testosterone should not be competing with XX individuals. Nor should XX individuals taking endogenous testosterone (for any reason) be in competition with XX individuals.
XY-CAIS people are not masculinized at all and have female-appearing genitalia so they won't frighten anyone in the locker room. World Athletics (which runs track and field) allows them to compete as long as they are completely insensitive to androgens. The partial form is an DQ.
No one would ever know they aren't typical normal feminine women and they "pass" without incident everywhere in society. I think allowing them to compete in women's events is fair and reasonable. They are neither a safety hazard nor a source of unfair competition to XX women.
Now, you could take the view that XY = male, which it does, and DQ them because they displace an XX woman. I can't argue with that. It's a question of values.
CAIS individuals don't appear to masculinize at all in appearance, but they still may have some physiological athletic benefits.
Frankly, XY-CAIS people are not competing in elite sports. Most humans can't. The only reason XY-PAIS individuals do so well is because they're competing in the wrong division. An XX individual doesn't get that kind of build or performance without a lifetime of anabolic steroids, which is also grounds for a DQ.
Agree. This is more of a theoretical concern that acknowledges there is such a thing as CAIS. There was a Spanish hurdler (~70 years ago?) who is said to have had CAIS and was good enough to get to the Olympics. Photos show her to be really lean and not muscular -- ectomorphs we used to call them --, as you'd expect for a hurdler. The usual story was that they ascribed their failure to get their first period to the intense training and dieting they were undergoing. The girls they were training with often didn't get their periods either. Many of them had also eating disorders -- not talked a lot back then but a real scourge in the women's sports (and ballet) where body fat is an obsession.
I have been looking a bit into the AIS disorder. They actually don't develop as female, as Dr. Wright has been defining "female." The males who have CAIS look like women and have "vaginas" that are often not complete, but they lack female reproductive organs. Dr. Wright has been teaching us that "female" means that the creature has the kind of body that produces large gametes. CAIS males actually have the kind of bodies that produce small gametes, they just don't have reproductive functionality because of a genetic problem.
It appears from what little I have read on the subject that CAIS people also have a number of medical problems due to their condition. Their estrogen production is in the male range, not the range found in functional females. They need hormone replacement to fully develop breasts at puberty, although some development happens without it, for reasons not fully understood (maybe absence of androgens, according to main theory).
There is one study that found CAIS males may be taller on average than normal females. The researchers found their participants to be "intermediate" in height between normal males and females. The number of subjects in this study was tiny and so results may be a chance finding. If it holds up with replication, CAIS people would have a competitive advantage in some sports.
What I meant by "develop as a female" is that by all appearances, they are female. I do not believe they should be competing in female athletics.
Not sure if you wish to weigh in directly or not, but just FYI, you are being personally attacked in the Comment section of this excellent article by Carol Dansereau: https://caroldansereau.substack.com/p/males-pour-into-womens-prisons-as
Oh that's just Substack's premier gender troll. Steersman has some persistent ideas he can't let go of which would undermine his own continuity as a self were he to take them seriously. He is so fixated on this mistaken thinking it rules his behavior so he's a bit like the gender dysphorics in wanting something to be true that isn't and forming his identity around it.
Steersman is a troll.
The link is to someone called Carol Dansereau. It argues against women in men’s prisons. Why is she a troll? Who’s Steersman?
You have to check comments. If you do not know who Steersman is I can only guess you're on the gender beat recently... He argues that sex is only defined for people in the window of fertility, ie men only exist post puberty and women stop being women on menopause. Additionally he slanders everyone who provides an alternative definition, such as Colin, who has banned him on this sub I believe.
I just checked the comments. Definitely a troll
OK, thanks for info. I have read quite a bit on this topic but I haven’t heard of him.
Good response. He’s a classic troll a la 1980’s Usenet.
Yep I checked the comments and found the guy. Definite troll. I was confused I thought they were talking about a substack writer.
Comical troll, Monty Python level skit reasoning.
Like the Argument Clinic.
“While activists are insistent in presenting the biology of sex as being so complex as to defy all categorization, and categorization itself as a social evil,“
I beg to differ that most of the activists you cite are insistent that categorization itself is a social evil.
The activist woke left is ALL. ABOUT. IDENTITY. POLITICS. Which of course itself is ENTIRELY. ABOUT. CATEGORIZATION!
Perhaps all you mean is that one of the arguments these particular trans activists make in trying to win this particular case is to mouth/write the words “categorization itself is evil”, but don’t think for a second that they actually believe this, because almost all of them have demonstrated exactly the opposite.
Would that we were so lucky that the woke left stopped all social categorization…
Exactly. The logical fallacy of stating that sex is ambiguous for everyone, and on a spectrum, and therefore meaningless, and then insisting that teenage girls and boys MUST be chemically and surgically altered in dangerously unhealthy ways to appear as (and “be”) the opposite sex, or the will die of depression, and men whom wish they were women must be treated as women, is too obvious to explain.
Yet somehow, activists argue both of these points as if they are consistent. Either there are males and females, and some people desperately wish they were the opposite sex, but are not the opposite sex, and we can discuss how to deal with those wishes, or there is no such a thing as a “sex” and nobody is really male or female, in which case all categories for male and female have to be gone. No women’s sports or bathrooms or changing rooms - just unisex everything. I don’t think too many trans activists want this. “Trans women” want to be treated as women, not as part of a unisex species. My trans identified daughter wants to be treated as a boy. Thus, these people assume the existence of “men” and “women” and “boys” and “girls.” They don’t believe sex is on a spectrum, but just argue it to muddy the waters and justify the right to claim to be the opposite sex - because sex is unclear. But again, if it’s so unclear, what makes a trans woman a woman or a trans man a man? Aren’t they just part of an ambiguous spectrum? None of it makes sense.
The trans-identified men who began seeking gender surgeries during the Nineties were generally very concrete, conventional thinkers regarding sex and femininity. If they liked feminine clothes and had a history of playing more with girls than with boys, they were inclined to think they must be women. These men were not typically very sophisticated or informed about postmodern ideas, and were in most cases not familiar with feminist theory or queer theory. Queer and trans theory was introduced later by trans activists, who found these ideas to be useful in confusing critics of the trans agenda. The fundamental problem of gender dysphoric people, however, continues to be concrete, rigidly binary, conventional conceptions about what it means to be a man or woman in terms of traditional sex role stereotypes.
“The fundamental problem of gender dysphoric people, however, continues to be concrete, rigidly binary, conventional conceptions about what it means to be a man or woman…”
Sorry, I disagree profoundly that this is the *fundamental* problem when we *now* see at least an order of magnitude more (especially biological females, but substantially more males as well) claiming gender dysphoria than even just 15 years ago.
The fundamental problem is clearly the miseducation of young people on this topic, combined with the willingness of leftists all over the medical and education professions to “affirm” such pronouncements by youth - and of course reinforced by leftist social media, where being LGBTQ++ is cool, while being straight white heteronormative is vilified.
If you persist in reducing the anti-realism of transgender activism to a left ideological conspiracy alone, then you will be wrong for two reasons. First, not all on the left or pro-IP, indeed many like me are highly critical of it for replacing the politics of redistribution with the politics of identity. Second, IP is completely compatible with consumer capitalism and neoliberalism. It is individualistic "cos you're worth it", taking the knee in sports as a cheap empty moralistic gesture etc., and it deflects attention from economic determinants of social injustice. Look how consumer marketing in divided into identity categories. Look at the funding of transgender activism. The list goes on about following the money. This woke left problem is aligned with US individualism post civil rights protests, and sadly has now infected many on the left in Europe. Many of us though are fighting back. This is both an ideological and an economic challenge, with anti-realism being at its centre. Scepticism about that anti-realism is not the preserve of socially conservative critics.
Feel free to be a leftist.
I am not condemning leftists who are not woke above or here.
And I don’t claim to understand UK/European politics sufficiently well to be sure that there is nothing else but woke leftism behind the denial of biology there.
And I don’t claim that all leftists in the U.S. today are woke, as that is not the case, in particular among older leftists.
But you are fooling yourself or denying the reality if you claim that anything other than woke left activism is the primary thing driving the push on trans issues in the U.S. today.
But none of that changes the reality that wokeism is objectively bad for humanity, nor that wokeism is a dominant force, if not *the* dominant force, in American leftist politics today, and that no one in power on the left today is pushing back against it. Some are actively pushing it, the rest simply don’t resist it and certainly do not denounce it. I defy you to show me *any* major U.S. politicians on the left who are denouncing wokeism.
That there is a bigger pushback against woke by European leftists is encouraging. I certainly have seen/heard it re: trans procedures on minors in the U.K. Bravo!
And I hope you are successful. Because until and unless you are, leftism becomes more and more il-liberal every day. The term “cultural Marxism” fits as label for the activist woke agenda is extremely well.
My comment was in regard to people who are actually experiencing gender dysphoria.
I think I know what you mean. And yet… some fraction - I know not what part - of these massive reported increases in gender dysphoria are actually experiencing “gender dysphoria” because they have convinced themselves that they are, no?
I think that the majority of adolescent and young adult females and perhaps also most of the young males presenting at gender clinics do not have the condition of gender dysphoria that was presented to gender therapists during the Nineties through more recent time. I think that most of the young gender clinic patients have other developmental and psych issues that are causing their symptoms. Outside of the gender clinics, I think that the young people, mostly girls, who are claiming to be various genders and sexual orientations are suffering from confusion induced by their own woke peer culture and its associated adolescent fads, as well as effects of indoctrination by their school systems, and by online trans influencers.
I actually don’t have all that strong an opinion about trans adults (except re: participation in women’s sports). But these activists are, at least, consistent.
They are consistent that what matters is being woke. The rights of the oppressed LQBTQ++ to do/have whatever is in *their* interest trump the rights of cishetero people, including girls’ and women’s ability to participate in sports.
More importantly, the “rights” of adults to be trans and be recognized as having rights trumps any sanity/circumspection/whatever in terms of what the proper thing to do is for children, including chemical and surgical alterations. Re: almost every other conceivable issue, children are the leftist justification for all sorts of restrictive laws. But in this case, since woke must triumph, we must do the opposite when it comes to children.
The creation of the trans child had to happen to make it more believable that trans is a thing. Now that there is a concept of a ‘trans child’ you have ‘trans adults’ and all these fetishy, AGP men running the world are getting what they want.
You are correct. The trans child is a reification created by activist clinicians. The Cass review in the UK inter alia drew attention to 'diagnostic over-shadowing' whereby gender questioning children from a wide range of biographical backgrounds (including abuse, autism, depression and being gay but with homophobic parents) are all lumped together in one reified grouping. This assumption flows from gender ideology invented by adults. See Moore, M. and Brunskell -Evans H. (eds) Inventing Transgender Children and Young People.
…if you believe the “rights” of the trans “oppressed” justify any means necessary to overcome their “oppressors”, then sure, it is a very acceptable price to sacrifice the health of children towards the goal.
This is what woke / DEI / intersectionality / Critical Race Theory teaches. This is what radicals believe. And this is what most leftists gladly go along with today, whether they understand it and truly believe it or not.
Dr. Wright is correct in saying that critical theory activists have argued that categorization is the source of oppression. I believe that Michel Foucault is the critical theorist who developed this idea. He was a French gay man, postmodern philosopher and psychologist. My understanding of Foucault's argument is that people who had sexual behaviors different from the majority were defined by the heterosexual majority as a different kind of person from themselves. The majority then assigned the sexual minority various labels, which concretized their classification as "different." Humans are often intolerant of people perceived as different, so then they devalued those who engaged in homosexual behaviors and created derogatory terms for them.
There is a lot of support for the above set of ideas in a body of social psychological research known as "attribution theory."
You are of course correct in your observation that woke activists are obsessed with categorization, to the extent that they ignore, deny or obfuscate individual differences among members of the groups they define. I think this behavior is completely contrary to Foucault's position, if I understand him correctly. The term "social justice fundamentalism" that is being used increasingly by critics of the woke activists captures the distortion being imposed on the critical theorists' highly abstract formulations.
'Critical theory' is now very elastic and often used by people who are ignorant of its history. (The term 'woke' also has history unaligned with its current usage.) Foucault's radical social constructivism was idealist in a philosophical sense, whereas those initiating critical theory (the Frankfurt School) were Marxist materialists. Only Axel Honneth in recent times as drifted towards the politics of recognition, and his excesses have been tempered by his mentor Jurgen Habermas. Re Foucault himself you are correct in your cautions about his writings. However, I tend to judge him as well by his actions, such as raping children at night in graveyards in his sex tourism to Morocco. Paedophilia and BDSM in his sexual life shaped his academic writings in part.
Ps Tunisia not Morocco See interview with Guy Sorman in the Sunday Times March 2021
Thank you for the very interesting and informative post! I agree that most activists do not know the history of critical theory nor have they examined the component ideas critically. Your point about Foucault's philosophy being idealist and the Frankfurt school Marxist materialists is fascinating.
I wasn't interested in these people during the period when I was an activist (1960's through 1980's), even though the New Left was highly influenced by Marcuse. I am a psychologist and as a student I was very interested in Erich Fromm, who was affiliated with the Frankfurt school. I was also smitten with R.D. Laing, who theorized that schizophrenia was something like a construction by the families of such patients (he didn't use constructivist terminology), an idea that I later rejected.
Habermas's ideas have been incredibly popular among psychoanalysts in recent years, but I don't know much at all about him.
What you write about “critical theory activists” and Michael Foucault’s work is interesting. It might even be technically correct. I am much more familiar with “critical theory” from its use in black-white relations and its now expanded use as justification of all oppressor-oppressed theory and in particular the justification of the use of any means necessary for the oppressed to defeat the “oppressors”.
Dr. Wright didn’t specify only “critical theory” activists. And even if he did, my point still stands ~100%: every activist on this topic (I doubt there is even 1 *activist* who does not, but of course it is theoretically possible) is someone who seeks to divide people into identity groups and use those identity groups as justification for all of their political demands and authoritarian government actions.
Completely agree with your second paragraph.
The only source of the problem is psychiatry, it’s the only “science” which propagates the myth of trans, and it promotes the concept that removing healthy tissue is a treatment for brain possession of the spirit of the wrong sex, and that follow-on treatment should consists of the rest of the world complying with the patients delusion.
Psychiatry has a terrible track record of surgical intervention for mental illness going back to trepanning, forward to lobotomy. It’s medieval quackery masquerading as seriousness.
“Postmodernism”, trans, queer, wokeism, liberalism, Marxism, no ism maintains the concept of trans and gender, only psychiatry was given the legal and medical responsibility and it has failed abjectly, and measurably.
Actually, pediatricians and surgeons have taken the primary role in medically transitioning people. They used to be very onboard with getting at least 2 letters from mental health professionals before prescribing hormones or performing surgeries, but gender surgeons and gender clinics have been progressively pushing their own mental health staff out of the decision making process. Medicine used to be based on biological and medical science, but obviously in this case the science has been defeated by other influences (ideology and monetary interests).
The diagnosis is psychiatric in origin, not physiological; the term gender identity is psychiatric pseudoscience which has to basis in actual medicine or treatment.
Pediatricians and other physicians relying on the pseudoscience of psychiatric gender and trans just supports my observation that psychiatry is the origin and sustaining force behind all of this. The moment psychiatrists say “we were wrong”, it all stops.
I agree that the diagnoses of gender identity disorder and gender dysphoria are psychiatric in origin. "Gender incongruence" appears to have been coined by trans activists and was included in the International Classification of Diseases by WHO. They have listed it among the diagnoses of actual illnesses, but have also said they don't believe that people who are "gender incongruent" are in any way abnormal.
My point is that the psychiatric profession no longer has control over the trajectory of the medicalization of people who say they are "transgendered, nonbinary, gender incongruent," etc. The gender clinic whistleblowers who are mental health professionals have said that they were not listened to when they raised questions about patients' mental health issues and treatment, or more commonly lack thereof. Trans activists have focused a lot of energy on changing medical transitions into a series of aggressive cosmetic processes and procedures, and are succeeding in their efforts to end requirements of undergoing psych evals and psychotherapy prior to hormones and surgeries.
The one major change in which accelerated this phenomenon in the US in 2010 was not the iPhone or social media but but was the Affordable Care Act,
Section 1557 which made paying for the diagnosis and treatment of gender-related pseudoscience a condition of being able to offer insurance in the US.
No queer studies group lobbied for that. And I’d psychiatry didn’t support it, it wouldnt be a medical condition.
The delusional shouldn’t define their condition, and the requirement for the world to pretend to recognize the delusion is real. Psychiatrists mandate this.
Astonishing. And, they get paid by insurers to do so!
Yes, you are right about the role of insurance coverage. I didn't know about the role of the ACA coverage---thanks for posting that history! Trans activists made insurance coverage a central goal of their lobbying efforts immediately after the "sexual reassignment surgeries" started achieving good cosmetic outcomes for male patients.
The American Psychiatric Association has been very influenced by radical cultural trends when it revises the DSM, and now the WHO is even more radical. The ongoing revisions in the gender identity diagnoses, now non-diagnoses, are blatantly not based in science.
I agree-biomedicalization has been an inter-disciplinary enterprise. In the UK and Holland it has been driven actually by clinical psychology (my profession) and the catastrophe of the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Clinic in London was led by psychologists not psychiatrists. The discussion here though is broadly in agreement that functional psychiatric diagnoses are all logically flawed and that psychiatry has had it fair share of 'great and desperate cures' (from John Bunyan on medical arrogance) from ECT and psychosurgery to anti-depressants and major tranquillizers.
I accept your point that psychiatry is the *original* source of “the problem” as you describe it, but I respectfully strongly disagree that it is the *only* source of the problem.
DEI / intersectionality / woke / Critical race theory oppressor-oppressed ideology that states that evil rich male Christian (and Jewish, where applicable) white capitalists are responsible for all evil - and little good - in the world, and that the BiPoC and/or LGBTQ+++ “oppressed” are justified in using *any* means at all to overthrow their “oppressors” is a *major* source of the problem.
This immoral ideology is also, e.g. the cause of about 50% of 18-24 year olds in this country (and no doubt a FAR higher percentage on college campuses) choosing “Back Hamas” (even when given 3 choices, including one to stay out of it) in the wake of the baby-decapitating, rapist murder and hostage rampage in Israel Oct 7th - and think themselves “virtuous” in the process.
This ideology is immoral, it is wrong, and it is dangerous. And IMO it very much is contributing to the issues we face here.
All that said, please be clear that I applaud Dr. Wright for the stand he has taken. He is doing important work.
I view it as a problem when a pseudoscience captures children and surgically and chemically extirpates their sexual organs. Don’t you? Simply because in some instances the child is and effeminate gay male and the father can’t tolerate it, with full cooperation of medicine.
The moment psychiatry halts the pseudoscience, you can’t get paid to recognize it.
There are no insured treatments: genital mutilation (treatment) becomes genital mutilation (abomination) like circumcision (utterly unnecessary).
That’s because the center of gravity shifts to saying the people _advocating_ the concepts of trans and gender are delusional. Until then, the people who _refuse_ to accept the psychiatric concepts are delusional, since we must accept psychiatry as the last word on human emotional and cognitive health.
The idea that those who oppose are delusional, all others are consistent with “medical best practice”. It’s the classic Catch-22 - only delusional people can say the situation is that of a delusion.
Here’s an example of what I mean: one major change which accelerated the trans this phenomenon in the US in 2010 was not the iPhone or social media but but was the Affordable Care Act,
Section 1557 which made paying for the diagnosis and treatment of gender-related condition of being able to offer insurance in the US.
It wasn’t a course on critical theory at Columbia, or postmodernism in Berkeley; it wasn’t GLAAD or Queer theory, or even trans activists shouting down women.
It was simply a lobby which introduced the idea that trans was a legitimate condition, gender treatment was a legitimate _billable_ concept and there you go.
“I view it as a problem when a pseudoscience captures children and surgically and chemically extirpates their sexual organs. Don’t you? ”
Of course I do, as I’ve made clear.
The difference between us is that you seem certain that this - problem and solution - is solely about psychiatry, with a little bit about Obamacare laws, while I believe whatever the initial cause, it is now primarily about activist woke leftist politics.
Psychiatry is the gatekeeping function.
Consider that psychiatric texts where taught “gender identity” throughout the US and Canada for decades - even after the principal pedagogical exponent Dr. John Money he was exposed as a scientific fraud in 2000, who committed surgical and psychological atrocities on children.
Decades of psychiatrists and other medical doctors are taught that gender is a real concept, that one can alter the sex of a child surgically and it will hold through life through based on a fraudulent “twin study” and “other studies” originated by at least one delusional physician.
All psychiatry has to do is
repudiate the concept of “gender identity” as a pseudoscience lacking any basis in reality
repudiate that sex can be changed surgically
Repudiate that children’s gendered behaviors can be altered through surgery or chemical castration
Repudiate that sex delusions can be treated by requiring that all other people globally accommodate the delusion
Repudiate the idea that surgical removal of sex organs for people who hate their organs is a legitimate treatment
That’s all.
Psychiatry hasn’t even unequivocally stated (well, meaningful American psychiatric groups) that homosexual sex behaviors cannot be extirpated.
Psychiatry going back 100 years or more preferred to “treat” homosexuals through castration and emasculation for them to “live as a woman”, and that was preferable to existing as a homosexual. Psychiatry in Nazi Germany, contemporary Iran, and those supporting “mermaids” and “Jazz Jennings” is fairly united.
The moment psychiatry grasps that the last 24 years have falsified the entire basis of their concepts suddenly the tide turns.
Delusional activists can howl all they want, but they don’t make medical diagnoses, treatments, and set laws.
Psychiatry lost all control when half the country’s states forbade psychiatric atrocities.
They can either get with the program or fold shop.
Again just for historical clarity, psychiatrists began the gatekeeping function for transsexualism in the 1970s but compassionate tolerance for the latter was mainly promoted initially in the 1960s by the sexologist and endocrinologist Harry Benjamin. His name went on the precursor of the WPATH guidelines. He was not a psychiatrist. Today the gate keeping role in the UK is ambiguous: it was from GPs and social workers but it keep shifting presumably it may vary from state to state in the USA. If you go on the CAN-SG website (a group I am member of) it contains many psychiatrists who are gender critical. I am glad that people on this blog are offering views on history, and in particular epistemology in its historical context. But to get that history correct the facts claimed need to be persuasive.
Critical Theory defines all categorization as a social construct. The idea of an objective physical category is completely rejected.
Queer Theory generally works to dismantle ANY category of "normal." Ironically, this is why they've gotten so homophobic lately: it's now normal and unremarkable to be in a same sex relationship.
Any "marginalized" category, of course, is sacred.
Fair enough. It is of course very convenient for the now authoritarian bullying left to get to not have anything be objective.
…including whether categorization is categorization 😏
But leftists and only leftists get to define who is “marginalized”.
Yup, and it's constantly shifting!
I use AIs to write books and one I came up with was the emergence of Satyrs and Maenads who celebrate pleasures of the flesh within their groups. A craze that spreads in the US and world.
The Maenads had to go underground because during the frenzied madness of their ecstatic journey they tended to rent the flesh and limbs off men to protect themselves. The Bacchae of Euripides.
Last few chapters are in the oven, one is a harvest festival in Sonoma, a naked Ted Talk, and a book tour by the founder.
Satyr and Maenad freedom!
Both were vigorously opposed by the rainies, the sad rainbow people who wished to sterilize everyone and deny everyone pleasure of the flesh, they wish to conform.
I sympathise with your frustration but for accuracy, identity politics is not only about the woke left. Many on the left are defying the absurdities of anti-realism and the ever elastic politics of recognition. For example most of the resistance to transgender ideology in the UK has come from second wave feminists and scientific realists who are left wing. Also the right expresses its own form of IP (Trumpism, Hindu nationalism, xenophobic Brexiteers etc). I have explored this ambiguity about the political spectrum presence of IP in my book 'Identity Politics: Where Did It All Go Wrong?'. Also note that key critics of the woke distortions on the left like Andrew Doyle still uphold values of the left. Nancy Fraser is another example from the USA.
“identity politics is not only about the woke left.”
As I am no expert about Europe, I will accept your assertion that THERE identity politics, and in particular what is going on re: trans “rights”, is not about the woke left. But your assertion is simply NOT true in the U.S.
Separately, Trumpism is NOT identity politics. I defy you to name the “identity” that is analogous to race, gender, religion, LGBTQ++ status to which it supposedly applies. You cannot do it. It is NOT. AT. ALL the same thing. And as you well know, a part of it - but only a part - is an explicit reaction to woke policies that seek to divide and create a spoils system based on identity.
And I do know enough about Europe to know that while there is zero doubt that *some* of the Brexiteers are just xenophobic white nationalists, most are not. So if your claim is that Brexiteers are an identity group (unclear from your comment, but very strongly implied), then I am forced to conclude that even for Europe your assertion is wrong, as there are very many Brexiteers who value freedom and are not white nationalists.
Re: your last point, yes there are indeed a precious few who identify as left (almost exclusively older people, most of whom either do not realize that they are voting for il-liberals when they continue to vote for the leftist Dem Party in the U.S., or do and undercut much of their own criticism when they do) who criticize woke. Bill Maher is another one. But their voices have been completely drowned out in the U.S., and in particular have zero influence in Dem party policy today.
It is so annoying that you, Colin, have to say this over and over and over again, and still there people who, for their own reasons, fail to understand this simple truth. Good job.
Intersex, Kleinfelter, other conditions are biological errors. They are not normal. They are failures of production. Freaks. Just need to get it out.
I've followed your work for years and am grateful for it. Clear, articulate, de-emotionalized (mostly). But sometimes I wish someone with your depth of knowledge would write a piece that is less defensive, less reactive to activists. I understand you need to argue against their flawed reasoning and faulty science. But most people who have come to me with sincere questions about this issue are neither scientists nor activists. They are people who want to demonstrate goodwill and support their communities in meaningful ways. I can point them to your work (and I do) or to Carole Hooven's work -- both a bit science-heavy but you can't avoid that, I think, and I can guide them through it. But your work is so focused on overcoming activist traps that unless the person seeking information is aware of the activist traps and has processed them, I don't think it helps them as much as it could.
At the risk of being presumptuous, I would love to see an essay that conveys exactly the above information, but more from the perspective of a genuine seeker in need of guidance who comes without some of the activist baggage. I could see it structured as: These are the things you might have thought or felt as you have seen discussions of gender issues in the news or in popular culture and I'm here to add the science to your thoughts so you can develop a helpful understanding of these things. The list might include things like: 1) You are worried about the mental health of the trans/queer/nonbinary kids in your community and have been told dire things about their outcomes if they aren't recognized and supported from an early age; 2) You know someone whose gender is biologically ambiguous and feel compelled to support trans rights movements in support of them; 3) You wonder whether the new gender curriculum at your kids school is really helpful or accurate but don't want to raise concerns you don't have the science background to support; 4) You have been told that puberty blockers and other medical interventions are completely reversible so you figure it's okay to err on the side of intervention since it can't hurt; 5) You feel it's hurtful to exclude any trans or trans-identifying or any gender-ambiguous person from competing in sports but also worry about what that does to girls and can't decide how to feel about it... And the list of conversations I've been party to goes on.
It's my experience that all of these questions can be sincerely motivated. People with these questions or concerns don't seem to have a reliable place to turn to disentangle their desire to be a good person from the few things they're hearing. Activists on both sides play to their desire to be good people but don't take the time to provide genuine information that could help. The number of times I've shared even basic facts with people and had them respond with, "Why have I never heard this?" saddens me, but I guess it's part of the general lack of informed discourse that will always be with us. Anyway, not really intending to tell you how to do what you do, you got it covered. But an amazing primer on how someone with questions like this can answer them would fill a gap in the discussion, imho.
Really excellent comment that clearly describes the position taken by all of the well-intentioned Democrats I talk to about "trans" issues. I second your request for Dr. Wright or someone with his expertise to come up with a manual to guide our conversations with the aforementioned people.
Thanks James-you have raised a really important question about the right to disagree running alongside the need to negotiate around strongly held differences of opinion. Beneath the stand off between gender critics and TRAs is a fundamental metaphysical gap. One side has a foundational commitment to ontological realism and the other does not but, instead, has conflated ontology and epistemology. Even beyond (or beneath)the challenge of scientific complexity, re the ontology of sex to get over to newcomers, is this gap. Foucault and Queer Theorists like Butler and Rubin, in the wake of Nietzsche, have left us with the politics and ethics of identity. Our challenge is to dissect the flaws in their anti-realism, while engaging with the good intentions of a generation genuinely hoping to be kind and tolerant to advance social progress and peaceful coexistence of all citizens. This is a tough strategic challenge given the incommensurability of realist and anti-realist arguments. I tend to start with engaging with them about the good sense of older deontological and utilitarian ethics to show that the ethics of recognition are not the only game in town, It works a bit sometimes.....
I'll say it again and again, the trans movement is rooted in homophobia and mysgiony. Move over gals, make room for the men. Thanks to Joe Biden and his leftward lurch Title IX has now been amended to include "gender identity". So basically men are now protected under the law to parade around as women naked in a women's spa/shower room/gym where biological women and children attend. Makes me sick.
Only in one sense does he have a point, which, as Churchill said about fanatics, causes him to redouble his efforts when he's forgotten his aim. "Body plan organized to produce gametes of one type or the other" does not strictly apply to some non-mammalian species that are undifferentiated as to body plan in early life and can morph into one sex or another depending on temperature of rearing or other social factors. (I'm not a fish biologist so forgive me any errors please and I have no idea how this works.) In these species, a pre-sexual body plan cannot be identified as to what gametes the individual could eventually make because it could make either, depending.
This obviously does not apply to mammals including people who have a recognizable body plan from long before birth that predicts with 100% accuracy *which type* of gamete that individual will eventually make. Of course not all individuals actually make gametes -- infertile males are legion but no *man* produces ova. No person who is XX makes spermatozoa and no person who is XY makes ova.
If we did decide to call pre-pubertal children and post-menopausal women sexless it would play havoc with vital statistics departments. This is not a trivial objection. Vital stats are really important. That transgender people can alter them is a scandal in itself. Children would be recorded as "U" at birth -- there would be no point in having the category because they would all be "U"-- and only when they became sex-competent could they go back and put a sex on their birth certificates. It would be a ritual of adolescence, like first communion, first drivers licence, first kiss, and the trip to the vital statistics registry to formally register your sex. And can you imagine? The kids would quickly catch on that all the functionaries behind the wickets know the reason they were here was because they'd had their first period or their first nocturnal emission....because how else can you tell if gametes are finally in play? Cringe if you've ever been 12 or 13.
And the poor woman in her 40s-50s would have to go in and whisper to the clerk: "I'm here to unsex myself because I'm in the change of life."
Steersman's shtick is that body plan is an arbitrary patch to make Colin's theory hold together and is not supported by standard biology textbooks. He thinks society would be better organized if these "U" people were all regarded as larval or senescent clownfish. I'm running with it to show how absurd the idea actually is.
We call a flying object an airplane when it’s not aloft, we call a car a car when it has no wheel. Pointing out that newborn females have all the eggs try will ever have stumped him, and similar for males. Not
Ovulating and not spermagenitatinf (is that a word)
Are no more disqualifications for sexual as grounded airplanes and cars. Not worth debating
Analogies aren’t arguments. All someone has to do is point out that cars and airplanes don’t have sex and the whole argument fails, so best not to use them. Since we can recognize differences in children that predict what their sex roles will be when they grow up — we can teach boys what it means *for them* when they become men, likewise with girls -> women — it is sensible to regard those anatomical differences as sex differences even though neither is making mature gametes. And post-gametic women continue to be women just because we say they are. I don’t think you have to invoke human dignity to say that. Even in cultures that treat women with very little dignity still know that a post-menopausal woman, or even a “barren” woman, is a woman.
Girls are of course born with oocytes that do not multiply during life, only ripen beginning at puberty. Boys not quite the same because they have to proliferate the precursor cells to make a new batch of spermatozoa each time and that doesn’t happen until puberty. But gamete precursor cells still count as gametes because they come from specialized cells found in only one type of organ, a gonad, which is different in the two sexes whether gametes are being made or not. I don’t care if not all life forms use the same system. All people do. It’s sophistry to argue otherwise.
(This isn’t directed at you as much as at Steersman.)
To whom you are attracted sexually is purely subjective and therefore cannot reasonably be contested by an outside observer.
Where you decide to live your life on a spectrum of superficial, stereotypical male to female attributes (and we all do) is also purely subjective and similarly cannot be questioned.
However, your biological sex reflects an objective reality which cannot be changed by your subjective personal view and futile attempts to do so can result in serious health impacts to you as well as harms to members of the sex you are impersonating (primarily women).
Others who are grounded in objective reality should never be forced to accept your subjective version of your actual biological sex.
Finally, it's past time for the LGB community to separate themselves from the trans activists who are trying to take away the rights of women to fairness in sports and to privacy and safety in their restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. They also advocate for the chemical and surgical mutilation of children many of whom would grow up gay.
Their actions are evil and the
understandable negative reaction to the harm they are causing is spilling over to innocent people who are just going about their business, marrying and leading their lives.
Thank you, I will keep this as a resource and re-read when needed. Seems like chromosomes- XY, or the presence of a Y chromosome- is the best single way we currently have to identify males. Birth certificates have been irreparably gamed and are no longer useful for this purpose.
The "intersex trap" is one of the best concepts I have read on this Substack, thank you, and I have found it helps enormously in discussions on gender. Now, when someone accuses, "What about intersex people?" I can just say, "What do they have to do with Lia Thomas?" Thows off the opposition every time because, at the end of the day, they don't really know what an intersex condition is.
Every person, one mother, one father, sex binary. Eight words. Prove me wrong.
That’s all I say now when the topic comes up - so I say when challenged that every living person is the product of a “sex binary” - exactly one woman who was the mother, and exactly one man who was the father - prove me wrong, show me someone who was not the product of one woman and one man.
Then they go bwa-bwa-bwa and stop arguing.
When I speak of ova and sperm, I can see the lights going off, or speaking of gametes. Too complicated.
One mom, one dad. That’s the binary.
How does the author classify the individuals embroiled in the boxing controversy? Which binary do they represent. If chromosomes can't be used to clarify/classify sex (outliers included) especially when it comes to pursuits like boxing, is there some other better determinant? It appears "looking up ones skirt" just doesn't cut it.
The two athletes in question clearly enjoy many of the performance advantages resulting from going through male puberty.
I will be dying on the hill that complete AIS are women. Female is default, and masculinization is the process of making females. Androgen receptor is necessary for this process. No receptor means female.
It is commonly assumed that sex has always been listed on birth certificates and passports, when in fact this is not the case. I recall my mother was annoyed for some reason that her birth certificate did not list her sex (she was born in Buffalo, NY in 1923; like most states, NYS did not list sex). At least in America and Britain, sex designation did not appear on passports until the last few decades. Other than as an aid to curious statisticians, it is not clear what objective purpose these designations serve, but they seem important emotionally to many people.
The Honest Broker (who I usually like), throws mud into the ring ... https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-olympic-war-over-women