{"id":15526,"date":"2022-07-13T15:50:58","date_gmt":"2022-07-13T21:50:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=15526"},"modified":"2022-07-13T15:50:58","modified_gmt":"2022-07-13T21:50:58","slug":"do-trans-people-exist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/do-trans-people-exist\/","title":{"rendered":"Do trans people exist?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"750\" height=\"422\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/uU7nzwbJ-Hk?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>There&#8217;s this video clip currently making the rounds where Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) confronts a crazy-eyed law professor from Berkely and gets called out for, among other things, saying that trans people &#8220;don&#8217;t exist.&#8221; It&#8217;s a highly partisan exchange that I&#8217;m sure will be used by both sides to rally the base, but it also gets at the fundamental incoherence of the modern LGBTQ+ movement, which I find absolutely fascinating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>First of all, it&#8217;s worth examining the accusation that Hawley doesn&#8217;t think that trans people &#8220;exist.&#8221; What exactly does that accusation mean? It can actually mean one (or both) of two things:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>The category of &#8220;trans&#8221; is not (or should not be) a legitimate identity for legal and societal purposes.<\/li><li>People who identify as &#8220;trans&#8221; should be un-personed and deprived of all their basic human rights.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s extremely disingenuous of the professor to conflate those things, because it is entirely possible to believe the former without believing the latter: that is, to believe that &#8220;trans&#8221; as a category is illegitimate while also acknowledging that people who identify as &#8220;trans&#8221; are still people and deserving of basic human rights. Also, it&#8217;s disingenuous of her to argue that denying &#8220;trans&#8221; as a category causes people who identify as &#8220;trans&#8221; to commit suicide, as the suicide rate for transgender people is the same after they transition as it is before they transition. But I digress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The thing that makes this interesting, at least to me, is that if you follow the professor&#8217;s logic to its conclusion, it actually undermines the fundamental premise of the gay rights movement: that gays, lesbians, and bisexuals didn&#8217;t choose to be gay, but in fact were &#8220;born this way.&#8221; Allow me to explain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At first, the argument was &#8220;I didn&#8217;t choose to be gay, I was born this way.&#8221; Thus the concept of sexual identity was born, with categories for heterosexual, homosexual (gay\/lesbian), and bisexual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then, the argument was &#8220;I&#8217;m a man\/woman who was born in a woman&#8217;s\/man&#8217;s body.&#8221; In other words, that gender and sex are separate things, and it is possible to identify with a gender that is different than your sex. Thus, the concept of gender identity was born, and with it the category of transgender.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At this point, it&#8217;s important to point out that the &#8220;born this way&#8221; argument still held sway. The idea wasn&#8217;t that trans people <em>choose<\/em> to change gender, but that they were, in fact, born in the wrong body. Thus the distinction between sex and gender.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But once the trans category was added to the movement, transforming it into LGBT, that created a major epistemological problem for its members: how do you know which category you belong to? That is, how do you know whether you&#8217;re actually a gay man, or really a woman in a man&#8217;s body? You can&#8217;t be both. You were either born one way, or you were born the other. So which one is it, and how do you know?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is where the movement began to fall apart, because there is no objective way to tell the difference between gay\/lesbian and trans. It&#8217;s entirely subjective. And once we allowed that, suddenly we got a bunch of people saying things like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;What if I feel like a man today, and a woman tomorrow?&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;What if I don&#8217;t feel like a man OR a woman?&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;What if I feel like I&#8217;m actually a cat, or a wolf?&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;What if I feel like I&#8217;m a totally different gender\/sexual category that none of y&#8217;all have imagined yet?&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And suddenly, just like that, the &#8220;born this way&#8221; argument was completely undermined, because if gender and sexuality are subjective, then it can be whatever you want it to be. Which is how we got personal bios like <a href=\"https:\/\/escape-artists.fandom.com\/wiki\/Serah_Eley\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"https:\/\/escape-artists.fandom.com\/wiki\/Serah_Eley\">this one:<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Serah Eley is a software developer and former podcaster who once produced a weekly science fiction podcast called Escape Pod. It\u2019s since gone on to become somewhat successful. She strangely mispronounced her name as Steve Eley at the time; she\u2019s since realized that life is much more fun as a woman, and came out as transgender last year. Serah lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her two wives, Alison and Cat.<\/p><p>So if there were ever any betting pools on what happened to Steve: changed sex, joined a committed lesbian love triangle is the dark horse winner. She is, obviously, still Having Fun.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>So gender is something you can change on a whim because it&#8217;s &#8220;more fun&#8221;? That doesn&#8217;t sound at all like Serah was &#8220;born this way.&#8221; It sounds a lot more like &#8220;reality is whatever I want it to be.&#8221; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But if sexuality and gender are all subjective, the entire premise that the movement was originally built upon\u2014that LGBT people are &#8220;born this way&#8221;\u2014is completely false, and the &#8220;born this way&#8221; argument is outdated at best, and at worst was a Trojan Horse for the LGBTQ+ agenda from the very beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Either way, by the standards of this Berkeley professor, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals &#8220;don&#8217;t exist.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Just like man and woman &#8220;don&#8217;t exist.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Just like objective reality doesn&#8217;t &#8220;exist.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because biological sex, &#8220;born this way&#8221; arguments, and objective reality itself are all fundamentally transphobic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s where you get if you follow the LGBTQ+ logic to its ultimate conclusion. The fundamental premises on which the movement is based are totally incoherent and self-contradictory. It&#8217;s remarkable, really, because the language the movement uses is not all that different from the Orwellian doublespeak of <em>1984.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But hey, I&#8217;ve also been reliably informed that reason and logic are all just constructs of white supremacy, so obviously that means that professor crazy-eyes is right and there&#8217;s nothing to see here. Move along. Move along.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s this video clip currently making the rounds where Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) confronts a crazy-eyed law professor from Berkely and gets called out for, among other things, saying that trans people &#8220;don&#8217;t exist.&#8221; It&#8217;s a highly partisan exchange that I&#8217;m sure will be used by both sides to rally the base, but it also&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/do-trans-people-exist\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Do trans people exist?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[841,364,1204,1597,414,1604,1603,599,1569],"class_list":["post-15526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-841","tag-culture","tag-culture-wars","tag-lgbt","tag-politics","tag-serah-eley","tag-steve-eley","tag-thoughts-reflections","tag-transgenderism","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-42q","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15526"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15527,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15526\/revisions\/15527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}