Social Vectors, Part 1: Transgenderism

     A few tangential words before I leap into the tirade that’s about to burst forth: I rise early in the morning: typically between 4:30 AM and 5:00 AM. My first truly conscious act is to sit down to Cyclops (my beloved Dell Optiplex 580 computer) and scan the news for spleen fuel. On some mornings I find a great deal that deserves a written reflection; on others, the news is entirely stale and uninteresting. Today was a morning of the former sort. After only half an hour’s work I’d added nine links to my “Future columns” list.

     Sounds like an “Assorted” piece is coming, doesn’t it? But no: the cloud of psychons swirling in my cerebrum decided to engage totally with one particular entry. The others must await their time...and that time might never come.

     I’m blathering about this for a reason. On any given morning the email is likely to present notes from a handful of Gentle Readers who have subjects to suggest for future pieces. They’re nearly always worthy suggestions. Yet I seldom actually adopt any of them. I simply can’t get them to engage with any of my current concerns and thoughts.

     So if you’re one of the Gentle Readers who’s sent me such material and have wondered why I haven’t addressed it, please be assured that: 1) I’m grateful for your suggestion, and 2) it’s no fault of yours that I haven’t written about it. It’s just a quirk of my mental machinery. Somewhere in my subconscious, there’s an Editor-in-Chief who decides my blathering priorities for me. So far I’ve proved powerless to overrule him.

     And with that, it’s on to today’s helping of bile.

---

     Courtesy of the indispensable Mike Hendrix, we have this observation about the transgender phenomenon:

     Eight trannies elected to office in one night? That’s good. Only two of them now identify as men? That’s bad—especially if one wants to pretend that gender is fluid. If one even dares to notice a firm statistical pattern that the roaring majority of trannies are men who claim they’re women, one risks subverting the entire Tranny Gospel. If, as the case seems to be nearly everywhere worldwide, the overwhelming majority of people who desire to change their sex are men who seek refuge in womanhood, this might suggest that our current cultural climate offers very few perks for men and plenty for women....

     Studies in Europe from the 1980s and 1990s found that when it comes to declaring you’re not the “gender you were assigned at birth,” men chose to become women at anywhere from 2.3 to 4 times the clip that women chose to become men. A study in England from the 1970s found that men chose to be women three times as often as women decided to be men....

     I strongly suspect that the current tranny mania which infects and clogs up so much of our popular discussion does not represent some new, bold, post-gender frontier in human development. If it did, the genders would be swapping genitals at an almost equal rate. But since it’s almost entirely male-to-female, I sense it’s nothing more than a cultural reaction to the fact that in the current climate, there’s almost nothing good about being a man.

     The author of the article, Jim Goad, is known for speaking his mind without concern for who might profess to be “offended” by it. The source, Taki’s Magazine, has a similar reputation. Such outlets are valuable. Far too many persons are unwilling to speak of their perceptions or convictions for fear of a backlash. Perhaps they remember Galileo and “Eppur si muove” too vividly.

---

     A while back, pricked by having made the acquaintance of two transwomen who struck me as well balanced and generally happy, I resolved to investigate the trend as deeply as possible. I happened upon patterns that struck me as highly significant.

     Before I go into those patterns, allow me to remind you that I was of the opinion that transgenderism is an indication of a mental disorder. I still believe that to be so about most persons who claim they were “born into the wrong body.” Therapists who’ve made a specialty of counseling and treating such persons report that about three out of every four such clients eventually presents an underlying emotional problem of which the claim of transgenderism was merely a symptom. Dealing successfully with the underlying problem, they asserted, could dispose of the impulse to change sex.

     However, be it duly noted that those therapists also asserted that in about one case out of every four, a sex change was the only possible alleviation of the client’s unhappiness.

     I’m not a mental health professional. (I try to avoid them; most of them are completely BLEEP!ing crazy, and such persons frighten me.) But when such a person makes such a declaration, I allow him the presumption of sincerity and his statement the presumption of veracity. I’m neither so knowledgeable nor so arrogant that I’ll dismiss the contentions of others simply because they clash with my preconceptions. So I decided to investigate.

     Here are the patterns I found:

• A very large majority (perhaps as many as 90%, though the statistics are incomplete) of sex changes are from male to female.
• Among male-to-female transgenders, the self-perception of inadequacy as a man was prevalent, and was often reinforced by factors in their surroundings.
• Male-to-female transgenders almost uniformly pursue femininity, often extreme femininity, in appearance, dress, and deportment.
• A surprising number of men, including some extremely masculine men, found them to be more attractive and sexually appealing than biological women of their acquaintance.

     These are strong patterns that deserve to be explored for their causal connections.

---

     No one wants to be thought incompetent, inadequate, or unattractive. The demonstration of that claim approaches tautology. Alongside that, no one wants to believe – or to be told – that his personal preferences and tastes are somehow “wrong.”

     Many persons eventually make their peace with being mediocre...but not everyone does. Many persons eventually settle for less than they want, especially as regards love, sex, and long-term partnership...but not everyone does.

     That this has been on my mind lately shouldn’t surprise readers of my fiction. But the causal vectors it suggests don’t get enough attention from most of us, including most of us who comment on the sociocultural scene.

     In a society where both traditional masculinity and traditional femininity have been under sustained attack by vicious, well mobilized forces, the emergence of a socially tolerated “escape” from the pressures was bound to attract a substantial number of dissatisfied, interested persons. “Inadequate” men tired of being treated as inferiors would see transgenderism as such an escape. Masculine men tired of the ravings of “angry ugly girls” and the gradual disappearance of the feminine virtues might find themselves attracted to persons who actively seek to be feminine even though born male. To attain what they seek, both groups would need resolve, perseverance, and the willingness to accept certain compromises.

     No, neither all inclinations to “transition” nor all inclinations among men toward romantic or sexual involvement with transwomen arise from those vectors. However, they go a long way toward explaining why the prevalence of transitions is from male to female, especially in our current legal and social climate of “anything goes.”

     Cole Porter didn’t know the half of it.

---

     The above presents some obvious implications, most of which are so obvious that I shan’t bother to enumerate them. However, one stands out above the rest: the relative impotence of parental reassurance to the teenage boy who feels himself to be incompetent, inadequate, and / or unattractive as a man. The parents of such a teen would be swimming against the currents, unlikely to persuade Junior to see himself other than as his peer group does. All they can do is praise him for his objective talents and skills, and hope for the best. The hope might be vague, given current trends and conditions, but it’s all they have.

     I continue to believe, as I noted here, that the majority of gender-transitions have net-undesirable consequences: specifically, the transitioned individual is less happy and less successful than he was previously. But that’s not an argument for banning the practice. Neither is it an argument that no one would ever improve his life and its conditions through a transition. Yet the sociocultural factors that propel many such individuals to the most radical imaginable step they might ever take, short of committing murder, should be closely scrutinized...and fought.

     More anon.