Getting Lost in the Crowd

Or, How the Big Tent Transgender Movement Distorts Science and Holds Back Civil Rights for Transsexuals

The word “transgender” was originally coined and used by Dr. Virginia Prince, a full time autogynephilic cross-dresser, in the early ’70s, to denote those like her/him as opposed to “transsexuals” who took hormones and had “sex change” surgery and also opposed to secretive “transvestites” who only occasionally cross-dressed, usually in private.  The term was meant to be exclusive of any other group, like drag artists or gender atypical gays or lesbians.

But…

In the early ’90s, Beth Elliott, using her nom de plume Mustang Sally, wrote an essay entitled, “The Incredible Shrinking Identity” in which she decried the social effects of subsuming transsexual people into the larger umbrella of “transgender”, which with each passing year seemed to be growing at its margins to include more and more people who just a few years before, would never have been considered to be in the same grouping.  Now we must differentiate between an ever growing host of self-defined “other” gender categories and underlying behaviors, identities that are lumped under “transgender” to the point of making the term meaningless to sexologists, social scientists, and the public alike.

Flashback, 1980:  Hanging out in the L.A. transsexual community, as it gained a political self awareness, was a teenager; let’s call her “Lee”.  Lee would tell anyone who asked that she was “transsexual”… yet caused great confusion to all who met her.  She was natal female, short even for a woman, pleasantly plump, and decidedly feminine in both appearance and manner.  She was in no sense gender atypical.  And during the time that I knew her, over 18 months, she never made any attempt to present as a man, nor even as butch.  She was always on the femmy side of androgenous to the point of being decidedly “cute” as she hung out, mostly with younger MTF transwomen whom she seemed to admire.  Had she been hanging out in this same manner in the gay male scene, they would have likely labeled her a “Fag Hag”.  The transsexual community, while leery of non-trans males who would have acted this way, affectionately accepted Lee’s non-threatening presence, while secretly rolling their eyes when she declared that she was “FtM”.

Thinking back on Lee, I’m fairly certain that she never transitioned and I’m willing to place fairly high odds that she married and had kids, probably now has grandchildren, none of which have any idea that she once hung out in the trans-scene.  At the time, we had no label for her.  Today, on the internet, the FtM transsexual community does have a label that would have applied, “tucute”, as in “Too Cute” to be trans.  If you visit the FtM pages on Tumbler, you are sure to run into a few… and will also note that they in turn, grumble about the negative feedback they get from those they call “Truscum” (“true” masculine gynephilic FtM transsexuals) for not accepting that they too are just as “trans”, even if they are in no sense gender atypical nor gender dysphoric.

Recent Events:  A couple years ago, via her facebook page, a very socially liberal, rather prominent (and wealthy) venture capitalist in my professional circle proudly announced that her teenaged child was “transgender”.  I’ve been living “mostly stealth” in that most of my professional contacts do not know of my medical history (yes, I “pass”).  But in a move to be supportive and perhaps even help her with the emotional issues that almost always come with a child’s transition I came out to her.  BAD MOVE!  Nope, upon learning more about her child, it became very clear that her daughter had always been very gender typical as a girl, was not the least bit gender dysphoric, and had no intention of legally, socially, nor medically transitioning.  No, she just wanted to be recognized as “transgender” and have everyone around her use gender neutral pronouns (cause she is they are so special, she they deserves it).

There is another couple names for this behavior, “TransTrender” and “TrendsGender”, as in it is now “trendy” to say that one is transgender, or “non-binary”, in the right circles.    Back in my college years, hanging around Stanford University, I would often hear complaints from actual gynephilic women, real lesbians, about the phenomena of primarily androphilic women taking social positions as “Political Lesbians” and “Lesbians Until Graduation”.  The “transgender” community now has the same phenomena.  It seems to have become “cool” in some comfortably well off, very socially liberal teenaged and young adult circles to be associated with the LGB and now T community, as though being associated with a marginalized group made up for their obvious social privilege.

One could well imagine the growing resentment felt by those of us who have experienced familial rejection, social disapprobation, economic deprivation, and psychic pain from a lifetime of gender atypicality and dysphoria towards those who misappropriate an identity from the protective cocoon of indulgent family, liberal universities, and the anonymity of the internet.

As one young transman put it,

“Dysphoria is the defining factor of a transgender person. It’s why they want to TRANSition. It’s why they’re called TRANS in the first place, fuckwits. It doesn’t have to be crippling “I hate my body ugh I can’t look at myself naked” (And I do know some trans people whose dysphoria is that bad). On a 10 is an “I can’t see myself naked” to 1 is a “I don’t feel right in this body”, I’m probably a 5-7. I can see myself naked but it just doesn’t feel right. Specially with my chest. That’s dysphoria. Not “omg I don’t want to be human I want to be a rabbit/sunflower/magical girl” or whatever these tucutes are on I don’t even know.   …

The more I look at it, the more I see tucutes acting like being transgender is a cute little accessory they can put on. You’re comfy with your body but you like girls even if you’re a girl yourself? Congratulations, you could be a lesbian. You like boys but you’re a boy? Good on you, you might be a homosexual man. You like the opposite gender? That makes you a terrible hetero person and that’s bad because all hetero people are transphobic and evil. 😦 Be trans instead. That’s cooler.

Except… it’s not.

It’s not cool to be trans. It’s not cool to wake up and see these parts of you that you feel so uncomfortable with having that you would wish cancer on yourself just to have them taken away. It’s not cool to have to struggle with the longing to tell your parents that you’re not the right gender because you want to trust them and want to open up to them but you’re afraid it’ll just add to the laundry list of things you’ve already disappointed them with. It’s not cool to have known you were one thing from birth but everyone else and your own body telling you you’re not and that you were supposed to be a certain way because that’s what you looked like from the outside.

It’s not cool to be trans.

If I had a choice, if being trans WAS a choice I would choose to be cis.”

If these issues had stayed on the pages of tumbler and facebook, it wouldn’t be a problem for science or those seeking better civil rights for transitioning transfolk.  But it hasn’t.

Consider a recent paper published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence in which the authors very laudably explore the issues of safety and bathroom access for “transgender” youth.  Ah… you are probably anticipating some of the problems that this might entail and you would be right.  But let’s explore each of them carefully.

The authors cite the now popular William’s estimate of 0.7% of the population in the US as “transgendered”.  The problem with that study is that is the number who identify as “transgendered” because William’s did not apply any operational definition beyond asking if they were “transgendered”. Yet we know that only 0.01% of the U.S. population has actually socially transitioned, according to US Census study that cross-correlated with name/sex status changes to Social Security cards (arguably the absolute best estimate we will ever get to the number of individuals who actually transitioned).  This means that less than 5% of those who identify as “transgender” ever transition.  Thus, by definition, more than 95% of those who identify as “transgender” never transition, that in fact, they aren’t at all gender dysphoric.  So who are they?

Most of them are young women who for various reasons want to sit at what they perceive to be the ‘cool kids lunch table’, as being “trans” or “non-binary” gives them a feeling of being special.  We should talk about both the psychology and the politics of non-gender dysphoric / non-gender atypical people , mostly teenaged girls and young women, claiming a “trans” and especially now days, a “non-binary” identity.  It must be hard on lonely straight folks seeing LGBT Pride celebrations and wishing that they too could be part of something larger than themselves, where they can be accepted and feel ‘loved’ by so many others, all at once.  Who wouldn’t want to be part of that?  Oh, and add into the mix the frisson of being a rebel, joining a cause, resisting homophobia and transphobia?  It’s every teen’s dream; They aren’t just some dissaffected youth, they are special and have a right to be angry with the world.

How badly off are the numbers?  In the Wernick study they found 86 individuals who self-identified as transgendered out of 935 students.  Seriously, 9%?  NINE &^%$#@ percent?!?  That’s more than three hundred times the number who actually transition.  That’s higher than the number of teens who grow up to be gay or lesbian.  Are all of the LGB kids claiming to be “transgendered”???  Or is this representative of all LGB plus all of the secretly cross-dressing and cross-dreaming boys plus the TuCutes and the TransTrenders, all balled into one?  Because, if the schools were statistically representative of the population as a whole, with only a thousand or so students, we could only expect a one in three chance of finding an actual transsexual among them, most likely an autogynephile who will transition as an adult and only one in fifteen chance of finding a transkid.

The design of this study was flawed from inception, as the numbers surveyed were never enough to find any statistically valid number of transkids, while using self report of being “transgendered” without a valid operational definition lead only to a measure of the trendiness of the label in the teenaged population combined with “mischievous responders”, kids saying ‘shit’ to mess with the study.

Transkids after transition

So we see, that truly gender atypical and gender dysphoric individuals will be a very small percentage of youth who will self-identify as “transgender”.  These are the kids who social scientists and policy makers should be concerned with, not those who have yet to transition or never will.  These are the kids who, while finding more and more visibility in the press as they transition, are the ones who are getting lost in the crowd in social science studies and policy making because of the failure to apply appropriate operational definitions.

Addendum September 2020:  Here is THE poster child for a young, clearly feminine white woman falsely claiming to be both a Person Of Color AND to being trans / non-binary, demonstrating the problem discussed above.  Note that she did this at a liberal university to take on the mantle of being a doubly under-privileged individual.  Vitolo-Haddad was outed on the ethnic impersonation.  Here I am outing her on her trans impersonation.  She needs to stop doing it and apologize for it.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/09/17/us/wisconsin-grad-student-race-trnd/index.html

Further Reading:

Essay on “How Many Transfolk Are There, Really?”

Essay on US Census Estimate of Post-Transition Population

Falsely Claiming To Be “Trans” is Cool (NOT!)

Is The Non-Binary Fad Ready To Fade?

External Further Reading:

“Tucute: What it is and why its wrong”

Research on “Mischievous Responders” causing over-estimate of transgender in teenagers

References:

Wernick, et Al, “Gender Identity Disparities in Bathroom Safety and Wellbeing in High School Students”, Journal of Youth and Adolescence
DOI: 10.1007/s10964-017-0652-1

Sumia et Al, “Current and recalled childhood gender identity in community youth in comparison to referred adolescents seeking sex reassignment”, Journal of Adolescence
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140197117300155

Joseph R. Cimpian, Jennifer D. Timmer, Michelle A. Birkett, Rachel L. Marro, Blair C. Turner, Gregory L. Phillips II, “Bias From Potentially Mischievous Responders on Large-Scale Estimates of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Questioning (LGBQ)–Heterosexual Youth Health Disparities”, American Journal of Public Health 108, no. S4 (November 1, 2018): pp. S258-S265. DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2018.304407

Goodman, M. et al., “Prevalence of Transgender Depends on the “Case” Definition: A Systematic Review” (2016) The Journal of Sexual Medicine
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsxm.2016.02.001

Reisner, S., Hughto, J., “Comparing the health of non-binary and binary transgender adults in a statewide non-probability sample” PLOSOne, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0221583