Transgender? Sex, Sexuality, Orientation and Gender
'Transgender' is a catch-all term that is used, today, to include all forms of 'Gender Non-Conformity' or (better) 'Sex Non-Conformity'. These are expressions in which individuals, for a variety of reasons, reject the social norms of dress and behaviour. Most 'transgenders' in the West today are in fact expressing fashionable youthful rebellion, just as hippies, punks, New Romantics and Emos did, in their turn.
However, there are some for whom this is a much deeper issue. Individuals of one sex who wish to appear to be and even live as a member of the opposite sex, do exist, although the numbers are hard to pin down.
To understand this, we need to quickly recap on sex, sexuality and gender.
Sex
Sex is a reproductive system in which individuals of one sex produce small, highly motile gametes and those of the other, large, immotile ones. We call the former male and the latter female. Which one you are is defined at conception, when one of each of
What are your thoughts on China?
I’ve noticed that the men tend towards feminine and the women tend toward masculine.
Could be a consequence of Communism
Dear Rod:
I’ve stumbled onto the transgender issue recently and found your information very enlightening, thank you for being generous and sharing it. I have a couple of questions that may interest you. Firstly I’m not a native English speaker and my first reaction to the “gender” concept was actually confusion since my native language is slavonic and they simply don’t have a word for it (they clumsily label the concept “psychic sex”). On the surface it appears that English is quite rare in having the distinction so it occurred to me that this may be connected with the current runaway phenomenon being largely confined to the Anglosphere.
Furthermore have you considered the current trans-wave is an instance of a culture bound syndrome such as koro or amok? As a writer with serious experiece in Asian cultures I wonder if you have any insights on these dynamics.
Hi Greg. ‘Psychic Sex’ was actually the term used by English speaking researchers until sometime in the early 20th century.
The current runaway phenomenon I don’t believe to be due to that, however, but to the toxic influence of feminism. This is especially so in non-homosexual female-to-masculine presentations and transition. Girls are taught that gender and even sex are ‘just social constructs’ when sex is obviously physical and gender is obviously innate; they are taught that they are ‘oppressed’ because they are women, when Western women are the most privileged group in human society, anywhere; and they are led to believe that ‘changing their sex’ can end all that ‘oppression’. So they line up for GRS and have their bodies and lives ruined. This form is overwhelmingly the largest part of the current uptick certainly in the UK, which does actually keep figures. It’s a fad, but one that destroys lives. IMO it is far more dangerous than, say, heroin.
As far as Male-to-feminine is concerned, there is some uptick in the non-homosexual form, which probably derives from the feminist demeaning of masculinity but that which is occurring in the homosexual form is the result of the repression which was formerly in place being lifted. This is actually positive, since it is a far better outcome for a male Sexual Invert to be a woman than to fall into the gaping Hellmouth of the New Gay Man meat market.
In terms of the non-homosexual FtM yes, there is a clear relationship between this and the social psychoses you mention and also to latah, compulsive screaming syndrome. It is a social contagion. The non-homosexual MtF has been called ‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria’ and I did a piece on it a while back. Bit it’s not really Gender Dysphoria, in my opinion, because there is no sexual element. It is an identitarian fad. It is also related to the bulimia outbreak of the late 90s and the ‘past life recall’ psychosis of the decade before. which now feeds ‘early life abuse memories’ most of which are imaginary.
Whereabouts in Asia are you based? I’m in the Philippines, as you’ve probably seen.
Thank your taking the trouble to answer, I’m actually solidly in Australia – unusually for an Australian I haven’t truly travelled thru SEAsia other than stopovers in BKK, KL & SGP. I was led to your site following trying to make sense of the emerging trans politics – like many I have egalitarian views but the extreme behaviour of the translobby is very worrisome, a generation of scarred children will emerge from this just like Thalidomide. Your background info has been very useful as its based in solid medical background rather than in constructed ideology of “gender identity” which was there but not yet taken at face value when I studied in the late 90s. I’m very worried about this wave of irreality sweeping the West, particularly the English cultural sphere. The gender ideology movement looks eerily similar to 21st C version of Lysenkoism – yes they are now trying to reconstruct biological sex as a social construct, no one is yet going to a gulag but some have started losing their jobs. At the centre of it seems the desire to gerrymander all taxonomies so that no group ever falls outside any category deemed “normative” because doing so is invariably oppression.
I’m almost relieved at coming from Eastern Europe (PL) as their populations are much less susceptible to the culture-war pushers – as the Left have lost there whatever credibility they retain here. Perhaps the post-Soviet nations have found the right medium between Putinesque authoritarianism and the pathologically tolerant West.