Saras World

Fay Weldon is absolutely right with her statement by Mary Fisher in Life and Loves of a She-Devil: “Nature has gotten away with far too much”. That’s the feeling I always get when reading the book Genderkinderen (‘Gender Children’) by Ellen de Visser and Sarah Wong.

The authors and some of the people they interviewed adhere very strongly to a binary gender model. It’s logical that children choose a binary model – it’s hard enough to deal with being gay, lesbian or bisexual during puberty, and it’s much worse if your gender identity is unclear. Nevertheless, viewing the issue this way is a disaster, because you do yourself and the world such an enormous disfavour.

This is why I find the book terrible and miserable, to be honest. It repeats all the conventional ideas about being trans*, starting with having Dick Swaab write the introduction. This reveals the essentialist and biologic stance of the authors. Swaab became known as the result of his discovery in the 1990s that a ‘sexually dimorphic core’ in the brains of deceased transgendered individuals more closely resembled that of the desired gender than that of the original gender (*). He has received a lot of criticism over the years, and recently Rebecca Jordan-Young published a blistering attack on Swaab’s methodology and concepts, among other things, in her book Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences.

Furthermore, in line with good journalistic and anthropological custom the authors give attention to the views of the involved persons (children, parents, gender team and others in their surroundings). However, these views are neither ‘innocent’ nor neutral. Anyone who clearly has other views or feelings regarding gender and/or sexuality simply doesn’t exist. They aren’t heard or understood, so they are not eligible for ‘help’. Where are the professionals who help you develop your own frame of reference and offer ‘strange’ options? My impression is that the provision of help is much too close to the client. There’s nothing wrong with a normative position as long as you are aware of the necessary limitations of your own normative position.

The prevailing model also creates privileged categories of trans* individuals: those who can fit their experience into the dominant pattern, versus those who cannot do this for whatever reason – such as that they are not sufficiently gender dysphoric and do not have enough of a problem, or that they unconsciously do not see the way open for them.

To repeat the obvious once again in plain language: transsexuality is a variant in the human spectrum of gender and sexuality and takes different forms in different environments. Furthermore, a lot of the difficulties we experience come from the limited ideas that everyone has about how to deal with your body, your gender and your sexuality. Psychological and social assistance to help you stay intact and learn to deal with your feelings, and to dare to learn to know your feelings, is good and important, but ‘help’ that teaches you that you have a gender dysphoria and a psychological disorder is not. Medical help is equally desirable for those who need it in order to improve their ability to live with themselves. I think that as trans* becomes more acceptable, the first result will be that more people will report for ‘diagnosis’ and that society will gradually accept the fact that there is a wider range of variation in human bodies and how we experience ourselves.

In the meantime, we need to radically alter existing society so that we, with our other bodies and genders, are not pigeonholed in the liberal scheme of things but instead disrupt it while building a completely different society, free from suppression on the basis of sex, gender, sexuality, skin colour, economic status or whatever. That’s a big task, but together we can do it.

This article has first been published in Dutch by Vreer.
The links in the text have been added by me to allow you further insight in several terms and are not present in the original article.

(*) I strongly recommend you to read the book "Delusions of Gender". This will allow you to better estimate the worth of such ‘discoveries’.

"In Delusions of Gender Cordelia Fine does a magnificent job debunking the so-called science, and especially the brain science, of gender. If you thought there were some inescapable facts about women’s minds – some hard wiring that explains poor science and maths performance, or the ability to remember to buy the milk and arrange the holidays – you can put these on the rubbish heap. Instead, Fine shows that there are almost no areas of performance that are not touched by cultural stereotypes. This scholarly book will make you itch to press the delete button on so much nonsense, while being pure fun to read." - Professor Uta Frith, FBA, FMedSci, FRS, University College London