The Failure of the Transgender Thought Experiment
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In my travels around the internet, I am often angered by the kinds of things that I read in articles and comments about what it means to be trans or what people think it means to be trans, as written by both trans and cis folk to be fair. I’m angered by the rhetoric of ignorance most of all; the ideas that are put forth by the cisgender men and women who exist in a world where opinion=fact. And they will state their opinion as if it is fact, despite being wholly unschooled in the science and evidence, the facts that those who have taken the time to educate themselves about all things transgender know to be true.
They will state opinions about biology, blanket statements about how birth sex is immutable and then some generalities about DNA. After all, these are science terms and since they know some science terms, they will say them. And when they are presented with the immense body of transgender research, they will claim that they have the right to believe what they do despite the evidence, falling back on their faith in the surface level science they learned in grade school, which apparently lacked the important lessons about needing to delve beyond the surface to keep testing the systems, unlocking new facts.
They will make arguments about how they feel oppressed by the transgender cabal that is forcing them to accept that trans people are actually amongst them and that trans people really are as they present themselves to be. They will claim the right to deny a trans person’s right to live their life because they have a right to their opinion, even if their opinion results in the loss of another person’s right to exist. They will make arguments about the dangers posed by giving predators access to gender-specific “safe spaces” by allowing them to pretend a trans identity:
How can we know who’s really trans and who is pretending to gain access to the ladies’ room? Isn’t it better to err on the side of caution and deny trans people access? Didn’t Mr. Spock say, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one?”
Facts are so difficult in the face of arguments about “safe spaces” because the argument itself is always presented as “man in a dress invades women’s room and rapes little girl” to which one might reply that this is “always a crime, trans access or not” or that there are no facts at all to support this argument other than the fetid imagination of those who imagine this might be a good thing (the way some lawmakers and others imagine a high school boy pretending a trans identity for a moment to gain access to the girl’s locker room ignoring the realities of transition entirely). Heck, they ignore the facts about where sexual assaults regularly occur:
About four out of ten sexual assaults take place at the victim’s own home. Two in ten take place in the home of a friend, neighbor or relative. One in ten take place outside, away from home. And about one in 12 take place in a parking garage.
And then, of course, there are the laws that deal with sexual assault which do so little to protect the victims and punish the perpetrators (and aren’t all the bathroom laws about protecting women from becoming victims?):
15 of 16 Rapists Will Walk Free
61% of rapes/sexual assaults are not reported to the police. Those rapists, of course, never serve a day in prison.
If the rape is reported to police, there is a 50.8% chance that an arrest will be made.
If an arrest is made, there is an 80% chance of prosecution. If there is a prosecution, there is a 58% chance of a felony conviction.
If there is a felony conviction, there is a 69% chance the convict will spend time in jail.
So, even in those 39% of rapes that are reported to police, there is only a 16.3% chance the rapist will end up in prison.
Factoring in unreported rapes, about 6% — 1 out of 16 — of rapists will ever spend a day in jail. 15 out of 16 will walk free.
But please make sure that trans women can’t use the women’s room even though:
And so on and so forth about bathrooms and locker rooms, almost completely ignoring the fact that trans women are generally hypercautious about their behavior in women’s “safe spaces” because we generally do not feel safe in any space, least of all ones where we imagine being outed and attacked for daring to go to the bathroom.
They will cite statistics about transgender suicide rates as evidence that we are generally unstable as opposed to massively unhappy because we must exist in a society where people question our right to exist.
But none of the studies that demonstrate the high suicide rates among transgender people actually prove the point conservatives are trying to make. They actually all indicate that people who are transgender feel ostracized for their identity; their high suicide rates reflect rejection, discrimination, violence, harassment, and the negative life circumstances that result from such treatment.
There are many more arguments that are made in stories and comments to negate the rights and needs of trans people. So long as people can imagine a possibility, they will state it as fact and state their right to believe and act on their imagined facts even if their opinions and beliefs result in others, in this case trans people, suffering.
And so we come to the Transgender Thought Experiment that is often offered as a means of generating empathy:
It asks the cisgender individual to imagine they woke up one morning in a body that was not consistent with their gender identity. It requires them to imagine the incongruence that would result, the truth that their bodies were not aligned with their brains.
In response, I often read about masturbation and sex fantasies because the imagining of different body parts usually comes down to these considerations.
I rarely read someone who has been tossing out their alternate facts who, when given the Transgender Thought Experiment, has an epiphany and resulting ideological sea change.
No, wait. I have never read of this happening.
It doesn’t happen for a number of reasons.
The first is simply that you cannot imagine it in any meaningful way. Ask a trans person who suffers dysphoria to explain it to you and they cannot do it in any way that transmits the actual experience of it. I like to think I can use words well from time to time and everytime I try to write it down, the words cannot express what it feels like in any way that would allow a cis person to honestly grasp it.
It doesn’t happen because beyond the physical nature of it, the experiment does not consider the psychological damage one suffers as a result of the incongruence, the years of having to exist in various states of acceptance and denial. The desire to be anything but trans, including dead. The daily wishing to wake up the next day in the right body, or at least a body that feels less wrong.
It doesn’t happen because even those with the best imaginations cannot begin to grasp the totality of what it means to be transgender. You can read about it (and there is much to be read and I promise you every trans person you know is far more well read on the subject than you can possibly be)…you can read articles like this one and even find some measure of sympathy for us, but unless you are trans, you cannot put yourselves in our minds in a way that makes the Thought Experiment successful.
I’ve been asked how I “know for sure” that I am trans. Sometime soon I’ll write about this in more detail, but to simplify, I know because I do and because everything I ever did to not be trans failed to change the fact that I am and that everything I have done after accepting my truth has confirmed it.
