Gender Binary Ideology

The Status Quo is a Stack of Ideologies in a Trench Coat

Let me start by saying that my goal in articulating difficult concepts is modest. I’m not seeking to radically convert anyone from X to Y. I’m primarily checking my own homework to see where there may be holes or weak spots. Beyond that, I’m simply trying to provide a thought process that may facilitate the journey for others, if they are so inclined. Ideally, I’m demonstrating that considered rational deliberation can be employed in such a journey. Whether that deliberation is done well or not is up to you to decide.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to meaningfully grapple with ‘trans ideology’ over the past decade. I think I got a head start over other people in my demographic, thanks to working in the game industry in Seattle. I had a coworker on my team -with whom I was friendly- transition sometime around 2007 or 8, I think. I was still in conservative Evangelical Christian mode, and was still emotionally ‘recovering’ from finding out a different coworker was *gasp* gay. When my boss told me that my transitioning coworker would prefer new pronouns my mind lurched into fight/flight/freeze mode. (After I chuckled, assuming it was a joke. Fortunately I was not near my coworker.)

I present this biographical introduction because I want to acknowledge that ideas are not pristine Platonic forms free from context, emotion, history and bias. As a related aside, I highly recommend my friend, A Forlorn Soul’s three-part beautifully complicated, poetic and profound work on the experience of struggling internally with ideas and how the process can change us.

I landed where I have (at this moment) because of many factors. One of which was being in relationship with people who transitioned. At the time, my worldview was able to accommodate working with someone cordially and being friendly, even when I thought they were spiritually and mentally ill. This wasn’t like a family member or best friend, so there was no need for a higher synthesis than that. But it did provide one LIVED data point, early on. I think this is crucial because the human mind is so prone to fill a strawman with any number of silly attributes when this data point is lacking. It also helps that this coworker was a gentle, kind, laid back person. I can imagine a tougher time getting where I am now if they had been a raging psychopath.

Now I’d like to trace the obstacles that I did encounter on my path to my present convictions. And I will do my best to lower them for anyone who feels a calling to explore this path themselves.

Let’s do a numbered list, then I’ll dive into some detail.

1. Religious conviction

2. Cultural status quo bias

3. The science is clear

4. Delusions ought not be indulged

5. Unfairness and fear of sex-segregated places and sports

Upon further reflection, I think it’s also important to list the prerequisites I’m not going to be explaining here. This piece is not a 101, it’s more of a 201. So if anything on this list is a show-stopper for you, you are simply not in a place to have ears to hear the rest. (though you may still find it a good intellectual exercise to understand how a straight cis allo middle aged former evangelical can think about these topics.

1. I won’t be trying to justify that sex and gender are different things. If you don’t understand this incredibly fundamental concept there are plenty of explainers out there.

2. I’m not proposing a definition for woman or man or any other gender. That’s precisely what is being culturally contested at this time.

3. I’m not addressing policy concerning transitioning for children. I believe that complicated issue is downstream from the things I am addressing. If you think that trans is simply mental illness then you would obviously think any medical intervention for children is a bad thing. Also note, virtually all anti-trans rhetoric, reporting and documentaries I’ve seen on the subject are massively exaggerated or blatantly false. (You’d have to venture outside your bubble to find more grounded data.)

4. I’m primarily focused here on male-to-female trans issues simply because it is the epicenter of the biggest, loudest social anxieties powering this culture war, and I already struggle with bloated, complex prose. But I think 80% of this is broadly applicable to all non-normative gender identities. (Relatedly, I know I often read like a robot when I’m trying to be precise. I haven’t figured out how to fix that.)

Religious conviction

When it comes to the religious doctrine of it all, I doubt I can be of much service to anyone who is blocked by this. I can only point out that there are many versions of every religion, and yours probably has some trans-affirming ones. But I know that’s not sufficient when you think that any deviation from your interpretation of your scripture is a slippery slope to hell. So this is one place where God’s going to work on your heart or not.

The one concept I’ll toss to you is this. There are ways that a thing can be multiple things in multiple ways. For example: our roles as children, siblings, parents, coworkers, mentors, etc. Every relationship can hold a different telos for the same ontological self. Meaning that the purpose (telos) of our creation is not one thing, and one thing only. One mind in one body (a single ontological self) shifts from one goal to another, often inhabiting many goals at once, throughout our lives. My telos as a parent does not negate that of neighbor, lover, or friend.

Likewise, God can create Male and Female. He can bless that project, call it GOOD, and endow it with the teleological purpose of procreation. AND it can be true that biological reality introduces variance of that model that is not in a category of good or evil, but simply IS. That variance creates fellow humans who have different experiences of the world and deserve the Love, respect and accommodation that all of God’s creations do. That variance does not need to be categorized as “not good”, as evil, fallen, broken, delusional, etc. for your conception of God’s intended plan for procreation to remain intact. Unless you have a very hard theological line that dictates every human must procreate for God’s “Good” status to remain intact. (that is: the teleological purpose of a human is to procreate.) If that’s your line, there is simply no way for me to reach you.

You may or may not find this helpful, but I think that for many people, the other barriers I’m addressing below get all tangled up into a gordian knot that reinforces the religious conviction on this matter. For SOME people, disentangling that knot could free their minds to approach the spiritual part of the issue with more clarity.

Cultural status quo bias

One of the most annoying things to me about the culture war around trans, is the anti-trans side successfully weaponing the word ‘ideology’. It contextualizes the idea of trans as a foreign concept seeking to infiltrate the culture. As opposed to the growth of a previously-repressed concept that has been with humans for as long as there have been humans. (Also, evident in countless animal species.)

Framing the issue as ‘an ideology’ also implicitly hides the fact that the status quo is ALSO an ideology. To insist otherwise is a false asymmetry. Status quo bias makes us blind to the fact that our inherited traditions and intuitions that create our “common sense” are all ideologies, Just as much as the “Gender Ideology” bogeyman.

I’ve railed against “common sense” before, so I’ll just sum it up here: Common sense is useful for a narrow range of topics like immediate cause-and-effect for things in a narrow range of sizes and materials. (Approximately human-sized and familiar materials like cloth, water, stone, etc.) The moment you investigate the very small, very large, very complex or anything that requires prerequisite knowledge, your common sense is not only useless, but often deceptive and counterproductive. Common sense is simply a proxy for your bias. Your bias can be correct when it’s informed by your experience. But it’s a drastic mistake to extend it beyond the scope of your everyday life.

Because status quo bias is so powerful it is usually interpreted simply as “reality”. It’s only the annoying philosophers and radicals who poke at the status quo enough to upset the apple cart, demonstrating that it’s just a stack of ideologies in a trench coat. So when a preposition is posited like: ‘A person designated male at birth, can transition to be a female’, all the status quo “common sense” rushes in like antibodies to protect your brain from this infectious thought. (See this great, thought provoking book for more exploration on the weaponization of infection and disgust metaphors.)

The status quo most of us (over the age of 25) have grown up with is that there are two sexes and two matching genders for obvious, “common sense” reasons. Any deviation from that is categorized as a medical malformation -kinda icky- and we really don’t wanna think about it.

I want to clarify, as much as I’m criticizing the mindless reproduction and reinforcement of the status quo, I DO believe that the status quo is important, and that radical departures from it require robust reasoning. (thus, the length of this post) I agree with the conservative idea of Chesterton’s Fence: we ought to know why a fence exists before tearing it down. I would add to this principle that we need to balance that utility against the opportunity cost of keeping it. What goods might it be blocking? What evils might be required to maintain it? (Many of such evils we don’t perceive because we aren’t in an oppressed class to experience them.)

The science is clear

If we remove the disgust-impulse ideology goggles, and just observe nature, we can see many problems with this status quo assumption. Sex can NOT be nailed down with genitals, secondary sex characteristics, physiology, chromosomes, gamete size/production, brain structure or hormones. While nature does tend to group these attributes in predictable ways, the more you look into it, the more overlap you discover.

This overlapping bell curve (bimodal distribution) is about gender expression, and is over-simplified. And below is a great resource for investigating the complexity of biological sex.

Most* societies deal with the overlap and complexity by assigning arbitrary gender boundaries. Cutoff points that one must stay on one side or the other if they don’t want to suffer the consequences of transgressing cultural norms. Usually a mostly-arbitrary list of traits, the more of which you tic, the better you are are fulfilling your role. And conversely; the fewer you tic, the more you are failing yourself and everyone around you. Thanks to status quo bias, the act of transgressing a boundary often triggers distrust in people. Most people think, (consciously or unconsciously) “If they don’t care about THAT boundary, what OTHER boundary might they cross?” This enforcement mechanism suppresses natural expression, and that creates an illusion that nature has created two tidy categories. “It’s just common sense!” one might say. The fact that generally, male + female = offspring further reinforces this intuition. So does the fact that some of the gender norms are justified by sexual dimorphism, assigning roles that one sex seems to excel at. And so it’s easy to sweep the edge-cases under the rug for the sake of the status quo and comfort for the majority.

Interestingly, as our society developed, our acceptance of this logic about maintaining the status quo and comfort for the majority has been diminishing. A majority of people can walk up stairs. But we still passed laws and spent millions (billions?) of dollars changing the infrastructure so that we could accommodate those who can’t. We’ll get back to this point in the section about unfairness and fear of sex-segregated places. The point I’m trying to make here about the science is that there is no coherent and consistent line you can draw in nature that fulfills the criteria of keeping 100% of every living person in only one of two categories. (See the complicated chart above for proof) If your response to this is that the number of people who fall outside your technical sex boundaries are so small that it’s not worth the consideration, then perhaps you need to stop acknowledging the less-than-2% of the world who are redheads.

If you are dead set on a sex binary you can create a ‘family-resemblance’ criteria with a checklist that requires some, but not all boxes to be ticked. (The kind that is used to categorize things like phylogeny, cults, autism, pornography, etc.) But ultimately those kinds of determinations leave the realm of science and enter the worlds of sociology, culture, language, philosophy, etc. In other words, you can SAY that 100% of humans are male or female by ignoring the science, OR by arbitrary (non scientific) categorization of the complex phenomena that make up these conceptual categories.

To say that, for practical purposes, it’s “best” to simply stick with two categories is not scientific. It is ideological. So anti-trans people ought to stop saying that trans ideology ignores science. The anti-trans, in fact, are the ones doing that.

Binary Sex is an ideology that ignores science in favor of an inaccurate model of the world for the convenience of binary categories and maintenance of the status quo.

Delusions ought not be indulged

Delusion is a perception that something not-real is real. “characterized by or holding false beliefs or judgments about external reality that are held despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, as a symptom of serious mental illness.”

Most arguments I’ve seen from the pro-trans side are not delusional, by the dictionary definition. Rather, they are specifically a contestation of the dominant ideology that insists that sex and gender are -and can only be- binaries. It is a fact that most people hold the view that sex and gender are/ought-to-be binary. A trans person does not delusionally claim this is untrue. They claim that the majority opinion is not good and ought to be changed.

Again, to be fair, it’s not arbitrary that most societies have a conception of binary sex and gender, since the physical experience of most people is one of two things. And the social construct of gender signifiers developed to accentuate and reinforce those experiences. So I understand why it can FEEL like statements to the contrary must be a delusion. But as established above, this is simply a disagreement about categorization, and the importance of maintaining a binary conception of sex and gender.

Here’s a historical precedent for our evolving language and concepts to consider. Until a hundred years ago we had two or three categories for the age of humans. Children, (sometimes divided into infants and children) and adults. Due to numerous factors -including economic, marketing, and educational- the teenager was invented. This was useful for describing a unique phase of development that had always existed, but now a bevy of institutions and new norms came into play around this demographic. Many laws changed. (Age of consent being the most stubborn.)

Intersex and trans people have always existed. Naming this and accommodating them is part of the larger trend of culture coming to grips with science and negotiating the best way to compassionately include a previously marginalized, misunderstood, or overlooked group.

Back to the accusation of delusion. I’ve witnessed anti-trans people and memes claiming that trans people literally think that their physical genitals are different than they actually are. Or that hormones magically change their chromosomes, etc. I am not exaggerating when I say that every trans person I’ve seen and heard talk about this topic is 100% lucid and aware of the physical constraints of reality. This makes sense if you think about it for even one second. Who is the one who is discontent with the role they’ve been assigned? And what are the primary outward characteristics that reinforce that assignment? Yeah, they KNOW about the hardware they’re dealing with.

So if this perception is why you think trans people are delusional, you are simply wrong. Obviously some percentage of any given group is going to suffer from delusion. The mistake is in assuming that a delusion is necessary for inclusion in this group.

Now, if not delusion, what IS the internal cognitive, emotional or otherwise ethereal state that drives a person to reject their imposed sex or gender category? Since I do not have this experience I have nothing substantive to answer.

But… I also have no experience of what it’s like to wake up well-rested, or feel great after a cardio workout. My point is that whatever I may say about this is pointless. However, I believe the people who DO know what it’s like to enjoy jogging and who feel well-rested in the morning.

So I want to speak to a common mistake people make when assessing another person’s state of mind or motive. And that is to project your own cognitive and emotional framework onto others and then determine that if YOU were to do, say or feel those things it would have to be for X reason. You fill in the blank based on whatever you think might be a close analogy from your experience.

For example, I have never been tempted to do drugs. But I have an intense sweet tooth. So I could make the mistake of thinking that an addict’s compulsion for drugs is like my compulsion for donuts. And worse, I could subconsciously render judgment on them for failing to control themselves as well as I can when feeling the “same” temptation.

Here’s a version that sounds less like I’m comparing trans to drug addicts. I have zero desire to camp. I enjoy nature and hiking. But I do not want to be there overnight. It’s uncomfortable and my hands feel constantly dirty. So when I build a mental model of the motives of a person who enjoys camping I could think: “They must love having filthy hands and being in pain. I wonder if that means they are mentally ill.” Or, I could use a little more imagination and realize that these factors are weighed against other positive ones I don’t feel as strongly as they do, and the discomfort is not noticed by them.

The mistake I’ve seen regarding the trans issue is people saying “Well, I don’t totally love the gender expectations on me either. But I don’t feel the need to make a big deal out of it.” Hopefully you can understand how this is a totally insufficient point of contact with the inner state of a trans person.

To summarize this section... Trans people are not delusional. They are contesting the arbitrary binary gender strictures our culture imposes and the subsequent definitions. And because the personal price is so high, it’s very unlikely that they are doing this on a whim, or because it’s cool. If you’ve never experienced what it feels like to profoundly disagree with your assigned gender, then you ought not pretend you understand their inner state, or think you can pass any kind of psychological pronouncement regarding them. The fact that there are innumerable physical characteristics that can contribute to mental states means it should not be hard to understand how certain configurations of these scientific facts could create such a state.

If you think that the arbitrary gender signifiers, roles and performances our current culture imposes are some kind of immutable fact of nature, or morality, or whatever, I posit that it is you who are delusional.

Unfairness and fear of sex-segregated places

Ok, this is a tough one. I’ve seen a lot of arguments from the pro-trans side that I do not agree with. My tendency is to bite the bullet on difficult topics to force conclusions that can at least be grappled with in good faith. But since I’m not in this category, my bullet-biting is not a risk to myself. However, I’ve been trying for years to progress my understanding on these particular topics to no avail, and I simply think there is no way to make social progress for trans people without dealing with the way these arguments strike the majority. So it is with begrudging trepidation that I lay these out. I’ve had a couple trans friends read this, and got their affirmation, and I’m hoping for more from any other trans folk who come across it. I think the following two arguments are fatally flawed.

1. The number of trans athletes is so small that the issue is inconsequential.

2. Bigotry is the only reason a person would feel unsafe in a sex-segregated context like bathroom, locker room, prison, etc.

I think I understand why these arguments gained the transaction they did in trans-inclusive spaces. Given the context of current cultural conditions and what real, long term solutions to these issues would require, the bullet is too big to bite for most people. The ‘demands’ are too large. I disagree with this. I think there are long-term ways to address them.

First: sports, as they exist today, are continually evolving cultural artifacts. How they have been negotiating with changing sex and gender norms is a long and interesting story. To imagine a world where that negotiation continues, and conforms to the reality of the spectrums of sex and gender is not actually a radical proposition. It is simply a continuation of the historical arc. There is already a precedent for dealing with various body types with weight classes. However, as someone who does not care about sports at all, I’m loath to go into any more detail, other than to say that this is not an unimaginable challenge. It doesn’t need to break the concept of competitive sports. It could actually make sports MORE fair, given that further specification would prompt better categories for everyone.

I want to call out a big problem with a current pro-trans talking point here; which is that a trans person on hormones (specifically male-to-female) loses their advantage due to muscle loss and bone density, etc. The problem with this argument is that it posits a binary; the very thing we argue against as regards to sex and gender. Since a sex transition takes a lot of time, and is never really in a steady state, having a binary bucket for pre and post transition is not accurate. Further, it reinforces the idea that HRT is a mandatory part of ‘being trans’, an exclusionary and classist position.

Again, I think I understand why, on this topic, the current doctrine is what it is. To get society to accept transness is already a huge challenge. Adding this more complex and nuanced topic on that pile is impractical. But I also think it’s a massive hurdle for anyone who’s on the fence about the issue. Fairness is a huge pillar in almost every person’s moral foundation. Any movement that says fairness isn’t important because the number of instances is low is not directly dealing with the core concern. This is my first haltering attempt to do so.

As for ‘safe spaces’, I do not think that a woman who is uncomfortable being in an enclosed space with a trans woman who has a penis must necessarily be a bigot. Every person has had different experiences in life, and many many women have been sexually assaulted by people with penises. Now… is it rational to suppose that a trans woman is more likely to assault them than a cis woman? I honestly don’t know. My understanding is that trans people are far more likely to BE sexually assaulted than to be the assailant. But I don’t think any number of statistics can stop a triggering experience. I want to point out that the fear of a man with a desire to sexually assault a woman in one of these spaces by disguising himself as a woman has always existed, and is vanishingly rare. So I do not believe that the inclusion of trans women changes this ‘risk factor’. IF male sexual predators disguising themselves as women were a common occurrence, THEN there could at least be an argument that the spectrum of ‘passing’-to-’less-passing’ trans women in these spaces might increase the camouflage that these predators have. But that is NOT the case, so this argument is false. But again, data is data. Feelings are feelings. The former rarely affects the later.

It’s important NOT to signal that cis women need to be protected from trans women. (Any more than from any other person.) But I think the desire to avoid that signal has backfired because it’s not accounting for the actually-existing internal states of victims, or simply the internalized warning signals all female-presenting people have to learn as they grow up.

So what’s the solution? As far as I’m concerned, this is an infrastructure issue. We’ve been working on infrastructure for people with various disabilities since at least the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. Ramps, bus lifts, brail and sounds on crosswalks and elevators, etc. So building individual stalls for changing rooms and restrooms seem like it would be a lot easier than all that ADA stuff. And I’ve always thought that there should be a law that every stall should have an emergency button.

The reason the ADA happened is that we, (or enough of us) as a society, decided that it was worth the money, effort and inconvenience to accommodate these minorities. We declared that even though there are way fewer of them than us, their basic dignity and humanity ought to be honored with some reconfiguration of our infrastructure, laws, and even some cultural norms.

In case this argument comes off as me implying that trans people are disabled, that was not my intent. It’s just the best example I could think of for a social infrastructure project that served a minority group.

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To conclude… I’m just doin’ my best here. As one person with limited perspective who’s trying to figure out how to live for Love and fight oppression. I surely can’t be doing it perfectly, and I’d love to hear how I screwed it up so I can get better. I highly recommend listening to this piece by Billie Hoard that examines these last two issues with two competing lenses (accommodation vs affirming) to demonstrate how framing changes the approach. A lot of what I’ve written is necessarily accommodation-oriented, because I think that’s where a lot of culture IS at the moment. It would be a question of strategy whether working to influence culture from this place is necessary or good. My experience is that on this, and many other topics, when messages use lenses the general public has yet to understand, then the messages are either misunderstood, ignored, or used as further evidence that the message and messenger are crazy. I can be very wrong. But even if you still disagree, I hope I’ve demonstrated that it’s not insanity driving assertions.

Again, I ask for grace from the trans community. Any guidance or corrections are welcome.