+GENDER
With rare exception, people are born with either male or female genitalia and the corresponding genetic profile. We call this their ‘biological sex’ and for most it’s just a fact of life. Likewise, a person’s perception of their gender usually matches their biological sex, and is likewise an unquestioned fact of life.
For a small number of people, their software is incompatible with their hardware, and the computer says no. In this cohort are some whose ‘gender dysphoria’ is so severe that they look to surgery to ‘correct’ their biological sex to match their gender. What we call gender reassignment (though it does no such thing) or transitioning.
This cohort also includes those who decide to ‘correct’ their perceived gender to match their biological sex. I don’t know if there’s a catchy word for it (except maybe denial) but I do know that Option B doesn’t involve a scalpel.
To complicate this already complicated area infinitely more, there’s the fashionable argument that gender is a ‘construct’ — the product of social and cultural forces which mandate not just your gender identity, but also your gendered behaviour. Maybe this is true.
But gender is much more likely to be the product of socio-cultural forces + biological sex + an individual’s perception of gender.
At least that’s how I see it.
Trans advocates of this trendy theory, beware!
If you insist that heterosexuality (for example) is a mere construct, then so is every other letter in the LGBTQI+ multiverse. Including trans. I’m not sure trans people like this. Some prefer the easily rebutted argument that trans people were ‘born that way’ whereas non-trans people were ‘made that way’. That’s simply disingenuous, because not even trans people can have it both ways.
If we accept (and I do) that society helps construct gender, then at least some people become trans because they think it’s edgy and cool, and not because they are confused let alone dysphoric. I mean, how many trendy lesbians became hetero married mums? Give it a generation and we’ll see an army of tweens renounce transgenderism for a quiet binary life. Once the frisson of being society’s “other” wears off and it become less Instagrammable.
You’d shrug your shoulders and move on, not caring, but there’s a huge difference between copping the occasional dick as a trendy young gay man, versus transitioning from man to woman to cop an equal volume of dick. I earnestly hope every transient trans has someone they trust implicitly, someone who is quietly insistent that they exhaust every option before the opt for the knife. Try being just gay for a while before you irreversibly mutilate your genitalia into a scarred simulacrum of something you are not.
+RACIAL
So, where does it end?
The next battleground will be transracial.
The term is outdated but in common usage as the signifier of what’s slowly being relabelled as ‘ethnicity’. With rare exception, people are born a particular race or mix of races. I can be identified by my genetic spoor as a person of Caucasian lineage, for example. It makes no more sense to be smug of this fact than it does to be smug to be male. I did nothing to earn either. In fact, I’m told it carries the dirty stamp of privilege, so I’d be wise to keep my head down and hope nobody notices.
Unless I’m a privileged white male who decides he’s a woman, of course. In which case I dare anyone to criticise me.
But for the sake of this post, and because I’m feeling fragile at the endless slur of being a privileged white male, what if I discovere/decide that I’m actually Asian? I may look for all intents and purposes to be the epitome of a Kalevala-esque Nordic demigod, but what if I feel Oriental on the inside? As a person now conveniently suffering racial dysphoria, how do I transition to Asian?
Let’s ask Rachel Dolezal.
Unkindly treated since being outed for ‘pretending to be black’ in 2015, she now calls herself Nkechi Amare Diallo and continues to insists that she’s black, despite the fact it hasn’t exactly paid off quite how she’d hoped. Nkechi just wants to be seen for who she is, rather than what she is. Instead, she’s been vilified as a ‘culture vulture’ and ‘race faker’ as if being black is an exclusive club. The race hate piled on dysphorics like Nkechi is appalling and hypocritical.
I love my brothers and sisters on the liberal Left, but sometimes you guys can be a pack of cun*s.
I read that poor Nkechi can’t get a job now except offers to do porn. She appears on Cameo – a site where celebs short of a buck sell personalised video messages to fans – for $2.99 per chat. How can social justice warriors march in the street for transgender rights, doxxing and cancelling the hard-earned careers of their forebears for perceived transphobic slurs from decades past, yet offer zero support to the transracial community?
It’s fucked up. What is especially fucked-up are those bigots who insists that you can’t be racial. Some trans people want it all for themselves. They can’t share victimhood with anyone.
Well (except maybe for the whole tiny-dick thing) I demand my right to be Asian! Or at least to see an Asian when I look in the mirror. Forget cultural appropriation, it doesn’t go far enough to satisfy my existentialist despair. I mean, it would be awesome to be good at Math. While I may struggle to unlearn everything I know about driving cars safely, I could really pull this Asian thing off. I even have my Oriental name all picked out: henceforth, you shall know me as Long Phat Dong. Or Mister Dong, if you prefer.
+SPECIES
Next?
Obviously once we’ve sorted the ‘problems’ of transgender and transracial people, the next trend will be trans-species-ism. And why not? I mean, who wouldn’t want to be a cat! I’ve already staked my claim as a male, white Siamese. Or perhaps a dwarf calico with an underbite and a sour expression. But that’s been done before.
And if you think this post has descended into farce, stop oppressing me!
For the record (and subject to change without notice) I’ll be a privileged white male on Mondays to get all my emails and shit sorted for the week, then on Tuesdays and Wednesdays I’ll be that cat I referred to previously (but still male and still white though, keepin’ it real), but on Thursdays I’ll take a break from all the haters and identify as a terrestrial mollusc, maybe a land snail. Fridays I might just be interspecies (a white, furry mollusc) before chillin’ on the weekends as an ammonite.
Because ammonites are cool.
Go on, admit it.