Saturday, January 21, 2017
Posted in
Life
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Politics
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Transgender
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Over the past few years I have posted several articles on the transgender issue, and all the articles had the same basic message: I don't get it, I don't sympathize with it, I don't condone it, etc. Setting aside for the moment the issue of transgender children, I finally realized that if someone feels that they are the wrong gender, it is not for me to say that their feelings aren't valid. But transgenderism isn't like homosexuality -- I say this because transgender people are using the same legal arguments that gays are using to secure their rights. If a man is attracted to men, that doesn't affect anyone else except his sex partners. But if a man says that he is actually a woman, that has a wider impact. Other people must accept the transgender person as the sex he wants to be, and in some circumstances (rest rooms, locker rooms, showers, at work) there can be conflicts. My point is that transgenderism is not a private thing; it involves other people.
To a certain extent, I feel that transgender people are trying to change reality, and I resent that. Gender has always been considered a physical thing (involving chromosomes, genitalia and other physical characteristics). Now we are supposed to believe that gender is in the brain. If gender is in the brain, why aren't other characteristics also in the brain, such as race? If we accept that a man is actually a woman because that's how he feels (despite what his body says), why shouldn't we accept that Rachel Dolezal* is black because that's how she feels? Personally, I think that transgender people will find acceptance more quickly if they are simply honest: "I am a man who feels like a woman, so I live as a woman, and I would appreciate it if you would go along with that because that will allow me to live my life the way I want to." The end of that sentence is what's interesting. Unlike being gay (which is what I am), being successfully transgender depends in large measure on the reactions of other people -- i.e., on whether you can "pass" as the opposite sex.
* (Rachel Dolezal is a white woman who pretended to be a light-skinned black woman so that she could run the Spokane, WA, chapter of the NAACP. When she was exposed as a white woman in 2015, she resigned. She didn't assert that she had a right to run the NAACP chapter because she felt black.)
Given the considerable physical differences between men and women, I think the notion that gender is determined by the brain is absurd. Even if researchers end up finding brain characteristics that correspond with the way transgender people feel, I don't see why that should be significant. Since our thoughts presumably arise from the functioning of our brains, it would make sense that there is some correlation between our thoughts and the physical aspects of the brain. Even if there is, that doesn't mean that one'e gender should be determined by the brain. Biology is destiny. A man who feels like a woman is a man who feels like a woman, not a woman.
In this world women are an oppressed group, even in Western countries. The transgender movement puts women in the position of having to accept men into their groups. Some women -- especially radical feminists -- resent this, and frankly I don't blame them. Most transgender "women" started out as men and know what male privilege is. None of them have experienced menstruation or child birth, and few of them have experienced sexual harassment, rape, partner abuse or employment discrimination at the rate that women have. Real woman can't be blamed if they have difficulty relating to a woman who was a man just a few years before, and they shouldn't have to accept such women into their groups.
There is a poet named Diana Goetsch who was formerly Douglas Goetsch. She details her transition from a man to a woman in an open diary on the internet. Goetsch helped me to see that the feelings of transgender people are real and deep-seated. In the pictures of Goetsch as Douglas, she looks unhappy, constrained. Indeed, she even looks embarrassed, as if she were misrepresenting herself to the world as a man. For some reason she couldn't be "herself" as a man. At some fundamental level, Goetsch felt that her body did not reflect who she was inside.
But Goetsch inadvertently reveals the shallowness of the transgender movement. Transgender people are mostly concerned with appearances. They are very focussed on projecting the image that they want to project, and that becomes clear in Goetsch's writings. Goetsch writes about the pleasures of looking and feeling feminine, of feeling elegant while walking around in skirts, and other superficial things. But most women don't think about their femininity much. Indeed, most women prefer to wear pants. So in Goetsch's story we are faced with a contradiction: Here we have a person who had a deep-seated desire to change genders, but her primary focus as a woman is to feel feminine and to project her favored image. That sounds both shallow and narcissistic to me.
In the pictures of Goetsch as Diana, she looks pretentious. She assumes feminine postures and expressions which reflect her idea of what a woman feels. It is clear that she sees women as being more sensitive, compassionate and intuitive than men, so she tries to project those qualities. I find myself wondering why Goetsch couldn't simply have been a sensitive and intuitive man. Why was it necessary for her to change genders in order to exude those qualities? I had a similar reaction to a picture of Chelsea Manning in which Manning was "talking with her hands" -- why couldn't Manning be more expressive as a man? (I don't know either of these people personally, so my impressions may be wrong.)
In Goetsch's favorite picture of herself as a woman, she is sitting at a desk in front of an audience. She is wearing long, flowing hair (a wig), and her head is cocked at an inquisitive angle. She has a Mona Lisa half-smile on her face, her eyes are lifted slightly heavenward in an expression of patient supplication, and her hand is gesturing upwards as one might do while explaining or teaching something. It is the posture of someone who wants to be a wise Mother Earth -- but it looks contrived.
In her standard portrait pictures, Goetsch doesn't just look at the camera; she puts on a similar expression of wisdom and patience. I suppose it's possible that if she just looked at the camera, the male features of her face might become more evident. If what she wants to be is a woman, should I blame her for putting on feminine airs? Perhaps I am just being mean and intolerant. She certainly isn't doing any harm to anyone.
On television I saw a transgender woman who had huge breasts, breasts which had to be fake (given that she was a skinny man before she transitioned). Where is the logic in walking around with a huge "rack" that everyone knows is fake, and which disappears when you take off your clothes? (I have since learned that reconstructive surgery can give a man -- even a skinny man -- very convincing breasts. Even so, they are still breasts that contain saline solution instead of mammary glands.)
On a news show I saw a transgender man who was completely humorless -- he didn't smile once, not even when he was introduced. I finally realized that he was projecting the image that, in his mind, meant "male" -- i.e., overly serious.
On yet another show I saw a transgender man who had gone the whole nine yards -- i.e., having his breasts removed and having a sex-change operation. His behavior was very straightforward and even gruff. This was a man who wanted to make sure that you knew he was a man -- a man's man, so to speak -- and he did it so well that I would have found him intimidating.
On a Frontline episode about transgender children, a transgender boy is shown boxing, and a transgender girl is shown acting ditsy. Clearly, the transgender boy believes that males are aggressive and athletic, so that is the way he acts; and the transgender girl believes that girls are ditsy, so that is the way she acts. Indeed, the more I see of transgender people, the more I find myself wondering, Why are they so superficial?
This focus on image is a kind of exhibitionism. They want to be seen and noticed. In other words, they need the agreement of other people that they are the gender they want to be. Indeed, if other people don't agree, there may not be any point in changing genders. In this regard, transgender people remind me of actors or entertainers. Actors are by definition pretenders, and therein is one of the reasons I find transgender people irritating: I feel uncomfortable being an audience to this particular kind of performance -- i.e., the drama of people living out their personal gender fantasies. It also strikes me as shallow that appearance should matter so much. Isn't it how we feel inside that is supposed to matter?
The whole transgender thing goes against principles that I have believed in all my life. Most notably, I believe that people should love and accept themselves as they are (unless there is something truly destructive about them, like murderous impulses or a sexual attraction to children). A transgender woman might argue that that is what she is doing: She feels like a woman so she is trying to be a woman. But that doesn't take into account all the things she might do to her body, like taking hormones and undergoing surgical procedures. Altering one's perfectly healthy body to conform to one's self-image is a radical thing to do. Ultimately, having one's genitals removed and reconstructed is an extreme thing to do (though not many transgender people seem to be opting for sex-change operations these days).
The transgender movement is confusing in another way. The women's movement has been saying for decades that men and women are not so very different, so women should be able to do any job that a man can do. Indeed, a woman who is behaving naturally behaves very much like a man, and vice versa. Yet here we have a group of people who are saying that the differences between the sexes are so huge that they must change genders. It doesn't make sense.
I have always assumed that humanity was becoming more androgynous. I expected that, in the future, women and men would wear similar clothes (probably pants and shirts); women would let their hair fall naturally; men and women would wear jewelry in about equal proportions; etc. If human beings become androgynous, will there still be people who want to change genders? It would seem that transgender people depend on the differences between the sexes to justify changing genders. If the sexes behave similarly, what's the point? Like transvestites, transgender people may always need to exaggerate the qualities of the gender they want to be.
Up until recently, the issue of honesty really bothered me. It seems dishonest that a transgender woman who still has her male genitals should call herself a woman and expect that to be accepted. If you have a penis, you ain't a gal! However, reading Goetsch's diary helped me to become a little less judgemental. Goetsch wanted to become a woman for reasons that had nothing to do with deception (although deception is certainly involved). But what does bother me is the idea that I might end up being attracted to a transgender man. Much to my chagrin, I have seen several transgender men who are very cute. I frankly don't like the idea of being attracted to a man who has female body parts in his pants. If I found myself in that situation, I would definitely feel deceived. I can imagine that a heterosexual man would feel deceived to discover that a woman he is attracted to has a penis and testicles.
I met a transgender woman years ago -- Wendy Carlos, who was formerly Walter Carlos of Moog synthesizer fame. It was an odd experience. She gave a talk to our little gay Mensa group (we called ourselves "homogeniuses"). She looked very much like a man in women's clothes -- that was before cosmetic surgery had been invented to make transgender women look more feminine. No one at that meeting asked her about her gender status (we had been asked not to). Back then, it was assumed (by me, at least) that she had had a sex-change operation, though I didn't actually know. I have often wondered how Carlos felt during that meeting. Did she know that she appeared to be a man in women's clothes? Or did she believe that she had successfully "passed" because no one mentioned it? Either way, I felt sorry for her.
In the late 1980's or early 1990's, I had an experience with a man who probably counts himself as transgender today. I met him at a local porn shop in Queens, New York (this was before Herr Giuliani became mayor and closed most of the porn shops). The man was young and very handsome, and I was very interested in him sexually. We ducked into the basement stairway of a nearby commercial building to fool around, but the experience was odd at best. He wasn't so much interested in fooling around as he was in playing a role. He spent most of our time together making high-pitched squealing noises in an attempt to imitate a woman's voice. I, in the mean time, was trying to be understanding of what he was doing. I got the feeling that he needed to scream like a woman. He had a nice penis, but he didn't get an erection. I walked away from that experience thinking, "What a waste of an attractive man!"
Because he was attractive, I gave him my number before the experience was over. He called me a couple days later. He told me that there were not many people who understood people like him, and I had to tell him that I didn't understand him either -- he had gotten the wrong impression because I was being polite. Surprisingly, he became self-righteous and aggressive in that conversation, asserting the naturalness of his feelings. I told him that we didn't have a lot in common, and that I didn't want him to call me again, and he refused not to call! I was so spooked by the guy that I called the phone company and changed my number only moments after we hung up.
In that experience, I learned how isolated transgender people can be, but I also got a taste of how aggressive they can be: "This is the way I am and you had better accept it." My impression was that the guy was suffering in his own little hell of confusion, and that trying to be a woman eased his pain. From this one experience I developed a little sympathy for how transgender people feel, and I understand the importance of assuming the appearance of the opposite sex -- but I still don't want a man with a penis telling me that he is a woman. There is a limit to what I am willing to swallow (no pun intended).
The very first transgender person I ever saw may have been in junior high school in the early 1960's. I was in the school cafeteria when it was mostly empty. I looked behind the counter, and walking past was a man in a white woman's uniform. He had a rough, gruff, masculine face -- think Popeye or Jimmy Durante -- but he was in a dress. He glanced at me and, embarrassed, scurried away. Was he transgender, or a man who had lost a bet? Or was he just a masculine-looking woman? I'll never know.
Transgender people are in a search for normalcy and acceptance, but I don't think they are going to find it. Gay and bisexual people constitute probably 15% of the population, and that gives them a big advantage towards acceptance. Transgender people, who might constitute 2% of the population, can expect the road to be harder, especially when some people (like me) feel a certain amount of revulsion. This is exacerbated by the fact that a man in a dress has, traditionally, been a source of amusement. I grew up watching Milton Berle and Flip Wilson act like total odd-balls in dresses, and now I am expected to accept men in dresses as normal? That is a tall order for me.
Transgender Children
I am not going to go into this topic at length except to say that children have a greater chance of outgrowing their transgender feelings than adults do. For some of them, it is clearly only a phase, just as homosexuality is a phase for many boys who end up straight. That being the case, I think it is wrong for any child to be given medical treatments to change his or her gender. The drugs which prevent a boy's body from maturing are especially horrifying to me. Frankly, I don't believe that a child has the right to make choices for the adult yet to come. I predict, in fact, that there will be law suits in which adults sue their parents for having allowed them to get transgender treatments as children. The legal argument will be: "I was a child and wasn't mature enough to make such a decision. Now, my body is damaged from hormone treatments, and my parents are responsible for allowing me to get them."
I read an article in the Washington Post by a man who, as a child, had transgender feelings. His mother, who had a progressive attitude, allowed him to run around in dresses (at home). Doing that allowed him to release those feelings, and now, as a young man, he wants to be a man. Perhaps if more parents were permissive and let their kids do that, there would be fewer adults wanting to change their genders.
Conclusion
Ultimately I have to accept reality, and the reality is that some people feel certain that they are the wrong gender. They have a right to be here along with the rest of us, and there is no reason not to accept them as part of our society. Indeed, enough people in the country may feel comfortable with them that they can have normal social lives. But that doesn't mean we have to accept the whole transgender agenda. We do not need to accept the idea that gender is found in the brain and not in the body. Women should not have to dress and shower with "women" who have male genitalia, and vice versa. Transgender people should be satisfied to use private rest rooms if that is how their schools choose to deal with the situation. Transgender people should not expect schools and health clubs to make expensive renovations to locker rooms to increase privacy. Indeed, men getting naked with men is part of the sports ritual. Most importantly, transgender girls and women should not be allowed to compete with real women, since they have a physical advantage. (I already know of instances in which girls have lost track races to transgender "girls" who were able to run faster.) And, as I said, children should never be given gender-changing treatments.
More Thoughts
In 2016 I read an article by an 18-year-old transgender "boy" who insisted that his school allow him to use the boys' rest room AND the boys' locker room. The article showed a picture of this "boy" -- he looked exactly like a girl, even to the extent of having a girl's short pageboy haircut. Having become a "boy" only recently, it could be assumed that he had breasts and a vagina -- and yet, he wanted to dress with the boys. How did he think that was going to turn out? This 18-year-old "boy" could have walked into the girls' locker room at any time and fit right in. His demands to be given special treatment were, in my opinion, nothing more than narcissism. Gavin Grimm is also acting out of narcissism, in my opinion.
When gay people started to fight for their rights in the 1950's and 1960's, they were under attack. Police were regularly raiding their bars and arresting them for no reason. Not only could they be arrested for having sex, they could be arrested for asking someone to have sex (i.e., "soliciting") (and still can be, surprisingly). They invariably lost their jobs if they were "outed". The gay liberation movement was necessary. What is happening with transgender people is different. They are turning into gadflies, demanding that they be allowed into places where they don't belong -- and demanding that society accept them for what they want to be, not for what they are. I predict that it will backfire. Indeed, it may already be backfiring. Obama lost support in his final years in office for taking an irrational stance on transgender students, and Clinton lost votes to Trump in the 2016 election for the same reason. People know when they are being fooled.
There is a documentary on PBS that has been showing for a few years. It is called "Denial: The Dad that Wanted to Save the World". It is a very odd show. At first blush, it seems to be about global warming, but then you learn that the central figure in the program -- David Hallquist, the CEO of an energy company -- is transgender, and he takes this documentary as an opportunity to come out to the world as a woman, transforming into Christine Hallquist by the end of the show. So there are two story-lines in the show. My reactions to the show are varied. On the one hand, it is obvious that David Hallquist feels like a woman inside, so to him, that's what he is (although I don't believe he actually says that at any point in the show). Between Diana Goetsch and Wendy Carlos and Christine Hallquist and the handsome man who squealed like a woman, I can't deny the feelings of these people. And I also have to acknowledge that they aren't responsible for how they feel, and they can't change it, just as I can't change my homosexuality. Feeling like the opposite sex isn't like being a "night person" -- something else which I am, given that I get up after noon every day. I am such a night person that it is almost part of my identity -- but not quite. If the world were set up in such a way that night people had no options in our society -- meaning that there were no second-shift jobs, and no stores open at night, and no people to visit -- I could learn to be a day person. But I could never learn to be a straight person, and transgender people can't learn to be the sex that they don't want to be.
But what continues to confuse me is why a transgender person can't just accept that he feels the way he feels without having to dress the part 24 hours a day. It seems to me that the way a transgender person feels is what determines his identity, not the way he dresses. If we lived in a society in which everyone went naked, then dressing the part wouldn't even be an option. Of course, in a world in which the outside weather is usually too cold, we have no choice but to dress. But before the transgender issue arose in society, it always seemed to me that the styles people wore were an unimportant and superficial thing. Consequently, it still feels odd to me that transgender people have elevated the style of their dress to such level of importance. It's as if they don't believe their own feelings about themselves unless they play the part. I know real women who would not care if they spent their entire lives in men's clothes, which tend to be functional more than stylish. Yet a transgender woman, once she transitions, will be happier wearing stockings, dresses, high heels and other clothing items that are clearly less comfortable than what she was wearing as a man. She will also be happier having long hair which gets in her eyes than having short hair.
So, even though I have accepted that the feelings of transgender people are deep-seated and fundamental to their identities, the whole issue continues to strike me as superficial and almost silly.
Since writing this article I have come to resent the way that transgender people are trying to redefine society's norms. They have redefined "gender" to mean the gender that a person identifies with. Gender as determined by physical characteristics is now just called "sex". Natural males are now called "cis males", and natural women are called "cis women". The term "non-binary" has been coined to mean a person who encompasses both male and female characteristics, or whose gender is vague in some way -- and we are expected to refer to such people as "they" instead of "he" or "she". (Can you imagine referring to an individual as "they" as if they were more than one person?) Furthermore, the anti-gay slur "queer" has been resurrected by the most pretentious of these people as being preferable to "gay", even though "queer" means "weird", "unusual", "strange", "abnormal" and "odd".
As a result of these redefinitions, a transgender man (who still has breasts and vagina) can now refer to himself as a "male", while I, a real man who has a penis, XY chromosomes and no breasts, have become a "cis male". That doesn't sit well with me.
Now, I can sympathize with the desire of transgender people to feel normal, but they are trying to achieve normalcy by redefining the rest of us. They need to find their happiness without redefining the whole world to suit themselves. This self-centered focus on their own needs is part of their shallow narcissism.
To a certain extent, I feel that transgender people are trying to change reality, and I resent that. Gender has always been considered a physical thing (involving chromosomes, genitalia and other physical characteristics). Now we are supposed to believe that gender is in the brain. If gender is in the brain, why aren't other characteristics also in the brain, such as race? If we accept that a man is actually a woman because that's how he feels (despite what his body says), why shouldn't we accept that Rachel Dolezal* is black because that's how she feels? Personally, I think that transgender people will find acceptance more quickly if they are simply honest: "I am a man who feels like a woman, so I live as a woman, and I would appreciate it if you would go along with that because that will allow me to live my life the way I want to." The end of that sentence is what's interesting. Unlike being gay (which is what I am), being successfully transgender depends in large measure on the reactions of other people -- i.e., on whether you can "pass" as the opposite sex.
* (Rachel Dolezal is a white woman who pretended to be a light-skinned black woman so that she could run the Spokane, WA, chapter of the NAACP. When she was exposed as a white woman in 2015, she resigned. She didn't assert that she had a right to run the NAACP chapter because she felt black.)
Given the considerable physical differences between men and women, I think the notion that gender is determined by the brain is absurd. Even if researchers end up finding brain characteristics that correspond with the way transgender people feel, I don't see why that should be significant. Since our thoughts presumably arise from the functioning of our brains, it would make sense that there is some correlation between our thoughts and the physical aspects of the brain. Even if there is, that doesn't mean that one'e gender should be determined by the brain. Biology is destiny. A man who feels like a woman is a man who feels like a woman, not a woman.
In this world women are an oppressed group, even in Western countries. The transgender movement puts women in the position of having to accept men into their groups. Some women -- especially radical feminists -- resent this, and frankly I don't blame them. Most transgender "women" started out as men and know what male privilege is. None of them have experienced menstruation or child birth, and few of them have experienced sexual harassment, rape, partner abuse or employment discrimination at the rate that women have. Real woman can't be blamed if they have difficulty relating to a woman who was a man just a few years before, and they shouldn't have to accept such women into their groups.
There is a poet named Diana Goetsch who was formerly Douglas Goetsch. She details her transition from a man to a woman in an open diary on the internet. Goetsch helped me to see that the feelings of transgender people are real and deep-seated. In the pictures of Goetsch as Douglas, she looks unhappy, constrained. Indeed, she even looks embarrassed, as if she were misrepresenting herself to the world as a man. For some reason she couldn't be "herself" as a man. At some fundamental level, Goetsch felt that her body did not reflect who she was inside.
But Goetsch inadvertently reveals the shallowness of the transgender movement. Transgender people are mostly concerned with appearances. They are very focussed on projecting the image that they want to project, and that becomes clear in Goetsch's writings. Goetsch writes about the pleasures of looking and feeling feminine, of feeling elegant while walking around in skirts, and other superficial things. But most women don't think about their femininity much. Indeed, most women prefer to wear pants. So in Goetsch's story we are faced with a contradiction: Here we have a person who had a deep-seated desire to change genders, but her primary focus as a woman is to feel feminine and to project her favored image. That sounds both shallow and narcissistic to me.
In the pictures of Goetsch as Diana, she looks pretentious. She assumes feminine postures and expressions which reflect her idea of what a woman feels. It is clear that she sees women as being more sensitive, compassionate and intuitive than men, so she tries to project those qualities. I find myself wondering why Goetsch couldn't simply have been a sensitive and intuitive man. Why was it necessary for her to change genders in order to exude those qualities? I had a similar reaction to a picture of Chelsea Manning in which Manning was "talking with her hands" -- why couldn't Manning be more expressive as a man? (I don't know either of these people personally, so my impressions may be wrong.)
In Goetsch's favorite picture of herself as a woman, she is sitting at a desk in front of an audience. She is wearing long, flowing hair (a wig), and her head is cocked at an inquisitive angle. She has a Mona Lisa half-smile on her face, her eyes are lifted slightly heavenward in an expression of patient supplication, and her hand is gesturing upwards as one might do while explaining or teaching something. It is the posture of someone who wants to be a wise Mother Earth -- but it looks contrived.
In her standard portrait pictures, Goetsch doesn't just look at the camera; she puts on a similar expression of wisdom and patience. I suppose it's possible that if she just looked at the camera, the male features of her face might become more evident. If what she wants to be is a woman, should I blame her for putting on feminine airs? Perhaps I am just being mean and intolerant. She certainly isn't doing any harm to anyone.
On television I saw a transgender woman who had huge breasts, breasts which had to be fake (given that she was a skinny man before she transitioned). Where is the logic in walking around with a huge "rack" that everyone knows is fake, and which disappears when you take off your clothes? (I have since learned that reconstructive surgery can give a man -- even a skinny man -- very convincing breasts. Even so, they are still breasts that contain saline solution instead of mammary glands.)
On a news show I saw a transgender man who was completely humorless -- he didn't smile once, not even when he was introduced. I finally realized that he was projecting the image that, in his mind, meant "male" -- i.e., overly serious.
On yet another show I saw a transgender man who had gone the whole nine yards -- i.e., having his breasts removed and having a sex-change operation. His behavior was very straightforward and even gruff. This was a man who wanted to make sure that you knew he was a man -- a man's man, so to speak -- and he did it so well that I would have found him intimidating.
On a Frontline episode about transgender children, a transgender boy is shown boxing, and a transgender girl is shown acting ditsy. Clearly, the transgender boy believes that males are aggressive and athletic, so that is the way he acts; and the transgender girl believes that girls are ditsy, so that is the way she acts. Indeed, the more I see of transgender people, the more I find myself wondering, Why are they so superficial?
This focus on image is a kind of exhibitionism. They want to be seen and noticed. In other words, they need the agreement of other people that they are the gender they want to be. Indeed, if other people don't agree, there may not be any point in changing genders. In this regard, transgender people remind me of actors or entertainers. Actors are by definition pretenders, and therein is one of the reasons I find transgender people irritating: I feel uncomfortable being an audience to this particular kind of performance -- i.e., the drama of people living out their personal gender fantasies. It also strikes me as shallow that appearance should matter so much. Isn't it how we feel inside that is supposed to matter?
The whole transgender thing goes against principles that I have believed in all my life. Most notably, I believe that people should love and accept themselves as they are (unless there is something truly destructive about them, like murderous impulses or a sexual attraction to children). A transgender woman might argue that that is what she is doing: She feels like a woman so she is trying to be a woman. But that doesn't take into account all the things she might do to her body, like taking hormones and undergoing surgical procedures. Altering one's perfectly healthy body to conform to one's self-image is a radical thing to do. Ultimately, having one's genitals removed and reconstructed is an extreme thing to do (though not many transgender people seem to be opting for sex-change operations these days).
The transgender movement is confusing in another way. The women's movement has been saying for decades that men and women are not so very different, so women should be able to do any job that a man can do. Indeed, a woman who is behaving naturally behaves very much like a man, and vice versa. Yet here we have a group of people who are saying that the differences between the sexes are so huge that they must change genders. It doesn't make sense.
I have always assumed that humanity was becoming more androgynous. I expected that, in the future, women and men would wear similar clothes (probably pants and shirts); women would let their hair fall naturally; men and women would wear jewelry in about equal proportions; etc. If human beings become androgynous, will there still be people who want to change genders? It would seem that transgender people depend on the differences between the sexes to justify changing genders. If the sexes behave similarly, what's the point? Like transvestites, transgender people may always need to exaggerate the qualities of the gender they want to be.
Up until recently, the issue of honesty really bothered me. It seems dishonest that a transgender woman who still has her male genitals should call herself a woman and expect that to be accepted. If you have a penis, you ain't a gal! However, reading Goetsch's diary helped me to become a little less judgemental. Goetsch wanted to become a woman for reasons that had nothing to do with deception (although deception is certainly involved). But what does bother me is the idea that I might end up being attracted to a transgender man. Much to my chagrin, I have seen several transgender men who are very cute. I frankly don't like the idea of being attracted to a man who has female body parts in his pants. If I found myself in that situation, I would definitely feel deceived. I can imagine that a heterosexual man would feel deceived to discover that a woman he is attracted to has a penis and testicles.
I met a transgender woman years ago -- Wendy Carlos, who was formerly Walter Carlos of Moog synthesizer fame. It was an odd experience. She gave a talk to our little gay Mensa group (we called ourselves "homogeniuses"). She looked very much like a man in women's clothes -- that was before cosmetic surgery had been invented to make transgender women look more feminine. No one at that meeting asked her about her gender status (we had been asked not to). Back then, it was assumed (by me, at least) that she had had a sex-change operation, though I didn't actually know. I have often wondered how Carlos felt during that meeting. Did she know that she appeared to be a man in women's clothes? Or did she believe that she had successfully "passed" because no one mentioned it? Either way, I felt sorry for her.
In the late 1980's or early 1990's, I had an experience with a man who probably counts himself as transgender today. I met him at a local porn shop in Queens, New York (this was before Herr Giuliani became mayor and closed most of the porn shops). The man was young and very handsome, and I was very interested in him sexually. We ducked into the basement stairway of a nearby commercial building to fool around, but the experience was odd at best. He wasn't so much interested in fooling around as he was in playing a role. He spent most of our time together making high-pitched squealing noises in an attempt to imitate a woman's voice. I, in the mean time, was trying to be understanding of what he was doing. I got the feeling that he needed to scream like a woman. He had a nice penis, but he didn't get an erection. I walked away from that experience thinking, "What a waste of an attractive man!"
Because he was attractive, I gave him my number before the experience was over. He called me a couple days later. He told me that there were not many people who understood people like him, and I had to tell him that I didn't understand him either -- he had gotten the wrong impression because I was being polite. Surprisingly, he became self-righteous and aggressive in that conversation, asserting the naturalness of his feelings. I told him that we didn't have a lot in common, and that I didn't want him to call me again, and he refused not to call! I was so spooked by the guy that I called the phone company and changed my number only moments after we hung up.
In that experience, I learned how isolated transgender people can be, but I also got a taste of how aggressive they can be: "This is the way I am and you had better accept it." My impression was that the guy was suffering in his own little hell of confusion, and that trying to be a woman eased his pain. From this one experience I developed a little sympathy for how transgender people feel, and I understand the importance of assuming the appearance of the opposite sex -- but I still don't want a man with a penis telling me that he is a woman. There is a limit to what I am willing to swallow (no pun intended).
The very first transgender person I ever saw may have been in junior high school in the early 1960's. I was in the school cafeteria when it was mostly empty. I looked behind the counter, and walking past was a man in a white woman's uniform. He had a rough, gruff, masculine face -- think Popeye or Jimmy Durante -- but he was in a dress. He glanced at me and, embarrassed, scurried away. Was he transgender, or a man who had lost a bet? Or was he just a masculine-looking woman? I'll never know.
Transgender people are in a search for normalcy and acceptance, but I don't think they are going to find it. Gay and bisexual people constitute probably 15% of the population, and that gives them a big advantage towards acceptance. Transgender people, who might constitute 2% of the population, can expect the road to be harder, especially when some people (like me) feel a certain amount of revulsion. This is exacerbated by the fact that a man in a dress has, traditionally, been a source of amusement. I grew up watching Milton Berle and Flip Wilson act like total odd-balls in dresses, and now I am expected to accept men in dresses as normal? That is a tall order for me.
Transgender Children
I am not going to go into this topic at length except to say that children have a greater chance of outgrowing their transgender feelings than adults do. For some of them, it is clearly only a phase, just as homosexuality is a phase for many boys who end up straight. That being the case, I think it is wrong for any child to be given medical treatments to change his or her gender. The drugs which prevent a boy's body from maturing are especially horrifying to me. Frankly, I don't believe that a child has the right to make choices for the adult yet to come. I predict, in fact, that there will be law suits in which adults sue their parents for having allowed them to get transgender treatments as children. The legal argument will be: "I was a child and wasn't mature enough to make such a decision. Now, my body is damaged from hormone treatments, and my parents are responsible for allowing me to get them."
I read an article in the Washington Post by a man who, as a child, had transgender feelings. His mother, who had a progressive attitude, allowed him to run around in dresses (at home). Doing that allowed him to release those feelings, and now, as a young man, he wants to be a man. Perhaps if more parents were permissive and let their kids do that, there would be fewer adults wanting to change their genders.
Conclusion
Ultimately I have to accept reality, and the reality is that some people feel certain that they are the wrong gender. They have a right to be here along with the rest of us, and there is no reason not to accept them as part of our society. Indeed, enough people in the country may feel comfortable with them that they can have normal social lives. But that doesn't mean we have to accept the whole transgender agenda. We do not need to accept the idea that gender is found in the brain and not in the body. Women should not have to dress and shower with "women" who have male genitalia, and vice versa. Transgender people should be satisfied to use private rest rooms if that is how their schools choose to deal with the situation. Transgender people should not expect schools and health clubs to make expensive renovations to locker rooms to increase privacy. Indeed, men getting naked with men is part of the sports ritual. Most importantly, transgender girls and women should not be allowed to compete with real women, since they have a physical advantage. (I already know of instances in which girls have lost track races to transgender "girls" who were able to run faster.) And, as I said, children should never be given gender-changing treatments.
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More Thoughts
In 2016 I read an article by an 18-year-old transgender "boy" who insisted that his school allow him to use the boys' rest room AND the boys' locker room. The article showed a picture of this "boy" -- he looked exactly like a girl, even to the extent of having a girl's short pageboy haircut. Having become a "boy" only recently, it could be assumed that he had breasts and a vagina -- and yet, he wanted to dress with the boys. How did he think that was going to turn out? This 18-year-old "boy" could have walked into the girls' locker room at any time and fit right in. His demands to be given special treatment were, in my opinion, nothing more than narcissism. Gavin Grimm is also acting out of narcissism, in my opinion.
When gay people started to fight for their rights in the 1950's and 1960's, they were under attack. Police were regularly raiding their bars and arresting them for no reason. Not only could they be arrested for having sex, they could be arrested for asking someone to have sex (i.e., "soliciting") (and still can be, surprisingly). They invariably lost their jobs if they were "outed". The gay liberation movement was necessary. What is happening with transgender people is different. They are turning into gadflies, demanding that they be allowed into places where they don't belong -- and demanding that society accept them for what they want to be, not for what they are. I predict that it will backfire. Indeed, it may already be backfiring. Obama lost support in his final years in office for taking an irrational stance on transgender students, and Clinton lost votes to Trump in the 2016 election for the same reason. People know when they are being fooled.
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There is a documentary on PBS that has been showing for a few years. It is called "Denial: The Dad that Wanted to Save the World". It is a very odd show. At first blush, it seems to be about global warming, but then you learn that the central figure in the program -- David Hallquist, the CEO of an energy company -- is transgender, and he takes this documentary as an opportunity to come out to the world as a woman, transforming into Christine Hallquist by the end of the show. So there are two story-lines in the show. My reactions to the show are varied. On the one hand, it is obvious that David Hallquist feels like a woman inside, so to him, that's what he is (although I don't believe he actually says that at any point in the show). Between Diana Goetsch and Wendy Carlos and Christine Hallquist and the handsome man who squealed like a woman, I can't deny the feelings of these people. And I also have to acknowledge that they aren't responsible for how they feel, and they can't change it, just as I can't change my homosexuality. Feeling like the opposite sex isn't like being a "night person" -- something else which I am, given that I get up after noon every day. I am such a night person that it is almost part of my identity -- but not quite. If the world were set up in such a way that night people had no options in our society -- meaning that there were no second-shift jobs, and no stores open at night, and no people to visit -- I could learn to be a day person. But I could never learn to be a straight person, and transgender people can't learn to be the sex that they don't want to be.
But what continues to confuse me is why a transgender person can't just accept that he feels the way he feels without having to dress the part 24 hours a day. It seems to me that the way a transgender person feels is what determines his identity, not the way he dresses. If we lived in a society in which everyone went naked, then dressing the part wouldn't even be an option. Of course, in a world in which the outside weather is usually too cold, we have no choice but to dress. But before the transgender issue arose in society, it always seemed to me that the styles people wore were an unimportant and superficial thing. Consequently, it still feels odd to me that transgender people have elevated the style of their dress to such level of importance. It's as if they don't believe their own feelings about themselves unless they play the part. I know real women who would not care if they spent their entire lives in men's clothes, which tend to be functional more than stylish. Yet a transgender woman, once she transitions, will be happier wearing stockings, dresses, high heels and other clothing items that are clearly less comfortable than what she was wearing as a man. She will also be happier having long hair which gets in her eyes than having short hair.
So, even though I have accepted that the feelings of transgender people are deep-seated and fundamental to their identities, the whole issue continues to strike me as superficial and almost silly.
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Since writing this article I have come to resent the way that transgender people are trying to redefine society's norms. They have redefined "gender" to mean the gender that a person identifies with. Gender as determined by physical characteristics is now just called "sex". Natural males are now called "cis males", and natural women are called "cis women". The term "non-binary" has been coined to mean a person who encompasses both male and female characteristics, or whose gender is vague in some way -- and we are expected to refer to such people as "they" instead of "he" or "she". (Can you imagine referring to an individual as "they" as if they were more than one person?) Furthermore, the anti-gay slur "queer" has been resurrected by the most pretentious of these people as being preferable to "gay", even though "queer" means "weird", "unusual", "strange", "abnormal" and "odd".
As a result of these redefinitions, a transgender man (who still has breasts and vagina) can now refer to himself as a "male", while I, a real man who has a penis, XY chromosomes and no breasts, have become a "cis male". That doesn't sit well with me.
Now, I can sympathize with the desire of transgender people to feel normal, but they are trying to achieve normalcy by redefining the rest of us. They need to find their happiness without redefining the whole world to suit themselves. This self-centered focus on their own needs is part of their shallow narcissism.
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