A quick summary of the truscum / transmedicalist controversy…
Transmedicalists get really pissed off when people who don’t have any gender dysphoria and no desire to transition, claim to be transgender.
To them, the dysphoria and transition are a defining part of the transgender experience and if you don’t have them, then you’re either…
- a fake.
- appropriating the trans struggle.
- just going through a phase of questioning your gender.
What are the psychological forces behind the transmedicalist position?
Although on the surface it can seem like an argument about semantics, it’s really about respect.
Imagine the following…
You are a trans woman and yor transgender experience has involved the prolonged suffering of dysphoria, surgeries, rejection and economic hardship. After ten years of this struggle, you’re on the verge of a nervous breakdown and go to a bar to drown your sorrows.
After the third drink, a new customer arrives and sits down next to you at the bar. You get to talking and discover you’re both transgender. Naturally, you pour your heart out and detail your intense ten year struggle to become the woman you always knew you were.
Once finished, your drinking companion responds with their story. “Wow, my story’s completely different. I’m nonbinary and I don’t really know if I’m a man or a woman, to be honest. I’ve never had dysphoria, can’t be bothered to transition, and don’t want to have surgeries.”
It’s easy to see why you feel outraged. It’s like being a French resistance fighter in WW2 who fought dozens of battles and lost a leg, having a drink with a French resistance member who can’t name any battles they fought in and is in perfectly good health, and then confesses that they can’t honestly say whether they wanted the Germans or French to win.
This is human nature. When being X involves one hell of a lot of pain and struggle for one individual, they believe that any individual who hasn’t had that struggle is not an authentic X. Their being part of X is just a technicality, but not the real deal.
Furthermore, you suspect that if being X gets a lot of sympathy and compassion or status or whatever, you think that the only reason they claim to be X is because they’re trying to ride on the coat-tails of X and trying to get that sympathy/status/whatever without putting in the necessary hours.
However, while the transmedicalist reaction may be human nature and easily comprehensible, is it correct for them to say that the other is not truly transgender?
A person who gets a really bad dose of covid and has to go to the hospital, is quite likely to say to their spouse was asymptomatic and able to run 10K while infected…
“Bah… you don’t know what it’s like to have covid…” or “You didn’t really have covid.”
However, they are not factually correct statements. The definition of ‘having covid’ is not the severity of the disease, but the state of having a certain quantity of viral load in your body, This definition means that the spouse both – did in fact have covid and knows what it’s like to have covid because… they had covid.
Similarly, the definition of transgender “a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex” qualifies your nonbinary drinking companion to be transgender.
You can’t say they are not transgender. By definition, they are. You can’t say they don’t know what it’s like to be transgender, as the fact they are transgender must mean they know what it’s like.
The sentence you really mean to say is (and the one that is factually correct) You have not experienced the suffering which many transgender people have experienced.
Why the transmedicalists are the architects of their own misfortune
However, in my opinion, the transmedicslists only have the,selves to blame because they are not true transmedicalists.
Blair White and my collegue, Felix Conrad, are true transmedicalists.
then you see someone who comes along
You haven’t suffered enough.
You’re shedding support.
you’re riding on my coat tails
