“My 7th grade schoolmates would call me a fag. “Progressives” would now call me “queer.” Because I don’t have gender dysphoria, it is pretty simple. I am a man and always will be a man. I am Tom. I always was Tom.”
I can relate to this more than I would like to admit in a public forum.
I feel inclined to add that even if you do have gender dysphoria, "i'm still my sex and will always be, i'm just me" can be both extremely jarring and liberating. Because gender identities have no legit boundaries and are often circular it promotes an unstable sense of self which is why is not unusual for many ppl questioning to swap genders over and over and crave constant validation to a conflicting level
Even if you still do (or haven't done but want to do) the things typical of transition such as changing name, throwing away clothes and grooming habits of your "assigned gender" for the opposite style or voice traiting, grounding yourself in your sex can let you approach things with a whole different (imo healthier) perspective.
I do feel deeply for all the kids who are growing into a world where overt gender nonconformity results in constant pushback and alienation, it makes perfect sense how the trans stuff becomes a release valve from all the pressure and hurt
This is both well-written and true. We all have fluid and evolving self-perceptions that are informed by both our biology and the conditions in which we develop.
These changing perceptions do not change our sex. Like the author, many men (and women) wish they were more readily accepted when they assume nontraditional roles. Unfortunately, to be that accepting of others requires thoughtfulness, patience, and the ability to think critically. These characteristics are currently in short supply.
As a fellow psychologist, I appreciated this essay very much. Thank you.
I love Tom. Jo loves Tom. I do not have a gender identity either. I love the clarity of your mind on this subject. I think you should write a children’s book about this. Seriously. Thank you for this essay.
As I’ve said elsewhere: I don’t know what it “feels like” to be a woman. I only know what it “feels like” to be me. None of us can ever, truly, know what it feels like to be anyone other than who we are. And when it comes to so-called “gender identity,” just about any description of “feeling like” the opposite sex is dependent on sex/gender stereotypes.
Thank you for articulating so clearly what I’ve been thinking for a while: I do not have a “gender identity.” I am of a certain sex (female). And I now (when I can) push back on, or decline to answer, questions that conflate the two. (It used to not bother me when a form said something like “Gender: M / F” because a lot of us were using “gender” as a prudish euphemism for “sex.” But now it’s a much more loaded term. Or the form now says “Gender: M / F / NB / other / none.”)
Yes, that is what it came too. I have no way of comparing my experience to someone with a different sex. Weird to think it was shocking to realize I was just me.
Though I think you miss a bet or important point that "gender" and "gender identity" are just rough synonyms for personalities and personality types. By which token, we all have those, even if some aspects happen to be more typical of the opposite sex.
A point that Lisa underlined in her being quoted in the Dallas News article on the Affirmation Generation video she posted recently.
But an absolutely horrific video in many ways, not least of which was where it, at about 7:39, showed a Transgender Forum that talked about "transitioning from female to male". They might just as well talked about 2+2 being equal to five, and which should have received the same level of anathematizing and criticism attending that claim; a bigger Big Lie is scarcely imaginable.
That is -- arguably or not -- one of the worst aspects of transgenderism: the sweeping under the carpet, the riding roughshod over the whole concept of sex, over understanding what it actually means to be male and female as biological sexes.
You may have some interest in reading the definitions thereof in the Glossary of this article in the Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction:
This reminds me of something a former patient told me about his troubled teenage years: "At first I thought I was confused about my gender. Eventually I realized I just didn't know who I was at all."
My peak-trans moment came in 2016, when two unrelated moms of teens girls told me about their daughter's binder requests, and I thought, WHOA, back it up, Josephine, I haven't campaigned for women's rights so that we'd start binding our breasts the way women's feet were once bound.
This movement hinges on overlooking or forgetting that 1) social contagions strike adolescent girls harder than any other group; 2) the American health-care system is a for-profit industry with a built-in incentive to support iatrogenic illnesses. I am not cynical enough to believe that the scores of pediatric gender clinics (not counting Planned Parenthood clinics) which have sprung up in the past 5-10 years don't really believe they are helping children. I think they believe in their mission, which just happens to be result in exactly what would happen if, say, our society decided to sterilize gender-non-conforming/likely-gay children; 3) that the old-school transvestite/transsexual men were in it to get off, and this is still true, which is why your neighborhood trans-folx are the wispy bearded 5'3" froggy voiced "men" and the 6' "women" who are the only "women" at their job wearing mini-skirts & fishnet stockings, and no one dares to challenge that; and 4) lastly, that this movement is anything but progressive because of how it allows men to become the first "female" Jeopardy champion/ass't secr. of health, supports putting rapists into women's prisons, allows any man to walk into any women's locker room/changing room, contends that a lesbian who refuses to have sex with be-penised individuals is a bigot, and undoes decades of fighting for parity in sports, tossing women off of podiums in sports, from golf to swimming to bicycling to weight-lifting.
I wish someone had noticed this before we got to "gee, maybe castrating boys and sending girls into menopause 40 years early isn't such a great idea" but here we are.
Nobody has ever, or will ever, mistake me for a female. I was "all boy" as a kid, and nothing about me suggests femininity today, by current American standards.
But inside, I exhibit a number of traits that our dumb society has labeled "feminine." Among them: I like colors, a lot; I am a "verbal processor"; I actually love therapy, where my wife can't stand it; I am effusively emotional; I like "relationship" and in my marriage am both sexual and emotional pursuer—I crave affection and touch as "real men" are not "supposed" to.
It's all nonsense and theater and stereotype and it's extremely irritating. That's why I like the way Lisa Selin Davis and similar thinkers approach it: The problem is society's stupid attempt at placing people in straitjackets with regard to "gender" behavior.
As has been noted by Davis and others, there has historically been more acceptance of "tomboys," i.e. girls who display more "masculine" interests and traits, than supposedly "feminine" boys. That's gross sexism and incredibly unfair to boys and men who do not conform to society's foolish "norms."
And of course now we have the situation in which boys or girls who do not "conform" to bizarre stereotypes and expectations are flat-out informed that they are the other sex.
Utter insanity.
Christians and right-wingers bear much of the blame for this because of their egregious homophobia and idiotic gender stereotyping. It makes me laugh when they freak out over the "trans" craze, because their own habits of dissing and shaming and trashing gayness have no doubt helped to get us here.
Let people be who they are. If some guy wants to wear eye makeup, why should anyone care? If some girl wants to be a tough-ass on a rugby field, I say, hell yeah!
Thank you so much for sharing this. It occurs to me that the reason why not conforming to gender stereotypes is now so radical that it requires labels like "trans" and "queer" and different pronouns is because the stereotypes themselves have become so rigid. Twenty or thirty years ago we barely noticed if someone didn't conform (at least in blue areas). Did recent generations bring back these strict gender dichotomies so that they could forge identities by rejecting them? Have big pharma and biotech been behind the revival of gender stereotypes for a long time, or did they just spot a good thing and jump on the bandwagon? Martine Rothblatt, the world's highest paid TIM, specializes in growing and harvesting organs. Could (s)he have a motive for encouraging young men and women to get theirs cut off? What a way to develop a market for your product!
Love this! Thank you! Your interests and actions make up who you are... biology is incidental. The gender activists are focused on the wrong thing and are developing into truly boring people. What you spend your time doing is your identity. And you have spent your time well- focused on skills instead of biology...
I get what you’re saying. While I don’t think that biology is entirely incidental -- for example, I strongly believe in sex-segregated changing rooms, prisons, and sports -- in many aspects of life it indeed should be considered incidental, rather than a defining feature of our identity. In most jobs, for example, it shouldn’t make a difference what genitalia the person doing the job has, how much melanin is in their skin, etc. But I’ve been accused of committing “microaggressions” and “hate speech” for saying that these superficial characteristics shouldn’t drive how speakers are chosen for conference panels, for example.
I agree. I meant sex is already there and unchangeable-no point in focusing on it. The individual tents of men and women are wide-focus on finding purpose in skills.
I also recently concluded that I don't have a gender identity though the road to that conclusion was a little different as the mother of a daughter who wants to be called "he". I actually told a complete stranger I was "agender". I explained I am post-post modern. If transwomen are women then I am no longer a woman. We need to come up with a new word.
Or accept “transwomen” as a word but be clear that they are NOT women, but men choosing to pretend to be women. I would prefer not to give up a perfectly good word!
Or come up with a better word for transwomen. As another Substack essay said more eloquently, words like “woman” (and mother, sister, daughter, etc.) are taken and trans people don’t get to use them.
The problem is that if you do come up with a new word, transwomen will want in too. Because the problem is not the word itself, it's the category it symbolizes (human females). They want to be IN the group and won't take a No for answer.
If all the so called "cis women" progressively reidentified as "glemins" (or any other invented term) and male transitioners were the only "women" left, after a while not only the problem of misogyny and female oppression by males would be obfuscated further despite changing little in practice, you can bet eventually they'd come up with something like how the word woman is archaic or problematic and then start a new snowball identifying as "trans glemins" and reattaching themselves to "cis glemins". It always comes back to the original reference, that's why the talk progressed to "feminine penises" then to "female penises and girlc*m" and now you get transwomen saying they're females and get periods and menopause and some even say they are much better at being women because they put so much effort and accusing dissenters of hateful gatekeeping. It all comes from a place of envy, desperation and alienation and an inability to let go of the wish to be something you cannot truly become. For many if "transwomen are women" is not true, the whole 'Raison d'être' of transitioning falls apart
Thank you, this is wonderful! I can picture Tom with his flower arrangement or at the kitchen sink saying, "My ‘gender identity’ just happens to be congruent with everything your eyes and 20 million years of human evolution can see." There’s more than one way to be man, of course! As a girl and then woman, I've been "non-conforming" too since I was raised by a feminist mom and never learned that I was supposed to play dumb and always agree with men. Shamelessly smart and opinionated girls will surely be considered too masculine for a woman's body in this new gender rigid world, and what a loss that would be. No more Mae Wests or Sharon Stones or Natalie Portmans, etc.!? Just as Tom found happiness despite his non traditional manhood, a world of pleasure and joy is possible for the vast majority of non conformists in the bodies God gave us.
Thank you Brigid. In some ways I've struggled with this stuff all my life and in most ways I've not struggled with it at all. Happy the piece spoke to you.
But you know, I don't think there is that much gender fluidity in life. If you are gay, especially an effeminate gay man, understanding that is a survival tactic. Masculinity and femininity have so much more in common throughout the world than they have difference.
And sex is observed, not assigned.....Homo sapiens are not a creation apart.
I've come to think that "gender fluidity" is merely how much one adheres or does not adhere to the sex/gender stereotypes of whatever culture you grow up in.
“My 7th grade schoolmates would call me a fag. “Progressives” would now call me “queer.” Because I don’t have gender dysphoria, it is pretty simple. I am a man and always will be a man. I am Tom. I always was Tom.”
I can relate to this more than I would like to admit in a public forum.
Thank you. Gender stuff is so front and center these days it is hard to escape the self reflection. Coming to the "I'm just me" was pretty relieving.
I feel inclined to add that even if you do have gender dysphoria, "i'm still my sex and will always be, i'm just me" can be both extremely jarring and liberating. Because gender identities have no legit boundaries and are often circular it promotes an unstable sense of self which is why is not unusual for many ppl questioning to swap genders over and over and crave constant validation to a conflicting level
Even if you still do (or haven't done but want to do) the things typical of transition such as changing name, throwing away clothes and grooming habits of your "assigned gender" for the opposite style or voice traiting, grounding yourself in your sex can let you approach things with a whole different (imo healthier) perspective.
I do feel deeply for all the kids who are growing into a world where overt gender nonconformity results in constant pushback and alienation, it makes perfect sense how the trans stuff becomes a release valve from all the pressure and hurt
This is both well-written and true. We all have fluid and evolving self-perceptions that are informed by both our biology and the conditions in which we develop.
https://everythingisbiology.substack.com/p/there-is-biological-evidence-for
These changing perceptions do not change our sex. Like the author, many men (and women) wish they were more readily accepted when they assume nontraditional roles. Unfortunately, to be that accepting of others requires thoughtfulness, patience, and the ability to think critically. These characteristics are currently in short supply.
As a fellow psychologist, I appreciated this essay very much. Thank you.
Sincerely, Frederick
LoL, "short supply", indeed .... 😉🙂
I love Tom. Jo loves Tom. I do not have a gender identity either. I love the clarity of your mind on this subject. I think you should write a children’s book about this. Seriously. Thank you for this essay.
Thank you.
As I’ve said elsewhere: I don’t know what it “feels like” to be a woman. I only know what it “feels like” to be me. None of us can ever, truly, know what it feels like to be anyone other than who we are. And when it comes to so-called “gender identity,” just about any description of “feeling like” the opposite sex is dependent on sex/gender stereotypes.
Thank you for articulating so clearly what I’ve been thinking for a while: I do not have a “gender identity.” I am of a certain sex (female). And I now (when I can) push back on, or decline to answer, questions that conflate the two. (It used to not bother me when a form said something like “Gender: M / F” because a lot of us were using “gender” as a prudish euphemism for “sex.” But now it’s a much more loaded term. Or the form now says “Gender: M / F / NB / other / none.”)
Yes, that is what it came too. I have no way of comparing my experience to someone with a different sex. Weird to think it was shocking to realize I was just me.
Interesting essay, some good points.
Though I think you miss a bet or important point that "gender" and "gender identity" are just rough synonyms for personalities and personality types. By which token, we all have those, even if some aspects happen to be more typical of the opposite sex.
A point that Lisa underlined in her being quoted in the Dallas News article on the Affirmation Generation video she posted recently.
But an absolutely horrific video in many ways, not least of which was where it, at about 7:39, showed a Transgender Forum that talked about "transitioning from female to male". They might just as well talked about 2+2 being equal to five, and which should have received the same level of anathematizing and criticism attending that claim; a bigger Big Lie is scarcely imaginable.
That is -- arguably or not -- one of the worst aspects of transgenderism: the sweeping under the carpet, the riding roughshod over the whole concept of sex, over understanding what it actually means to be male and female as biological sexes.
You may have some interest in reading the definitions thereof in the Glossary of this article in the Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction:
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
This reminds me of something a former patient told me about his troubled teenage years: "At first I thought I was confused about my gender. Eventually I realized I just didn't know who I was at all."
My peak-trans moment came in 2016, when two unrelated moms of teens girls told me about their daughter's binder requests, and I thought, WHOA, back it up, Josephine, I haven't campaigned for women's rights so that we'd start binding our breasts the way women's feet were once bound.
This movement hinges on overlooking or forgetting that 1) social contagions strike adolescent girls harder than any other group; 2) the American health-care system is a for-profit industry with a built-in incentive to support iatrogenic illnesses. I am not cynical enough to believe that the scores of pediatric gender clinics (not counting Planned Parenthood clinics) which have sprung up in the past 5-10 years don't really believe they are helping children. I think they believe in their mission, which just happens to be result in exactly what would happen if, say, our society decided to sterilize gender-non-conforming/likely-gay children; 3) that the old-school transvestite/transsexual men were in it to get off, and this is still true, which is why your neighborhood trans-folx are the wispy bearded 5'3" froggy voiced "men" and the 6' "women" who are the only "women" at their job wearing mini-skirts & fishnet stockings, and no one dares to challenge that; and 4) lastly, that this movement is anything but progressive because of how it allows men to become the first "female" Jeopardy champion/ass't secr. of health, supports putting rapists into women's prisons, allows any man to walk into any women's locker room/changing room, contends that a lesbian who refuses to have sex with be-penised individuals is a bigot, and undoes decades of fighting for parity in sports, tossing women off of podiums in sports, from golf to swimming to bicycling to weight-lifting.
I wish someone had noticed this before we got to "gee, maybe castrating boys and sending girls into menopause 40 years early isn't such a great idea" but here we are.
Nobody has ever, or will ever, mistake me for a female. I was "all boy" as a kid, and nothing about me suggests femininity today, by current American standards.
But inside, I exhibit a number of traits that our dumb society has labeled "feminine." Among them: I like colors, a lot; I am a "verbal processor"; I actually love therapy, where my wife can't stand it; I am effusively emotional; I like "relationship" and in my marriage am both sexual and emotional pursuer—I crave affection and touch as "real men" are not "supposed" to.
It's all nonsense and theater and stereotype and it's extremely irritating. That's why I like the way Lisa Selin Davis and similar thinkers approach it: The problem is society's stupid attempt at placing people in straitjackets with regard to "gender" behavior.
As has been noted by Davis and others, there has historically been more acceptance of "tomboys," i.e. girls who display more "masculine" interests and traits, than supposedly "feminine" boys. That's gross sexism and incredibly unfair to boys and men who do not conform to society's foolish "norms."
And of course now we have the situation in which boys or girls who do not "conform" to bizarre stereotypes and expectations are flat-out informed that they are the other sex.
Utter insanity.
Christians and right-wingers bear much of the blame for this because of their egregious homophobia and idiotic gender stereotyping. It makes me laugh when they freak out over the "trans" craze, because their own habits of dissing and shaming and trashing gayness have no doubt helped to get us here.
Let people be who they are. If some guy wants to wear eye makeup, why should anyone care? If some girl wants to be a tough-ass on a rugby field, I say, hell yeah!
Thank you so much for sharing this. It occurs to me that the reason why not conforming to gender stereotypes is now so radical that it requires labels like "trans" and "queer" and different pronouns is because the stereotypes themselves have become so rigid. Twenty or thirty years ago we barely noticed if someone didn't conform (at least in blue areas). Did recent generations bring back these strict gender dichotomies so that they could forge identities by rejecting them? Have big pharma and biotech been behind the revival of gender stereotypes for a long time, or did they just spot a good thing and jump on the bandwagon? Martine Rothblatt, the world's highest paid TIM, specializes in growing and harvesting organs. Could (s)he have a motive for encouraging young men and women to get theirs cut off? What a way to develop a market for your product!
Would give this 5 hearts if I could! Clear, concise, and awesome. Thank you Tom!
Love this! Thank you! Your interests and actions make up who you are... biology is incidental. The gender activists are focused on the wrong thing and are developing into truly boring people. What you spend your time doing is your identity. And you have spent your time well- focused on skills instead of biology...
I get what you’re saying. While I don’t think that biology is entirely incidental -- for example, I strongly believe in sex-segregated changing rooms, prisons, and sports -- in many aspects of life it indeed should be considered incidental, rather than a defining feature of our identity. In most jobs, for example, it shouldn’t make a difference what genitalia the person doing the job has, how much melanin is in their skin, etc. But I’ve been accused of committing “microaggressions” and “hate speech” for saying that these superficial characteristics shouldn’t drive how speakers are chosen for conference panels, for example.
I agree. I meant sex is already there and unchangeable-no point in focusing on it. The individual tents of men and women are wide-focus on finding purpose in skills.
You remind me of a saying common a few years back:”You do you.”
👏👏👏
I also recently concluded that I don't have a gender identity though the road to that conclusion was a little different as the mother of a daughter who wants to be called "he". I actually told a complete stranger I was "agender". I explained I am post-post modern. If transwomen are women then I am no longer a woman. We need to come up with a new word.
Or accept “transwomen” as a word but be clear that they are NOT women, but men choosing to pretend to be women. I would prefer not to give up a perfectly good word!
Or come up with a better word for transwomen. As another Substack essay said more eloquently, words like “woman” (and mother, sister, daughter, etc.) are taken and trans people don’t get to use them.
The problem is that if you do come up with a new word, transwomen will want in too. Because the problem is not the word itself, it's the category it symbolizes (human females). They want to be IN the group and won't take a No for answer.
If all the so called "cis women" progressively reidentified as "glemins" (or any other invented term) and male transitioners were the only "women" left, after a while not only the problem of misogyny and female oppression by males would be obfuscated further despite changing little in practice, you can bet eventually they'd come up with something like how the word woman is archaic or problematic and then start a new snowball identifying as "trans glemins" and reattaching themselves to "cis glemins". It always comes back to the original reference, that's why the talk progressed to "feminine penises" then to "female penises and girlc*m" and now you get transwomen saying they're females and get periods and menopause and some even say they are much better at being women because they put so much effort and accusing dissenters of hateful gatekeeping. It all comes from a place of envy, desperation and alienation and an inability to let go of the wish to be something you cannot truly become. For many if "transwomen are women" is not true, the whole 'Raison d'être' of transitioning falls apart
The roles we learn to play do not change our biology. Acceptance of those roles without judgment is the key.
Thank you, this is wonderful! I can picture Tom with his flower arrangement or at the kitchen sink saying, "My ‘gender identity’ just happens to be congruent with everything your eyes and 20 million years of human evolution can see." There’s more than one way to be man, of course! As a girl and then woman, I've been "non-conforming" too since I was raised by a feminist mom and never learned that I was supposed to play dumb and always agree with men. Shamelessly smart and opinionated girls will surely be considered too masculine for a woman's body in this new gender rigid world, and what a loss that would be. No more Mae Wests or Sharon Stones or Natalie Portmans, etc.!? Just as Tom found happiness despite his non traditional manhood, a world of pleasure and joy is possible for the vast majority of non conformists in the bodies God gave us.
Thank you Brigid. In some ways I've struggled with this stuff all my life and in most ways I've not struggled with it at all. Happy the piece spoke to you.
Thank you for this.
But you know, I don't think there is that much gender fluidity in life. If you are gay, especially an effeminate gay man, understanding that is a survival tactic. Masculinity and femininity have so much more in common throughout the world than they have difference.
And sex is observed, not assigned.....Homo sapiens are not a creation apart.
I've come to think that "gender fluidity" is merely how much one adheres or does not adhere to the sex/gender stereotypes of whatever culture you grow up in.
🙌 🙌 🙌 Brilliant!!