> Her self-imposed seclusion is a cautionary tale for us today, something that she admitted in the 1979 People interview. “The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish, indifferent,” she said. “There had never been any need of this charade to have taken place. It had proven a monstrous waste of years of my life.”
While that kind of tolerance/indifference wasn't available to everyone -- it probably helped to be wealthy enough to do what you want, and to be already established as a respected musician (Carlos actually was and still is world-famous!), and I'm sure it wasn't even as universal for Carlos as she was feeling it to be when she gave that quote in 1979 -- the quote makes me wonder if things have gotten worse over the past few years.
While there's more public acceptance in some quarters, it's also become a much bigger controversy in fact. It's hard to imagine a public figure feeling the kind of "indifference" Carlos described, where it didn't actually effect her career much, it wasn't a big deal to it. It was seen as an oddity, yes, but trans was perhaps not the cultural flashpoint like it is now.
Rather than "even today", I wonder and suspect that some things may actually have gotten much worse than they were in 1979 -- for all kinds of things, actually.
The lyrics[1] to the song are great, but one line in particular:
There'll be another messiah right here next week
They've gotten consistently worse since about 2015.
I started transitioning in 2009 when I was 18. I come from a very conservative environment and growing up I'd even tried to come out as gay a few times only to be "shot down" more or less but in college I used my own money and I found doctors to help me look how I wanted and I started dating men openly and as awful as it is to say, because I looked and acted the part people got over it pretty fast and begrudgingly accepted that I - at least - wasn't a man. My parents even got upset with me a long while ago when I insinuated that I was a part of the gay community because they said it was disrespectful to my then boyfriend who is now my husband (he had only dated cis girls before me and is straight to anyone who hasn't run a DNA test on me ha).
These days I can feel a change even from people who were kind to me before. All the coverage on conservative media outlets, the JK Rowling "trans women are a threat to women" and the Matt Walsh "trans women are mentally ill perverts" talking points have eroded goodwill so much that more religious and conservative members of my own family avoid me now as where they didn't before and I feel that I'm only able to have a good life because I'm in the fortunate position of being "passable" and attracted to men.
In 2012 when I came out to someone they'd usually just be curious about my experiences. Even conservative Christians and Republicans. In 2022 almost nobody is curious except about which surgeries you've had because they've already made their mind up about how they feel about you. For about 50% of the population that means you're a piece of scum who deserves ridicule and punishment (if it looks like you could still pass as male physically) or excommunication (if it looks like you're so feminine and far gone that you couldn't fit in as a man), for about 40% of the population that means indifference akin to what you'd get back in the good old days and for about 10% it means an outpouring of support and love in an attempt to make up for the 50% who are openly hostile.
I think more and more trans people are taking the Wendy Carlos approach these days because of this. Much of the community wants to avoid attention and get along with their lives. There's a growing trend of people "boy moding" or "man moding" which is where they take hormone replacement therapies but dress in drag to try to fit in as their gender assigned at birth in public the same way that Wendy did. As an amusing sidenote, many of these people begin "male failing" which is where the hormone replacement therapies make it impossible for them to pass as their gender assigned at birth and so they are read as being trans still but coming from the other direction.... It's so sad that it has to be this way.
It did thanks.
> I think it is fine for society to be critical
Of course. Critical in the sense of skeptical. However a lot of "critics" of trans people act much more like schoolyard bullies or people worried that rock 'n roll music will make the children worship satan than people with fair concerns about the wellbeing of others.
> I don't want to see documentaries in 20 years about people having regrets
There isn't any decision that people can make that will leave 100% of people satisfied. Gender therapy has existed in its modern form for about 100 years now and in that time study after study shows that people who go through with it are happy with the results 90%-98% of the time. This is higher than most treatments of any kind.
You'll find that almost every commentator who talks about detransitioners or trots some out for a political show has the end objective of ending all gender affirming care for all people and replacing it with conversion therapy due to their ideology. In the case of someone like Janice Raymond that reason is radical feminism. For someone like Matt Walsh it is traditional Catholicism. In both cases they are misleading the public by insinuating that gender therapy is some sort of factory process where hapless victims are swept onto a conveyor belt and mutilated haphazardly.
People who transition and then regret it will always exist. Just like people will regret getting any sort of elective surgery. Just like people will come out as gay and then later regret it and then later regret that they regretted it and so on.... It's a story as old as time.
This study tracked people over a 50 year period and found a regret rate of 2%.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262734734_An_Analys...
> The FM:MF sex ratio fluctuated but was 1:1.66 for the whole study period. There were 15 (5 MF and 10 MF) regret applications corresponding to a 2.2 % regret rate for both sexes. There was a significant decline of regrets over the time period.
The worrying thing is not that 2% regretted their decision, the worrying thing is that the people who are against trans people would be LESS happy if the figure were to be 0%. They want 100% of trans people to regret transition and repress because that would make reality conform better to their ideological leanings where "men are men" and "women are women" because God made them that way.
What percentage of detransitioners have been taken in by anti-trans panic and social contagion? What percentage will regret detransitioning? There are already quite a few examples: Elisa Shupe and Ky Schevers, who were both politically active in anti-trans movements, later retransitioned (and/or found a gender identity that works better for them) and regret the time they spent organizing against trans people.
Medicine has a social context as well. This relatively recent idea that someone can become more female or more male through drugs and surgery is one that has repercussions on how we as a society view the two sexes, what constitutes a woman or a man, and what is an acceptable expression of one's masculinity or femininity.
Maybe it's the right idea. But we should all reserve the right to be critical and consider alternatives, for this and any other idea with broad societal implications.
The social context has nothing to do with it, that's just a way to say that if enough people say that you can't do to yourself what you want to that that makes them right, which has historically led to all kinds of wrongs. See also: the right to euthanasia, abortion, being gay and so on and so on. It's always the sanctimonious groups that are hell bent on telling others how to live, but it never was any of their business.
How 'we as society' view this has no bearing on something that is ultimately the domain of a single individual, the person affected.
In the United States this is codified by "The right of the people to be secure in their persons" though of course there is plenty of hairsplitting going on about what that actually means, even though the simplest reading is to take it for what it says.
The implications of this are far reaching (for instance: I'm on the one side against a vaccine mandate because it would infringe on that right, on the other I think that a lot of people have allowed themselves to be pushed towards this on a pretext).
If you naively consider the topic only from a bodily autonomy perspective, then the answer is deceptively simple: get the blades out and start slicing. But this ignores the wider medical ethics concerns over whether it's the right thing to do for the patient, if the surgeon is causing harm by doing so, if gratifying the patient's short-term desires genuinely helps them in the long-term over their entire life, if it's reasonable to expect a surgeon to perform such a procedure and how they may feel in the aftermath, if there are any other interventions that would be more effective. And societal questions over whether it's ethical to deliberately add new members to a population who already find it difficult to find the support they need, how this will affect others who may now be situational obliged to assist with this person's new disability, and so on.
It makes no sense to focus solely on the individual and ignore the wider context, when there are so many other factors to consider.
So this strawman won't stand.
So before you go off on a tangent about what is and is not accepted practice and which things doctors are required to do and which things they abstain from on ethical grounds I will have to bow out because we are at the limits of my knowledge on the subject and that's not for want of reading material. Let me close with: I know where the line lies in simple cases, but if you start dragging in things that I have not spent enough time on/read about/have knowledge about then I simply will not be able to hold that conversation. If you have this knowledge then more power to you, but so far you have not convinced me of it and you come across as an ideologue.
Pot, kettle, black.
The Hijra community (Indian trans/non-binary) has been around for thousands of years, and surgical castration has been one traditional way for them to achieve their identity during that period. It's not relatively recent.
https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/religion-context/case-studies/ge...
In any event, I think in a free society we must start with the premise that all things are permitted and only with valid reason restrict that freedom. There are many valid reasons, but merely being critical of someone else's means of existence is not what I would regard as sufficient reason to restrict their personal freedom. At a minimum, potentially cognizable harm should be shown. And to be clear, I don't think there's any potentially cognizable harm to be found in someone conforming to their own gender identity.
Many trans people that join the hijra community leave it due to the abuse. The ex-hijra community is one of trans women that has been around for roughly as long as the hijra community has been.
Here's a project from former members of the hijra community that left because of the abuse they faced in it: https://aravaniartproject.com
In any case, trans people have been around for as long as people have been around.
The western idea of transness is better (more freedom, less suffering) so of course it is seeing adoption worldwide. I'm the exact opposite of a cultural relativist. I think it is morally good for the best cultural ideas to win.
In any case it still doesn't change the fact that something resembling trans people have been around in every single culture for a very long time. It is because transness is universal, a part of the human condition.
Funny how "you shouldn't exist" is taken is a personal attack, I wonder why that could be?
That's a wonderful wish, but I don't think it holds up to the evidence.
Off the top of my head:
1. If you watch HBO's Lady and the Dale, you'll see that in the mid 1970s a local reporter was hounding the company not because he suspected fraud. (Apparently the entire company was fradulent.) Nope, he wanted to reveal that Carmichael was really a man who was dressed as a woman. (If someone told me that Eugene Levy's character from Splash was based on this reporter, I'd believe them. :)
That documentary had later commentary from the same reporter (in the 80s/90s, I think)-- still proud that he outed a trans person.
2. Check out Gloria Steinem's mid 70s musings on transgenderism. Her thoughts in a 1977 essay on the subject would be right at home today on the alt-right podcasting space, and there are probably also many HN'ers lurking here who agree whole-heartedly with her anti-trans surgery statements.
Unfortunately, I don't have access to the relevant article ATM, but I'm pretty sure this quote was written in the context of the same anti-trans-surgery chapter-- "If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?"
The point is-- we're talking about Gloria fucking Steinem! And her non-apology apology to the trans community didn't appear until 2014 or so[1].
The fact that Amazon sells trinkets with the "shoe doesn't fit" phrase tells me that there's probably a lot more anti-trans history that's been swept completely down the memory hole.
That local reporter was Tucker Carlson's father, Dick Carlson.[0] Let's just say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
Did they mention that in the documentary? If so, I can't believe I missed it.
I mean, think about that last part for a moment. Gender dysphoria caused distress in Carlos. Transitioning eased that distress for her. Then she was dressing in drag to present publicly for her career-- dressing in the exact way which previously caused her so much distress that she decided to transition in the first place!
Those practices are almost certainly the "monstrous waste of years of my life" she's talking about.
Anyhow, both things are true. First, the public was vastly more tolerant/indifferent than what she was protecting herself against (and, therefore, the precautions she had taken turned out to have been too extreme). Second, transphobia was so common during the time that even well-known feminists could spew forth with literally no repercussions for decades (and even then, no discernible repercussions AFAICT).
In short, Stevie Wonder and George Harrison are pretty cool guys. :)
It still seems to me that something has changed here, for the worse. That it's very unlikely that such a public figure today could discover that despite their fears"the public" was largely indifferent and unconcerned about it. sassyonsunday below, who I was replying to, seems to agree at least in part too. Which doesn't necessarily conflict with anything you said.
Anyway, either it is or not, we can have different takes, and we're not going to work out the answer here!
Yeah, I guess I don't see any conflict or disagreement here.
This is as opposed to second-wave feminism on, for example, sex work issues, which is necessarily bad because it is more interested in moralizing than in caring about freedom or materiality.
Of course, anyone spreading the same propaganda now will not be part of the global struggle against fascism, as Judith Butler put it.
The radical feminist position on prostitution is about reducing harm to women as a class. That a minority choose to willingly engage in sex work doesn't negate the structural issues at play here. Most women in prostitution are from marginalized backgrounds and many are trafficked. Where is their freedom?
Fundamentally this is about men holding physical, sexual, and economic power over women, enforced by violence or the threat of it. Treating women as a product to be consumed and profited off, rather than co-equal individuals. What is so bad about wanting an end to this?
"Prostitution in and of itself is an abuse of a woman's body. [...] In prostitution, no woman stays whole. It is impossible to use a human body in the way women's bodies are used in prostitution and to have a whole human being at the end of it, or in the middle of it, or close to the beginning of it. It's impossible. And no woman gets whole again later, after"
This doesn't distinguish between survival sex work and people who are doing it more by choice, nor does it seek to improve the material conditions behind the lives of those forced into sex work, so that they have other choices and survival sex work can organically disappear. Nor does it connect survival sex work to other sorts of difficult jobs with great bodily risks.
Instead, politically, second-wave feminism has sought to orient the full weight of the carceral state against sex workers (i.e. the Nordic model), with all the expected consequences.
Lemmy read the quote again:
> "In prostitution, no woman stays whole. It is impossible to use a human body in the way women's bodies are used in prostitution and to have a whole human being at the end of it, or in the middle of it, or close to the beginning of it. It's impossible. And no woman gets whole again later, after"
That's a strident statement that leaves no room for interpretation. It's clear that it's the stated opinion of the author that no woman who was fully informed of the nature of the work beforehand but prostitutes herself, could ever do it by choice, ever enjoy it, or ever have it be a meaningful, beneficial part of her life.
That right there is my problem with Dworkin's statements and other statements like them. At best, they entirely ignore (and at worst, they seek to silence so as to make the discussion "focused and un-muddled") people who enjoy fucking, and also enjoy fucking for money.
The exact same problem applies to migrant farm workers, but nobody is proposing to solve it by making farming illegal.
Not sure I understand what that means.
Just to clarify: I don't have the research in front of me, but I'd be willing to bet that by 1977 there were at least two or three decades of research on trans issues relevant to Steinem's words about trans people. E.g., more than enough to persuade any good faith writer on the topic (or even a writer who knew and talked to a friend in that field of research) that the "shoe doesn't fit" quote is at best wildly misleading.
In other words, I'm claiming Steinem was wrong by 2022 standards, wrong by 1977 standards, and non-apologetic by any standard.
> Of course, anyone spreading the same propaganda now will not be part of the global struggle against fascism, as Judith Butler put it.
I agree.
For some reason, Steinem's words on this topic irk me, it's my day off, and I want to keep writing this post. :)
I get that Steinem was writing a political essay. And I can even imagine a line of thinking that says, hey, good for trans people, but that's a medical intervention for a specific condition (that turns out to apply to both sexes, btw), and I think it's a distraction from the specific feminist battle against oppression I'm trying to describe.
Then all she would have had to do in 2014 is say, "Sorry trans people, your battle should have been part of my battle all along. Accept my apology, and let's work together!"
But nooooo, she had to concoct her own artisanal justification to exclude trans people, using only wit and first principles, and add a little zinger for book sales. Then, when called out, shift the conversation away from her previous lack of knowledge, and claim a lack of understanding on the part of her opposition.
She's like the original HN troll account.
(John Money, who created the idea of gender identity in the 50s, was wildly off base about the specifics, which resulted in the tragic human rights violation of David Reimer, a cisgender man forced to live as a girl with crippling gender dysphoria. He also lied about the success of his forced gender reassignments, which resulted in routine intersex genital mutilation -- the one procedure that every single right-wing US bill banning gender-affirming healthcare for minors carefully excludes!)
Or at least that's my read of the situation! I could be wrong.
I know Robert Sapolsky did a talk on essentially this subject, but it looks like he's on sabbatical writing a book atm.
Money's main failure was his belief that gender is more or less exclusively a social constuct. Gender roles certainly are, but one's innate sense of their own gender is not.
Anyway, it's pretty easy to look him up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money
I'm particularly interested in pre-1977 research that Steinem would have had access to.
In short I, want to use my annoyance at her non-apology apology to fuel my education in the history of trans research. :)
"In a way, transsexuals themselves are also making a positive contribution by proving that chromosomes aren't everything. By ignoring this internal structure they cannot change, and focusing on external body appearances and socialization, they are demonstrating that both biological women and men may have within them the qualities of the opposite gender and thus the full range of human possibilities. Unfortunately, this point isn't made in the popular press. On the contrary, transsexualism is used mostly as a testimony to the importance of sex roles as dictated by a society obsessed with body image, genitals, and 'masculine' or 'feminine' behavior. But the main question is whether some individuals are being forced into self-mutilation by the biases around them, and whether their self-mutilation is then used and publicized to prove that those biases are true.
"Feminists are right to feel uncomfortable about the need for and the uses of transsexualism. Even while we protect the right of an informed individual to make that decision, and to be identified as he or she wishes, we have to make clear that this is not a long-term feminist goal. The point is to transform society so that a female can 'go out for basketball' and a male doesn't have to be 'the strong one'. Better to turn anger outward toward changing the world than inward toward mutilating our bodies into conformity. In the meantime, we shouldn't be surprised at the amount of publicity and commercial exploitation conferred on a handful of transsexuals. Sex-role traditionalists know a political tribute when they see one.
"But the question remains: If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?"
This point of view doesn't seem typical of your average alt-right enthusiast to me, she's considering transsexualism within the context of radical feminism, specifically the abolition of gender.
The old ladies in the parks were very rude and shouldn't have done that, but, having "feminine beauty and grace" isn't a requirement of womanhood, it's not what makes someone a woman. This is unfortunately yet another gendered imposition, with women feeling like they have to adhere to a beauty standard that comes from the male gaze.
It doesn't help either when males who opt-in to this beauty standard for their own pleasure get praised as if they are being good women. On the plus side, at least Wendy Carlos wasn't trying to be an ultra-feminine caricature or anything like that, just living life making amazing music while also trying to achieve a more reasonable bodily satisfaction for a less distressing sense of self.
No, women should be free to present however they please, that's my point. We shouldn't feel pressure to conform to imposed ideals of femininity, to be praised for it or knocked for not complying.
I agree with you 100%. When I was in middle school I wanted to look very neat and proper and it caused me problems with boys. I can remember getting picked on for looking too... well groomed? I feel like the opposite pressure exists for people assigned female. I was born with the default option of not needing to look "pretty" in the sense of enhancing my feminine features with clothes and makeup but I enjoy life a lot more when I'm allowed to.
Women who are trans feel this pressure enforced against them with public humiliation, overt misogyny, and violence.
> It doesn't help either when males who opt-in to this beauty standard for their own pleasure get praised as if they are being good women.
Trans women aren't males and certainty don't opt-on to the male gaze. Are you referring to drag queens? There's a more nuanced conversation to be had there, but not in the current climate of terroristic acts against transgender people. Drag is often a critique of gender roles.
There is nothing grotesque about femininity or a trans woman expressing it.
Beauty standards are set and enforced by both men and women. A lot of women dress up to impress other women, not just men.
She didn't become world famous like she may have if she'd been lucky enough to be born cisgender, but the thing that matters most is whether she found happiness in her private life. I hope she did.