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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
‘I was four and three-quarters when I asked my mother if, from now on, I could please go to school as a girl instead of as a boy …’
In this extraordinary new book, renowned philosopher Sophie Grace Chappell combines personal memoir, philosophical reflection, open letters, science fiction writing, and poetry to help us all figure out transgender.
What is it really like to be transgender?
How can we as a society do better to accept the reality of trans lives and to welcome and include trans adults, trans children, and trans families?
How can trans people thrive in a cisgendered world?
For too long now, clouds of myth, misinformation, alarmism, and wrong-headed ideology have masked the reality of trans people’s lives. By answering questions like these, this book blows away the clouds and gives us the truth instead.
Rich, informative, and deeply moving, Trans Figured will be widely read and celebrated for years to come.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Part I: That Was Then
1.1: ‘I just want to’
1.2: The opposite of a Tom-boy
1.3: One secret wish
1.4: Eden, and a snake
1.5: Auditioning for the angels
1.6: The vanishing
1.7: ‘Please God, let me be a girl’
1.8: The shame
1.9: And the confusion
1.10: Why there is no such thing as ‘gender confusion’ – or at least, not the kind you meant
1.11: Purity and danger
1.12: Back to the Fifties
1.13: Why there is no such thing as ‘gender ideology’ – or at least, not the kind you meant
1.14: The claustrophobia of the body
1.15: ‘When ideology meets reality’ – the reality of experience
1.16: What is it like to be a human being?
1.17: ‘Reality matters’, part 1: Two baffled double-takes
1.18: ‘Reality matters’, part 2: Four silencing falsehoods
1.19: Terminology 1: ‘Cis/trans’
1.20: Terminology 2: ‘Gender critical’, ‘transphobe’, ‘TERF’, and ‘trans-exclusionary’
1.21: Rewinding the tape
1.22: Shoulda coulda woulda
1.23: The cross-dresser
1.24: Je ne regrette not very much
1.25: A quick blast against the ‘non-affirmation model’
1.26: Epiphanies
1.27: The lethality of rural life
1.28: Things visible and invisible
1.29: Role models
1.30: The stories we have to tell
1.31: Bizarre and unpleasant accusations, part 1: ‘Fetishists’
1.32: Bizarre and unpleasant accusations, part 2: ‘Narcissists’
1.33: Bizarre and unpleasant accusations, part 3: ‘Confused gays’
1.34: Doing completely the right thing, completely by accident
1.35: A secret specialist in unrequited love, part 1
1.36: Ugly, and inarticulate
1.37: A secret specialist in unrequited love, part 2
1.38: Fight the good fight
1.39: The best days of your life
1.40: The Manichee
1.41:
De profundis
1.42: The box
1.43: In dreams
1.44: Eustace and Ged
Notes
Part II: This Is Now
2.1: Patriarch Kirill on the Gay Pride Parade
2.2: Sunday Bloody Sunday
2.3: The canary in the mine
2.4: The Boy Scout and the Blue Angel
2.5: Lining up ten myths
2.6: Myth one: ‘Trans is a fad, a recent fashion’ (1)
2.7: Myth one: ‘Trans is a fad, a recent fashion’ (2)
2.8: Myth two: ‘Society is being brainwashed by trans ideology, and anyone who resists is cancelled’
2.9: Myth three: ‘Trans women are deluded, mentally ill’
2.10: Myth four: ‘Trans women are men really’
2.11: Myth five: ‘What trans women really need is not “the affirmation model” but aversion therapy or talking out of being transgender’
2.12: Myths six and seven: ‘Trans women are cultural Marxists, part of a cunning ideological plan to overthrow the traditional family’; but also: ‘Trans women are subverting feminism by reinforcing the ideology of the patriarchy’
2.13: Myths eight and nine: ‘Trans women are really sissies, softies as the
Beano
used to call them
(malakoi,
1 Corinthians 6.9), effeminate, weak, limp-wristed’; but also: ‘Trans women are sexual predators’
2.14: Myth ten: ‘Transgender is unbiblical and sinful’
Notes
Part III: Is Consciousness Gendered?
3.1: The alleged inaccessibility of ‘what-is-it-like?’
3.2: The publicity of the mental
3.3: Bats and humans and men and women
3.4: Bodiliness
3.5: Raising consciousness
3.6: A brief history of gender oppression
3.7: Two objections
3.8: Is consciousness
trans
gendered?
Notes
Part IV: The Adoption Analogy
4.1: The analogy
4.2: Spelling it out: what nobody thinks
4.3: A little terminology
4.4: A disanalogy?
Notes
Part V: Gatekeepers, Engineers, and Welcomers
5.1: Some bendy concepts
5.2: Maybe all concepts are bendy?
5.3: The very ideas of ‘regularity’ and ‘irregularity’
5.4: Brushing up our ideas
5.5: No true Scots(wo)man?
5.6: Drawing another analogy
Notes
Part VI: An Open Letter to J.K. Rowling (June 2020)
Notes
Part VII: Lissounes
Prefatory remarks
Notes
Extended Contents
Part 1: That Was Then
Part II: This Is Now
Part III: Is Consciousness Gendered?
Part IV: The Adoption Analogy
Part V: Gatekeepers, Engineers, and Welcomers
Part VI: An Open Letter to J.K. Rowling (June 2020)
Part VII: Lissounes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
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Dedication
In memory of my parents:
William Gerald David Chappell, 11/4/1935–24/12/2019
Gillian Patricia Chappell, 30/4/1937–13/12/1989
TRANS FIGURED
On Being a Transgender Person in a Cisgender World
Sophie Grace Chappell
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Sophie Grace Chappell 2024
The right of Sophie Grace Chappell to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6150-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023942966
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
The timeline of this book’s writing is complicated. I had various parts of it in print well before spring 2020, when I first reached the reluctant conclusion that I really had to write this book, and began in earnest to try to. Putting those constituents together, and adding the other material that the project seemed to require, was a complex and time-consuming process, and interrupted, during the COVID lockdown, by some real crises of confidence and indeed mental health.
At times I tried to write parts of this book, especially Part II, as a kind of real-time diary. That means that some of the book’s ‘real times’ are no longer real; it also means that some of the most significant developments in the politics of transgender in the UK do not map squarely on to what I say here. The most obvious example is Scotland, December 2022 to May 2023, a period that, as I write, is barely past, and undoubtedly not yet in proper historical perspective. To me, from where I stand today, it looks absolutely outrageous that a lying and bigoted London-based government, backed by a lying and bigoted London-based press, has robbed Scotland of the chance to make a genuinely progressive change in the direction of trans equality – one that is happening everywhere else in Western Europe – that demonstrably poses no conceivable threat to anybody’s safety, and that Westminster itself still favoured right up until August 2020. And it looks no less outrageous that slurs and slanders about people like me have become convenient political weapons against the Scottish independence movement. But all of this is very recent; and on the whole I don’t regret that it isn’t properly discussed in this book. Another time, and another place, will no doubt be available soon.
Various parts of this book (in earlier versions) have already appeared elsewhere, online or in print. Some of Part II has been published as ‘Being transgender and transgender being’, Therapy Today (the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy magazine), March 2017. Part III is based on ‘Is consciousness gendered?”, European Journal ofAnalytic Philosophy, 19(1) 2022. Part IV, ‘The Adoption Analogy’, has been published in various forms on the Crooked Timber blog, the American Philosophical Association blog, and in Think, 2021, pp. 25–30. A different edit of Part V, ‘Gatekeepers, Engineers, and Welcomers’, is forthcoming in J. Beale and R. Rowland, eds., Wittgenstein and Contemporary Moral Philosophy (Routledge, 2024). Part VI, ‘An Open Letter to J.K. Rowling’ (June 2020), also appeared on Crooked Timber and on a number of other blogs. ‘Lissounes: A Thought Experiment’, is forthcoming in Katherine Dormandy and Gertraud Ladner, eds., Liminal Lives: Female Scholars Challenging Boundaries in Theology and Philosophy of Religion.
For their invaluable help and encouragement and critical reader eyes, I want to thank Chris Belshaw, Kurt Blankschaen, Imogen Chappell, Miriam Chappell, Philip Chappell, Thalia Chappell, Tristan Chappell, Vanessa Chappell, Zsuzsanna Chappell, Ben Colburn, Rach Cosker-Rowland, Matt Cull, Helen De Cruz, Cora Diamond, Katherine Dormandy, Miranda Fricker, Raimond Gaita, Jim Hankinson, Stanley Hauerwas, Simon Kirchin, Stephen Latham, Alasdair MacIntyre, Ian Malcolm, David MacNaughton, Michael Morris, Sasha Lawson-Frost, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, Peter Momtchiloff, Claudia Richardson, Miriam Ronzoni, Constantine Sandis, Jennifer Saul, Leonie Smith, Eleonore Stump, Kurt Sylvan, and many others whose names I will be embarrassed to have left out of this list when I realise my mistake. None of these good people, obviously, is in any way responsible for what I have to say here.
Simply by being a majority, cisgender people create the world that trans people live in.
Shon Faye, The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice
Life is freedom, and … consciousness [is] the flame of freedom … What constitutes the freedom, the soul, of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in somebody’s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning, when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.
Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
For when my outward action doth demonstrate
the native act and figure of my heart
in complement extern, ’tis not long after
but I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
for daws to peck at. I am not what I am.
Shakespeare, Othello 1.1
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
Maya Angelou
PART IThat Was Then
1.1: ‘I just want to’
I was four and three-quarters when I asked my mother if, from now on, I could please go to school as a girl instead of as a boy.
Four and three-quarter years old; but even that wasn’t anything like the beginning of something. I wasn’t so much asking to start something new as asking to carry on the way I was, only in the new circumstances of school. By then I’d already been dressing as a girl at home, on and off, for as long as I’d been able to dress myself at all. (So, maybe eighteen months.) On and off: not always but quite often, when I thought I could get away with it. And preferably, but not always, when I was alone: I was getting more self-conscious about it, and opportunities to be alone were getting rarer now I’d started school.
Actually, my question was more like the end of something, because my mother’s response was ‘Why?’
Why? I was four and three-quarter years old, so most of the things that can happen to us in life had not yet happened to me. Certainly, no one had ever asked me that before. I’d never put the question to myself either. I hadn’t the faintest idea why I dressed as a girl, or why I felt so happy when I dressed as a girl. I had no clue why I wanted to be seen as a girl, or why, in fact, I wanted to be a girl.
I just did.
‘I just want to’, I said eventually.
My mother already looked furious – and scared – and now she looked angrier still. ‘Why?’ she repeated in a louder voice. I wanted to repeat ‘I just want to’, but I could see what would happen if I did: she’d ask me ‘Why?’ a third time, in an even louder voice, and I’d say ‘I just want to’ a third time, maybe also in a louder voice, and at some point she would stop repeating the question, lose her temper, and smack me instead.
I don’t remember what happened next. Maybe I did say ‘I just want to’ again, and maybe she did ask me ‘Why?’ again, and maybe we did go on like that until she started smacking me. Nor do I remember whether this was my only conversation with my mother on the subject. Maybe, before this conversation, there was a whole series of other conversations like it.
But it was definitely the last conversation like this, because something happened afterwards that was enough to stop me ever asking again, at least in that direct way, if I could go to school as a girl. Something, too, that made me bury the whole experience in my subconscious for a very, very long time. Until quite recently, until getting on for fifteen years after I began moving towards transition in 1998, I didn’t remember any of this confrontation at all. And I still don’t remember how it ended.
But I’m guessing that, whatever happened next, it wasn’t good.
1.2: The opposite of a Tom-boy
My mother died in 1989, so I only have my own recollection to rely on for this first thing. (And if she was alive, would we be able to talk about it? Impossible to say; but the little evidence there is, is not encouraging.) However, there are other little parcels of memory from the same time period that have, as it were, the same postmarks, and for those I have my older brother’s confirmation.
At about the same time as that conversation, I was learning to read, and got to The Famous Five. And there I read that there was a name for a girl who wants to be a boy, as George does (who was christened Georgina): she’s a Tom-boy.
‘Right’, I said when I first came across that word, all excited. This was decades before the internet. I had no idea that I wasn’t the only boy in the entire world, ever, who wanted to be a girl instead. I didn’t even learn the word ‘transgender’ until about thirty years later, in 2000 or thereabouts. But now – ‘Right! Perhaps after all I am not the only one, perhaps people do have words for what I’m like. So if “Tom-boy” is the word for a girl who wants to be a boy, what is the word for a boy who wants to be a girl? Because that’s what I am.’
My brother remembers me asking this. (He was about seven.) He also remembers me asking the connected question, ‘What is the feminine form of “Tom”?’ because, whatever it was, I was clearly a that-girl – a Tamsin-girl, if ‘Tamsin’ is the girl-form of ‘Tom’. And he remembers too that my questions were met with a nasty silence from whichever adults were listening. He didn’t himself, he tells me, make much of it at all. As he rightly points out, I talk a lot, and a lot of what I say is nonsense that doesn’t really add up to much.
Not all of it, though.
1.3: One secret wish
In the movies, there were fairy godmothers and magic wands and secret transforming spells. And that all looked pretty good to me, at six years old. In the movies, you could become anything, anything you wanted – with a bit of luck and a plot twist.
So why not a girl?
And at primary school I joined in with the girls’ games sometimes, and one game they quite liked to play was Weddings.
So why could they all get a turn at being The Bride, but not me?
And I used to hear other kids answering the question, ‘What would your one wish be?’ and think, ‘Are you crazy? You get this Magic Wish, this one and only Magic Wish, and you blow it on that?’
I don’t think I was much older than six when I twigged what you do with a Magic Wish, anyway: you wish for an unlimited supply of Magic Wishes, of course. But leaving that aside… Suppose they plonk me down in front of some fairy godmother or vat of secret elixir. Do that, and there isn’t the slightest doubt what I am going to ask for. No contest. Just one thing. Just the one same thing that I prayed for with my whole heart, secretly, desperately, again and again, as I went to sleep at night: please turn me into a girl.
Nope.
‘You can have anything in the world – but you can’t have that.’
‘Simply by being a majority, cisgender people create the world that trans people live in’ – as Shon Faye observes.1 And that makes the cisgendered world an uncomfortable one for transgender people to live in.
But maybe it doesn’t have to be quite this uncomfortable?
1.4: Eden, and a snake
It starts in Eden where everything starts, in the unconsciously known of early childhood. It starts out as the snake hidden in the garden; the thing about yourself that you know and don’t know, can’t avoid but can’t admit, can’t ever say but can’t honestly gainsay either.
Self-knowledge is extremely hard when there is something about yourself that no one around you wants you to know, and that you yourself – once you begin to pick up others’ inhibitions – start trying as hard as you can not to know.
‘Let kids be kids’, people say today. What do they mean by this rather sentimental and (I would say) deeply misleading slogan? Apparently quite often, in Florida and Texas for example, what they mean is: ‘Don’t let transgender kids be transgender kids.’ As a transgender child in a society like ours, you are rapidly taught not to be yourself. Which seems to be what they want; the same people frequently say: ‘There is no such thing as a trans kid’, which is just a flat refusal to listen to millions of us, including me (see 1.18 below).
But apparently these people don’t mind if their ringing pronouncements don’t fit the facts. Because saying ‘There is no such thing as a trans kid’ does fit their gender ideology. It also fits what seems to underlie that ideology: namely, a deep desire that there should be no such thing as a trans kid.
The wish is father to the thought; and the wish is this: they want us not to exist.
Once that lesson is in – that you mustn’t be yourself – the fact of your own nature becomes, even for you, something you yourself don’t want to know either. Simply because it’s so ‘wrong’. It’s so strange, so unexpected, so contrary to everything that you’ve been taught and told ever since you had ears at all. Above all (and the more you pick up others’ standards, the more this matters), it’s so deeply embarrassing.
But there, inescapably, it is. You have the body of a male; you want to have the body of a female. You want to be female; and you want everything that goes with being female. (And presumably it’s the other way round if you’re a trans boy; though I should let trans boys/men speak for themselves.)
‘You want to be a girl, not a boy’: is that it, though? Do you want to be a girl, not a boy, or do you just (‘just’?) want to dress as a girl, not a boy? Is it about your sex – femaleness, the actual physical body? Or is it about your gender – femininity, the social role? Do you want to dress and present feminine as a means to the end of being female (or getting as close to it as you can)? Or do you want to be female as a means to the end of dressing and presenting as feminine (again, as far as possible)?
This book is, designedly, a personal book. In everything I say in it, I can only speak authoritatively for one transgender person: myself. But for me it was, and is, both: it’s about changing gender as a means to changing sex, and it’s about changing sex as a means to changing gender. I wanted to be feminine in order to be female, and I wanted to be female in order to be feminine. It ran in both directions. It still does.
(Though one thing that isn’t relevant in either direction: I was never really confused, I think, about the difference between ‘liking girly stuff’ and wanting to be a girl. True, it was hard to see a way to express my wish to be a girl except to go for girly stuff. Still, I always understood that boys could like dolls and ponies, or girls could like tractors and Action Man, without any of this in any way compromising their status as boys or girls. Being feminine, being female, and liking girly stuff are three different things. Some trans-exclusionaries claim that people who diagnose themselves as transgender do so because they don’t understand these differences. They are simply mistaken.)
And is it nature or nurture? What trauma or hormone triggered it? Was it the wrong mix in the chemical brew of the womb, or was it too many Saturday mornings spent furtively reading Ballet Shoes instead of Biggles? Was it in my parents’ DNA or in mine?
Well, I know there is embryological science that seems relevant to transgender. Who knows, maybe it’s true. And if so, maybe true of me. I also know that my parents wanted one son and one daughter, and when I arrived they were disappointed that I wasn’t a daughter, so they tried again (successfully, this time).
We can speculate about all these possible causes, but it’s never very convincing. For any supposed triggering condition for transgender that you care to name, it seems like that condition is going to apply to lots and lots of people who aren’t transgender – and not apply to lots and lots of people who are. In the end, I find these questions as unanswerable as ‘Who started it?’ about the Eden narrative.
What made me transgender?
What made you cisgender?
‘If someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.’
1.5: Auditioning for the angels
At five or six I had a certain reputation as a funny little joker. With adults, charm was my trump-card. Charm got me on Braden’s Week once: that old light-entertainment TV programme had a regular slot where they interviewed small children with a view to getting a laugh from ‘the things they come out with’. I don’t remember at all what I came out with. I enjoyed the recording process, but when I saw the output, I felt betrayed. I already knew that adults were (among other things, of course, many of them good) perfidious, untrustworthy gaslighters. But to trick me into being ridiculed by other adults, on telly? Even for adults, that seemed like a new low.
What charmed adults was partly my unexpected articulacy, and partly my cheeky-monkey looks. At that age I was ash-blond with a lopsided quizzical grin, big round hazel eyes, and long dark eyelashes, like my mother. And though I didn’t spend a lot of time in front of mirrors (I have always been a bit of a scruff about my appearance), I did look all right, I thought, in a dark green satin dress.
In a dress at six years old, I was not definitely a girl. But at least I was not definitely not a girl. Things would have been more satisfactory if my mother had let me grow my hair long, as (in vain) I begged her to. But even short-haired I was ambiguous in a dress, and that was – that was a start.
I joined the village church choir because of the vestments. Long floaty white surplices with frilled lace collars: they were dresses, really, and boys got to wear them too. And not only to wear them in public, but to wear them on ceremonial display. Mind you, I couldn’t read music (I only learned in 2015) and I bored easily, sniggering with the other choristers while we knelt on the hassocks and something long-winded and unintelligible went on from the pulpit. And, in reality, the surplice, when you put it on, was cold and faintly damp from the dusty cupboard, easily ripped fragile old white cotton, faintly hinting at mothball-must and a rusty iron, pre-worn by who knows how many previous choristers. But it was worth it to be dressed like that for an hour and a half a week. And it all fitted with what was going on inside me.
Which was what? Well, two things in particular. One thing was a bedtime routine in my own head. ‘If you can’t sleep’, my parents often had to say, ‘then tell yourself a happy story.’ The recurring story that I told myself to get to sleep was a story about arriving in heaven, and being fitted for angel’s wings and robes; about being transformed from whatever it was that I was, into a kind of impossible, blissful, celestial, and definitely-not-male purity. (‘Where like stars his children crowned, all in white shall wait around’: a line in a carol that I latched onto the moment I heard it.)
And the other thing was the presence to me of God’s love. Quite simply, he was there, like a heat source, a fire or a radiator, in the corner of the room. To be conscious was to be conscious that he was present, in my consciousness, as much as I was present there myself. He was maybe not obvious all the time, but he was in there somewhere. And the less distracted I was by other things, the quieter I and my surroundings were, the more I was aware of him.
It’s still like that today. It is perhaps the most important thing of all for me that God is just there, and always has been.
Not that, at first, I was aware that it was God’s presence that I was aware of. But in Sunday School one day we had a story from 1 Samuel 3. It’s a time when hardly anyone in ancient Israel hears God speak to them (a bit like Britain now); but the worn-out old prophet Eli has a small boy-servant Samuel who keeps coming to him in the middle of the night saying ‘You called?’ when Eli hasn’t called at all, and is just trying to get some sleep. But eventually it dawns on Eli: the voice that Samuel is hearing is Yahweh’s voice. So Eli tells Samuel to stop bothering him when he hears the voice. Instead of bothering him, pray: ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’
And so I discovered that though the people around me apparently didn’t have words for boys who wanted to be girls, still they did have words for this warm happy watching Presence that was in me, and of me, and yet was not me but someone else present to me, and loving and watching over me: silently mostly, but always there.
A lot of my childhood games were about running off and disappearing. But wherever I disappeared to, He came too.
1.6: The vanishing
Hidden in you as the sleeping deer is hidden
warm in the highest cairn of the furthest hill,
I am snow-bound, thin-air-remote, unwatched
by the spies of the woodsmoke glens.
Or I am barred and locked, your secret garden: sealed
with soft flowers’ fragrance, quiet rumours of water,
rumours relayed over blank and roughcast walls
that shut in the shining green, the sunburst lawns;
and all that bustles beyond our walls goes by
my paradise and pleasance of your joy.
Or fast in your arms, I sleep the sleep of dreams
in the deepest bed in the house of the perfect eaves.
He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
She who rests in the shadow of the Almighty
disappears.
1.7: ‘Please God, let me be a girl’
If you actually want to get trans figured, if you actually want to understand transgender –
And do you, by the way? Do you actually want to understand transgender? Or is transgender something weird, alien, threatening, ridiculous, contemptible to you, and you’ve just come here to get a clearer fix on exactly why you find us – me – so contemptible? You’ve just come here for ammunition? For target practice? You’re not here to get trans figured, you’re just here to get the dirt on me?
I’m sorry, what a rude, hostile, gatekeeping interrogation that all was. The question does need asking, unfortunately; it’ll become obvious why as we go along. But anyway, as I was saying:
– If you actually want to understand transgender, the first things you need to understand are how serious it is and how early it is.
How serious is it? Well, at least from my own experience, and from what I know of the experience of all the trans people I know well, it is no random whim. It is no casual fad. It is no passing fancy. It is absolutely the biggest thing that you want, so big that sometimes you can’t even get it in focus or perspective, like a passenger on an ocean liner trying to get a photograph of the ship itself. And it is the thing that you want most urgently and unavoidably and permanently and inexorably. (As the psychiatrists say when diagnosing ‘gender dysphoria’: consistently, persistently, insistently.) It is crushing. It is suffocating. It colours everything else; it is your burden and your delight; it is your deepest anguish and your highest bliss. It is everything. And it is life or death.
How cis people think trans people decide to transition: Well, that was an interesting essay by Judith Butler. I’m convinced. I think I’ll start wearing skirts and put she/her in my email footers as a political gesture.
How trans people decide to transition:i can’t go on like this any more or i will die.
On ‘gender dysphoria’, by the way. I have already accepted that talking about gender dysphoria is one way to talk about being transgender. Is it the main way? Is it the only way?
Some current commentators evidently think so. And in our state of society, they’re certainly on to something. But maybe we should question our state of society? Ask yourself this (a good question for me, given that, as well as being transgender I am also a keen mountaineer): why is there no such general thing as ‘mountain dysphoria’? Why, broadly speaking, does no one in our society succumb to mental health problems because they can’t get at mountains?
As a matter of particular fact, I myself have sometimes suffered a bit from depression and frustration because I was living too far from the hills. But in general, the answer to my question is obvious. There is (generally speaking) no such thing as mountain dysphoria, simply because people can get at mountains. They want to climb mountains, and they get to climb mountains, and the result is a great deal of mountain euphoria. Mountain dysphoria would only be a big social phenomenon if, for some reason, our society took mountaineering to be a dubious, eccentric, perhaps perverted activity that needs to be banned, suppressed, and denied. But since people who want to climb mountains are typically allowed to climb mountains, there just isn’t a problem here, just a great deal of human happiness and fulfilment… you can see where I’m going with this analogy.
And on suffocating. Everyone, I suppose, is a something-phobe; I am a claustrophobe. I’ve always had a deep anxiety about being trapped inside things. I don’t get panic attacks underground any more, like I used to as a child, but caving has never appealed, and wide-open spaces like mountain tops always have. Some people, for reasons that escape me (see 1.17 below), are militantly opposed to the idea that anyone can be ‘born in the wrong body’. But the predicament that you feel, or at any rate I felt, in looking in the mirror and seeing a male me when I wanted to see a female me: that little phrase expresses how it feels exactly.
And how early is it? As early as can be. From the very beginning. As much as a religious sense is there (in those in whom it is there, like me), your sense of yourself as transgender is in everything, right from the off. Of course, there can be times when you hide it from yourself: as we’ll see, mine is the story of someone who hid it from herself for decades and decades, who spent half her life trying with all her might not to be trans – and in the end failing. Conversely, of course, there can also be times when you cop on to yourself, when you realise what you want and who you are, and it seems that through some epiphany you ‘become more transgender’ – as we’ll also see. But it’s there all along, running right through you, through everything you are, like the lettering through a stick of rock. As long as you have any awareness at all, you’re aware of that. It’s who you are right from the start.
In this book I write personally, as I say. I don’t claim to speak for anyone else, and I’m sure that I’ll say some things that other transgender people will disagree with, or not find ‘relatable’. I’m not trying to make universal, exceptionless generalisations. But I do know, from talking to other transgender people, that I am in many ways very similar to a lot of other trans women.
The thing about praying every night to be changed into a girl, for instance. I did it; lots and lots of trans girls do it. There have presumably been trans people praying this sort of prayer all along, because people have been reporting that they prayed it for as long as people in our society have been even slightly open about being transgender.
There is a great deal in Jan Morris’s classic memoir Conundrum that was unnervingly, spookily familiar to me when I first read it. In particular this passage, where Morris is recalling something from the year of my father’s birth, 1935. At the time, she (or at the time, to all appearances, he) was a nine-year-old chorister in Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford:
I began to dream of ways in which I might throw off the hide of my body and reveal myself pristine within – for ever emancipated into the state of simplicity. I prayed for it every evening. A moment of silence followed each day [at Choral Evensong] the words of the Grace – ‘The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all ever more.’ Into that hiatus, while my betters I suppose were asking for forgiveness or enlightenment, I inserted silently every night, year after year throughout my boyhood, an appeal less graceful but no less heartfelt: ‘And please God let me be a girl. Amen.’2
Jan Morris uses the phrase ‘born in the wrong body’ in the very first sentence of Conundrum. Carol Steele has the born-in-the-wrong-body idea too, in her very similar report on growing up roughly halfway between Jan Morris’s childhood and my own:
[When I was seven, in 1952] my father read out a story from The News of the World to my mother, and suddenly it all became clear to me. The story was … about Christine Jorgensen, the first transgender person to receive worldwide publicity about her gender confirmation surgery. I recognised myself in that story. This was who I was too. I also remember, in chilling detail, the words my father said after he finished reading that story: ‘Perverts like that need locking away in a loony-bin and the key throwing away.’ That was the beginning of the shame that haunted me for a further twenty years and resulted in two attempts at suicide.
From that point on, my childhood was spent every evening praying that God would put right this terrible mistake and that the following morning I would wake up a proper girl. At primary school, I used to be teased and called a sissy and the boys started calling me Stella. Oddly enough, even though I knew this was meant to be bullying, it gave me a sense of peace and confirmation that my peers recognised me for who I actually was.3
Perhaps, if we had had centuries of openness about transgender, we would have centuries of reports of the same sort. But what we actually have is just a couple of decades of the internet, where for good or ill people have been as open about being transgender as they have about everything else in human life. Before the internet everything was different; most things to do with transgender were veiled in secrecy, hidden in shame and confusion.
Why the shame? Why the confusion? Where does that come from?
1.8: The shame
As far as I can tell, the shame comes mainly from outside. And to judge by her words just quoted, Carol Steele would agree. It doesn’t occur to you to be ashamed of how you are and who you are until other people tell you that you should be. You just are that way, and you’re perfectly happy that way, and it seems in no way abnormal to you. It’s your normal, and you carry on being normal – normal for you; being who you are – until other people block your path.
When I was (as I then saw it) a small boy who wanted to be a small girl, that was just how things were and who I was, as far as I was concerned. Left to my own devices I would have accepted it and built it into my ordinary life without the slightest shame or confusion or embarrassment, as naturally and as happily as I accepted and lived with the facts that I was English, ash-blond, hazel-eyed, and right-handed.
I wasn’t ashamed of being who I was until I was taught to be ashamed. The shame came later – not much later, but later (it wasn’t there before I started school). It came from my parents and my siblings and, well, everyone really. Over the next ten or twenty years, it came from Walter the Sissy in the Beano and Basil Fotherington-Thomas in Nigel Molesworth, from ‘You’ll Be a Man, My Son’ in Kipling and the gendering of everything I read from the Famous Five to Narnia, from constant firm reminders from everywhere that Boys Do This and Girls Do That, from my schoolmates’ vocabulary of derision and their playground chants. Shame about my predicament was not a natural but an acquired response. So was the very idea that it was a predicament, a problem, as opposed to simply how things were for me.
What are little boys made of?
What are little boys made of?
Frogs and snails,
And puppy-dogs’ tails;
That’s what little boys are made of.
What are little girls made of?
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice,
And everything nice;
That’s what little girls are made of.
You can be chaotic, messy, dirty, rough, noisy, adventurous, an outdoors kind of person; or you can be sweet, tasty, orderly, tidy, pretty, demure, an indoors kind of person – a classroom or library or nursery kind of person. But you can’t be both: you have to be one or the other. If you are frogs and snails, then you aren’t sugar and spice. If you are sugar and spice, then you aren’t frogs and snails. And you don’t choose which to be – it’s not up to you to decide which you are. As people now like to say, ‘Being a woman is not a feeling.’ If your body looks like this, that’s it: no sugar and spice for you. If it looks like that, too bad: frogs and snails are off.
And if you feel any different, like I did – if you are into both frogs and snails and sugar and spice, but also think that, if you really do have to choose between them, then it’s the sugar and spice that you most deeply go for – if you are like that, then you should feel ashamed of yourself, and your parents should feel ashamed of you too, and they should do something to stop you. The opposite of what they do in the Who song ‘I’m a boy’, where a boy child is forced into presenting as a girl because that’s what his mother wants. A song that I heard much later than the nursery rhyme, of course, and sung with plenty of subversive intent to them; but even when I was fourteen, I heard the words before I noticed the subversion. To have parents who left me no choice but to be a girl instead of a boy – yes, well, I could dream. But dream was all.
1.9: And the confusion
I wasn’t ashamed, then – not at first. And I wasn’t confused, either – at least, not when I was four or five I wasn’t. If you’d asked me when I was four or five ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ I’d have said, grumpily and sadly, ‘A boy, I suppose.’ If you’d asked me ‘What do you want to be, a boy or a girl?’ I’d have said, immediately and definitely – and very hopefully – ‘A girl – please.’ And if you’d then asked me ‘So are you really a boy or a girl?’ I think I’d have scratched my head and said something like: ‘I don’t really know. I know I look like a boy. But that’s not the way I really am… or feel… or want to be… Could we try this again, please, this which-am-I business? Please can I change?’
No one ever asked me any of these questions, unfortunately. But I don’t think my hypothetical answers to them were symptomatic of confusion. Incomplete information, yes; uncertainty, yes; but confusion? I wasn’t confused at all. As far as any small child can have, or could have then, I had a very clear idea of my own nature and my own situation.
I did have a certain sense that I wasn’t being told everything, and that sense perhaps was part of what motivated me, as I always have been motivated, to find things out for myself rather than taking other people’s word for them; to find different ways of exploring and learning things. Me all over, in pretty much every sphere: I find an unorthodox way to do something, and do it that way and feel guilty about it, and pretend I am doing it the same way as everyone else – until it dawns on me that actually there might be something to be said for my unorthodox approach. The first exam I ever took was the entrance exam to my private primary school when I was four and a half. I was asked to solve a maze, to get a mouse from the gateway to the cheese in the middle. I already knew that the easiest way to solve a maze was backwards, starting from the endpoint and going back to the beginning. But I didn’t know whether I was supposed to know this, or whether doing the maze that way was cheating. So I did the maze twice in the time allowed, once furtively, backwards in my head from the cheese to the mouse, and once openly, tracing the route forward with my finger from the mouse to the cheese, as I believed I was supposed to.
I took the unorthodox route with learning to read, too. So long as my learning-to-read books were Janet and John and Peter and Jane, I hated reading and was bored rigid by the whole business and insisted vehemently that there really wasn’t any need for me to learn to read. I had always got by in the past (all four and a half years of it) without being able to read, so why, I insisted, shouldn’t I get by without reading in the future too?
And then, while I was staying at my grandparents’ house, I got hold of a creaky, dusty old copy of Alice in Wonderland, probably my father’s from his childhood, or maybe my grandmother’s from hers, all hand-cut pages and oil-sheet-covered Tenniel illustrations, and learned to read from that instead.
I wonder what it was about the contrast between dreary, monosyllabic, large-font prose involving faceless, cardboard-cut-out, gender-binary figurines, and a riotous explosion of a book about a subversive, solitary girl in a Victorian dress who finds herself magicked away into a world of giddy mathematical imaginings, that can possibly have made the difference for me.
But on the topic of boys who wish they were girls all the time, I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. I didn’t have the first idea whether anyone else had ever been like me in this way. I hadn’t a clue how I might tell if they were, or what to look for in others to try and read them or clock them or work them out. Nor did I have the slightest clue what, if anything, could be done about my constant, deep, haunting longing to turn into a girl.
Another thing that happened when I was about four was that I had my tonsils out. In some vague way I had high hopes of this operation, especially since I was dressed for it beforehand in what looked to me pretty much like a girl’s nightie. Secretly, I was deeply disappointed when I came round afterwards with a very sore throat – and a boy’s body still.
Like the shame, the confusion came from outside. I wasn’t confused about being who I was until I was taught to be confused – until I was taught that being a boy who wanted to be a girl was being a problem, an anomaly, a freak of some sort. It was being someone who deserved to be laughed at, someone who was mixed-up and weird, and had a duty to keep their weirdness to themselves. Whether or not it seemed that way to me, I was taught that being a boy who wanted to be a girl was being someone who was both confused and shameful.
I am not in the least angry or bitter about how my life has gone. My life has gone great, thanks, so far, and provided it doesn’t end with me getting knifed in the park by some lunatic transphobe, or with us all getting blown up by some lunatic tyrant. But even if my life hadn’t been good, I would still believe in forgiveness. The autobiographical aspect of this book wouldn’t be there unless I thought that there were things that can be learned from it, things to reflect on, things that might prompt course-corrections for others besides me. Still, this is not a denunciation or a charge sheet; nor an exercise in self-justification or revenge. It is a memoir. Maybe it is even, in the end, a celebration.
So I don’t want to blame anyone for anything.
And anyway, truth to tell, the person in my family who gave me the hardest time for being transgender was, by far, me myself.
Still, I really don’t think that it should have happened like it did. I really don’t think that children should be taught to feel confused, and ashamed, and guilty, and wrong, just for being the way that they naturally are. I don’t think it’s right for any attempt they make to say who they are, and be who they are, to be met with anger, aggression, hostility, repression, ridicule, denial, bullying, browbeating, threats, enforcement, punishment, sanctions, deprivations, surveillance, policing, gaslighting, ideological brainwashing, demands for desistance, Praying Away The Sissy – and the patronising accusations that the children in question are ‘confused’.
In fact – and especially if we focus on the effects that follow this sort of behaviour, rather than the intentions preceding it – I’d call it child abuse.
‘You can be whatever you want. But you can’t be that.’
1.10: Why there is no such thing as ‘gender confusion’ – or at least, not the kind you meant
In this context, of course, ‘confusion’ is a loaded word now. It’s being used these days as a weapon in a culture war, as in the wearily familiar talking point that ‘young children are being confused by being exposed to gender ideology’. We’ll come on to ‘gender ideology’; let’s start by dealing with this idea of ‘gender confusion’.
It really needs to be dealt with, because there’s no such thing. At least not in the sense usually intended. The idea behind the phrase is evidently that ‘normal people’ (the non-freaks; the ‘cis’; the natural people, including the ones who rage about being described as ‘cis’) have a common-sensical feel for what it is for them to be a boy, or a girl. This sense is strong and clear, though it might not be an inner feeling of any kind; perhaps it just derives from noticing the shape of your own body. And this sense guides ‘normal people’ into the correct two paths of the ‘gender binary’: each of us is either a boy with no doubts about it, or a girl with no doubts about it.
However (the idea is), this clear strong sense of what it is for them to be a boy (or a girl) can be disrupted! People can be infected by doubt and confusion about their doubt-free, unconfused sense of what it is to be a boy (or a girl)! Bad people who want to harm our society – and our children!! – are busy spreading this doubt and confusion! Transgender is an ‘irreversibly damaging’ ‘craze’ that is ‘seducing our daughters’!
(Alert readers will spot which book I am referencing here. I hope all readers will understand why, if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not spell out the reference. This sort of talk deserves obscurity, not amplification. First, it is factually wrong to describe transgender as a ‘craze’. Transgender is not a merely recent or local phenomenon (see 2.6 below), and realising that one is transgender is not like suddenly deciding to go in for hula-hoops or Wordle; it might be more closely compared to facing up to the fact that one is gay. Secondly, there is certainly ‘irreversible damage’ being done to transgender people; but – as I know to my own cost – the vast majority of it is being done by those who submit us to intimidation, browbeating, harassment, and sometimes outright psychological or physical torture, with a view to preventing us from existing as transgender people at all. So from someone with violently trans-exclusionary views, these words are, shall we say, a bit much. They are also, thirdly, irresponsibly inflammatory. To begin a discussion of transgender with the claim that ‘our daughters’ are being ‘seduced’ is to resort to the kind of moral-panic rhetoric that is used, and I speak literally here, to whip up lynch mobs. In a world that is increasingly threatening for transgender people, where transgender children are routinely bullied and brainwashed to deny their own nature, where an increasing number of US states are making snoopy-neighbour informers’ witch hunts against the families of transgender children part of their law, and where lethal transphobic violence is by no means just the dark imaginings of offline anxiety, such dangerous language deserves, not the oxygen of publicity, but what a certain author would call an invisibility-cloak.)4
When you lay out this train of alarmist thought about ‘gender confusion’ like this, it shouldn’t be hard to see how, well, confused it is. If this sense of what it is for someone to be a boy, or a girl, is so strong and clear, how come it is also so fragile, so easily disrupted by ‘confusion’? And how come there are counterexamples to it? Both cases of people who aren’t sure about their own gender, and maybe wish they didn’t have a gender at all, and also cases like mine: cases of people who are sure which of the two genders they belong in, but are sure that it’s the other one from the one they were ‘assigned at birth’.
And anyway, what exactly is so harmful about having one’s sense of one’s own gender disrupted? Maybe our society’s norms of femininity and masculinity are oppressive, and could do with a bit of disruption and subversion. Or even if it is confusion we’re talking about, well, is it always such a terrible thing to be confused? Cocksure ignoramuses are hardly ever confused. Speculative research scientists are confused all the time.
Keep it in mind that we’re talking about cases where someone is perfectly well aware of the biological facts about their own body (at least in its original form), but decides for whatever reason that they’d like to live in a way that flouts normal expectations about the lifestyle of people (who at least started out) with that shape of body – in what is sometimes called, jocularly or scornfully, a gender-bending way. In cases like this, why speak about confusion at all? Why not speak instead of, say, exploration? What’s the confusion here? What are gender-bending people supposed to be confused about?
Or consider, again, the language of ‘seduction’ that has (as above) so reprehensibly been inveigled into this discussion. ‘Seduction’ implies deception of some kind. (It also implies sexual abuse and non-consensual sex; like I say, it’s a pretty despicable move to invoke the word at all.) But usually, when someone chooses to bend gender norms, there is no deception. And there is no deceiver.
‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate; God made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate.’ Suppose we voluntarily chose to live together in a community where everyone’s basic physical needs were provided for by an elected organising committee, and, beyond those needs, everyone had exactly the same amount of money to spend on whatever they wanted. Such communities exist; kibbutzim, monasteries, anarchist collectives, and nunneries are organised in something like this way.
Does a community like this involve its members in ‘confusion’ about the God-given ‘estates’ of ‘high and lowly’? What would the confusion be, exactly? Confusion presumably means false or incoherent beliefs; but where is the falsehood, or the incoherence, in communal living?
Or even if there were some confusion involved – say, an undermining or a compromising of some people’s previously firm conviction that the estates of rich and poor are in fact God-given – would that be so terrible?
In any area you like (wealth or gender or sexuality or anything really), would it actually be worse to be confused about society’s norms, than to be totally clear what they are and utterly distressed by them?
1.11: Purity and danger
When people talk about ‘gender confusion’ in this way, as a taint or infection that you can catch from other people, they are talking the language of purity and danger. Purity and Danger
