Transgenderism Still Fucking Up Feminist Theory

By Janet Bloomfield (aka JudgyBitch): Transgender individuals are in the news again, particularly teenage transgender boys who want to use girl’s bathroom and changing facilities. I find this debate particularly interesting because of the giant wrench it throws into feminist theory. According to feminism, gender is a social construct, and there is no such thing as a ‘male’ or ‘female’ brain – we are all humans and any observable differences are down to socialization, and that is that.
Slate has an article up, declaring that ‘male’ and ‘female’ brains are likely a myth.
Is it just me, or do feminists trying to argue their way out of the science of the brain sound an awful lot like creationists trying to disprove evolution because there are no rabbits in the Paleolithic Era?


The subject of evolution is always amusing when it comes to feminism. On the one hand, creationists are idiots who don’t understand basic science, but evolutionary psychology is just a bunch of made up bullshit with no scientific basis at all. Okay, so which is it? Is evolution a fact, or is it not?
Every aspect of our biology has its roots in the evolution from single celled organism to homo sapiens except the brain?!?! How the hell does that work? The human brain just sprang into being all by itself?
Luckily, one doesn’t need a degree in neurobiology to take a look at pop culture and make some intelligent connections between gender, evolution and the brain. Take this chick, for example: she’s a big, blubbery cry-baby. The slightest emotional trigger sets off the waterworks, entirely against her conscious desire. She cries uncontrollably over pretty much everything, and she finds it both embarrassing and counter-productive. It’s hard to play the corporate badass when a question about your data sends floods rolling over your face.
In many cases, I can totally relate. I cannot watch little kids in a pageant or recital without fighting back tears. Even thinking about it, my throat starts to close and I feel the telltale prickle of tears. I don’t know why. One memorable dance recital, Daddy carried two little three year old ballerinas out onto stage in flower pots. When the music started, they climbed out of their pots, adorable little daisy petals framing their faces and proceeded to stagger around the stage like two drunks. Half the audience was in tears, because it was just so fucking cute! Most of the snifflers were women, but lots of Dads and Grandpas and Uncles were weeping, too. Watch these baby ballerinas get in brawl on stage. How do you not cry and laugh at the same time?

Crying at dance recitals? Totally appropriate. Crying at marketing meetings? Not so much. So what did our crybaby do?

She started taking testosterone supplements.
Yes, she embraced the toxicity of masculinity to control her emotional responses, and lo and behold! It works! It works the other way, too. Oxytocin spray can make men more cuddly and more prone to experience emotional reactions. Change a person’s hormone profile, and you can change their behaviour. Whether we should do that is a whole other conversation, but the science is settled: hormones affect behaviour.

But…but….but….

You can hear the feminists already! This can’t be true! Gender is a social construct! Men don’t cry as much as women because they are socialized to think tears are girly and stupid! Patriarchy cripples men emotionally! Men choose to embrace a more stoic emotional approach to life! They are repressed women! It’s all just made up bullshit and …..

If you can pry their fingers out and interrupt the feminist dialogue on toxic masculinity and gender socialization to bring up transgenderism, all of sudden, the opposition to the idea that there might be such a thing as a ‘male brain’ or a ‘female brain’ evaporates. Introduce a new category of ‘victimhood’, and your sobbing feminist will transform into a cheerful advocate of essential gendered biology. Of course you can be born with a female brain in a male body! Of course you can! Lol! Silly. Why wouldn’t that be possible?
Uh….
#FeministLogic
There are plenty of people, both feminists and regular, sane people alike, who consider transgenderism a type of mental illness. Both Germaine Greer and Ben Shapiro cast big old side-eyes at biological males who think they are females, albeit for different reasons. Some feminists were upset when Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner was proclaimed the Glamour Woman of the Year, lamenting that even when it comes to being women, men do it better. Greer went even further, saying:

“Just because you lop off your dick and then wear a dress doesn’t make you a fucking woman. I’ve asked my doctor to give me long ears and liver spots and I’m going to wear a brown coat but that won’t turn me into a fucking cocker spaniel.
“I do understand that some people are born intersex and they deserve support in coming to terms with their gender but it’s not the same thing. A man who gets his dick chopped off is actually inflicting an extraordinary act of violence on himself.”

I’m going to side against Greer and Cernovich and Shapiro and everyone else who thinks transgenderism is a form of mental illness. I don’t think it is, at least in the normal way we understand mental illness. If one were to get pedantic, we could define blindness as mental illness, in that a blind person has eyeballs, and a brain, but the optic nerves that should connect the two aren’t working, which is a type of brain malfunction, ergo a mental illness. I don’t find that a helpful conversation. Mental illness in the common vernacular centers on having some sort of delusion – the reality you perceive is not reality at all.
A great deal of soul-searching went on when Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King, both white people, insisted they were really Black, because they imagine themselves to be Black.  Why can’t they be Black? If a man can imagine himself a woman, why can’t a white person imagine themselves to be Black? To me, the answer is pretty clear: science. If half your DNA is derived from a genetically white person, and the other half from another genetically white person, there is no point during fetal development that you were exposed to Black genes that might affect your self-perception. I’m no endocrinologist, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how race works, anyways. Race is not the result of hormones.
Biological sex is, and it is a necessary condition of development to be exposed to sex hormones in utero – those hormones determine whether your body is sexed as male or female. I suspect those same hormones determine whether your brain is sexed as male or female, too, although there is no settled science on the matter that I am aware of. Please correct me if I am wrong. When hormone levels get fucked up, transgenderism results. Again, no evidence, but it meets the logic threshold I’m comfortable with. To be certain, there likely are some individuals who are just delusional and fucked up, in the same way that some people will cut off their limbs or poke out their eyes because they are deluded into thinking they are ‘disabled’. I strongly suspect those people are in the minority.
My best guess is that transgender men and women were subjected to ‘wrong’ levels of sex hormones during development, resulting in the brain of one sex, and the body of another. They’re not mentally ill, they’re physically ill, through no actions of their own. As such, they deserve compassion and more importantly, treatment (of their own choosing). The more difficult question, of course, is how do we deal with realities like change rooms? How do we get around impossible convolutions, like the fact that a 16 year old person who sends a picture of his penis to all the underage girls in his class is guilty of creating and distributing child pornography (not to mention arrogance and general rudeness), but that same 16 year old person can whip his penis out in a change room in front of all the same underage girls and simply be exercising his rights?
Shapiro sums the craziness up:

• If you’re a boy who shows a picture of your penis to a girl in your class, you have likely violated both federal child pornography laws as well as local sexual harassment laws. If this happens consistently in your school, the school has violated Title IX.
• If you’re a boy who says he’s a girl, the girl must be placed in position to see your penis and testicles. If the school does not allow this, the school has violated Title IX.
• If you’re an adult who sexually touches a child with the consent of the child, you have committed a crime, since children are incapable of consent.
• If you’re an adult who gives a child hormone therapy or surgery to prevent normal development of the genitals, with the consent of the child, you are a hero.

Please use a change room with privacy curtains seemed like the sane response, but that is exactly what the courts rejected. I think this is nonsense. If we accept that transgender people are suffering from an endocrine condition, then appropriate accommodations are both reasonable and fair. Some kids have colostomy bags that need to be emptied periodically. There is no biological reason this should occur in a bathroom, nor is there any absolutely necessary reason the contents should be disposed of in a toilet. Hey, we let babies poop in diapers and toss those in the trash, so why not let kids with colostomy bags stand in the hallway, lift their shirt a few inches and place their feces filled bags in the hallway garbage? Because gross, that’s why. Go into a stall and dispose of your bag contents as if you were a person with a normally functioning digestive system. We can understand the reality of having a colostomy bag, and engage in complete compassion for anyone who has to live with one, but there is no need to place that medical reality front and center for everyone to enjoy.
Common courtesy.
No, it’s not a perfect analogy, but no analogy ever is, which is why it’s called an analogy. It’s very common for critics to counter arguments they don’t like by complaining about the use of analogies, but that’s such a stupid criticism, it’s barely worth responding to. ‘You can’t reason by analogy’ is like saying ‘just because lions are large cats with sharp claws and powerful limbs and ferocious growls and wicked teeth who will kill you and eat you doesn’t mean you should be cautious around tigers- tigers are clearly different.’. Okie dokie. Good luck on the savannah!
I agree with Ben Shapiro that it’s pretty much insane to demand that people with female brains and male bodies should be permitted to display their male body parts to underage, nonconsenting girls in the change room, but not because I think those boys are mentally ill. I think they are physically ill, and that sucks, but you don’t get to impose the misfortunes of your physical health on other people, no matter what that physical condition happens to be. Being disabled or ill doesn’t exempt anyone from basic courtesy.
Keep your dick in your pants, unless you are surrounded by other bodies who have dicks, too. And it works both ways. Keep your breasts in your bra, unless you are surrounded by other people with breasts, too. And if that isn’t possible, then use a damn stall. Get over yourself.
It shouldn’t be hard.
Lots of love
JB

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