One year on Substack

I just marked one year on Substack* and that’s all the permission I need to share a few of my favorite posts…

Loyalty tests: Calling a deer a horse:

A true test of loyalty hinges on an invention, a piece of pure fiction. If an issue hasn’t been invented—or distorted beyond recognition—it’s a poor test of loyalty, an experiment contaminated from the start in ways that might skew the results.

There’s a Chinese expression for this: “calling a deer a horse,” derived from a famous 2,000-year-old loyalty test that exposed and thinned the Chinese court and smoothed an Imperial Chancellor’s rise.

To bring us up to the 21st century, when Trump was newly elected, it was a test of loyalty to send out spokespeople and other sycophants to praise the unprecedented size of his inauguration crowds when anyone with eyes could see the distortion.

So loyalty is a function of disparity. The greater the disparity between what actually is and what someone attests to, the greater the loyalty that person demonstrates.

There are plenty of ways allies can voice support for trans identities. A trans ally might say something like 'transwomen are transwomen,' an (admittedly rather bland) statement that recognizes the unique status of males who identify as women. But 'transwomen are transwomen' isn't saying very much, is it? A male who identifies as a woman is a male who identifies as a woman. Why bother? Better to kick it up a notch: 'Transwomen are women.'

Enforce a line like "transwomen are women" and you'll learn something about the people who repeat it—or don't.

‘Transwomen are women’ is the perfect loyalty test because ‘transwomen are women’ is not a conclusion it’s possible to come to based on observation or inquiry or even just sitting alone in a room thinking your thoughts all the way through to the end. You have to take some other route to reach such an absurd conclusion.

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Fantasy lives and Muggle dreams:

I was 11 years old when I picked up The Sorcerer’s Stone, the same age as the main characters, and so we were children together on the cusp of adolescence.

I remember falling into that book and knowing it was fantasy and knowing what fantasy meant and knowing that Hogwarts didn't really exist and yet—that summer—a part of me thought: But perhaps a letter will come by owl. The universe of Harry Potter fitted so neatly into the universe I inhabited that nothing ruled out its existence. Invisible edges separated the two worlds. Perhaps I would find such an edge and peel it back. Of course, I would never have said such things out loud. I knew those fantasies were ridiculous and yet—

—if there were witches—and witches don’t exist, of course, I knew that, everybody knows that—but if there were witches, I was surely a witch, and if I were a witch, everything would make sense: that misfittedness I could never shed, that shapeless longing I had...

In any case, I was terribly lonely then. My runaway imagination kept me company, nourished me. I clung to the possibility that fantasy could be more than fiction.

Take the 11-year-old girl I once was. What if my desires had taken some other form? What if I had wanted to be not a witch but a boy? Could I—at that age when I couldn't quite separate fantasy and reality, no matter how cleanly I would have divided the two if asked—have consented to trade my open future for the circumscribed one transition offers? Even if adults had made the limits of transition clear to me—even if I said I understood—would I have understood what inexorability means? Wouldn't my fantasies of transformation have survived underground, out of sight, nurtured by the strength of feeling that made those fantasies necessary to me?

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The woke philosophy bro emails (parts one and two) are fun.

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“I ask this one thing only: Let me go mad in my own way.” But nobody ever does.

In both anorexia and gender dysphoria, the patient dissociates mind and body, then submits the body ruthlessly to the mind’s will. Forget Merleau-Ponty’s body-subjects. Forget Beauvoir’s “first radiation of subjectivity.” For anorexics and gender-dysphorics, the mind rules over the body like a brutal despot, beating the body—whittled by starvation or surgery, sacked and pillaged—into submission.

Medical providers tend to frame anorexia as the pathological pursuit of an (objectified) female form. I tend to see it as the opposite: a pathological rejection of objectification and sexual development. The fear isn’t becoming fat so much as becoming flesh. The anorexic persecutes the body that betrays ‘the self’ by its very existence: by its femaleness, by its soft curves and dark secrets, by blood, by the reproductive potential written into female flesh and by the things society writes on that flesh. Anorexics aspire to be pure spirit, pure intellect. They need only one food: not to violate the ‘self’ by becoming flesh.

Transition, too, scapegoats the body for its failure to faithfully represent ‘the self.’ Gender-dysphoric people talk about feeling like a ‘brain in a jar’ or a gender identity stuck in a ‘meat vehicle’ or ‘flesh suit.’ Major surgeries are spoken about with cool disregard, as though they were minor home-remodeling projects.

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Dear Chase Strangio…

So let’s talk about pretending: who is being asked to pretend, about what, and why? And where does all this pretending lead?

We’re supposed to pretend everything we know about sex is wrong: that legislatures never knew just who they targeted when they denied women the vote. That pimps and johns never knew whose bodies they sold. That the reproductive potential of child brides is pure guesswork. That the burdens of human reproduction settle, if not evenly, then at least mysteriously across the population.

It’s an interesting conceit, in a revisionist-history ‘what if the Mongols had taken Vienna?’ kind of way. It’s also, as everybody knows—no matter their claims to holy ignorance—bullshit.

… You suggest that women like me want you to pretend you don’t exist. But—believe it or not—the solution here isn’t more pretending.

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Heads, you’re trans. Tails, you’re not cis: Trans thought experiments

But let’s step away from questions of what’s possible or impossible. These thought experiments remind me of nothing so much as fairytales where characters’ fanciful—inevitably half-cooked—wishes are granted: the king whose touch turns everything to lifeless metal; the eternal youth doomed to outlive all loves, even the love for life, condemned to the inhumanity of immortality; the desire to compel—with a potion or a spell—what can only have value if it’s freely given.

Many fairytales spring from runaway metaphors, marrying whimsical fancies with utter ruthlessness. Often these metaphors spiral out of control because they have been taken too literally. I wish everything I touch would turn to gold. Everything? Really? The bunch of grapes in your hand and your daughter, too? Whatever you ask for, you will pay and pay and pay for it, and what you end up with will be something other than what you imagined.

There’s a ruthlessness to any attempt to live out one’s fantasies. Be careful what you wish for: maybe it exists, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it will be as you imagined, or maybe it will obey the forms and defy the substance of your hopes and expectations…

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Gender malware:

When you first run into a claim like “transwomen are women,” your internal antivirus software pops up a warning: Wow, this looks weird. What does that even mean? Are you sure you’re on board with this?

If you disregard those warnings and proceed anyway, you’ve let the hackers in. Once an idea like “transwomen are women” gets into your system, it insinuates itself everywhere and starts to dismantle potential sources of resistance.

Once you’ve decided to proceed anyway, it doesn’t really matter why you clicked "OK". Maybe you trusted the source. Maybe it seemed like the right thing to do. Maybe you thought it was no big deal. Maybe you didn’t even notice the warning. It's too late.

Your system now runs on a false belief. Once you’ve let such an obvious piece of nonsense in, once you’ve embraced this nonsense as the profoundest of truths, a lot of things have to bend or break to preserve that “truthfulness.” And bend and break them you will.

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The new global empire of disembodiment:

But because there’s an obvious need for a word to refer exclusively to half of humanity, we find ourselves shuffling through unsatisfactory, inaccessible, and often downright insulting alternatives: birthing bodies, gestators, menstruators, cervix-havers, AFABs We can fight over whether ‘woman’ is a sex-word or a gender-word or asex-and-gender-word—and we will!—but what’s truly remarkable is what happened to the most obvious alternative: female.

Nowhere is the trans community’s loading of language more clear than when we consider the words ‘female’ and ‘male,’ words that refer to reproductive roles not just among humans but across the animal kingdom.

For the overwhelming majority of society, ‘female’ and ‘male’ refer simply and unproblematically to sex. These words don’t imply a right or wrong way to be male or female. 'Female' and 'male' don’t say anything about identity. They’re ideal for use in scientific or medical settings where gender-sensitivity forbids the use of ‘woman’ and ‘man.’

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But the word's real crimes are more basic.

‘Female’ coherently picks out the sex class that can bear young and excludes males (never mind that biology excluded males first). ‘Female’ keeps women together as a sex class and keeps women’s bodies intact, rather than spinning us off into body parts, functions, and services... And it’s an unfashionable reminder of our embodiment, our humanity, and that we’re animals—none of which sits comfortably with the new global empire of disembodiment that’s pushing the sex trade, surrogacy, virtual reality, and transgenderism all at once.

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What do you do when the story you’ve been telling yourself falls apart?

But what happens when the new identity regime collapses? When patients detransition, they must face the realities they sought to escape by transitioning. A similarly daunting challenge faces gender clinicians when patients detransition: they must accept that they did not know what they were doing—that instead of doing good, they caused harm.

*Check the archives, and you’ll see I back-dated a bunch of posts that had started out as Twitter threads…