tl;dr: The Internet did not make me trans but I would not be trans without the Internet

New kinds of people, Ian Hacking, multiple personality, and gender identity

tl;dr: The Internet did not make me trans but I would not be trans without the Internet:

For me, i wouldn't have realized I'm trans (ftm) had i not learned about it from the internet. So the internet did not make me trans but rather helped me realize I'm trans. The internet made me realize being trans is a thing that exists.

What's happened is that we've created a new way to be a person: being trans. People who in the past would never have understood themselves in these terms now do. For some, this new self-understanding puts them on the pathway to lifelong medicalization, with the medical technologies (sex-reassignment surgery, artificial hormones) developing alongside the applications (transsexual, transgender, nonbinary identities).

Take multiple personality, which Ian Hacking tracks through his brilliant book, Rewriting the Soul. Hacking shows how vulnerable people, looking for a template to make sense of their suffering, latched onto the narrative multiple personality provided:

“When new descriptions become available... then there are new things to choose to do. When new intentions become open to me, because new descriptions, new concepts, become available to me, I live in a new world of opportunities."

In other words: "Multiple personality provided a new way to be an unhappy person."

Hacking draws a direct comparison to cult initiation: the way the idea of multiple personality is introduced invites susceptible listeners to feel the prototype "awaken" in themselves. Suddenly, everything clicks.

These newfound multiples begin reinterpreting their pasts in light of their fresh self-understandings. They realize only now that they were always multiples. When you rewrite your whole life story with multiplicity in mind, it's obvious.

Unscrupulous therapists play a role, too. Most therapists never saw a single ‘multiple.’ But activist-therapists practically manufactured them, transforming patients' diffuse suffering into compelling narratives of multiplicity. Hacking shows how the desire to validate and legitimize multiples drove a search for "child multiples." In reality, this meant therapists encouraged troubled children to dissociate through therapeutic suggestion, rather than supporting integration of traumatic experiences. Ultimately, multiplicity became not just a diagnosis but a social movement demanding validation. Allies demonstrated their support by their credulous acceptance of ever wilder claims, which eventually snowballed into the Satanic Panic of the 1980s-1990s. When researchers and therapists sought a deeper understanding of the roots of multiple personality, activists cried foul: do you think multiples are faking it? Who would choose to suffer like this?

No, they’re not faking it. The suffering is real and the self-understandings are sincere. The point is a much more subtle one.

Is this what's going on with gender identity? It sure looks like it.

Let's drop back in on that Reddit conversation: "am I being brainwashed into being trans by the Internet?"

One commenter says not to worry:

"First of all, nobody can brainwash you into being transgender. Full stop. Anything you realize about yourself probably had to be there in some capacity already, but you might not have been aware of it."

But...

"A lot of stuff can be buried by your subconscious. I didn't think I had any signs either at first, until I started remembering and re-contextualizing my experiences later on..."

Another recounted how the Internet provided a framework for a radical new self-understanding:

"The internet didn't make me trans. The internet helped put into words the things I was feeling."

And another:

"i personally would've never realized i was trans without the internet, i wouldve just been unhappy with how i looked and never know why. just because you didnt start thinking about it untill that pointz doesnt mean your being brainwashed."

Finally, Hacking turns to one of the core tasks of therapy: the therapist's quest to help a patient develop a narrative he or she can live with. To what extent does it matter if that livable story is true?

Taking up the case of a self-identified multiple, Bernice, Hacking writes: “There is a sense in which she really does not know herself… So what? Bernice has achieved a coherent soul. It works, or so we are told. What better truth for her is needed? The therapist will say, perhaps, none.”

But Hacking worries about false consciousness: "I mean something quite ordinary by false consciousness: the state of people who have formed importantly false beliefs about their character and their past.” Something's gone wrong as this story took shape: "It is we ourselves who must choose the ends. That is a stern creed: we can be fully moral beings only when we understand why we choose the ends." Patients who have been misled in their self-understandings do not freely choose the ends:

“Confident and blatant skeptics cheerfully dismiss all that as fantasy, but it is the less arrogant and more reflective doubters whom I have in mind. They accept that the patient has produced this version of herself: a narrative that includes dramatic events, a causal story of the formation of alters, and an account of the relationship between the alters. That is a self-consciousness: that is a soul. The doubters accept it as a reality. They are all too familiar with the fact that psychiatry is filled with pain and inability to help. They respect a clinician who can make a client feel more confident and able to get on with her life. Nevertheless, they fear that multiple personality therapy leads to a false consciousness… there is some sense that the end product is a thoroughly crafted person, but not a person who serves the ends for which we are persons. Not a person with self-knowledge, but a person who is the worse for having a glib patter that simulates an understanding of herself… Such tentative and cautious skeptics ask whether multiple personality is real. Not being philosophers, they feel that they have to continue their doubts in a utilitarian vein, raising questions about what is the most effective treatment. But since I am a philosopher, I should now speak for them. I say that in their hearts they suspect that the outcome of multiple therapy is a type of false consciousness. That is a deeply moral judgment. It is based on the sense that false consciousness is contrary to the growth and maturing of a person who knows herself. It is contrary to what the philosophers call freedom. It is contrary to our best vision of what it is to be a human being.”