Gender dysphoria and transition, part 2: How to present?

The first question to address, when considering gender dysphoria, is also the easiest. Is this even a thing in the first place? Does gender dysphoria really exist?

The answer is obviously Yes. Dysphoria means pain or misery or unhappiness. If at least one person on Earth is unhappy about the gender he* was assigned at birth, gender dysphoria exists. That was easy.

But if someone suffers from gender dysphoria, what next? When people feel deeply alienated from the genders they** were assigned at birth, what advice should they be given about how to live their lives and present themselves to the world?

The answer to this second question is a little more involved, and relies on two premises.

The first premise is the modern (non-linguistic) distinction between gender and sex. This evening, Wikipedia defines gender as: 

either of the two sexes (male and female), especially when considered with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones. The term is also used more broadly to denote a range of identities that do not correspond to established ideas of male and female.

In other words, if sex is taken to denote a biological structure — a structure involving genital organs shaped like this and hormonal chemicals balanced like that — then gender (by contrast) involves someone's social and cultural identity: how he acts, and how he is received and treated by others. This distinction will become important in a minute.

The second premise is a general confession of human ignorance. There is a lot that we don't know. And it behooves us to tread cautiously in areas we don't understand. Since we sometimes learn that we were confused even about topics we thought we understood,*** it behooves us to tread cautiously in most areas.

The implications of these two premises become clear when we ask the question, How many genders are there? The unthinking answer is, Two, of course! Umm ... aren't there? 

But let's slow down. We know that the vast majority of humans belong to one of two biological sexes. (A few people are intersex or fail to fit the standard male-or-female categorization in some other way at a biological level.) But gender has to do with cultural and social systems and categories. And we all know that cultural and social systems are far more creative, and show far more diversity, than biological systems. So how can we be sure that there are only two genders? How can we be sure that there aren't three, ... or four, ... or six, ... or twelve, ... or twenty-seven?

We can't.

And therefore there are no reasonable grounds on which to constrain the ways that people choose to present themselves. For all that we know, there are more genders than we are aware of: so perhaps this person belongs to one of those unknown genders, and perhaps members of that (unknown) gender normally dress like this and act like that. Maybe it is normal for people in the gender to which this person actually belongs to present themselves in this way, or in this complex of ways. We just don't know, because we just can't know how many genders there really are. And therefore we have no grounds for telling this person, You're doing it wrong. 

Therefore the advice to those who feel alienated from the gender to which they were assigned at birth has to be, Act, dress, and present yourself in whatever way seems right to you in your own eyes. We have no grounds to say anything else.     

__________

* Yes, I still use he as the unmarked (generic) third-person singular personal pronoun. I recognize that some readers will find this usage problematic, but I have not yet seen an alternative which is both euphonious and standardized. Often I will reword the sentence so that I can use they with a plural verb, but sometimes I find I have painted myself into a corner. In the cases when I use he, as I once advised in another context, I am emphatically not trying to make a political point.

** Ha! That time I got to use they! See? I do try. 😀

*** There were a lot of people who were certain they understood astronomy because they had studied Ptolemy, and who were certain they understood medicine because they had studied Galen. They were wrong.

    

Gender dysphoria and transition, part 1: Topics

A week and a half ago, I got a phone call from a guy I'd gone to college with forty years ago, and whom I hadn't really heard from since then. I'll call him Cassius. It was a long phone call, filled with a lot of news on both sides, and I've written about the rest of it elsewhere. But one of the things he told me was that he has come to the realization that he suffers from gender dysphoria, and that he wants to transition to living as a woman. (I don't remember if he said he was simply thinking about transition, or if he has already made plans. Some of his other news makes me suspect he is still at the "thinking about it" stage.)

I have to admit I wasn't expecting that, though when I discussed it with another common friend who knew us both back then she said she wasn't surprised. (That makes one of us.) What I told Cassius at the time, and in a follow-up email afterwards, was that I had not tought a lot about transgender topics, but that of course I supported my friends. This was only partly true, because I have actually spent a certain amount of time mulling the issue over the last few years, just because it seems to be somehow in the air. But until now I have not had any concrete reason to sit down and spell out my thoughts in any detail. Also, I didn't think that phone call was really the time to get into a philosophical exploration of the subject.

The stated purpose of this blog is to see the world through classical eyes, and the classical world certainly understood that gender is not an immutable category. Dionysus was in many ways a gender-bending character: nominally male, but without any of the martial or heroic attributes that the Greeks assigned to masculinity, and followed by women who were intoxicated and deadly. The seer Tiresias was transformed into a woman and spent seven years of his life as one before being transformed back into a man. And Greek mythology also recognized the character of Hermaphroditus, who can be thought of as an ancient Greek futanari.

What part of this requires philosophical thought? I think there are at least four questions to consider:

1. Is gender dysphoria a real thing?
2. When people are assigned to one gender but feel deeply that they belong to another, how should they act and present themselves?
3. What should be the extent or role of medical intervention?
4. How should these people be treated by our laws, and by society at large?

I plan to address these questions in my next three posts. I will address Questions 1 and 2 together, and then write one post each for Questions 3 and 4.

If there are other questions I have missed, or if you have any other feedback, I welcome comments.

           

Return to the One (sections 1-2)

I've started reading Brian Hines's Return to the One. Here are a few short notes on his first two sections, "God is the Goal," and "One is Overall."

He starts by making the point that Plotinus is an ascetic, but not because he wanted to be a joyless curmudgeon. He says that Plotinus is an ascetic because he wants to get at what is truly good, and not be distracted by lesser goods which are unsatisfying. That remark sounds a little like my thoughts about asceticism here. Then he says that we all desire the One, that we should therefore channel all our desires towards it, and that when we finally achieve the One (if we ever do) all our desires will cease. 

How does it make any sense to say that we all desire the One? Don't we desire a lot of different things? Food, shelter, love and companionship, money and nice things, admiration and respect, … and on and on? Well yes, of course. But Plotinus says that these are only distractions from the One, or at best they are reflections of it; whereas if we had the One Itself, we wouldn't need all the other things.

At first hearing, this sounds bizarre. It comes from Plato defining the Good as that which we all seek, and that definition comes in turn from saying, "I want food because it is good; I want shelter because it is good; I want companionship because it is good," and so on. But to jump from saying all these things separately to saying that there is one single thing called "the Good" that we can somehow acquire and that will satisfy all our desires at once … that sounds like a joke. It sounds like Plato (or Plotinus) is playing with words to charm us or mystify us or confuse us, and in any event to get us to follow along. Of course Plato and Plotinus would deny that the Good (or the One) is a "thing" that we can "acquire." Also, they are both very smart; so if I can see that the jump from adjective to noun looks like a stretch, odds are that they see it too. Maybe there is more to it than meets the eye. Keep this question in mind as we go on.

Notice by the way that Robert Pirsig does something similar in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when he introduces the term Quality but refuses to define it beyond saying "Quality is what you like." [p. 232] There are some words in there about Quality as an immediate felt experience, but nothing very exact. If the comparison helps, I think it is fair to use it. 

When Plotinus says that all desires will cease he sounds for a minute like a Buddhist (I've remarked before that the Buddha dharma and the Πλατωνικός λόγος sound awfully similar) but his path doesn't sound especially Buddhist. Hines writes that, "Plotinus does not espouse the extinction of desire, but the channeling of desire. Within us is a spiritual engine, longing, that is always running strong.... [But] In truth, that hunger can only be satisfied by the One." [p. 40]

Is the difference real, or only apparent? I'm not sure yet. This is another question to keep in mind as we go, to see if it is answered later. I admit that when I hear that the way to the One involves using all our power of longing and desire but simply channeling it, the first thing I think of is William Blake's remark in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that "at the end of six thousand years …. the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite & corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment." [plate 14] But I'm probably wrong: at any rate I make no claims here that Blake and Plotinus are saying anything like the same thing. 

So if we all want the One, where do we find it? Plotinus says that the One is everywhere, that it is the source (but not the creator) of all existence, and that the only way to see it is to look back on ourselves in contemplation, screening out all the other distractions that occupy our attention. Here again, the advice sounds quasi-Buddhist: meditate quietly in order to understand the true nature of reality. Right now my working hypothesis is that the methods and experience which Plotinus is teaching may turn out to be very similar to the methods and experience taught by the Buddha, but that the language and conceptual structure in which he describes them are rather different. Let's see if this hypothesis holds up.       

What's wrong with following your passion?

There is a kind of fashionable advice on careers that says to find work you are passionate about. The argument behind it is that your passion will fuel your hard work, and the hard work will bring success. And usually there is an example given, of this or that person who never finished school or labored under some other handicap, and who nonetheless succeeded because of single-minded dedication fueled by passion. 

This argument is wrong in two ways, not just one. One well-understood flaw is that it is an example of survivorship bias. (See especially this section of the article, as well as this cartoon.) 

But the second error is that it assumes passions are immutable. On the one hand, if you find yourself becoming successful at something you are likely to start feeling passionate about it. But also, if you regularly fail at something you are likely to lose your passion. Think of a young boy who loves role-playing as a superhero. He hears the advice about following your passion, and so he makes it his life's goal to achieve fame and fortune in a career where he can role-play as a superhero. Of course such careers exist — there are actors who star in superhero movies, after all — but they are few and far between. So the numerical odds are stacked way against him, and the overwhelming probability is that he will fail.

What then? Will he be as passionate about playing superheroes at 45 as he was at 10? Probably not. His tastes will likely have changed over time, and his repeated failures to make even a bare living this way will likely have dampened his ardor. But if he then complains to the propagandist who sold him on the "Follow your passion" dogma years ago, how is that fellow going to reply? "Don't complain to me, Sonny. Just look at yourself: you're no longer passionate about superhero role-playing, and so of course your flabby commitment is dragging down your performance. Of course you failed. It's your own fault for losing that passion you had when you were younger, because if you had only kept the flame alive you would surely have succeeded one day."

In other words, "follow your passion to achieve success" really means "your failure is your own fault." 

But sometimes it ain't.

See also a similar point made by Scott Galloway on Twitter, here. 

This clip is excerpted from a much longer speech which you can find here:

         

Return to the One (Introduction)

 Some months ago, I bought a book that has been sitting around waiting for me to read it. (To be clear, this happens a lot.) In the meantime, though, I've picked it up and browsed at random through it any number of times. (This, too, is pretty common.) And I've thought, "What if I actually read the thing from start to finish? You know, the way it's meant to be read."

The book is called Return to the One: Plotinus's Guide to God-Realization, and it's by Brian Hines. In the Introduction, he says that the right approach to Plotinus's teaching is to probe it, criticize it, and ask questions. Plotinus taught a very distilled form of Platonism; so as the conceit of this blog is that ancient philosophy is still meaningful today, looking into Plotinus's thought would seem to be a natural thing to do. And isn't the medium of a blog post just tailor-made for criticizing or asking questions? For thinking through topics when you're not sure how they will turn out? Maybe if I plan to post something here once a week or so it will keep me on track. We'll see.

I explained back in the inaugural post of this blog that at the time I saw great value in classical thought as well as some areas that I simply disagreed with. That's still true today. To make it clear where I am starting from, let me quote one summary paragraph (and just a bit more) from Hines's introduction:

During the third century, in Plotinus's lifetime, Neoplatonism and Christianity competed for the hearts and minds of those in the Mediterranean world.... Indeed, the spiritual message of one of these combatants can be summarized in this fashion: There is only one God, who is all love; every human being has an immortal soul, whose highest destiny is to be united with God; if we live virtuous lives, we will join our heavenly Father after death, but if we do not, justice will be done; we must humbly yield to the divine will, accepting with equanimity whatever life brings us; to be attracted to the sensual pleasures of this world is to be distanced from God, the Good we seek but never find in material pursuits. And then there is the Christian conception of spirituality, which I won't bother to summarize, as it should already be familiar to the reader. [Hines, p. xvi]

Fine, let me take this radically abbreviated summary of Neoplatonism and suggest where I stand today with respect to each of its points. Naturally by the time I get to the end of the book I might have changed my mind on some of these opinions.

• There is only one God, who is all love. Of course it depends on how you define the word "god." Under one definition this claim is perfectly reasonable. But the word has also been used to describe other phenomena as well, that don't fit so neatly into this view. It will probably take me at least one whole post on its own to explain what I have in mind.
• Every human being has an immortal soul, whose highest destiny is to be united with God. If I look at this through the metaphysical lenses that I normally use, it's hard to agree. What is this soul made out of? Matter or energy? How do we detect it? Also, anything made out of either matter or energy cannot be immortal, based on what we understand of physics. On the other hand the anecdotal sources attesting to ghosts or other communications with the dead are many and they come from all over the globe. So this point deserves some thought before I dismiss it.
• If we live virtuous lives, we will join our heavenly Father after death. This belief relies on what came before, about the immortal soul. If that fails, this does too.
• But if we do not [live virtuous lives], justice will be done. This, on the other hand, looks perfectly obvious to me. If I lead a corrupt and vicious life, my punishment is to be the kind of person that my actions make me. And living a life as that kind of person is unpleasant. Such a life is not worth living. So the justice is immediate and, I would argue, inescapable: cause and effect, no more.
• We must humbly yield to the divine will, accepting with equanimity whatever life brings us. Yes, equanimity is a good thing. And kicking against Reality -- refusing to accept that what is, is -- that's just a waste of time and effort. And it makes you needlessly miserable. I'm completely onboard with this point.
• To be attracted to the sensual pleasures of this world is to be distanced from God, the Good we seek but never find in material pursuits. Not so sure about this one. Are we really supposed to think that wine and music and love are worthless distractions? That's a hard argument to make, and I will be interested to see how Plotinus makes it. I have already started to discuss this point before, for example here and here.

So it's a mixed bag. And again, my positions may change after I read the book. Let's see.

             

Philodemy

I started wondering today about a phenomenon that I'm pretty sure is a real thing but I don't know if it has a name. My questions to you are therefore first, Is this a real thing? and second, Does it have a name?

The phenomenon I have in mind is the envy of -- or perhaps even the fetishization of --  the common man or the simple man or the uneducated man on the part of the urbane, the sophisticated, and the intellectual or cultural elite. (Compare, for example, this post where I talk about the flattery of the poor by the rich.)

When I say "envy or fetishization" I am thinking of the idea (sometimes not consciously articulated) that this simple, common man is somehow more in touch with Real Life than the person making the judgement or any of his friends. And I think, for example, of Lady Chatterley's Lover, where it is the lower-class gamekeeper who brings Lady Chatterley's sexuality alive, … because, I don't know, maybe upper-class people don't have sex? (Don Juan would like a word.)

By Margaret Brundage - Scanned cover of pulp magazine, Public Domain,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8091452

I'm sure there are plenty of other examples that I'm just too lazy to think of right now. And I think the phenomenon is also related (a little more distantly) to the way that Europeans, for example, fetishized their colonial subjects; or the way that Americans in the 20th century were sold an image of Mexico as (in the words of Tom Lehrer, who was of course satirizing this very attitude) "that Magic and Romantic Land South of the Border."

Anyway, this is why I think it is a real thing. Now, what's it called? 

I've been playing with names like Philodemy or Philoplethy (which looks harder to say), because ὁ δῆμος and τό πλῆθος both mean "the common people." But I have this nagging fear that there is some more obvious word that I am blanking on, and that I will feel like an idiot for not thinking of. Still, if you can think what it is, I'd like to know. (Grin)

I started thinking about this because I saw a play-reading this morning over Zoom. The play was called "Human Error," and it's basically a comedy. The set-up is that an infertility clinic goofs, and accidentally implants the fertilized ovum from Couple A into the wife of Couple B. This brings the two couples into each other's lives. But of course (since this is set in more-or-less-modern America only without COVID-19), Couple A are liberals and Couple B are conservatives. And the playwright goes out of his way to make them solid representatives of their type. Couple A is an interracial couple: he works at a research institute and she's a yoga instructor. Couple B are both white: he owns a small business and a big truck and goes hunting, while she is a stay-at-home mom who is active in her church. But what I began to notice was that -- to my eyes, at least -- the liberal couple didn't seem as likeable as the conservative couple. I say this even though I'm morally certain that the playwright himself has more in common with the liberal couple than with the conservative couple. So what's the deal? Why would he write His Own Team to be less nice than the Other Guys?

To be clear, the differences are subtle. None of the people are saints, and none of them are terrible. If this is a case of philodemy, I don't consider it blatant or overt. I would call it a very subtle shading. But I do think it's there. 

Anyway, I've been mulling over this today. As usual if I'm full of it please feel free to say so.

The New Yorker agrees we are violent

More confirmation of my basic thesis that we Americans are a fundamentally violent people. This time it's an article in the New Yorker.

The Violent Style

I'm not really glad that everyone seems to agree with me. I mean, … this is the kind of topic where it would be nice to be wrong. (Sigh.)