Questions About Transgenderism

Regular Contributor Chad Felix Greene

I have a few questions about transgenderism. Or is it ‘transgender’? Sometimes they just call it ‘trans.’ As I discussed in an article titled: Transgender Suicides: What to Do About Them:

“The various liberal resources are shockingly equivocal as to what gender identity actually is. Gender identity is an “innermost knowing,” an issue of hormone imbalance, the result of a male brain in a female body, or a ‘transsexual’ brain, maybe an inherited characteristic, and many other possibilities, depending on whom you ask. According to some, gender is an inborn and permanent state; for others, a fluid awareness that might change by the day. How is it possible that a condition so insusceptible of consistent definition could be universally declared fatal without medical treatment?”

It is difficult to even define what ‘transgender’ means in any given context.

But of the multiple forms this experience can take, it is the internal and external conflicts that interest me most. The liberal world seems to grasp onto an idea and only after the conservative world expresses concern or objection do they stubbornly hold onto it regardless of reason or logic. Years can pass with an ever-growing conundrum surrounding the topic, and they will continue smugly dismissing all of it, waving self-serving studies around and declaring whatever it is they currently believe to be ‘science.’ But the rational among us can see through this perception filter.

For example, Janet Mock, a well-known trans and sex worker advocate, titled an article in 2011 to Marie Claire, I Was Born a Boy. By 2014 she was lecturing Piers Morgan on his transphobic assertion she had ever been male at all: MOCK: “Before commercial break, we had a lovely conversation, and then all of a sudden you said, “…who was formerly a man.” I was a baby. I was assigned male gender because of the appearance of my genitals. As I grew up, I discovered my girlhood, I discovered my womanhood, and I proclaimed and defined myself for myself.” Are we really supposed to believe that this individual was unaware of her original gender until 2014?

The answer is, of course not. In 2011 it had not yet become politically advantageous to assert trans were always their preferred gender. We, as a society, were perfectly content with the understanding that sometimes a man felt like a woman inside and had a little operation. It wasn’t until around 2014 that we began to see trans demand bathroom access based solely on their identified gender and then soon after it became popular to equally demand said identity was scientifically accurate. But it brings up an important question: if Miss Mock were in fact born a woman in a ‘male assigned’ body, why did she go through hormone and cosmetic surgery to prove it?

It has become common very recently as well to see LGBT declare, with alarming self-righteousness, that men can have periods and women can have penises. If this underlying understanding of human biology is correct, then why would trans go through so much effort to force their bodies to resemble, superficially, the other sex? Notice I said sex and not gender. Gender Queer theorists will tell you that sex and gender are separate things. Sex is your physical body and gender is your identity. However, every physical and chemical component to transgender treatment involves secondary sexual characteristics.

Women cut their hair short, remove their breasts and grow a beard. They take testosterone to deepen their voices. If testosterone makes you look like a man, sound like a man, feel like a man and think like a man, how did an individual without testosterone know she was, in fact, a man beforehand? Why the need for testosterone to enhance or validate this knowing? Do injections of testosterone make you male? If so, how were you male before you started taking them? They in effect, mimic the physical sex of a male. Janet Mock has undergone great effort to resemble what everyone knows is a woman. If sex and gender are separate things and men can have periods, why on Earth would any trans feel compelled to change their physical body in the first place? Shouldn’t they simply declare that being a man is not constrained by physical characteristics such as menstruation?

Obviously, the goal of a transgender person is to resemble and be treated as the opposite sex, not merely to express a gender identity. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be interested in surgery or hormones. But this begs another question. If Miss Mock, for example, believes her real self is female and has taken every conceivable physical effort to portray this to the world, is that admitting she was not female originally? Again, if she were simply a woman with male genitals, it goes to reason she would have appreciated her natural form and insisted it be viewed on its own as proof of her womanhood. Instead, she grew breasts, inverted her penis, had plastic surgery to appear more feminine and behaves, speaks, dresses and presents as a stereotypical Western woman.

If as trans activist Zinnia Jones insists, a woman with a penis has a female penis, wouldn’t it stand to reason that her hair, face, chest and overall image also be female regardless of how it looks? Why then wear makeup? Why wear women’s clothing or acquire breasts? This issue becomes even more confusing when you enter the world of ‘gender fluid’ where the spectrum of trans extends beyond physical transformation. Here we have individuals who believe they have no gender, are both genders, are multiple genders, sometimes one or the other gender at any given time and often entirely new genders no one except themselves has ever heard of.

Interestingly, regardless of the identity, the behavior is always the same. A male will put on female clothing, grow out his hair and wear makeup and a female will cut her hair short, wear boy’s clothing and behave in a masculine way. They take opposite-sex names and appropriate the other pronoun. In nearly all cases you simply have an individual cross-dressing while proclaiming new and profound expression of unique gender.

This too begs the question, if one is nonbinary, fluid or some other version of ‘trans’ then why adopt culturally-dependent stereotypical gendered dress and behaviors? You just don’t see average-looking individuals saying ‘Oh, yes I’m male but I love my female body and I don’t need to conform to society’s standards of what a man is.’ The need to change who they are physically in order to reflect who they believe themselves to be mentally or emotionally is universal across trans identity.

​Another question I have is in regards to the obsession with gender-neutral child raising. It has become popular in liberal circles to declare, as new parents, that they do not intend to ‘impose’ gender onto their baby. Feminism has always fought against the notion of female-gendered toys, clothing or interests and strove for decades to incorporate male versions into girls’ daily lives. Today, liberals praise stores for, as the Disney store adopted, refusing to identify clothing or Halloween costumes by gender. They shriek with joy at a little boy choosing a princess dress.

At the same time liberals lecture us on the inappropriateness of ‘Gender Reveal’ parties as burdening innocent children with potentially unwanted gender obligations, LGBT are celebrating trans children coming out as young as age 2. In a Parents.com article titled, My Child Is Transgender: This Is How I Know, the writer states, “By age 2, Isabel refused to wear dresses…” On the highly controversial cover of The National Geographic’s transgender child issue featured an 8-year-old boy dressed entirely in pink with long hair and pink highlights.

Children who identify as the other gender do so in an obvious way – they adopt the other gender’s dress and behaviors. If we eliminate gendered toys and clothing, how exactly will trans children know they are, in fact, the wrong gender? How will they express or prove this to others? The 8-year-old boy in the National Geographic article stated: “The best thing about being a girl is I don’t have to pretend to be a boy.” Obviously, in his mind, this means dressing and behaving like a girl. That requires gender stereotypes and models in order to be effective. Otherwise being a girl would be as easy as just saying you are one. How can a movement that believes children can determine their own gender also advocate for removing gendered expression at the same time? It is almost as if they haven’t thought this through.

My suspicion is they are attempting to prove transgender theory by raising a generation of children without gender and seeing how many defy their biological sex. The irony, of course, is without a concept of firm gender roles there is nothing for a child to hold onto in terms of a different identity. Trans are said to have an ‘innermost feeling’ of being the other gender. But logic tells us they can only understand what being the other gender is like from witnessing expression from that gender and copying it internally. The fantasy has to involve established gender roles distinct from their own.

​Make our society gender-neutral, and you eliminate transgender altogether.

Another interesting conflict in the ‘innermost feeling’ of gender is the fact that neither version of trans actually mimics anything beyond shallow and socially stereotypical gender norms. Transmen, women who identify as men, have a tendency to keep their reproductive organs and become pregnant. Transwomen, men who identify as women, do not argue for artificial wombs or express any desire for pregnancy themselves. It would require reason to understand that if you are physically male but you are actually female, biologically or otherwise, you would contain all that there is to be female. So why don’t transwomen seem to have a maternal drive or instinct? Why do transmen seem content with having their periods, to the absurd point of demanding that ‘men have periods.’

In practice, transgender is fairly transparent. A segment of our population, for whatever reason, has a strong desire to adopt the culturally stereotypical gender norms of the opposite sex. If we accepted gender queer theory as it is presented, it would be offensive to trans to suggest they alter their bodies to conform to some ‘cishet’ idea of what a man or woman is. Yet they claim, as my article above on transgender suicides demonstrates, that without this body-altering treatment they suffer so profoundly they are susceptible to suicide.

We seem to be in a period of confusion and uncertainty disguised as revolutionary science and social awakening. The Left has taken its notion of gender to such an extreme it has splintered into multiple, incompatible fragments and it is all colliding together. None of it makes sense. Even the simplest of questions results in mind-numbingly incoherent ranting about various theories and ideas that unravel at the slightest touch of inquiry.

One last question, although it begs a much larger series of questions. If a straight man identifies as a woman, transitions and becomes a lesbian, was he born gay? I suppose, like everything else related to this topic, we will never know for sure.

For more from Chad, visit chadfelixgreene.com and follow him on Twitter @chadfelixg.