a snail trapped in a man's body

Ever since I was a child, I've been filled with the certainty that I wasn't like other boys. When other boys wanted to play baseball, I felt that bi-pedalism was just not right for me. When told it was bath time, I felt only dread that my protective mucus coating would be stripped from me and I worried yet more about the salt content of the bathwater. When teased by classmates, I tried to retract into my shell only to be frustrated to discover that I didn't have one. But perhaps the most cruel insult was the discovery that did not have both a penis and a vagina and the gonads to match. Fortunately, with the assistance of a support group and a surgeon sympathetic to my plight, I am scheduled for experimental shell transplantation as soon as a suitable donor is found. If you think this is hard to read, think about what it must be like to know that you've been born into the wrong phylum.

Except you can't think about what it is like to be transphyletic, not only is it philosophically problematic, it is a patently absurd claim to even make. So too are the claims of people who believe themselves to be transgender; to say that they are mistaken is generous because to merely be mistaken assumes there could exist a world in which they were correct.

Mistaken beliefs

It is important to note that I don't deny anyone the right to imagine that they are truly a malformed snail. If you wish to believe that, my objection would be as foolish as commanding that you must believe the earth is spherical. However, if you want me to accept your delusions of snailness and make accommodation, you are going to have to present me with reason to believe that your claim could possibly true. And that is something that the transphyletic and transgender advocates have failed to do because it is impossible for them to do.

This is certainly an audacious claim for me to make and an understandable retort would be “how the hell could you possibly know what it is like to be transgender?” to which my answer would be “that's exactly my point”.

In his seminal 1974 essay titled “What is it like to be a bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel explored the idea of knowing what some other's conscious experience might be like.

Although concerned with a broader discussion of the reductionalistic analysis of the “mind-body problem” Nagel's investigation must cross areas of direct relevance to the question of transsexual claims:

To the extent that I could look and behave like a wasp or a bat without changing my fundamental structure, my experiences would not be anything like the experiences of those animals. On the other hand, it is doubtful that any meaning can be attached to the supposition that I should possess the internal neurophysiological constitution of a bat. Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. The best evidence would come from the experiences of bats, if we only knew what they were like.

Nagel, being a philosopher, writes like a philosopher which is often dense but precise, so fret not if that passage bears a second reading. Notably, long prior to modern analyses of transgender, Nagel was using the language “future stage of myself thus metamorphosed”. I call attention to this turn of phrase as “metamorphosis”  is a metaphor common in the transgender literature so much so that some transgender advocacy groups use a butterfly to symbolize the experience they are trying to describe. But Nagel's claim, and my own, is that the phenomenology of experience does not fluidly slip across the boundary of “what I am” to “what I imagine my future self to be”.

There is no fluid slip across the boundary; the claim is that the subjective experience is wholly inaccessible. In order to make the contrast greater, Nagel used a bat as the target of exploring another mind, but his conclusions are just as valid human to human, a point which he mentions in passing:

The problem is not confined to exotic cases, however, for it exists between one person and another. The subjective character of the experience of a person deaf and blind from birth is not accessible to me, for example, nor presumably is mine to him. 

To which I amplify, the subjective quality of what it is like to be anyone other than exactly who I am is also inaccessible; as with bats, if I have to guess what it is like to be you or you me, all we can do is guess. And here is why I believe people who claim to be transsexual cannot be other than mistaken, that their claims are guesses at best and more akin to fantasy than anything that they could possibly know. People who claim that they are transgender can only imagine what it is like to be other than themselves, no matter how strident their assertions to the contrary.

Transgender phenomenology

So if people who believe themselves to be transgender are mistaken, what are they reporting? I'm certainly not accusing anyone of lying, for we know too well that it is possible for anyone to be mistaken regarding just about any subject but this implies neither that they are stupid nor stating something contrary to their beliefs. For example, I can believe that Boston is a large, coastal city in Texas, be completely consistent and honest in that belief and yet still be utterly, indisputably mistaken.

I expect that there will be responses from people who argue that not being them or people like them, I cannot possibly understand the dysmorphia they experience because I am not them. This is actually a discussion that I have had multiple times. To date, the only objections that have been presented to me are purely political ones of the form “I refute this because I am adamant that everyone should be allowed to believe what they want”.  The reason transgender rhetoric falls in on itself is that one cannot consistently assert that I have no basis for saying transgenders are mistaken yet that they have valid basis for believing that they ought be other than they are.

Put more simply, if you are willing to tell me that I cannot know the mind of someone not like me, do you truly believe that you have unique privilege on the matter? If you think my claim about someone else's imagined identity audacious, the counter-claim can not be any less arrogant.

So although we can't both be correct on the subject, I do concede we could both be incorrect. But there is an asymmetry present, though. Transgender advocates are asking the world, thus me, to grant the existence of something imaginary which, by definition, they cannot consistently claim. The burden lies with them to show cause to accept that view; it is not incumbent upon me to accept that claim as valid simply because someone would like me to believe that fantasy.

An alternate guess

So if claims of transgender are mistaken, is there a better explanation? I think so, but I don't even elevate it to the level of hypothesis. Almost everyone has at some point felt something that we call “uncomfortable in my own skin” or the existential confusion of “I don't know what I am, but I'm pretty sure I'm not that”. This is so common that I can't even call it aberrant; I tend to think of it as the birthright of every human. For some people I'm sure that this feeling is particularly intense or lasts longer than it does for others.

People are keen on finding explanations for things we don't understand, even if we have to manufacture them. Although I strive toward rationality, I know that I have constructed false explanations for things I have felt and will likely do so again.

Barring some rare but dramatic organic defects, sex is pretty binary in the animal world, humans being no exception; you either have ovaries or testes, but not both. Gender is a term that is used to describe complex constellations of behaviors and dispositions which don't cleave neatly in two. That is: they form continua across multiple dimensions. We find it convenient to stick labels on the ends of a spectrum, for example light being bounded by red on one end and violet on the other. Since these are labels of convenience, points along the continuum are necessarily fuzzy: where precisely on the spectrum does red turn to orange or blue to green? The answer to these questions is clear: there is no firm dividing line between green and blue.

Similarly, for convenience we label the extremes of gender as feminine and masculine, but just as there is no clear point where a person goes from being tall to short, neither does gender afford clear division. And even though there are traits that we generally consider decidedly masculine or feminine, we have no problem accepting that people of either sex can slide along those continua of gender willy-nilly either by trait or even time of day.

Why is it anyone else's concern?

The preceding could be said to be purely academic or even mere sophistry. As right-thinking people of our time, we are firm in our belief that someone's sexual orientation ought not concern us and certainly tells us nothing of the content of their character. Nor, like skin color, do we have any reason to use sexual orientation as a reason to deny anyone equal protection of the law or even equal courtesy. Is not someone's mistaken belief regarding their gender on completely equal footing with sexual orientation, religiosity, or ethnic heritage? No.

I did consider the epistemology of transsexualism to be largely academic until I read that people are acting on these mistaken beliefs and their acts range from utterly benign to manifestly evil. The latter are why this question matters. In the US we've had unfortunately too much experience with body dysmorphia, especially among teens. While there are few responsible, knowledgeable people that would advocate for extreme anorexia or bulimia as being a matter of valid personal preference, there are significant "pro-anorexia support groups" which promote self-starvation. Similarly, as the transgender community fights for the right to have their confusion accepted as a legitimate life-style choice, children are being given hormone antagonist drugs to suppress their adolescence. Unfortunately, hormones don't merely affect the development of visible sex characteristics: they are used throughout the body to coordinate myriad, complex, developmental pathways. What are the neurological correlates of interfering with body hair? What are the cardiopulmonary effects? We don't know, and given the small number of recipients of such well intentioned "treatments" likely won't soon. Arsenic compounds had historically been used to help people cope with the social stigma of the condition of unwanted pregnancy. Is something as patently foolish now being advocated to cure a disorder from the imagination?