sophiaserpentia: (Default)

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

This diatribe by Paul McHugh, at one time Psychiatrist-in-Chief of Johns Hopkins University, against transsexualism is not news. But since encountering the text of it online last week, i have been pondering how to respond. I think the best response i can give is a line-by-line answer.

When the practice of sex-change surgery first emerged back in the early 1970s, I would often remind its advocating psychiatrists that with other patients, alcoholics in particular, they would quote the Serenity Prayer, “God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Where did they get the idea that our sexual identity (“gender” was the term they preferred) as men or women was in the category of things that could be changed?

McHugh is a gender essentialist. That is, he believes that at some point in our early development it is determined that we will be a man or a woman, and once this differentiation occurs it is complete, profound, and eternal. Furthermore, this differentiation is based on externally-verifiable clues; in cases of ambiguity an answer can be imposed on someone by society or by an expert with absolute certainty.

This external imposition has nothing to do with one’s individual experience; experience is squishy, unreliable, not to be trusted. Individual variation is seen as aberrance, which is most properly dealt with by being corrected in accordance with the proscriptive norm. For example, the woman who is not subservient or sufficiently maternal is aberrant and must be corrected.

This position is normative; it breaks the human experience down into categories by which individual experience and performance is given a value judgment as “normal” or “aberrant.” In other words, in the gender-essentialist view of the human condition, you are either a “normal man,” a “normal woman,” an “aberrant man,” or an “aberrant woman.”

This position does not recognize transsexualism. People who report an experience of gender incongruence between their body and mind are aberrant, in that we must be delusional.

Once that the gender essentialist declares that i am delusional, there is nothing i can say to him or her. The gender essentialist, confronted with my account of my experience which cannot be reconciled with his or her belief system, has chosen to resolve the dilemma by putting his or her hand over my mouth. So we know from this that the entire article will consist of speaking at transsexual women rather than speaking with us.

Prepare to be depressed. This is long, so i’m putting it behind a cut.

Read the rest of this entry » )

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