The social emerges from the biological

The reverse is not true.

Note on usage: Sex is biological—i.e., which gametes a body is structured to produce. Sex roles are the behavioural manifestation of sex. Gender is the cultural manifestation of sex.

In my post on us being embodied strategic actors—which leads to sex-differentiated patterns of behaviour because we are dimorphic species, so the differences in our bodies lead to different patterns of choices—I concluded by noting that the social is emergent from the biological. It is not divorced from it.

An academic privately commented on my post that:

… identity does not in any way, ever, determine biology, so biological males remain males even if they identify as females, and have no business winning titles in female sports or private female spaces such as bathrooms or changing rooms.

In other words, the biological does not emerge from the social. Biological realities are not socially constructed.

A so-called “sex-change” operation does not change your sex. Such an operation changes—with varying degrees of success—aspects of your physical presentation of sex to mimic that of the other sex.

Such physical alterations are done so as to physically support changing your cultural manifestation of sex—so your gender—not your actual sex, which remains chromosomally imprinted on every cell on your body. You lose the capacity to produce one set of gametes, you don’t acquire the ability to produce the other gametes. Such treatment typically also involves hormone supplements to further support the change in physical presentation.

Across thousands of years, castrating male animals was not held to make them female. Plenty of societies have had what we can reasonably characterise as trans identities in the form of culturally feminine biological males. Such across-sex (Trans) identities are clearly a human thing. None of such societies thought the identity, even the castration, changed their sex: who could, or could not, get pregnant (or get a woman pregnant) was vitally important when most people lived lives at, or not much above, subsistence levels.

Gender versus sex dysphoria

The running together of biology (sex) with culture (gender)—culture is socially constructed, on a biological base—leads to disastrously muddled thinking. There is a difference between what is reasonably called gender-dysphoria—alienation from cultural expectations tied to your sex—and sex-dysphoria—alienation from your physical sex.

Any young gay, lesbian, tomboy or sissy experiences some version of gender dysphoria (properly so labelled). If it gets strong enough, such gender-dysphoria may extend to the sex dysphoria (ditto). Sex-dysphoria may also have other underlying causes.

Even so, the evidence very strongly is that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, as the child goes though adolescence, such sex-dysphoria will resolve. Typically, they will become homosexual adults.

The failure to distinguish between alienation from cultural-expectations and alienation from one’s own sexed body is how it becomes frighteningly easy to “Trans the gay away”. Especially when there are clearly parents who prefer a Trans child who is physically rendered—i.e., surgically and hormonally mutilated and sterilised—to be gender-conforming than a non-gender-conforming homosexual child.

The big issue with gay or lesbian kids is not sex—especially when they are too young to be sexually active—it is their gender-nonconformity, which can manifest at a very young age. The young girl utterly uninterested in people, children, or babies, who wants to wear trousers, run around with the boys and is fine with getting dirty. The young boy who cries a lot, hates getting dirty and likes pretty things. Western societies have de-stigmatised gay sex more than we have gender non-conformity.¹

This is the other side of Trans rejecting physical identification of sex—all the “sex assigned at birth” nonsense—and replacing it with stereotypical definition of sex: that is, acting and feeling feminine or masculine. Not only does abandoning physical definition of sex require you to adopt stereotype-markers of sex: of the feminine or the masculine, as the case may be. It leans into a big selling point—Transition will give you a gender-conforming child.

Patterns of activism

The use of Queer Theory to underpin Transactivism has tied the distress of gender and/or sex dysphoria to the risk of suicide. This is mostly specious. Yes, mentally distressed folk have a higher rate of suicidal ideation—considering suicide—and a higher rate of suicide. But Transitioning folk has very little impact on the risk of suicide. The “a Transed child or a dead child” rhetoric is monstrous bullying: it is quite, quite evil.

It also provides a mechanism for children to manipulate their parents. The march of left-progressivism through the academy, media, arts, entertainment and institutions has generated a spurious authority for children. If the imagined future is the benchmark of judgement, and so we have to be saved from the benighted legacy of sinful past, then children—being untainted by the sinful past—are more morally pure, and have an presumptive authority, denied to parents and grandparents, who are tainted by the sinful past and its legacies.

Worshipping the Future

This is, of course, utter, toxic nonsense, but it has, alas, acquired genuine cultural power and the evil nonsense of “a Transed child or a dead child” adds a whole extra level of manipulative levers for children to use against their parents. A manipulative lever schools, therapists and other professionals have increasingly bought into.

The WPATH Files

Trans identity also provides a potential refuge for the child from being sexualised. There can be a lot of things going on, none of which involve having some sort of gender soul distinct from your sex.

Even if we run with the prevent-suicide argument, Transactivism is still full of duplicity. Dev from ShortFatOtaku provides typically thoughtful coverage of the “prevent suicides” moral underpinnings of Transactivism. He distinguishes between life-style activism (e.g. gay activism)—seeking the same rights as everyone else—and medical activism (e.g. disabled activism), with its inevitable negotiations with the wider society. The first concentrates on similarity—we are all human. The second concentrates on difference—we have these needs that others do not. Hence the need to negotiate the resources that will help with, or solve, those needs.

Transactivism plays a double game, where the suicide-prevention is the latter, but their rights activism operates like the former. As Dev points out, this is a form of Motte and Bailey play. The Motte is preventing suicide, the Bailey is being treated as their preferred sex in all ways, including changing how everyone uses language.

In part, this double play is because much Trans advocacy is from former gay rights non-profits who needed a new cause to keep the donations flowing and so shifted to Transactivism. They are applying their old gay-rights playbook to the new cause.

Various folk are also concerned not to be on the wrong side of a civil rights argument and assume the gay rights and Trans rights cases are similar when they are very, very not. In particular, sexual orientation is attraction to the visceral reality of a particular sex, Transactivism seeks to deny or override that visceral reality.

Transwomen demanding access to the spaces of women who are emphatically not attracted to people with penises is a denial of lesbian choices. There is a profound difference between seeking to be left alone—to be treated like others—versus changing use of language, re-construing basic concepts such as male and female, controlling how other people speak of you, and seeking to supplant parental authority via schools not informing parents when socially transitioning their children.

All of which is why various LGB’s (lesbian, gays, bisexuals) want to divorce the T (Trans). They have even more reason when support for gay equality is declining, as the implicit bargain of “we will give you same-sex marriage, now leave us and our kids alone” is being so flagrantly broken.

This double-play of shifting between sameness and difference as convenient is not unique, or even original, to Transactivism. Feminism has a very similar issue: it says it seeks women to have all the same rights and opportunities as men, but then also either plays up, or ignores, the biological differences, as convenient. A deep problem with Feminism is precisely that it seeks equality—defined as sameness, as in the same outcomes between men and women (at least for social goods)—across genuine biological differences.

Feminists often balk at anything that implies there are any cognitive differences between men and women, such as systematic differences in preferences that have a biological basis. It is as if evolution applies to the rest of the body, but not, in any sex-differentiated way, to the brain or to the effect of hormones, differing strength and the possibility of pregnancy on behaviour.

Feminism is often not willing to grapple seriously with that men and women are differently embodied strategic actors inevitably creates differences in actions and choices. Actions and choices that are socially situated, but biologically mediated, not just socially constructed.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. (On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.)

So wrote Simone de Beauvoir. Transactivism and Queer Theory—the basis of Gender (Identity) Theory—takes her at her word.

“Gender-critical” Feminism—Feminism that acknowledges that the biological differences between men and women matter—has found itself wrong-footed by it accepting such sex essentialism. For gender-critical Feminism accepts that there are constraints built into reality that social action has to accept—specifically, that men and women are biologically different.

Yet “essentialism” has long since become a boo word for left-progressivism. Such constraint puts limits on the possibility of human action—crucially, socially transformative human action.

The entire tendency inherent in left-progressivism—going back to Marx but thoroughly exemplified by Critical Social Justice activism—is to see constraint as oppression.² To insist on the biological maleness of a Transwoman is to constrain the expression of their gendered psyche. It is therefore oppressive—indeed Transphobic.

Hence Trans Exclusory Radical Feminist (TERF) becomes a term of abuse. By insisting on the reality of biological difference, such TERFs are “excluding” Transfolk from “their” womanhood. Hence also the “sex assigned at birth” nonsense, for to say sex is simply observed is to be oppressively essentialist—that is, accept that certain structures, and so trade-offs, are built into reality.

This leads to the adoption of the classic strategy when biology means that Biology gets in the way of left-progressive Theory—Lysenkoism. That is, use institutional power and moral abuse to punish folk who fail to go along, while insisting that Theory trumps reactionary—thus illegitimate, as it seeks to oppose social transformation to eliminate oppression—science in all official documents.³ The same underlying patterns of ideas lead to the same social control mechanisms and strategies.

This goes with DEI officers as political officers/commissars, DEI training as struggle sessions and Zhdanovism in arts, literature and entertainment. The latter being particularly vicious in destroying careers in the name of ideological conformity dressed up as Social Justice, based on the belief that people who think like you own morality.

All of which is part of a wider pattern of left-progressivism regularly using Theory to grade evidence, for that way they can preserve their ownership of morality and understanding. The social transformation of society to eliminate all oppression is the perfect goal as the basis of such “ownership” of morality, as it provides a trumping moral purpose that coordinates believers.

Their ownership of morality, along with shared language used to signal common commitments, justifies them acquiring dominant social leverage, so that the goal can be achieved. Hence left-progressivism naturally adopts the Jacobin mode of politics: politics unlimited in scope, as all social action has to be bent to, or at least never impede, the glorious goal; and politics unlimited in means, as anything which leads to the glorious future is justified. This patently includes the surgical and hormonal mutilation and sterilisation of minors.

Transactivism thus becomes an excellent vehicle, as everything has to be mobilised—particularly all language—to eliminate any social acknowledgement of the constraints of biology. This is systematic action against reality; a series of arrogant, self-righteous falsehoods that, as Helen Joyce points out, breaks everything.

But left-progressivism has already tyrannised hundreds of millions of people and murdered or starved tens of millions since 1917. Transactivism, however destructive, is a comparatively minor war against reality and its trade-offs. The number of minors who have been hormonally and surgically mutilated and sterilised has, at most, barely hit the thousands.

Transactivism will not allow Trans to be an identity that is biologically marked off from male or female, as the case may be. If they were willing to accept that biology does mark off men and women, so that Trans was a cross-sex identity, most folk would be willing to accommodate that.

It is precisely the refusal to do that—under the slogan of “Transwomen are women”—that generates all the problems. But, as we have seen, there are powerful urges against such minimalism. Especially now that Trans has been added to the sacred oppressed/marginalised identities, such that no trade-offs against their claims are permitted.

Trans dynamics

There is also a deeper reason—specific to Trans identity itself—that works against accepting the notion that Trans is a separate thing. Urges and wishes that work against accepting that a Transwoman can be culturally feminine but not biologically so.

This is the wish to be a woman, to have everything conform to that identification. To have this, they must control how others speak of them. Let us be clear, the public humiliation, the seeking to shun and shame, to destroy the livelihoods and reputations, of women who speak out against the denial of biology is not a regrettable bug, it is a desirable feature.

This is not only because of the demand to control their own public representation. It is also that autogynophiles can be very jealous of women; even to the extent of a profound misogyny. Especially if they want to have “heterosex” with no women involved. But that jealousy can still be there even if they do want sex with women. They want their desires to dominate women. They want to supplant women and their choices—whether in sport or denying them control of their spaces.

At what point do we notice the misogyny of transactivism?

Along with this very specific appeal, it also clearly mobilises—for themselves and among their allies—the emotional indulgence that Aldous Huxley draws attention to.

Weirdly, this what-biological-men-want-wins also plays to aspects of Feminism. The demand that all social goods be shared equally between men and women—or, more accurately that no social good be predominantly male: they are clearly perfectly fine with any social good being predominantly female—sets what men want for themselves as the benchmark for women. In particular, it ends up denigrating motherhood, because that gets in the way of achieving everything men do.

It can even end up denigrating women having different attitudes to sex than men. Sex reduced to pleasurable catharsis—a classic male pattern—becomes allegedly “liberating” for women.

A man in a dress demanding to be treated as a woman—and who definitely cannot get pregnant—becomes a sort of weird fulfilment of what men want for themselves being Feminism’s benchmark for women.

Reality is reality, and it always wins in the end, though the path to its final victory can be quite horrible.

Women don’t have penises. Men don’t have vaginas. Any living organism has to deal with trade-offs: indeed, evolves to deal with trade-offs.

Trans is a cross-sex cultural identity. Like everything social, it emerges from, and is constrained by, biology. The social does not determine, nor trump, biology.

References

Mia Hughes, The WPATH Files: Pseudoscientific Surgical and Hormonal Experiments on Children, Adolescents and Vulnerable Adults, Environmental Progress, March 4 2024, https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/wpath-files.

Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, OneWorld, 2021.

Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, Regnery, [2020] 2021.

Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, Fleet, 2021.

Murrray N. Rothbard, ‘Karl Marx: Communist as religious eschatologist,’ Review of Austrian Economics, (1990), 4, 123–179. https://cdn.mises.org/rae4_1_5_2.pdf

1. Some conforming to what is required to be usefully functional in a society is entirely proper. Contemporary society definitely has a problem of over-indulging—at times seeming to sanctify—the dysfunctional. But hormonally and surgically mutilating and sterilising minors so they are more gender-conforming is simply evil.

2. The notion that limitation—so constraint—is an alienating fetter exists in Hegel, with his notion of the “sorrow of finitude”. Marx’s ruthless criticism of all that exists, and his notion of the final society as the end of scarcity, where folk can work in whatever order they wish and all needs will be satisfied, also points to constraint—especially in the sense of exclusion that is inherent in private property—as oppression. None of this tradition of thought, right up to the most cutting edge Theory, at any stage grapples seriously with Darwin, evolutionary biology or evolutionary anthropology. The revolt against trade-offs inherent in belief in the Culmination-of-History Society free of any negative constraints cannot incorporate the study of the trade-offs of biological—and emergent from biology—social reality.

3. This is Marcuse’s Repressive Tolerance in operation.