Originals and Facsimiles

There’s a painful gap that stretches between what trans activists mean when they talk about acceptance—or self-acceptance or authenticity—and what those terms actually mean. These concepts undergo a botched transition when they’re translated into the language of gender identity.

Yet these counterfeits cling to the resonance and moral authority of the originals: it really is healing to accept yourself and to be accepted by others as you are. We understand acceptance to be a precious social good. Trans activists tap into this resonance to sell a very different idea of ‘acceptance’: to be accepted and accept yourself as what you are not.

Of course, this ‘acceptance’ is conditional. The path you must follow is a narrow one, with sheer cliffs on either side. As @lacroisz put it: “[you] have to keep going deeper into being trans to continue getting it.” Margaret Singer Thaler—who devoted her career to researching cults—observed that “the group says in essence, ‘ We love you because you are transforming yourself,’ which means that any moment you are not transforming yourself, you are slipping back.’”

In gender land, self-acceptance and authenticity go hand-in-hand with a process of transformation that involves rejecting yourself and changing everything about yourself: your name, your body, your self-presentation, but also your expressions, your gestures, your personal history, lest you give yourself away. When transition ‘works,’ we say that someone ‘passes’: the facsimile gets mistaken for the real thing. From mastectomies and phalloplasties to ‘neo-vaginas’ and ‘facial-feminization’ surgeries, everything is in the process not of becoming something new but of producing an ever-more convincing facsimile.

To the young person who doubts whether transition is the right answer, the community responds: keep going. You’ll get there eventually. 

In a piece for The Telegraph, Charlie Bentley-Astor wrote:

At the time, the adoption of each new masculine stereotype felt like a step closer to that “true”, “authentic” self my friends had idolised. I was being who I was meant to be. Yet I had less confidence in myself than ever. I felt more preyed upon than ever. I was more depressed than ever. 

And when I looked round at friends, also “living their most authentic lives”, they were as unhappy as I was. They smiled, as I did, and revelled in how free and just and authentic it all was. But it is no exaggeration to say that every one of them had at least one major unmanaged mental-health issue – panic, suicidal-depression, self-harm, and eating disorders among the most common manifestations of something not being right.

But, if we were unhappy, it’s because we hadn’t made it to our destinations – not that the destination is a dystopia or that the destination doesn’t exist. And all of us were certain it did. 

I think this is what detransitioners are talking about when they say they finally realized that transition would never be over, that performing would never pass into being, the promised destination was a flickering mirage on the horizon. And that that wasn’t enough. “I couldn’t just mimic the opposite sex for the rest of my life,” Sinead Watson wrote. “You can look the part, but you’ll never be the part, and it’s vital that this is understood.”

These young people weren’t sold on transition as a lifelong role-playing game (who would sign on to such an undertaking?). They were promised the real thing: really becoming, transition as total transformation. And that impossible promise was broken.

The concepts trans activists and ‘gender-affirming’ medical providers throw around still mean something to so many children and young people because these concepts speak to real human needs and desires for meaning, direction, purpose, and belonging.

That’s why dysphoric children and young people need access to the real concepts, not the facsimiles they’re offered. True self-acceptance can lead you toward a healthier relationship with yourself, and away from elective double mastectomies and iatrogenic endocrine disorders.

When we turn a concept inside out but call it by the same old name, we remove the ability to think with the original concepts, and you need to be able to think with those concepts in order to grow and change and engage with the world as it really is.

Without access to the original concepts, the facsimiles weaponize young people’s needs and desires and questions and doubts against themselves. If you’re hesitating about starting ‘T,’ maybe you’re just struggling to ‘accept’ yourself as trans. Maybe you need to do something about your ‘internalized transphobia.’ Be more self-accepting and your doubts will melt away. You’ll know you’ve accepted yourself when you proceed with the next step in your transition.

It reminds me of what the Chinese Communist Party tells its citizens: What you live in is a democracy. What you have is freedom. What we administer is justice. Abusing language in this way hollows out concepts that should mean something and replaces those concepts with useless facsimiles. If China is a democracy, why should the Chinese people have any need of democratization? If life under the Chinese Communist Party is what freedom looks like, who in their right mind would want more of it?

This kind of propaganda inoculates people against ideas that are in fact quite threatening to the propagandists—just as real self-acceptance and authenticity threaten the entire enterprise of gender transition, which makes young people impossible promises about transition and self-acceptance and authenticity in order to sell them dissociation, self-rejection, and disembodiment.

If this is what self-acceptance looks like, who wants more of it?