Further Confessions of a “Transphobic”

Henry Fuseli, Teiresias Foretells the Future to Odysseus, 1780-1785

1,884 words

Spanish translation here

Drama, self-mutilation, and suicide are par for the course with transsexuals, so the recent death of would-be transgirl Joshua “Leelah” Alcorn, who threw himself in front of a semi truck, is less of a news story than the subsequent reactions of the Left, who have taken up his challenge to change society so nobody like him will ever shed another emo-tear.

Modern liberalism is basically a crusade against any ideals, norms, or standards that make botched, subnormal, alienated, or just slightly odd individuals feel bad about themselves. To make the Leelahs of the world safe, all we need do is throw overboard nature, religion, morality, and common sense. And the tears of those who resist? To the social justice crusader, all of them put together are not worth one of Leelah’s fake fingernails.

The fact that transsexuals are the latest politically-correct totem group is further proof that liberalism really is a mental disease. Lunatics know their own. And unfortunately the lunatics are running the asylum. My hypothesis is that Leftists are physiologically addicted to righteous indignation, which they arouse by adopting simple and absolute values as the focus of moral fanaticism. The fact that one-dimensional moralism is destructive of other values actually counts in its favor to the addict’s mind, just as sacrificing babies to Baal underscored and elevated the god’s sanctity. And just as drug addicts require ever higher doses to achieve the same effect, Leftists always require new, more extreme and radical crusades. This is how the history of liberalism has been reduced to a long, glorious march from the tyranny of dashing dictators and divinely-anointed monarchs to the tyranny of sniveling neurotics.

Another reason for today’s trans-lib initiative is that homosexuals regard trannies as human shields, reasoning that if normals say “no” to transsexuals, homosexuals will be next. The LGB community regards the medical mutilation of Ts as a small price for other people to pay to consolidate its recent social gains.

Bain Dewitt argues, however, that the Alcorn affair is not just an embarrassment to the Left but a challenge to the Right. What would a healthy White Nationalist society do about people like Joshua Alcorn? For a racial community presumably has a commitment to all its members. As long as the Leelahs of the world are arrayed against us, it is easy to just mock and dismiss them as well as their enablers and exploiters. But what would be do in our ideal societies if one of our tow-headed youths declared that he was actually a pig-tailed maiden trapped in a boy’s body?

My first instinct is simply to dismiss this as a delusion. It is a delusion. But simply to label it as such does not make it go away. One could say that virtually any mental illness is delusional, but that label does not make them any better.

We know that a small percentage of people are born physically “intersex,” meaning that they have more or less developed traits of both sexes. It is at least conceivable that people are born with a mismatch between their physical sex and their psycho-sexual self-image. For convenience, I will refer to these as “trans” people, since they feel “transposed” into the wrong kind of body.

The question is: what to do about such people?

The first thing to make clear is that there can be no sensible solution unless we recognize the normative status of heterosexuality, monogamy, and the roles of men as protectors and providers and of women as mothers and care-givers. We also need to recognize that a society in which these norms are upheld and institutionalized secures the happiness of the overwhelming majority of individuals and the propagation and upward development of the race as a whole. These ethical and political norms are grounded in human biology. White Nationalism, as I conceive it, is about restoring the biological integrity of the race and must address sexuality and sex roles as well as demographics.

But although nature provides us with sexual norms, she also provides us with exceptions like intersex individuals and “trans” people. A society in which sexual norms are clearly understood and institutionalized is not threatened by the existence of such people, so we should simply make reasonable accommodations for them. We should add them to the list of different human possibilities and allow them to be themselves, as long as it does not undermine norms or infringe on the rights of others.

A key value here is authenticity. People are happiest when being themselves. Authenticity is inseparable from the idea of self-actualization or becoming oneself. And setting aside people like sociopaths and pedophiles, who cannot be themselves without harming others, a White Nationalist society rooted in biological realism should promote self-actualization. Indeed, my central rationale for ethnonationalism is that it is the political philosophy that best allows different races and nations to live in accordance with their own identities.

Unfortunately, the preferred way of dealing with intersex and “trans” people has nothing to do with authenticity. Indeed, it is the epitome of inauthenticity, since in both cases, cosmetic surgery and hormone treatments are used to make such people into simulacra of males or females. Surgery and hormones cannot, of course, give intersex people a particular sex, or transform one sex into the other, for sexual identity is ultimately determined by chromosomes. These treatments are not “cures.” They are simply cosmetic.

For intersex individuals, the goal is simply to change their appearance to fit in with the binary male/female norm, so they can “pass” as one sex or the other.

In the case of transsexuals, however, the usual goal is not to “pass” for the opposite sex. Instead, the typical transsexual wishes to be socially accepted as a transsexual. They do not wish to be taken as a man or a woman, but to be socially accepted and affirmed as a transman or transwoman. In such cases, transsexualism is connected with a significant dimension of histrionic “drama queen” narcissism combined with immense bitterness and aggression. And when the visceral revulsion, religious scruples, and moral qualms of the rest of humanity do not part like the Red Sea for transman’s or transwoman’s triumphant turn on the catwalk, their anger and hatred turn inwards and large numbers of end up killing themselves. (Do they also feel phantom tingles in their discarded genitalia? That can’t help much either.)

In the case of congenital abnormalities that are purely cosmetic, like a harelip or vestigial tail, it makes perfect sense for parents to correct them surgically as soon as possible, so that the afflicted children can live normal lives. So it is natural for parents of intersex babies to think that subjecting them to surgery and hormone therapies as soon as possible might let them pass for normal and lead more or less normal social lives.

Unfortunately, it does not seem to work. It is cosmetic treatment for a problem that is not cosmetic and cannot be fixed cosmetically. Furthermore, many intersex individuals bitterly resent the painful surgeries and mind-bending hormone treatments to which they were subjected as children. If given the choice, they would have preferred to remain intact and ambiguous, the way they came from nature (or God, as some believe).

So, at the very least, in the case of intersex individuals, a decent society should say, “Not yet” to cosmetic surgery and hormone treatments. Parents should not be allowed to mutilate the genitalia of their children. This is analogous to another form of childhood genital mutilation, e.g., circumcision, which should be banned. The operative value here is autonomy: people should not have permanent, life-changing cosmetic alterations forced upon them as children.

But bodily integrity is also a value, which in some cases should trump even the desire of adults to make radical cosmetic transformations of their bodies. We have to ask which is better: to alter the body to meet social expectations or to alter social expectations to preserve the integrity of the body? Do we sanction radical cosmetic transformations of the body so that intersex people can merely pass as male or female? Or do we expand our sexual categories, simply recognize that such people exist, accept them as they are, and make sensible social accommodations (e.g., in toilet facilities and gym classes)? I think the latter solution is most consistent with the values of authenticity and bodily integrity. Furthermore, such a change in attitudes no more threatens sexual norms than the recognition of dwarfism threatens height norms.

Why are intersex individuals campaigning against subjecting minors to cosmetic surgeries and hormone treatments, while it is a progressive shibboleth that parents should be able to subject sexually confused “transsexual” minors to the same hormones? The question, of course, is rhetorical. We are dealing here with evil and insanity.

A decent society should provide for the physical and mental health of all of its members. When individuals are incapable of making decisions for themselves, because of immaturity, insanity, or other mental impairments, a decent society exercises paternalism, making decisions for them. Would-be transsexuals suffer from a mental illness, for which they should receive treatment. But in the name of authenticity and bodily autonomy, we should say “No” to “sex changes.” Indeed, I would ban all such procedures as violating the basic medical principle that physicians should “do no harm” to healthy bodies. We should also say “No” to people who think they can change their sex simply by saying so.

Only a small percentage of people who imagine that they are gluten intolerant actually are. And if there really are people who are born feeling they are transposed into the wrong body, what are the chances that everyone who thinks he suffers from this now-fashionable malady actually does? Some might just be seeking attention. Others might be mistaken in their self-diagnosis. Still others might simply be self-hating homosexuals. (I suspect that is true in a lot of cases.) Some might just outgrow it. All these false positives will be sorted out in time, and any genuine cases can simply learn to live with their condition, perhaps with some stoic dignity rather than narcissism, self-mutilation, and suicide.

Again, we should prefer to alter social expectations to preserve the body’s integrity rather than mutilate the body to conform to social expectations. Again, the solution is to expand people’s sense of what is psychologically possible so that discontented individuals do not feel any pressure to mutilate themselves. In this case, we are talking about a handful of people with an invisible malady. It is not even clear if any objective accommodations are required. We already accommodate far larger groups suffering from far more socially disruptive maladies. (Consider the costs of cigarettes and alcohol abuse alone.) There will always be assholes, but the vast majority of white people would neither know nor care about the inner Leelahs of the world.

There are norms, and there are exceptions. When the norms are secure, exceptions are no threat. But when the exception becomes the norm, and all standards must be overthrown to spare the feelings of every special snowflake, then healthy people will naturally conclude that the machine of civilization must be lubricated with tranny tears.