2,978 words
Ryan T. Anderson
When Harry Became Sally
Encounter Books, 2018
Gender properly understood is a social manifestation of human nature, springing forth from biological realities, though shaped by rational and moral choice.
-Ryan T. Anderson, When Harry Became Sally
Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls
It’s a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world
-The Kinks, “Lola”
***
We know that the culture wars exist partly because we are acutely aware that we are fighting in them, but also because of those who say that the culture wars don’t exist. To quote Leonard Cohen: There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say that there isn’t. It’s a recurring theme on the left that the battle for white culture – as we would see it – is not actually taking place, and is merely the usual conspiratorial right–wing bluster. You won’t read The Guardian for too many days without reading some sneering popsy telling a waiting world that the idea of “so-called culture wars” is one supported by far-right men, fascists, and probably orcs, for all anyone knows and for all this terrible newspaper could show to be the case. But the battle does exist, and the culture wars are what the young people would call “a thing.” And, as in any war, there are battles and military fronts, but there are also local border skirmishes, and they are as much a part of the conflict as major offensives.
One such return of small–arms fire took place recently in the world of publishing, with Amazon reinstating a controversial book it banned from its sales platform on publication in 2018. When Harry Became Sally, by Ryan T. Anderson, deals with transgenderism, and the author did not approach the subject in the celebratory mood the state requires from its citizens on this subject. The book explores every aspect of transgenderism as it was halfway through Trump’s first term as president (according to Anderson, Trump was “examining” transgenderism at that time): medical, cultural, political, psychological and philosophical. In the seven years since its publication, When Harry Became Sally has already become a premonitory book warning about the future, the near future, in our case.
Transgenderism is now a state religion, or at least a major supporting wall in a state religion. Not a particularly original thought, but originality is less important than correctly naming things in order to better understand their nature. What has been called a “progressive moral theology” has taken the place of the old metaphysics of religion, and now it is required that one displays one’s belief, not in a deity, but in a credo. But what exactly are we being asked to worship? What are these strange idols in the city square?
The author confirms his position with regard to gender. This used to be called science, but is now the drawing up of battle lines:
The best biology, psychology, and philosophy all support an understanding of sex as a bodily reality, and of gender as a social manifestation of bodily sex. Biology isn’t bigotry.
This leaves Anderson with the wriggle-room to discuss body dysmorphia and other personality disorders which might lead to gender confusion, as well as his own belief in the use of cognitive therapies in order to address the (very real) problem of gender dysfunction. As Anderson will lay out, the rush to surgery is one of the great scandals of the so-called TG movement. That said, he is adamant that some people who suffer gender-based dysphoria of some kind can and should be helped to adjust with non-surgical methods.
But it is not all clinical talk. Transgender is a cultural phenomenon as well as a medical one. According to Anderson, transgenderism as a cultural phenomenon is celebrating its first decade this year. The author cites the appearance of Bruce – now Caitlyn – Jenner on the ABC channel in 2015 as pivotal. As the idea that a man could now become a woman, and gain enthusiastic media attention by so doing, began to fascinate the bored cultural elites of the West, so the political class (to whom these cultural elites act as advisers) followed suit. Obama changed the wording in civil rights law – holy scripture during his presidency – so that sexual identification was now adjusted to gender identification. This was as radical as anything Trump has done. Once the effects of epistemic relativism become woven into the law, it isn’t time to take notice, it’s time to realize you should have taken notice long ago. It’s too late for that. You just have to fight it now. “2015”, said Fortune magazine, “is the year transgender went mainstream”.
And it did. It really set sail. I suspect the biggest difference in the cultural presence of transgenderism now compared with 2018 is the increased presence of transgender characters in televisual dramas, particularly soap operas. The soap opera has become a standard delivery system for cultural propaganda intended to socially engineer compliance and consent. I recently watched a British YouTuber who showed clips from a soap opera set in England. The plot–line involved the visit of a teenage boy to hospital to see his dying grandmother. Only he is now the old lady’s granddaughter, he explains, a boy dressed in a girl’s school uniform. “I haven’t got a granddaughter”, the old lady says in defiance. She refuses to accept this transition, and the rest of the plot-line concerns not the tragedy of his grandmother’s death, but the fact that she had become such a transphobic old bigot. It was heartless, morally sterile viewing.
But the media today carpet–bombs the citizenry with this transvaluation of values. It’s a relentless campaign. We know, or we should know, that the forced acceptance of transgenderism has to do with control. Someone disciplined by their HR department for “misgendering” a work colleague is not being told that they have failed to note a scientific fact about the person’s biological sex. They are being told that they have willfully opposed a state mandate. If you do so, particularly in the UK at present, there are penalties, and those imposing them are fierce judges.
Anderson devotes chapters to different aspects of what was still a relatively new phenomenon in 2018. We see from our vantage point how the enforcement of transgenderism has evolved to be a major weapon in the arsenal of those who wish to disrupt natural human relations. And those wreckers have come from many shades of the cultural spectrum.
In a chapter on Gender and Culture, the author notes the symbiosis between feminism and transgenderism:
Feminism originally sought to liberate women from a restrictive understanding of gender and free them to be themselves, but it turned into a movement seeking to make women the same as men.
But it was more than just a program for gender equity. The feminists provided the kiddie–car metaphysics which fund the transgender belief–system today:
Many second-wave feminists sought evidence in science for the view that sex-based differences in social roles and expectations have no basis in biology, and they believed they found it in research on disorders of sexual development. Specifically, they cited John Money, the psychiatry professor whose work with ‘intersex’ children at Johns Hopkins led him to conclude that our social concept of male and female, or ‘gender,’ is entirely separable from biological attributes.
I struggle to see what good feminism has done for anyone, woman or man, and it must be one of the most over-hyped and under–achieving movements in history. Everyone knows about the heroines of the Suffragette movement, and their valiant victory in winning the vote for women. You don’t hear too much about the fact that Emily Pankhurst and her sisters didn’t want working–class women to have the vote, only their own pampered class.
And then, of course, there is the fact that a lot of these harpies were, are, still in charge of children, which no feminist should ever be allowed to be. This illustrates how much fun it is for children to be around feminists:
Some feminists have pressured schools and toy companies to counteract… demonstrated preferences, on the grounds that children have been ‘socialized’ into them, and in the belief that gender-neutral toys and activities might undo or prevent this effect.
The only dry pleasure I got from reading that was that it reminded me of a tale by Hector Hugh Munro, better known as Saki. This English writer of poised and brilliant short stories wrote The Toys of Peace, in which children’s toy soldiers, and cowboys and Indians, are replaced with toy council workers and parking attendants. The children soon get bored attempting to recreate Sweden in their sandpit, and begin attacking each other with the toys.
Rather more seriously, the psychological carnage transgenderism creates if it is unfettered and state-sanctioned is a tragedy all on its own. The suicide rate among TGs, then, was something like 19 times that of the rest of society. Anderson quotes figures showing that over 40% of TGs had attempted suicide. He makes the accurate but rather tragic point that if some TGs begin transitioning in order to improve their mental health by correcting their gender, there is a good chance that their mental health problems will get worse rather than better. There is a chapter of case studies of de–transitioners, and on a human level they are profoundly depressing. But not simply due to the pathos of the interviewees as they recount their tales of frustration, pain, and mutilation. Anderson emphasizes that the main reason he wrote the book was because he could not get the stories of de–transitioners out of his mind. What also stays with the reader is the sheer wickedness of the medical profession in this field.
Members of the medical profession repeat the Hippocratic Oath, which begins “First, do no harm”. With transgenderism, however, some of these same people seem to exercise a willing suspension of ethical belief. Some of the subjects of the case studies say they feel they were “experimented on”. The ease of prescription of powerful puberty blockers and hormone treatments, the encouragement of confused youngsters to have surgery, the collusion with schools in keeping transitioning from parents; These strike me as extraordinary lapses in ethical judgment from a supposedly highly ethical profession.
Anderson also notes the extreme “posture of defensiveness” evident in the pro-trans lobby. As with race, any dissenting voice is subject to extreme and morally charged rhetoric. The outraged horror of conversion therapy, for example, among the transgender caucus is predictably both shrill and given to absurd hyperbole:
[A]ttempting to change children’s gender identity seems as ethically repellant as bleaching black children’s skin in order to improve their social life among white children.
There is also evidence of a “commodification” of individuals who are often pressured into surgery when they are too young to understand what it is they are committing to. This is a small price to pay, however, for one surgeon based at the prestigious Johns Hopkins Center, which famously specializes in transgender surgery. As he puts it, his services mean “providing customers with what they want”. Of course, he won’t need to be around for the after-sales service, when buyer’s remorse has set in, but he keeps the customer satisfied, like a shoe-store attendant. One case study has a young man recalling saying that, on seeing a particular girl, “I realized I could have seen the body I wanted”. The body becomes just another expensive consumer durable, like a motorcycle or a music system. Just choose the one you like and go get it. These are your statutory rights, like the ones you read about on every pack of sausages or batteries or toilet roll.
Anderson is not a philosopher, but he covers that aspect of transgenderism briefly and well. I have written several times about the epistemological dangers of ideologies such as transgenderism, and Anderson presents a good summation of the fault lines within that ideology itself:
The claims of transgender activists are confusing because they are philosophically incoherent. Activists rely on contradictory claims as needed to advance their position, but their ideology keeps evolving, so that even allies and LGBT organizations can get left behind as ‘progress’ marches on.
Later, Anderson will write of a “Gnostic dualism” at the heart of transgender beliefs which is contradicted by a type of monism they themselves are forced to bring into being. The TG lobby has created an “alternative metaphysics”, he concludes.
There is a strange yearning among the cult-like members of the transgender caucus. It’s as though they can’t bear to be told that they can’t wish away nature. All respected books on biology are quite clear about gender, that it exists down to the cellular level, just as every textbook of embryology explains that the beginning of human life is the point of conception. And that is why these books must be consigned to the flames of the new auto da fé.
But Anderson’s book, although cast onto the fire, has been rescued from the flames, at least by Amazon. It is quite expensive there, perhaps the price being boosted by publicity over its reinstatement, but can be obtained at a considerable discount here. The book will enrage those for whom transgenderism is both moral crusade and cash-cow, now as then, and that can only be good for men and women everywhere.
26 comments
This is another excellent article by Mark Gullick. I remember watching a documentary on the BBC or some other English station, back in the days when it still did good work, about body dysphorias, detailing the lives of (nearly all young) English women, and a man or two, maybe, who fervently believed that they were meant to be blind or paraplegic, or that they were hideous, or that their noses were too big.
It wasn’t just a twinge of disappointment like I feel when looking in the mirror and (accurately) seeing my thinning hair; these people were enthralled by their delusions. One poor girl reportedly spent hours staring at the sun before resorting to pouring bleach into her eyes, so adamant was she that she was ‘a blind person trapped in a sighted person’s body’. To me it seemed much easier for her to just close her eyes, or maybe tape them shut, but I guess she had too much integrity to try deceiving herself like that.
The key thing, though, is that all the physicians and psychologists were in agreement that the best way to help these people was not to cut off healthy limbs and gouge out healthy eyes, no matter how much their clients begged, but to work with them to improve their opinions of themselves.
Gender dysphoria, to the extent that it exists, is just another kind of body dysphoria. What’s the fundamental difference between a man who hates his left arm and wants it cut off, and a man who hates his penis and wants that cut off? Well, you know the difference. Anything to do with sexuality – especially of a deviant kind – is sacralized by those on the left. I thought the argument from body dysphorias in general to gender dysphoria specifically was sound. If helping one man to accept his arm was the right approach, then for various reasons helping another man to accept his penis was also the right approach.
But the left can take premises to their logical conclusions, too. In fact, they’re quite good at that, and now the whole thing has come full circle. (Or is it a semicircle?) Whatever cliche is appropriate, patients and doctors are now arguing backwards from “gender-affirming care” to body dysphorias in general, and we have doctors giving serious consideration to amputating limbs and scooping out eyes on the basis that this will help patients ‘become their authentic selves’. I might have even read a news report that elective amputation is already happening.
It’s madness. Sometimes I envy the “lower” animals. They may never reach for the stars, but they’ll never reach our depths of depravity, either…
I remember a British article from the mid-1990s, titled “A new way to be mad”, about the phenomenon of people wanting to chop off limbs for no reason. What I don’t get is why someone would ever arrive at the conclusion that two arms are too many. Are we as a society so bored that some people make up fake disabilities to entertain themselves?
Thanks for the comment. I had a girlfriend with anorexia. She went on to get a PhD in Clinical Psychology, and she was a slip of a thing. She would eat a couple of bites of a meal in a restaurant. Then she would go to the toilet, although she had drunk almost nothing. When she returned, I knew she had been sick. She knew she had been sick, and she knew I knew. I tried, so many times, to talk to her about the fact that her idea of herself was all wrong. Nothing made any difference. The psychological dysfunction is almost ignored in favor of these dangerous new ideas.
It must be sad and frustrating to be unable to convince someone close to you of a truth that should be as plain as the nose on her face, especially when she’s hurting herself due to the false self-image.
I heard a lot about anorexia when I was young. There were public service announcements, documentaries, messages in school, and so on. But I haven’t heard about it in decades. Either it’s far less frequent now, or people just don’t care much anymore, and both possibilities are interesting. Was it just a fad? If so, what does that say about us? Or is society so much crazier these days that a little anorexia is positively pedestrian by comparison?
How old are you, and can you source those details? It’s worth a feature.
I remember from the mid-1990s that there were a number of websites run by teenage girls encouraging self-harm, like anorexia, bulimia, and cutting. That was the madness du jour back then, before it became “top surgery”, puberty blockers, and all that. A key difference is that in the 1990s, the self-destructive behaviors were discouraged; now, the new variety is being encouraged by schools, the media, and all the rest of it.
Mid-forties. If the details you’re referring to are the public service announcements and messages in school from my childhood, I think they’d be really hard to find, if they still exist at all, unfortunately. Those were pre-internet days…
Then they put them into the gender mashing machine and turned them into rainbow ice cream while rubbing their hands together…
What’s the fundamental difference between a man who hates his left arm and wants it cut off, and a man who hates his penis and wants that cut off? Well, you know the difference. Anything to do with sexuality – especially of a deviant kind – is sacralized by those on the left.
There are more than a few adult men and teenagers who never had any physical or medical problems with their intact (non-circumcised status), but they got the idea that having a denatured penis is somehow more desirable, and indeed go and have the foreskin (AKA prepuce) removed surgically. I’m not making this up.
I’d suggest that the high number of cut (white) men in the English speaking countries – at one point the rate was about 90% at least in the cities – is a major factor in the normalization of deformities regarding the body. It eventually morphed into the more extreme denaturing that you refer to. I can hardly wait to see what fad will follow “sex changes”. Also, stupid – really, really stupid – women have two healthy breasts cut off so they don’t get breast cancer. It does not occur to them that if there are no breasts to host tumors, the cancer will just go elsewhere (lungs, stomach, liver, etc.). And then they’ll really have problems. So much for western-style preventive medicine.
The actress Angelina Jolie had her breast removed for that reason.
It is good to see Counter-Currents on the side of nature and moral rightness against feminism and transgenderism.
I haven’t read this one but The War on Gender by transbrit Claire Rae Randall is a winner. When upsets me the most is how these scum who gleefully prey on kids to mutilate/terrorize, ruin the lives of fathers who say stand up to these criminal piece of shit judges, will likely never get the punishments they deserve for doing this.
The entire trans “thing” is actually a great example of how you should never cede ground to your Talmudic enemy, because they will continue to siphon as much sanity as you’ll allow out of whatever system they are attacking. Conservative academics should have fought hard against the broadening of the very concept of gender outside of the world of grammar (the only world in which it belongs). There were actually still some right-leaning professors left when it first started. But of course, hindsight, 20/20, etc.
Latest Gallup polls say that over 9% of Americans identify as LGBT. Are you saying that every single one of them was simply duped into it?
The T part is much smaller (~1%?). What proportion of them were pulled into it by peer pressure, teacher/mentor persuasion, or the outsized praise and attention given to the “stunning and brave” is hard to know for sure, but it seems to be significant, and maybe a majority, especially now that they say you don’t even need to have any gender dysphoria to be trans…
So what are you trying to say? That transgenderism should not be taught about? That people should not be able to do what they want with their own bodies? All you are doing is moaning.
I’m only trying to say that Richard was referring to the T part, and the LGB part isn’t relevant, so it’s not 9% but a much smaller number. I’m not attaching a value judgment to it.
As an aside, I’m not even sure that the “LGBT community” is a real community, given how much acrimony there seems to be between the different letters (e.g. L vs. T).
To begin, I’m sure you have many fine qualities as an individual. I would kindly suggest, though, that you’re wasting your time with this particular topic among this audience which is simply not receptive.
Is he going to tell the millions of men who watch tranny porn that they don’t “properly understand” gender?
Everyone should just eat the lowest possible quality food and never buy exercise equipment because that would make the body “just another expensive consumer durable”. Does this apply to cosmetics and hygiene products too? What about cisnormative women and Botox?
Laughably bad article full of the usual misinformation, false statistics, spurious tales and debunked assertions. Word to the wise that trannies are being shut out of travel due to Trump’s EO’s and effectively depersoned by the regime. Of course garbage like this “enrages” them. Anderson is a liar, and so long as you keep listening to him he’ll keep lying to you, just like any liar.
The “proper” understanding quoted in the article was that it’s a “social manifestation of human nature, springing forth from biological realities, though shaped by rational and moral choice”.
The people who “don’t ‘properly understand’ gender” include the ones who think there are more than two sexes in humans, that sex is a “spectrum”, that it’s “just a social construct”, that we don’t have natural sexual dimorphism, or that it’s possible for a human to change sex (especially by mere declaration), and there are an awful lot of people who profess such beliefs.
If someone doesn’t think there’s any biological basis to sex differences, then he can’t understand the roots of the gender (e.g. sex role) differences that are widespread across human societies. For example, women are encouraged to mother because of their (average) biological nature, shared with other mammals, not because of a desire to oppress them.
The “shaped by rational and moral choice” part leaves some wiggle room for individual exceptions and gender-bending, but biology ultimately imposes constraints.
Your comment is a basically a case study in how the right wing makes up absurd things and then believes them out of moral self-aggrandizement. Only the most radical of extreme fringe Marxists hold the position you describe and it’s absolutely not what the transgender movement espouses. Gender is a social construct and a spectrum and there are countless persons who are intersex in various ways. Real life isn’t this stupid black and white Nazi cartoon where there’s no outliers, complications or different valid models, numbskull.
It’s hard to respond when you’re not specific. I described at least six positions. Are they all extremely fringe? For example, various scientific organizations and popular science outlets argue the “sex is a spectrum” and “there are more than two sexes” positions. (These expansive redefinitions of sex lead to the claims that sex is largely a social construct or can be changed.)
Sex-atypicality is not the same as being intersex and does not negate the reality of one’s biological sex. Moreover I don’t see what it has to do with transgenderism because a) it doesn’t mean one should opt for hormones and surgeries and b) most trans people are hetero-/bisexual and are behaviorally typical of their natal sex.
When you devolve into this level of hairsplitting you’ve already lost the argument. Gender is a social construct and rightoids are going to have to deal with people self-assessing their gender in the same way they self-assess what diet, clothes and lifestyle is appropriate for them.
For those interested, I wrote a review of this book some time ago:
https://counter-currents.com/2024/08/when-the-temperate-is-decried-as-extreme-a-review-of-when-harry-became-sally-responding-to-the-transgender-moment/
Transgenders don’t qualify as people according to linked article.
Nazi.
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