Into the Darkness III:

Do Trans People Exist? (Part I)

See? I told you it was going to get dark. Who the hell even asks a question like that? Well, aside from the folks who want to eliminate us, we do. We ask questions like that. At least many of us do when we’re first sorting through our gender “stuff” prior to transition and perhaps later during those super scary times when transphobia smashes hard into our beings and comes tearing at our souls, making us question the very trans identities we have built up over time to sustain ourselves. And that’s one of the goals of it, folks. Or at least the dangers. Of the anti-trans agenda that is bearing down on us now. Once the transphobia outside gets too unbearable, it starts to seep inside and take over. And then you start to lose yourself. And the next thing you know, you have become entirely undone. And then it’s over.

So that’s what I want to start asking in this installment. Do we exist or not?

There are different things this question can mean. One of the things it can mean – at least to me – is the question whether or not our identities are valid. Since, in my case, I not only regard myself as a trans woman, but as a woman period, to say that my identity is not valid would be to say that I am wrong in believing myself to be a woman. Of course, there is still a sense in which I would exist as a human being. But I would not exist as a woman, should it turn out that this belief of mine was false. And that would matter to me very much. But I don’t want to discuss that sense of existing in this installment. I will discuss it later on in this series.

Instead, I want to discuss a more basic sense of existing or not existing as a trans person. The question I have in mind is simply this: Is there even such a thing as transness or not? This question might strike you as utterly outrageous. After all, we’re here, right? Being trans, right? So clearly transness exists, right? So, what am I worried about? Well, truthfully, I am not worried that I don’t exist in this sense. However, I am worried that other people seem to think that we don’t exist in this sense or, at least, seem to be saying that we don’t exist in this sense. And, I am also worried that perhaps some other trans people might become convinced, in the darkness, that they do not exist in this sense. So, I feel compelled to discuss it. To dig in, let me begin with a personal story.

The first professor I came out to as trans as a grad student at UCLA – the one I was working with closely at the time – was quietly out and grounded in an older gay culture. While he was, in his own way, supportive, he said some things that took my breath away. Besides reframing my desire to transition as the desire to “go to campus in drag,” he worried that transsexuality didn’t really exist. His worry was philosophical. He thought that the whole notion of being in the wrong body depended upon an erroneous view of the mind and the body that was “Cartesian” in nature. As he was very much of the “Wittgensteinian” persuasion, this is a view that he rejected. Now the philosophy here isn’t important. What is important to me – what I was too disempowered to blurt out at the time, young student that I was – is the simple fact that the phenomenon of transness exists, even if some particular theory used to describe it is wrong.

By this, I mean that many of us experience a kind of extreme discomfort that motivates transition – a discomfort that often goes under the name ‘gender dysphoria.’ Some of us prefer to speak of the happiness we get in achieving transition - a happiness that goes under the name ‘gender euphoria.’ Me, I prefer the name ‘phoria’ to capture all of the complex feelings we can have, good, bad, and in-between. But the point is, we have these powerful feelings and emotions that lie at the basis of our decision to transition and to seek various forms of gender-affirming care. Even if the specific ideas and claims made in the Wrong Body Account aren’t accurate, it doesn’t follow that we don’t experience phoria. Phoria still exists. We just might need a different theory to understand it.

So far so good. Now we arrive – finally - at the question of nonexistence that concerns me. Last time, I mentioned this 2024 campaign speech from Trump in which he claims that the idea of being in the wrong body “was never heard of before in all of human history” – something that the “radical left invented only a few years ago” (starts 3:15). Here, I think that Trump is not only talking about a view or theory. I think he is talking about phoria itself. I think he means that trans phoria is nothing but an effect of ideological indoctrination. This view is also replicated in the Executive Orders “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” and “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” Nowhere is the possibility that a child might experience trans phoria ever recognized. The only possibility presented is that they have been duped by an ideology from the left.

In one sense, this proposal is not as absurd as it might seem. It is certainly possible for those in cults, for example, to experience various feelings and emotions that arise due to the belief system into which they have been indoctrinated. Feelings of outrage, grief, anger, and the like. These can all be induced through the medium of an ideology, manipulated by the leader of the cult. So, the idea, I take it is that if there were no radical gender ideology from the left, there would be no trans phoria (since it is merely an effect of that ideology). In this sense, there is really no such thing as gender phoria, and therefore no such thing as trans people.

In another sense, this proposal is as absurd as it seems. To show as much, one might trot out examples of “trans” folks from different historical epochs and different cultures. For my part, I am more than a little nervous about that strategy. I don’t want to smear our contemporary ideas of transness all over everything - including the idea that everyone we might be inclined to call “trans” experiences or experienced phoria as we do.

Rather, I simply know for a fact that my own phoria existed independently of any theory or ideology. I know this because I had to go looking for a theory to explain it. Phoria was there before the theory. After all, back in the nineties, there was no internet. Only books. And while, admittedly, I was vaguely familiar with the notion of a transsexual, I already felt disqualified because I hadn’t already been aware that I was a girl from the age of four. Still, I read up on transsexuals. Wished I was one. Meanwhile, the Beyond the Binary account started to emerge. And while I liked the political aspect, the idea of being beyond the binary sickened me (no offense intended). This is because I had experienced myself as agender for most of my life and this experience was highly dysphoric. My own views about transness? Well, those have been carefully developed over decades.

Here’s my point. While I can’t climb inside anybody’s head, I will venture that for many of us there is, at least to some degree, a lack of fit between our own experiences and the various theories about transness that are out there. And there can be different reasons for this lack of fit. One is that the theory misdescribes our own experiences. Another is that the theory outright induces an experience of dysphoria (i.e., it feels yucky).

I would also venture that in addition to this lack of fit, many of us engage in our own critical thinking about these theories and develop our own views. Most of the trans people I’ve met have been veritable philosophers, whether degree-holding or not. We critique, argue, theorize. In fact, we can - as some of us do - reject all of the existing theories outright. And, behold! The phoria remains! I suppose at this point, one might attempt to argue that any view that is trans-affirming is ideological and that the phoria is simply due to that ideological commitment. However, the claim that any view that is trans-affirming is automatically ideological is question-begging (see Into the Darkness II). And, besides, most of us have had to fight for a sense of affirmation. Our phoria hardly came pre-equipped with happy trans affirmations. On the contrary!

These two facts – the lack of fit between experience and theory, and the critical reflections and theorizations – strongly suggest that phoria is independent of any one theory that aims to explain it and that it is certainly not a function of some ideology. The ideology of a cult can allow for no feelings that are dissonate with the ideology. It can only recognize emotions that are promoted through it, via the leader. And as for critical thinking. Well, yeah. So, in this extraordinarily meager sense, I can confidently conclude that trans people do exist. QED, and all that.

I know. Big deal, right? Well, as I said in my introductory essay, we’re taking baby steps. Until next time,

Hugs,

Auntie Ideology