Jan Bergstra & Laurens Buijs
Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team
In March of this year, UvA professor Jan Willem Duyvendak wrote a critique in NRC of the remarks about non-binarity made by one of the authors of this blog, Laurens Buijs. In that piece, Duyvendak gives an argument often used against critics of the emancipation of transgender and non-binary people: these critics would be similar to the critics of homosexuality 50 years ago. Or as Duyvendak puts it:
“Many of the accusations Buijs makes against non-binary people are suspiciously similar to what homosexuals were told before: they did not exist, or they could not actually exist, and certainly were not allowed to exist; if they did exist, then they were not allowed to show that they existed, and incidentally, they were dangerous to others (such as children). Just as Buijs now invokes biologists, psychologists and moralists for his claim that non-binary people would be ‘unnatural’ and ‘unhealthy,’ biologists, psychologists and pastors then argued that homosexuals would be sick and sinful.”
Nothing new under the sun?
We call this argument by Duyvendak the nothing-news-under-the-sun argument. That argument goes like this: with the emancipation of transgender people, there is nothing new under the sun, and one had better learn from the past and then simply accept transgender persons as such now without further investigation.
We claim that the nothing-news-under-the-sun argument misses the mark and can be seen as a deliberate attempt at deception. Sexual orientation has been systematically considered for another 150 years or so. For some information on this history, see pp 22/23 of AGTRT-5. The literature on sexual orientation, meanwhile, is vast and complex. Homosexual (man falls for man) and lesbian (woman falls for woman) sexuality are orientations that have gained a stable place alongside both heterosexual orientations (man falls for woman and woman falls for man).
The untenability of the nothing-news-under-the-sun argument becomes clear when we apply it to other topics. Man falls for child and man falls for animal are (according to some) also sexual orientations, should they now be accepted as well? This is obviously too short of the mark. Science has by no means accepted that man falls for child and man falls for animal would be sexual orientations, and there is no reason or justification to draw a parallel with the acceptance of gay and lesbian sexuality.
We see that the nothing-news-under-the-sun argument must be used with caution: is the parallel correct and is the conclusion valid? These are two relevant questions that need to be asked in the process.
Transgender consensus on homosexuality is not there yet
Sexual orientation cannot simply be compared one-to-one with transgender. On sexual orientation, a high degree of consensus was reached on a number of observations: (i) a person may experience a change from one sexual orientation to another, but such a change is quite unusual and, as far as is known, is never a result of a decision of will on the part of the person concerned or of therapy carried out by third parties. (ii) Men and women can have both orientations at the same time. (iii) These orientations are established at birth, and a person “discovers” their own sexual orientation, so to speak. (iv) After that discovery, it may be quite some time before one shares it with others. (v) There is no trace in the literature of the idea that a person could or should be guided through medical means to be “truly” gay or lesbian. (vi) There seems to be great consensus that a male body can function both heterosexually and homosexually, idem with women.
The social acceptance of gay and lesbian sexuality involved the acceptance of concepts that were at their core clear and penetratingly described by many authors. It can be compared to the acceptance of atheism, and of adherence to a religion that is not dominant in a state. It involves the acceptance of a situation defined in sufficiently clear terms.
With transgender, the case is different. Classic are the transitions from male to female and female to male. Even though many Christians and other conservatives do not want to know about it, there is no doubt within the scientific field about the existence and relevance of both these forms of transition. Such a transition requires, among other things, complex and lengthy medical interventions. Since not everyone believes that with such a transition the biological sex also changes, people prefer to speak of gender and transition of gender in this regard.
There is confusion about biological sex. There are several definitions of that concept in circulation (see AGTRT-4) and one definition allows for a change of sex in a human being while another does not. There is no generally accepted definition of biological sex, and that very fact creates a great deal of confusion that can be reasonably resolved through the use of the term gender.
Bio-transgendering versus psycho-transgendering
Let us use the term bio-transgendering for the forms of transgendering just described, that is, gender reassignment through medical intervention. Indeed, the nothing-new-under-the-sun argument applies to the acceptance of bio-transgendering. We have described in AGTRT-4 that the limits of bio-transgenesis can certainly be expanded to some extent.
In bio-transgendering, there is a fierce debate about from what age and in what way one may (or should) bring about or support bio-transgendering by medical route. But the latter discussion does as little to detract from the existence and relevance of bio-transgendering as the discussion of the minimum age for marriage between two people detracts from the existence of the concept of marriage.
Emancipation from bio-transgenation, then, is indeed nothing new under the sun in that sense. But this is not the whole story. Meanwhile, partly because of hard-line trans activism and because of the influence of organizations like Stonewall, there is also what we might call psycho-transgendering. This is the transition from male to female or female to male based solely on subjective psychological factors.
It is over this psycho-transgendering that the hard battle between (allegedly progressive) proponents and (gender critical) opponents is currently being fought. Gender-critical philosophers ask the legitimate question: is there then no limit to transitions from man to woman and from woman to man?
Between bio-transgendering and psycho-transgendering lies a spectrum of options. The importance and frequency of psycho-transgendering are now so great that it no longer makes sense to consider transgendering as a homogeneous category of behavior/behavior modification that one can or should be categorically for or against.
Read Buijs’ rebuttal to Duyvendak in NRC:
Science still struggles with gender, self-identification is not everything
Gender-critical voices are much needed in debate
Psycho-transgendering as a concept is still so problematic – however it develops in the future – that the nothing-new-under-the-sun argument cannot be used to argue its plausibility. In AGTRT-M4, we describe the tension between “responsible transgendering” and “capricious transgendering.” One question then is how to prevent reckless transgendering.
Conceptual ambiguity is also evident in the transition from male to neutral and from female to neutral. Psycho-transgenation also plays a large (if not now dominant) role in these two transitions.
From progressive quarters, there is a strong commitment to minority emancipation in the areas of sexuality and gender. In the process, unsubtle ideological statements are regularly made. This fails to do justice to the complexity of the issue, unfairly dismissing valid arguments from gender-critical quarters as transphobic. In many ways, trans-emancipation is indeed something new under the sun, and deserves an open debate with room for critical voices as well.
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