[AGTRT-BF37] Marcus Dib is transsexual but not transgender: what does this mean for gender theory?

Jan Bergstra & Laurens Buijs
Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team

An interview with Marcus Dib is circulating on YouTube. Dib was born a woman, but now goes through life as a transgender man. Yet “he” sees himself as biologically female, and “he” does not want to be called transgender.

We see a strikingly strong and clear speaker in this interview. Dib provides relevant criticism of co-essentialism (or the “woke” idea that everyone can decide for themselves whether they are male or female). “He” comes closer to essentialism (or the conservative idea that the difference between man and woman is simply fixed in biology), but also deviates from it.

Read more about essentialism and co-essentialism:
Our search for a middle-of-the-road gender theory has led us into a curious two-front war

Note: We use “he” as a personal pronoun (in quotation marks) to refer to Marcus Dib, because we do not know whether we should otherwise write he, they or them. By the way, a difference between “he,” “she” and “them” we do not make for the time being. This corresponds quite well to the undefined gender from AGTRT-1.

Marcus Dib’s position can be summarized as follows:

(a) “He” is not simply trans (F2M trans),
(b) “He” is transsexual (F2M, with full medical/surgical transition, and also socially, in behavior and in dress),
(c) “He” sees himself as biologically female,
(d) “He” does not want to be called transgender because he does not accept its connotations that have nothing to do with biological gender.
(e) “He” has no desire to be seen as a man because “he” as far as “he” is concerned is a woman. “He” only has the desire to pretend, dress and act like a man,
(f) “He” would like to be gender neutral but he believes that gender neutral is a contentless classification and “he” forgoes it for that reason.

“He” has a number of additional positions:

(i) Gender-neutral does not exist (as “he” says: non-binary does not exist),
(ii) Gender is no longer a useful term (too much influence with a political bias),
(iii) Puberty blockers are problematic,
(iv) The detransitioning movement is growing and deserves support,
(v) Support in adults who want to become transgender is problematic if these people have other psychiatric problems,
(vi) The term non-binary is “offensive” (but with slightly different arguments than we mentioned in AGTRT-3).
(vii) “He” does not want to be forced to choose his own gender pronouns (personal pronouns), on that point there should be freedom. “He” wants to be addressed with “he” but is not going to force another to do so.

For some people suffering from gender dysphoria, Marcus Dib’s solution is undoubtedly useful. These people are not asking to be legally classified as transgender. This implies the possibility of redefining the concept of transsexing. A person is then “restricted” transsexual when there is no transgendering (in the legal sense) or desire to do so.

Marcus Dib’s setup poses some intriguing questions to formal gender theory (and its various variants), and we briefly discuss those questions below.

1. Dib assumes a modern biological definition of gender (from which it inevitably follows that “he” is still a woman). This gives the impression that (M2F) transsexuals who believed at the time to become a woman had misunderstood. But, of course, that doesn’t have to be the case. They had every right to use a morphological definition of (not yet so named biological) sex, with the corollary that they did mutate sex, so the term transsexual was rightfully used. Marcus Dib’s use of the term transsexual is somewhat paradoxical. He uses the term precisely because he claims no change of sex. In any case, Dib brings transsexuality back into the discussion even though the term seemed outdated.

2. Co-essentialism also faces a question: Dib apparently has a male gender identity but claims to be a woman. That doesn’t really fit with the idea that gender identity determines gender. From a co-essentialist perspective, does this mean that Marcus Dib is a man even though “he” himself sees it differently?

3. From an essentialist perspective, the positioning of Marcus Dib also raises questions: Dib is female, but is morphologically male. From a TERF perspective, the question then is: does Dib have or not or access to the women’s locker rooms (etc.)?

4. Dib presents the design of FGT(formal gender theory) with a rather fundamental question. Suppose a person X comes up with his own story about himself in relation to biological sex and gender; should we now accept X’s right to have his own theory about himself and try to incorporate this theory into formal gender theory, for example through clever concept engineering? Or are we also allowed to say, “X can claim so much, we won’t do anything with that”? As an example, take a person Y who claims to be a man on the left and a woman on the right. It is an illusion in advance that formal gender theory can meaningfully accommodate such an idea, and we have little choice but to say that we have nothing to offer Y, in terms of theoretical clarification or anything else. But is Marcus Dib now such a “maverick” example (as Y), or does Dib actually have a relevant position that we do need to take fully seriously and see fit into FGT? We haven’t figured it out yet.

5. Marcus Dib creatively translates the liar paradox into gender theory by basically saying the following, “I do not have the gender you assign me, even if you ask me to assign myself a gender first, because then I do not answer that.” Clearly, any variant of gender theory will struggle to deal with this convincingly. This is a purely logical problem that you will encounter with any classification of people into a limited number of categories, it has nothing to do with gender. Either the classification is incomplete (not everyone can be classified with the given categories) or the classification is sometimes coercive (one cannot evade classification).

The fifth point above is of great importance. Those who see gender (as we do ourselves) as a way of categorizing people into three classes (male, female and neutral) cannot escape the fact that gender assignment sometimes carries a coercive character. The concept of gender thus inevitably becomes “oppressive” in some circumstances.

Now a division of people into biological male/biological female is equally oppressive”. So the question is not to avoid in concept engineering of gender that the designed notion of gender is oppressive. The question is to design a concept of gender that is socially useful and relevant on the one hand, and minimally oppressive on the other.

We cannot ignore the fact that any variant of formal gender theory (FGT) regarding Marcus Dib is “oppressive.” Indeed, the assumption made by FGT in all variants is that MD is assigned one of three possibilities as gender: male, female or neutral.

Specifically, from the essentialist perspective, Marcus Dib is a woman (female gender), from the perspective of a moderate MotR version of FGT, Dib is a man (male gender). From a co-essentialist perspective, Dib has (presumably) neutral gender. But none of these categorizations will accept Dib, because Dib “does not do gender,” and so there will be involuntariness on Dib’s part in assigning gender to Dib. Adding a new category of gender does not solve this problem, because even then Dib can reject any gender assignment.