Political Urgings

I keep getting political urgings from my friends to publicly endorse this candidate or that, this party or that, because of their stances on transgender issues. They may be disappointed in this blog post because in this post I will not endorse any candidate or party. I am, however, going to talk about transgender issues as explained by science and rational thought. It is up to you to make up your own mind who to vote for. Fair warning, some positions are a bit radical. You might agree with some but not others. Given today’s political climate, if I bat .500 or better with you, I will have succeeded. I am willing to be persuaded to change on these issues but don’t come at me with outrage, come at me with facts, evidence and rationality.

I see today’s political scene through the lens of Modernism, and not through the lenses of political parties such as Republican, Democratic or Libertarian. Modernism was conceived in the early 1600s in the Enlightenment and features science, reason, rationality, laisse-faire capitalism, individualism, and democracy. Modernism seems to me to have proven itself since the Enlightenment in elevating the human condition. It may not be perfect but it is the best we have to reach the goal of individual happiness. Modernism was developed in opposition to theocracy and the divine right of autocratic kings which we will call Premodernism. And now it is in opposition to Postmodern thinking which refuses to believe in facts and the human ability to perceive reality.

So here goes on my list of issues:

Human and Political Rights

The goal of human and political rights, as in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, is to allow individuals the freedom they need to prosper and reach individual happiness and to shape how government will behave. The proper role of government, is to prevent the use of external or internal force, or threat of force, against individual citizens. This approach, during the Enlightenment, was in reaction to the feudal economic and political system which had resulted in serfdom, royal abuse, poverty, war and disease.

Through the Modern approach, discrimination against cross presentation in public was reduced based on rational jurisprudence starting in the 1850s in the United States. Today transgender rights are protected in many states but there is more to be done. These protections did not occur automatically but through the application of Modernist principles and the hard work of transgender people and their allies. It is irrational to discriminate against people who present differently from the norm because it causes damage to those people through stereotyping and denies the world the use of their productive talents. Although progress was slow, the United States led the world in eliminating forced servitude and discrimination against minority groups including many African American people, as well as some Chinese people who also had been trafficked to the United States. The principles of Modernism leave us still not totally satisfied with the progress to date but the gains have been substantial.

Now we see the U.S. State Department has formed a “Commission on Unalienable Rights” to reduce the number of human rights and base the remaining rights on religious doctrine. This is a throwback to Premodernism. Ostensibly this commission is supposed to shape our policies with regard to foreign countries, but, in time, some will no doubt try to apply them to the United States. Some of the founding fathers may have been theists when they wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights but they were well aware of the history of persecution and violence pursued by some religions against other religions in Europe and the Colonies.

You can also bet that being transgender will not be protected as one of the rights surviving in the commission report. Although the commission is supposed to base their decisions on natural rights, many of the commission members in previous statements have regarded LGBT people as unnatural and pathological.

I also reject the Postmodern notion that individuals owe their right to exist only as part of a collectivist group or society. In the 20^th Century, collectivism was tried in Germany, Soviet Union, China and elsewhere and it did not achieve its economic and moral claims. These economies collapsed and their promises of a more moral society were revealed to be just a smokescreen. These experiments resulted in collectivist brutality and in the death of at least 100 millions of their own people, not to mention those who were killed by their hands in war. And transgender people were some of the first to be targeted for discrimination and/or elimination. You can bet that if the collectivists take control of government, just as all of the collectivist societies did in the 20^th century, they will turn on minorities like transgender people. This is because, in a collectivist society, the worth of any given individual approaches zero, except for a ruling class. Transgender people will not obtain their happiness through collectivist government because being transgender is an act of individualism which the collectivists abhor.

I believe that citizens have a right to freely associate which includes activities in the bedroom. Marriage should be allowed between two consenting adults in order to allow them to realize their values in the other person which makes them happy. Using religious doctrine as a basis for marriage laws means that such laws would be based on superstition or revelation, rather than the established human behavior of voluntary cooperation in family groups which has shown evolutionary value in maintaining the species. I am against rollback of same-sex marriage not only because it violates freedom of association but also because it leaves the children of such relationships unprotected. And there are many transgender people who are protected in their relationships by same-sex marriage.

Michael Foucault

The Postmodernist, Michael Foucault in the 1950s published a book and encouraged free sex and promiscuity. I witnessed the results in the 1960s during college life. He did that to shake up existing family and cultural institutions in order to promote collectivism. While we cavorted in the 1960s, the Postmodernists were quietly taking over university campuses, riding along with the anti-war and free love movements. I saw that in the early 1970s when I had to deal with a potential de-platforming plan to block one of the outside speakers I had scheduled for my department as a graduate student. At that point I lost all belief in Postmodern academic “freedom” of expression because it clearly resulted in censorship and potentially in violence.

The Postmoderns have an authoritarian streak in them, and since any given individual has zero value, it is perfectly acceptable to suppress free speech on campus. Modernists encourage free discussion and deliberation. If Postmodernists do manage to grab power outside of academia, you can bet that later it will be acceptable to restrict freedom to express transgender behavior. Just look at contemporary China, discriminating against LGBT citizens, at one time allowing only one child per marriage, and imposing their philosophies by force on Turkish Muslims in the western province of Xinjiang and in Tibet.

So, I am against the identity politics of current political parties which seeks to divide people into minority groups based on irrelevant demographic criteria in order to control their voting. I recognize each individual as an intersectional minority of one.

Healthcare

United States healthcare has become a mixed economic system, combining the worst of government and the worst of monopolistic corporations. The result is that mental health and medical providers no longer work directly for individual patients. With regard to transgender people seeking assistance, we must fit into this irrational system by being assigned to pathological categories. The change from “gender identity disorder” to “gender dysphoria” did not really achieve depathologization as the latter is still in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The DSM is still the governing document for diagnosis of pathological mental conditions. I don’t care that it is in a different section of the document from the previous version, it is still in there. Surveys show that at least 20% of the population believe that transgender people are pathological and this belief is often used to deny them rights and treatment.

Johns Hopkins Hospital

When the free market of transgender care existed, it produced improvements in transgender treatment. During the time when university gender clinics existed, led by the Johns Hopkins Gender Clinic in the 1970s treatment of transgender people was controlled by a small group of authoritarians in these clinics. Transgender people needed to fit the right criteria to get care, such as requiring the right sexual orientation which had no basis in science. The scientists who actually studied transgender people most closely were Magnus Hirschfeld and Harry Benjamin and they did not find these criteria useful. (It should be noted that neither of these researchers were academics.) The criteria were evidently made up to conform to cultural expectations, that a transgender person after transition should have the “approved” sexual orientation to fit cultural heterosexual expectations.

When the university gender clinics disbanded, transgender people and their providers were increasingly free to develop affirmative approaches for adult counseling and treatment and ultimately affirmative treatment for trans children. Criteria for treatment such as having the “correct” sexual orientation were discarded. However, the universities have now re-formed gender clinics and are increasingly dictating how transgender people should be treated. And they can be influenced by the prevailing philosophy of Postmodernism on some campuses. Research is limited because such research must be approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) or other Federal government organization. Federal legislation required IRBs after a series of academic and government experiments resulted in atrocities. The cost of an IRB is thus a barrier to entry into science. The current initial barrier is running about $25K a year with annual charges of $10K even for the least risky research. Right now, I am trying to help Tri-Ess develop a survey of transgender people but we have no IRB to turn to. Peer review of publications and approved language restrictions further reduce freedom to conduct and report research that is not within the Zeitgeist. The IRB and research systems needs to be changed, so that research can take place outside of academia and government. All this falls right into the hands of Postmodernists of university campuses who value authoritarian approaches and use transgender people as poster children to gain power.

Consistent with the Premodernistic approach to transgender rights, many states now allow providers to refuse treatment to transgender people on the basis of religious belief. I am still trying to figure out what routes to take on a drive to see my grandchildren in Colorado and Virginia considering the possibility that I might get injured in an accident or get sick along the way. Yes, I know that there is a Federal law requiring treatment in the emergency room but with states signaling something different, subtle discrimination may occur. I was repeatedly unable to get breast implants from an eminent provider institution here in Atlanta for 4 years until one of the doctors left and the Affordable Care Act was passed. Now the ACA is in the process of being gutted with respect to transgender protection and maybe all protections. Under normal circumstances this is a problem but in the time of COVID-19, this may signal to providers that we are not worth as much as hospitalized cisgender people and should consequently get less care. In the chaos of the hospitals fighting COVID-19, such neglect of transgender people may not be detectable. Transgender people have higher frequency of HIV, tobacco use and chronic conditions that make us more susceptible to the severe effects of COVID-19.

In order to properly support transgender, and all United States citizens, a restructuring of the healthcare mess is needed. The solution is not more government, but elimination of government support for healthcare monopolies and the conduct of anti-trust actions. Transgender people resort to medical tourism because other countries of the world are not saddled with the high costs resulting from our current system. We broke up Ma Bell, we can do this. This will improve healthcare and reduce the rate of growth of its costs.

Bathrooms and Locker Rooms

Ah yes, one of my favorite topics. I have pontificated in detail about this enough in these blog posts. Suffice it to say that this problem would go away if facilities were upgraded to make them clean and safe. I have extensive experience with these rooms in athletics, the military and civilian situations. They tend to be biological hell holes even in the best of organizations. Politicians on one side want you to believe that women will not be safe with a transgender woman in the room. The facts are that no woman has been hurt by a trans woman in one of the sex segregated facilities. However, several transgender women have been hurt. Politicians on the other side want you to believe that this is somehow a failure of tolerance and acceptance. My experience is that people are really just not interested in what other people do in these facilities but that a little more privacy might be provided with a little more money. Using a locker room does not have to be an accepted embarrassing rite of passage for high school students. We do not need the embarrassment or cognitive dissonance and we should not have to tolerate the filth.

The real problem here is that the Premoderns have a long history of trying to divide people by sex based on divine revelation and to conflate gender with sex so that it can be controlled. The Postmoderns want “anything goes” to break up cultural norms so that they can grab power so the bathroom controversy is good for them. Modernists observe this to be a contrived problem and view it as a backlash after same-sex marriage was made legal. There are many rational solutions to this issue but they are not being pursued because of prejudice or unwillingness to spend the money to improve such facilities.

Sports Competition

As with bathrooms and locker rooms, the basic problem here is money — but in a different way. The spirit of amateur athletics is that all people should be free to participate and compete. It is only when prize money or scholarships are in the offing that this becomes a problem for transgender people. I went to a college that was totally amateur with no athletic scholarships and things worked out just fine. As for qualifying for higher level amateur competition, there is no reason why four finishers rather than the top three finishers cannot move up to higher competition, say from high school to state championships. It’s a matter of good judgement which has been ignored, resulting in current lawsuits because of the almighty dollar. In some states, where competitions are segregated by sex assigned at birth, trans men are prohibited from competing with males as they would want, so they are singled out for ridicule because they beat females assigned at birth, as a wrestler in Texas has been doing. This problem is due to state and international athletic associations and governments having lack of knowledge and being rigid about sex and gender. The politicians use this issue as a “red meat” political wedge issue to further divide the voters.

Caster Semenya

At the professional level, we have some decent rules about transitioning adults, hormone therapy, and hormone levels that seem to be working to equalize the competition. Problems still exist for transgender people which are illustrated by a current problems with Castor Semenya, an Olympic Gold Medalist runner, because her naturally occurring testosterone levels exceed the anticipated range for females. She is not transgender. Some organizations want her to take hormone-suppressing drugs which I regard as cruel and potentially dangerous. This is akin to forcing Alan Turing (Codebreaker, The Imitation Game) to take similar drugs in the mistaken belief that it would curb homosexuality. (I have written about that too in these posts.) The evidence indicates that there is a big overlap of males and females regarding testosterone levels and, within sex, testosterone levels do not predict performance. That is, athletes with higher testosterone levels do not always win! Using testosterone levels in this way is clearly a back handed method of reassigning sex, which international competition organizations have never been able to do in spite of some 90 years of trying.

It is abusive to treat athletes in this way but when the monetary and political stakes are high, people will cross the line. As my wife used to say “When it comes to money, people go a little crazy.”

Summary

I am looking for leaders to vote for that want to deal rationally with the city, state and Federal problems that can address the issues I described above. Unfortunately, I do not see any on the horizon. As many people report, they frequently have to choose between the lesser of two evils with regards to politicians and/or parties. And maybe I will too.

I won’t see you at the polls, I am old enough to automatically get an absentee ballot.

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Tags: featured, History, politics, Transgender

Category: Transgender History, Transgender Politics