Trigger Warning: Personal opinion Ahead. I will explain my position on the growing divide. This isn’t intended to offend, but of course that doesn’t stop you claiming to be offended if you so desire.
Spot the odd one out: Blue eyes, Green eyes, Brown eyes, Black hair
I’m pretty sure you got it right. But isn’t it the same with LGBT? The L, G and B are all about sexuality – Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual. If we wanted to add extras to that list, we could add H for Heterosexual and A for Asexual, or O for Omnisexual. LGBHAO might make some sense, detailing the main options for sexuality, but LGBT doesn’t. The T refers to ‘gender’, someone’s inner feelings of their alignment with attributes they associate with men or women, compared to the sex they were born, and that is largely independent of sexual preference. Someone says they are transgender if they feel more aligned with the attributes they consider to be associated with the sex opposite to that they were born.
I put ‘gender’ in quotes and defined transgender using ordinary words, because like many people, I do not buy in to the often divisive, insulting, self-contradictory, illogical, deceptive and devious jargon created by activist groups. Nothing in this blog is intended to cause offense, but as a scientist and engineer, I strongly value clear thinking and logical reasoning. It makes very little sense to create a term such as ‘non-binary’, and then define it using reference to binary options of male and female. It makes no sense to define a woman as ‘someone who considers themselves to be a woman’. Sorry, what do they mean by ‘woman’? Circular definitions are meaningless.
I am no historian, but it seemed to me that activist groups that once stood up for L, G and B people took on the T group because like any organisation, extra members means extra income, extra power and influence. The inclusion of “T” for transgender in the acronym is also an acknowledgment that gender identity issues sometimes intersect with sexual orientation in the social, political, and personal realms. While sexual orientation and gender identity are distinct aspects of an individual’s identity, they are both integral to the broader conversation about rights, recognition, and respect for all individuals, regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation. In any case, activists had done a great job, taking a much-oppressed group and getting legal protection and social respect. Back then, there were very few ‘transsexuals’ – around 1 in 2000 people had been the norm for decades, remarkably similar across the whole world, and most people had a great deal of sympathy for anyone who had suffered the misery of gender dysphoria, the psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s experienced or expressed gender and one’s birth sex, i.e. the feeling that they had been born in the wrong body, couldn’t relate their body to their inner feelings, and hated the sight of their own body parts. Pretty much everyone accepted that such people need sympathy and protection from discrimination, and together, they all had a bit more power and influence to win more rights and protections. Striving for basic protections and rights was a good cause that most of us could buy into.
For a few years it all seemed to be going quite well and we all got used to seeing the LGBT acronym, but in the last decade that unity has been failing and now a great many LGB people have separated off into The LGB Alliance, and one of the common hashtags on social media has become #lgbwithoutthet. Activist groups are strongly resisting the split, hurling insults at those who threaten their power.
The majority of trans people are just trying to live their lives in a way that makes them more comfortable, and that is entirely worthy of respect and tolerance. None of us can fully know what someone else feels or what they have to cope with. I and most other people would be perfectly happy letting them get on with doing so in peace, free from discrimination.
Nevertheless, the chasm is rapidly widening, and with good reason – the T bit, that had originally only included trans-sexuals, soon started accepting cross-dressers (someone who dresses in the clothing typically associated with the opposite sex from their birth sex), a several times larger but completely different group who like to present themselves as the opposite sex for fetishistic reasons, and who get sexual thrills by being affirmed as such, and drag queens, who dress up as female parodies for entertainment purposes. Some cross dressers and drag queens might well have transgender self-perceptions too of course, but self image and outward behaviours are quite different concepts. Having accepted those quite different groups, the definition of what makes someone transgender had already ballooned close to bursting point, but since then, the T group seems to have been taken over by extremist activists that have welcomed in many bad actors who are not T at all, but are using the cover to abuse its associated privileges, most of which were won by leveraging the association with LGB, while aggressively attacking those who questioned the extent of that association. While most transgender people are innocent, just getting on with their lives as best they can, reading any daily newspaper will quickly reveal that the broader group now claiming to belong to the T category now also includes a good many bad actors who should never have been allowed in – rapists and violent abusers who want to go to women’s prisons to gain access to vulnerable women and hide from potential punishment by other male offenders; mediocre sportsmen who cannot win prizes in male sport, who want to capitalise on superior male strength or height to win women’s prizes instead; paedophiles who use the T platform to gain access to children; people who want to persuade L, G and B children that they are not really L, G or B, but T, and they should be ‘cured’ by asking for hormonal and surgical sex reassignment, otherwise known as ‘conversion therapy’.
These four bad actor groups (I may have missed others) should never have been accepted into the T lobby, because they have destroyed the reputation of the transgender lobby as a whole, which used to solicit widespread sympathy and support. They managed to infiltrate and take over the platform via the fringe activism that made those illogical definitions, that ‘a woman is anyone who says they are a woman’, so that can quite happily include a 6ft, 150kg rapist with huge muscles and a full beard. Once those cracks in language appeared, they were quickly forced wide open into wide doorways through which anyone could pass any time for any reason, good or bad. These bad actors have become prominent in recent media, essentially taking over and fouling the public image of transgender people, so it really is not surprising that others no longer want to associate with that lobby, at least until it purges itself of those bad actor groups.
Meanwhile, the T is no longer T, but has exploded into TQIA2SPD+, the + meaning that new letters are frequently added at will. . LGB covered everyone that wasn’t heterosexual, typically around 3-5% of the population. TQIA2SPD… covers the much smaller 0.1% who said they were transgender in the most recent UK census. The tail is now wagging the dog. Many LGBs feel their organisations and political power have been stolen from them.
Let’s go back to lists of similar things. We could for example have LGBHAO for sexuality, so that everyone is included, as is today’s fashion. T is actually a large basket of different things now, so we need to unpack it and group those things into more manageable groups to get more sensible acronyms.
Firstly, a few of the extra letters are about a person’s feelings of how they relate to their perception of sex stereotypes. Already, we are in trouble, because no two people have the same view of what it means to be ‘male’ or ‘female’. Apart from sufferers of schizophrenia and other brain disorders, nobody has any experience of what it is like to be someone else, let alone someone of a different sex. We can only imagine how it might feel, based on a combination of life experience and prejudice. In that sense at least, transgender activists have a point that ‘gender’ is at least partially a social construct, though they usually omit the fact that that construct is very different between one person and another. Each of us has a perception of how a woman or a man might feel, but perception is not reality. I can’t even put myself inside the head of someone else who is the same sex, let alone someone of the opposite sex. If you think you can, that’s almost certainly just projection. If, as gender activists want us to accept, that there is a spectrum of femininity and masculinity, then there are currently 8 billion locations on that spectrum. No two people are the same, so what’s the point of trying to give names to every position? For millennia, we accepted that some people were unusually macho or girly, or tomboys or sissies, but we used to manage fine without 100 different terms. It seems to me that these terms would still suffice, and that at least some of the new terms show a quite distasteful degree of narcissism. It’s quite enough to know that you do or don’t consider yourself extremely feminine or masculine or somewhere in between, I really don’t care about the mind-numbingly boring details of your self-obsession thanks!
The other letters are more about sexuality, but we didn’t do that for the L,G and B groups, so why do so for T? Why should the 0.1% get all the attention, compared to the 5%? Why not explode their letters to the same degree too, to cover all the various divisions within lesbian or gay or bi people. I won’t attempt to expand the LGB bit because I have absolutely no idea what the correct names should be. Thankfully, LGB groups haven’t forced every aspect of their personalities onto the front pages of newspapers and social media every day. Apart from the odd Pride march, they just get on with their lives and leave the rest of us to get on with ours. Now even Pride marches are far less LGB and far more T.
If we are exploding fields, we could expand other dimensions such as how people present themselves (they might dress up just like regular people of the opposite sex, or in drag, or as a transvestite, or only online or in games or in VR as an avatar etc etc). Regular, Drag, Gaming, Social media, VR. Add an extra subscript letter for each one. Tr, Td, Tg, Ts, Tv to start? Surely the external presentation of someone’s feelings is just as important as their labels of their internal feelings and their associated pronouns, especially if they demand that we have to acknowledge and conform to their choices?
The reasons for being trans can be very different too, but are just as important. Studies have shown that under 20% of ‘transwomen’ suffer ‘gender dysphoria’, the feeling that their body doesn’t match their internal perception of themselves, and that the other 80% or more of transwomen are autogynephilic, (autogynephilia is a male’s paraphilic tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought of oneself as female), getting a sexual thrill from presenting themselves as the opposite sex and ‘gender euphoria’ when they ‘pass’ or someone otherwise ‘affirms’ their chosen gender. I would have thought that distinction very important – one is relief of mental suffering while the other is indulgence of a fetish, but members of the 80% are often offended if that is pointed out. In fact, there has been much effort by gender activists to discredit the studies.
Dividing the T into Td and Ta would thus make a lot of sense. But now with all the bad actor hangers on, perhaps we could add Tc for those who only pretend to be the other gender for convenience, to gain access to other sports categories or prisons. And Tp for those who do so for perversion reasons, to gain access to children for example. How does LGBTdTaTcTpQIA2SPD… look?
Adding the second subscript letters, I suspect Tdr would be extremely popular claims (someone who suffers gender dysphoria and just wants to live as the opposite sex, dressing as a perfectly normal person of that sex, but who gets no sexual thrill from doing so, only the relief from their dysphoria). I equally suspect that the far more honest Tad would be rather less willingly used, (someone who pretends to be the opposite sex for fetishistic sexual stimulation reasons, and dressing to maximise that thrill). The high likelihood that people would not be very honest about choosing their letters perhaps explains why these categories are missing from the current nomenclature. Nobody wants to admit to being a fetishist or a pervert; everyone wants the rights and protections we might think appropriate for the gender dysphoria category, even if they can’t be bothered to shave off their beard and wear wig and dress. The one that used to be T.
I think that is the reason for the LGB split from the TQIA2SPD+, and it is overdue. Everyone still supports protection for the few people with gender dysphoria, and to a lesser extent for the many others who enjoy living in another gender for whatever reason without harming anyone, though many of us would still draw the line at entry to places rightfully reserved for the other sex. That tolerance and support hasn’t evaporated yet, though it is certainly under strain. But it is very overdue to remove the bad actors and fetishists from the T category, and restore the power balance towards the 50 times bigger LGB grouping. The sooner it happens the better. Bad actors and fetishists will still exist, but they deserve no support and protection.