Why I Don't Like People
OK. In blog terms this is ancient. It's over a week old. But it captured a good chunk of my thought for three or four days and I was thinking about blogging it at some point during the past week, so I'm going to try and set down my meager thoughts now.
This story (which was linked here) pretty much broke my heart for a few days, and as I explained to my father over dinner, kind of captures one of the big reasons I kind of don't like people: I kept turning out variations on the sentiment that "the narrowness of human imagination is beggared by the breadth of human experience." And for people living outside that collective imagination the rest of us make life hell.
I don't have a great deal to say about the meat of the story itself; I feel it largely speaks for itself, and I don't have any insights to offer on the experience of identifying as transgender. I can't pretend (and, frankly, I don't think either therapist should either) to have a certainty about what attitude one should take towards children with the apparent dispositions that these two kids display, and while I'm much more sympathetic to Ehrensaft's approach than Zucker's, I also doubt that any one way would work for every child (in current society, at least, which is the larger concept of this post). The stress and pain Zucker's methods are clearly causing Bradley had me tearing up when I read them, but on the other hand I'm fearful for the transition Jona may experience on reaching puberty, at which point it's most likely (barring an intentional hormonal intervention that I'm very uncomfortable with condoning) that predictable physical changes will make it much more difficult to smoothly integrate as a girl.
Assuming that Jona still wants to be Jona at that point, which wraps back around to where I was starting from. There's a pretty common story out there about what it means for a sexually mature adult to ID as transgender, and many people are or are becoming aware that there isn't anything like a 1-to-1 correlation between being TG and having homosexual desires. However, it's also my (imperfect) understanding that this story, which usually involves some heavy revelations like "I just never felt at home in my own body" may not even represent a majority of the TG experience-spectrum. Whatever the case for each individual, for adults there's a mature understanding of how we perceive the natural order of sexuality and what is and isn't the common experience for the overwhelming percentage of people who fall within the norms. (Norms and normal being deployed in a pseudo-scientific context here and not in any way an evaluatory one; it's not normal to be seven feet tall or know calculus in grade school.) An adult has the capacity to weigh her/his emotions and come to clear realizations about how s/he feels about and towards her/his body and, particularly, primary and secondary sex characteristics. A child simply isn't, at least as far as I can conceive. Sure, kids know that boys have penises and girls have vaginas (or at least they know what they have - some overeager Freudian would surely have a field day with the story that when I learned c. age 2-3 that my mother didn't have a penis I told her, "Don't worry, mommy, Daddy and I will get you one") but until they're old enough to understand what those organs are primarily for (or even what they're like in maturity) that's not driving their impulses to "TG" behavior. Perhaps this is a failing of my particular imagination to encompass the whole of human experience, but I don't think six year old biological males feel alienated from their penises, at least not in the way an adult could be. Bradley and Jona[h] certainly don't seem to have expressed themselves in that fashion; they've been categorized as [potentially] TG on the bases of nonsexual behavioral impulses, and that categorization may hold accurate for the rest of their lives or it may not.
But it's being driven by things like preferred clothing and toys and there appears to be a lack of reflection on the causal chain involved. Perhaps these are kids who simply have disproportionate and improbable tastes for things that are culturally marked as feminine, and perhaps they're kids who at a very early age felt an attraction to the feminine in some elemental way and thereby intuited an attraction to what we currently code as such - which social coding has I believe been demonstrated to be extremely pervasive and more than powerful enough to overcome parental example and influence. And it's all bullshit, of course. One hundred years ago the color pink, bane of Bradley's self-control in his quest to bend over backwards for adult approval, was the appropriate color, a strong color, for baby boys, and was not considered a "girl's" color. Two hundred and fifty years ago the Founding Fathers wore wigs, stockings, and chunky high heels. Scotsmen traditionally wear special skirts. The cultural markers of what is masculine and what is feminine are subject to change and not nearly as essential as they appear to us at any given point in time. Armpit shaving is a primarily American invention that's about a hundred years old, and in that time - an instant in biological evolution but an eternity in cultural evolution - it's become a de rigueur practice for women, and those who choose to ignore it are mocked pretty incessantly. (And it's not like my intellectual awareness of all this somehow frees me from the shackles of our momentary convictions; I dated a girl who if memory serves didn't shave her armpits [I think she shaved her legs but I could be wrong - this was now about ten years ago] and didn't think much of it at the time but I'd be lying if I said I didn't strongly prefer "smooth feminine hairless" skin to, you know, the actual natural condition.) Maybe loving Barbie and wanting a dress* is a clue that these kids are going to grow up and live their lives as women, but the concern that's being driven by such ephemeral expressions is maddening. I really don't blame either set of parents; I think they come across as people who love their children but felt overmatched and turned to professional help and are sincerely doing what they've been led to believe is right for their child. I blame (naturally) the society that drives us to those concerns in the first place. Our natural human instinct to impose an externally designed order upon the universe of natural variation is ever and always a failure, but the failure of "man and woman" to capture the spectrum of genotypic and phenotypic expressions, let alone purely psychological persuasions, is much more upsetting than our inability to settle on a universally congenial definition of what is and isn't a "species".
And it's that ephemera that wound up really driving my disdain for Zucker in particular, who draws the idiotic but superficially wise analogy to the case of a black toddler who "wants to be white". Well, I presume Zucker imagines a child who, like Michael Jackson, is at unease with the brute physical fact of his skin color. I have only the NPR story to go on, but based on the information presented this isn't a boy who toddled into Zucker's office and said he hated his penis, he's a boy who wants to play with unicorns and roll around in pink chiffon. The analog is not to a kid who wants to change his skin color to be white, but his behavior to be white. This is inadvertantly and irrelevantly trodding into another, highly charged, ddeeply nuanced territory that I can't really do justice right now, but think of how elementally silly our concepts about "acting" white or black are - would Zucker really be concerned about a black kid who, despite the mockery of his peers, wanted to speak like, oh, Zucker? Who preferred, I dunno, badminton to basketball, or foie gras to fried chicken? I'm trading in gross stereotype for a reason here - to point up the apparent failures of Zucker's imagination to think outside the rigid strictures we've artifically imposed on our world, and how corrosive it is for the few (but still many) who fall outside those strictures.
I was reminded of the fatuous single-sex education** activist Dr. Leonard Sax, who wants to turn averages of gendered experience into prescriptions (and proscriptions) on how we ought to differently "educate" our boys and girls, by catering to the supposedly natural inclinations they feel so as to better engage them in the classroom. You know, boys will be encouraged to be boisterous and rough and tumble and special attention might be paid to tricking us into enjoying reading while girls will be allowed to sit primly and be called upon and write flowery stories that help them understand all that nasty abstract math. In other words, make school hell for someone like me. Other than having an aversion to scholastic teamwork and a level of confidence that's thought of, in grade school students, as being stereotypically masculine (but was actually driven by being, oh, smart, and, incidentally, confident) I conformed in most every respect to the average preferences and habits of the young female student - I was quiet and well behaved, didn't like disruptions, didn't like to get messy, loved reading and writing and found it congenial and attractive to express myself creatively and artistically vs. being focused on, what, monster trucks and baseball. This despite my being a well-adjusted, academically exceptional, well-liked, reasonably athletic kid who grew up into a somewhat maladjusted, intellectually strong, reasonably well-liked, pretty damn heterosexual man. The only more hellish academic experience I can imagine for myself than a Saxian boys' institution is the classic English boarding school, where academic seriousness could be balanced by retrograde gender notions, corporal punishment, and a social order that treated its younger members like Greek slaves, equally useful for shoe-polishing or pederasty.
* The description of young Jona weeping because the improvised T-shirt/belt outfit was, despite so much effort and modification, still not right, also had my eyes tearing up. The brief passage where the mother watches her child "mournfully finger" the outfit perfectly captures for me the kind of deep sadness (obviously magnified here) that a young child feels at the frustration of a beloved pursuit. We'd be better people as adults if we could maintain the kind of serious focus and wholehearted commitment with which children throw themselves into their fantasies and enthusiasms, but the price for that mindset is an emotional pain that I can't really access anymore, yet for which I feel weirdly nostalgic.
** Single-sex education isn't fatuous (though I'm generally opposed), just Dr. Sax's take.
This story (which was linked here) pretty much broke my heart for a few days, and as I explained to my father over dinner, kind of captures one of the big reasons I kind of don't like people: I kept turning out variations on the sentiment that "the narrowness of human imagination is beggared by the breadth of human experience." And for people living outside that collective imagination the rest of us make life hell.
I don't have a great deal to say about the meat of the story itself; I feel it largely speaks for itself, and I don't have any insights to offer on the experience of identifying as transgender. I can't pretend (and, frankly, I don't think either therapist should either) to have a certainty about what attitude one should take towards children with the apparent dispositions that these two kids display, and while I'm much more sympathetic to Ehrensaft's approach than Zucker's, I also doubt that any one way would work for every child (in current society, at least, which is the larger concept of this post). The stress and pain Zucker's methods are clearly causing Bradley had me tearing up when I read them, but on the other hand I'm fearful for the transition Jona may experience on reaching puberty, at which point it's most likely (barring an intentional hormonal intervention that I'm very uncomfortable with condoning) that predictable physical changes will make it much more difficult to smoothly integrate as a girl.
Assuming that Jona still wants to be Jona at that point, which wraps back around to where I was starting from. There's a pretty common story out there about what it means for a sexually mature adult to ID as transgender, and many people are or are becoming aware that there isn't anything like a 1-to-1 correlation between being TG and having homosexual desires. However, it's also my (imperfect) understanding that this story, which usually involves some heavy revelations like "I just never felt at home in my own body" may not even represent a majority of the TG experience-spectrum. Whatever the case for each individual, for adults there's a mature understanding of how we perceive the natural order of sexuality and what is and isn't the common experience for the overwhelming percentage of people who fall within the norms. (Norms and normal being deployed in a pseudo-scientific context here and not in any way an evaluatory one; it's not normal to be seven feet tall or know calculus in grade school.) An adult has the capacity to weigh her/his emotions and come to clear realizations about how s/he feels about and towards her/his body and, particularly, primary and secondary sex characteristics. A child simply isn't, at least as far as I can conceive. Sure, kids know that boys have penises and girls have vaginas (or at least they know what they have - some overeager Freudian would surely have a field day with the story that when I learned c. age 2-3 that my mother didn't have a penis I told her, "Don't worry, mommy, Daddy and I will get you one") but until they're old enough to understand what those organs are primarily for (or even what they're like in maturity) that's not driving their impulses to "TG" behavior. Perhaps this is a failing of my particular imagination to encompass the whole of human experience, but I don't think six year old biological males feel alienated from their penises, at least not in the way an adult could be. Bradley and Jona[h] certainly don't seem to have expressed themselves in that fashion; they've been categorized as [potentially] TG on the bases of nonsexual behavioral impulses, and that categorization may hold accurate for the rest of their lives or it may not.
But it's being driven by things like preferred clothing and toys and there appears to be a lack of reflection on the causal chain involved. Perhaps these are kids who simply have disproportionate and improbable tastes for things that are culturally marked as feminine, and perhaps they're kids who at a very early age felt an attraction to the feminine in some elemental way and thereby intuited an attraction to what we currently code as such - which social coding has I believe been demonstrated to be extremely pervasive and more than powerful enough to overcome parental example and influence. And it's all bullshit, of course. One hundred years ago the color pink, bane of Bradley's self-control in his quest to bend over backwards for adult approval, was the appropriate color, a strong color, for baby boys, and was not considered a "girl's" color. Two hundred and fifty years ago the Founding Fathers wore wigs, stockings, and chunky high heels. Scotsmen traditionally wear special skirts. The cultural markers of what is masculine and what is feminine are subject to change and not nearly as essential as they appear to us at any given point in time. Armpit shaving is a primarily American invention that's about a hundred years old, and in that time - an instant in biological evolution but an eternity in cultural evolution - it's become a de rigueur practice for women, and those who choose to ignore it are mocked pretty incessantly. (And it's not like my intellectual awareness of all this somehow frees me from the shackles of our momentary convictions; I dated a girl who if memory serves didn't shave her armpits [I think she shaved her legs but I could be wrong - this was now about ten years ago] and didn't think much of it at the time but I'd be lying if I said I didn't strongly prefer "smooth feminine hairless" skin to, you know, the actual natural condition.) Maybe loving Barbie and wanting a dress* is a clue that these kids are going to grow up and live their lives as women, but the concern that's being driven by such ephemeral expressions is maddening. I really don't blame either set of parents; I think they come across as people who love their children but felt overmatched and turned to professional help and are sincerely doing what they've been led to believe is right for their child. I blame (naturally) the society that drives us to those concerns in the first place. Our natural human instinct to impose an externally designed order upon the universe of natural variation is ever and always a failure, but the failure of "man and woman" to capture the spectrum of genotypic and phenotypic expressions, let alone purely psychological persuasions, is much more upsetting than our inability to settle on a universally congenial definition of what is and isn't a "species".
And it's that ephemera that wound up really driving my disdain for Zucker in particular, who draws the idiotic but superficially wise analogy to the case of a black toddler who "wants to be white". Well, I presume Zucker imagines a child who, like Michael Jackson, is at unease with the brute physical fact of his skin color. I have only the NPR story to go on, but based on the information presented this isn't a boy who toddled into Zucker's office and said he hated his penis, he's a boy who wants to play with unicorns and roll around in pink chiffon. The analog is not to a kid who wants to change his skin color to be white, but his behavior to be white. This is inadvertantly and irrelevantly trodding into another, highly charged, ddeeply nuanced territory that I can't really do justice right now, but think of how elementally silly our concepts about "acting" white or black are - would Zucker really be concerned about a black kid who, despite the mockery of his peers, wanted to speak like, oh, Zucker? Who preferred, I dunno, badminton to basketball, or foie gras to fried chicken? I'm trading in gross stereotype for a reason here - to point up the apparent failures of Zucker's imagination to think outside the rigid strictures we've artifically imposed on our world, and how corrosive it is for the few (but still many) who fall outside those strictures.
I was reminded of the fatuous single-sex education** activist Dr. Leonard Sax, who wants to turn averages of gendered experience into prescriptions (and proscriptions) on how we ought to differently "educate" our boys and girls, by catering to the supposedly natural inclinations they feel so as to better engage them in the classroom. You know, boys will be encouraged to be boisterous and rough and tumble and special attention might be paid to tricking us into enjoying reading while girls will be allowed to sit primly and be called upon and write flowery stories that help them understand all that nasty abstract math. In other words, make school hell for someone like me. Other than having an aversion to scholastic teamwork and a level of confidence that's thought of, in grade school students, as being stereotypically masculine (but was actually driven by being, oh, smart, and, incidentally, confident) I conformed in most every respect to the average preferences and habits of the young female student - I was quiet and well behaved, didn't like disruptions, didn't like to get messy, loved reading and writing and found it congenial and attractive to express myself creatively and artistically vs. being focused on, what, monster trucks and baseball. This despite my being a well-adjusted, academically exceptional, well-liked, reasonably athletic kid who grew up into a somewhat maladjusted, intellectually strong, reasonably well-liked, pretty damn heterosexual man. The only more hellish academic experience I can imagine for myself than a Saxian boys' institution is the classic English boarding school, where academic seriousness could be balanced by retrograde gender notions, corporal punishment, and a social order that treated its younger members like Greek slaves, equally useful for shoe-polishing or pederasty.
* The description of young Jona weeping because the improvised T-shirt/belt outfit was, despite so much effort and modification, still not right, also had my eyes tearing up. The brief passage where the mother watches her child "mournfully finger" the outfit perfectly captures for me the kind of deep sadness (obviously magnified here) that a young child feels at the frustration of a beloved pursuit. We'd be better people as adults if we could maintain the kind of serious focus and wholehearted commitment with which children throw themselves into their fantasies and enthusiasms, but the price for that mindset is an emotional pain that I can't really access anymore, yet for which I feel weirdly nostalgic.
** Single-sex education isn't fatuous (though I'm generally opposed), just Dr. Sax's take.
Labels: Culture
posted by medrawt at
01:04
<< Home