The Myth of True Trans

When there are only feelings and no facts, what do you do?

A common refrain to detransitioners from some people is that they were never “truly trans.”

Some people claim that only homosexual transsexuals are “truly trans,” while “trenders” and AGPs are “fake trans.”

Some say that only if you have clinically diagnosable gender dysphoria are you “truly trans” (usually called some flavor of “transmedicalism,” which primarily sees transness as a medical condition.)

Some people say that “nonbinary” trans people are fake and that bottom surgery is required for being a “true transsexual.”

The pure subjectivists will say someone is “truly trans” if they have a gender that’s different than their “assigned gender,” and that one can only know this on the basis of subjective self-report, which makes someone’s “true trans” status a matter of subjectivity where everyone is the best expert on their own true gender.

The concept of “true trans” might be defined as the idea that there are objective criteria that can clearly define whether someone is “truly trans,” or perhaps the idea that “trans” is a clearly defined natural kind with an intrinsic essence.

Why does this matter? If there is no such thing as “true trans” then therefore there is also no such thing as a “true trans kid,” which opens up new possibilities for how to interpret the various clusters of symptoms lumped under terms like “gender incongruence,” a term that both says nothing meaningful but is also loaded with theoretical baggage.

The argument is that “gender incongruence” is just a pattern of behavior, feelings, symptoms, etc., whereas saying someone is “truly trans” doesn’t really mean anything unless we have clear criteria that define what it means to be “trans,” and the claim is that there’s no non-arbitrary criteria that clearly defines who is truly trans vs merely gender nonconforming, etc.

What is “trans”? Is it a medical condition? Many people think it is a medical condition defined by psychological distress concerning your sexed body/relationship with gender. But merely noting there is genuine psychological distress associated with this phenomenon doesn’t thereby establish the validity of “true trans” because it is also known that similar feelings of distress can also be caused by struggling with feelings of homosexuality and associated gender nonconformity.

So, we have to distinguish between feelings of gender incongruence and “trans” as an explanation for where those feelings come from, which differs depending on your theory of what it means to be “trans.” For example, an old cliche is that a trans woman is a female who was born in the “wrong (male) body.” Sometimes this is explained in terms of a “female brain” mismatched to a male body where “female brain” is sometimes explained as a brain that has a female “subconscious sex” or “gender identity,” a brain that believes it “ought to be female.”

The gender identity theory says that the feelings of gender incongruence are caused by the “brain-body mismatch” of having the “wrong” gender identity combination with the body e.g. having the gender identity of “woman” while having the body of a male. The distress of this mismatch is said to be a medical condition and the “treatment” is to socially and medically “transition.”

The gender identity theory says these “gender identities” are neurologically wired in some deep, innate way and that we are born with our gender identity matching our body (“cisgender”) or our gender identity not matching (“transgender”.)

However, in the case of males, there is an alternative explanation as to the ultimate cause of feelings of gender incongruence. According to the sexologist Ray Blanchard, a better explanation must account for the well-established differences in how male gender dysphorics clinically present.

The first presentation of trans identified males is exclusively attracted to men, highly effeminate from a young age, often made fun of as “sissy boys,” and often struggles with feelings of homosexuality and transitioning is often seen as a way of dealing with internalized homophobia and discrimination, where being socially perceived as a straight woman interested in men is thought to be socially advantageous compared to living as an effeminate gay man. Blachard called these the homosexual transsexuals or HSTS.

The second presentation of trans identified males is bisexual or exclusively attracted to women, often not overtly effeminate from a young age, often with stereotypical masculine interests, often “realizes” they are trans at a much later age, has a history of crossdressing or fantasies about being a woman causing arousal, often initially worries their trans identity is “just a fetish,” has a history of being perceived by everyone as just being a regular, masculine, heterosexual male. This is the autogynephilic or AGP type. Phil Illy calls them autoheterosexual because it is as if their heterosexuality becomes partially or fully “inverted” upon themselves, such that they are attracted to women but they also want to be what they are attracted to.

Blanchard noticed that whether a trans woman was homosexual vs bisexual/heterosexual was the key predictive factor in understanding these two distinct “types” of transsexual women: HSTS vs AGP.

Trans activists have tried to dismiss these findings as “transphobic pseudoscience” but never seem to dispute the differences in the two presentations or types. They just disagree about what causes the two distinct presentations.

But I raise the point of Blanchard’s typology to suggest that it’s at least an open question whether the feelings of gender incongruence in males are truly a “medical disease” caused by an inborn identity-based mismatch in the brain or merely a side-product of one’s sexual orientation, either homosexual or non-homosexual (AGP).

In the female case it gets even more complicated because there are likely more “types” than just classic homosexual type (well-established) or autosexual type (more controversial), there are also types with more sociogenic causes such as the “rapid onset” type which seems to be correlated with autism and other mental health comorbidities, onset in adolescence instead of childhood, leans more towards “nonbinary” identities, and social learning environments saturated with transgender narratives (e.g. Tik Tok, peer groups, etc.)

So, who is “true trans” and who is not? Can we build a measuring device that can detect “true trans” status? To calibrate such a device, we’d have to know ahead of time what “proxy” we are using to infer the presence of “true trans” or not so that we can tell whether our machine is measuring accurately or not.

The most obvious example of such a proxy is self-id. Aka, if someone says they are trans, then they are trans. This is prone to obvious false positives, as someone not “truly” trans could easy just utter the words “I am trans” and it’d trigger the device to measure “yes.”

We need something more concrete, like a neural correlate of some kind. Suppose we found a candidate on the basis of correlating to professed self-report. And then suppose someone did not have the neural correlate but still insisted they were trans. Would we say the device must have got it right? Or does the self-report always trump the measuring device? Trans activists will say the report must be “sincere,” but how is sincerity defined? Can that be measured?

To insist the device is correct would make sense only if we defined transness as whatever neural correlate the device is measuring for. But clearly if self-report conflicts with the neural correlate, the trans orthodoxy is that you can’t be wrong about your own self-report and that nobody “truly trans” would ever have any selfish motivations for such identification (despite the obvious possibility of unconscious motivations and social incentives the trans identity can bring, particularly for those young, white “cis hets” who feel guilty for being oppressors and want the social status in progressive circles associated with being a marginalized person who can now “take up space.”)

But remember, this gender identity theory is supposed to be an explanation for a mental feeling of incongruence, and feelings are by definition subjective mental states not directly measurable. So how would we know for sure that the neural correlate is the correct proxy to measure what is defined as immeasurable?

This is where the concept of “true trans” breaks down for the gender identity theory. Because by their nature “gender identities” cannot actually by directly empirically measured. They must be inferred from other physical entities. But we don’t have a theory that says how a physical entity can cause a discrete “feeling” or “identity.” We are just relying on people’s self-report. If someone’s identity is “agender” or “demigirl” or “nonbinary” we have no mechanistic theory that would predict that on the basis of any neural correlate.

But compared to an amorphous concept of “identity,” sexual orientation can be measured and operationalized much more easily in standardized scales measuring androphilia and gynephilia. This is what Blanchard did in his original research. Sexual orientation is a much more solid construct to build a science of “gender incongruence” upon than anything gender identity theory can offer. For this reason, the idea that “gender identity theory is mainstream science” while Blanchardian sexology is “pseudoscience” is patently absurd.

The whole question of “true trans” can now be turned on its head. The question is not “how can we detect if someone is truly trans or not.” Rather, transness becomes the symptom being measured.

Whereas in gender identity theory the “identities” are what explain everything else, in the sexological approach the “identities” are explained as symptoms of sexual orientation (plus, obviously, interacting with other factors.)

But the key point is the feelings and the identities do not play an explanatory role but are the symptoms or phenomena in need of explaining. Because the interesting question isn’t whether someone truly contains an intrinsic “trans” essence that explains the feelings of incongruence.

The better question is what are the variables associated with why different types of people say they have these inner “identities.” Transness is better thought of as the phenomenon being explained rather than “gender identities” themselves being the explanatory entities that do any explanatory work themselves.

And no better theory has been proposed that can account for the two distinct profiles of male gender incongruence other than one that puts sexuality at the heart of the phenomenon, whether homosexuality or (inverted) heterosexuality.

In other words, “trans” is not an essential, intrinsic quality one is innately born with, but rather, a symptom in need of explanation where the symptom is reporting one has a mismatched gender identity, a symptom explainable by other explanations besides that there literally is such a thing as a mismatched gender identity that shows your body to be “wrong” in some way, which is the theoretical postulate of gender identity theory.

But we can accept that is the symptom to be explained without agreeing with gender identity theory that what explains the symptom is the purported existence of these mismatched identities.