Some Middle-Ground Thoughts on Transgenderism

So since I’m a demon and everyone’s going hate me anyway, I thought I’d write an opinion piece on the trans movement! 😃 No, this has nothing to do with March 31st a few weeks back being Trans Visibility Day (which I admit is a lot shorter and more practical than a more appropriate name, like “Let’s-All-Point-at-the-Transpeople-for-Being-Different-and-Make-Them-Fear-Even-More-for-Their-Lives Day”). It also has nothing to do with the unbelievable stink around it happening to fall on Holy Easter Sunday this one year, though maybe if I hadn’t been so shy it would have been better to write this piece back then. 😬 It’s just something that’s been on my mind a lot and I want to talk about it! Specifically, I want to offer a middle-ground perspective on it, because with all the vitriolic polarization going on in Western politics these days, I think trying to find some kind of empathetic compromise is really badly needed!

Maybe I just don’t get it because I’m a demon, and we demons don’t really have this problem. We aren’t tied to any biological sex, and we appear as whatever makes sense at that moment. They found out about succubi in the Middle Ages for example because all those nuns in the convents were getting pregnant, and they wisely realized there could be absolutely no other plausible explanation for that whatsoever other than demons were going around impregnating them! Just like there is no other possible explanation for why inmates in women’s prisons keep ending up pregnant today! It’s obviously us. And when we do stuff like that, we do it in male form, because you kinda need to be male to do that. And we get our ammo to do that in the first place by gathering it from men during their vulnerable moments of sleep paralysis! And when we do that, we naturally do that in female form, because it’s what you need to be to do that! It’s just about using the right tool for the job, and nothing more. It has nothing to do with who we are as individuals or anything we need to do to express ourselves. We’re the same person either way! Lots of my demon friends forget the rest of the time whether they are in male or female form as they walk around and chat, because nobody really notices or worries about it. Because why would it ever make sense to?

You mortals though, you haven’t figured out how to change your apparent sex until more recently. Your brains aren’t really built to handle it, and it seems to be getting you all confused. You seem to think when you change from male to female or female to male, that something spiritually significant and important has just happened to you. Somehow, it means you need a new name, because your names somehow have to be gender specific in the first place. Somehow, it means you need to dress and cut your hair differently, like the way you did that before is bad now, or the way you do that now was bad before. Somehow, it means you need to be viewed and judged completely differently, and have a completely different set of things assumed about your emotional needs, mental abilities, and character just because your face has become softer or more robust. You don’t even seem to really understand you are still the same person at all, and people say things like how they’ve lost a daughter and gained a son, and you don’t correct them and say how you are still who they’ve always known and loved by any name!

And then when you undergo this change, all these really conservative, religious people start getting really grossed out for some reason, like you’ve done something bad that makes you into something repulsive. I realize you humans tend not to like us demons very much. 😐 But angels can appear as different sexes too you know! It’s not gross when they do it. It’s not perverted when they do it. So why is it so bad when humans do it? Because it’s not natural? Cute little toy doggies aren’t natural either and humans don’t call that perverted and gross, even when they worry about what that does to their health and lifespan. Living past age 40 is also pretty unnatural for humans to do, because modern medicine is unnatural. Cutting off a boy’s foreskin is super unnatural and if I have this right God even asked a bunch of people to go and do that! But is there something specifically evil and wrong about trying to change your biological sex around? Being a demon, I haven’t really read the Bible… maybe someone could point me to the passage where it says not to try doing that? I mean, I know there’s Genesis 1:28 where it talks about subduing nature, but that’s just about fixing what’s wrong with it to make everything better and happier to the will of a personification of love. That clearly isn’t related to helping transpeople. Not sure why I mentioned that really…

But I digress. Even if I can’t understand the reasons why, it seems like this whole “gender” thing you guys came up with is really important to you, and I should be sensitive to that. I mean, if you just see some people whining about something and getting all mad, maybe they aren’t that serious and are just wanting attention, but when you see kids and adults alike committing suicide at alarming rates over something, I think it’s safe to say that’s different. I think it’s safe to say that only an exceptionally stupid and mean and insensitive excuse for a person who is not worth listening to under any circumstances would refuse to take that kind of pain seriously. So let’s take it seriously, and let’s recognize that this pain is very real, whether we can understand it or not, whether the people “should” be feeling it or not. Because if pain, being the subjective thing that it is, is really being felt by somebody, then it’s by definition as objectively real as pain can ever be.

So what do we do about that very real pain? How do we make it go away?

On one side, you have the conservatives who are really disgusted and grossed out by trans people, but to charm the masses into doing what they want, they pretend to feel sorry for them instead. The same side that is overwhelmingly more often caught molesting children pulls out the same tired “think of the children” card to talk about how perverts are corrupting and exploiting kids by doing something as evil as caring about their feelings and taking desperate measures – misguided or not – to stop them from killing themselves. Ignoring countries that have had co-ed bathrooms for decades without any problems at all, and ignoring the fact that very roughly 1.7% of the human population has been naturally born physically somewhere in-between male and female for at least hundreds of thousands of years, they talk about how these altered people who can’t cleanly fit into one of two biological sex categories are a new, untested threat to people’s safety if they are allowed somewhere to go pee that isn’t a concrete wall in an alleyway. They find detransitioners – who may or may not be commonplace – and prop them up on stage, walking the tightrope balancing act between shocking away your reasoning skills with their supposedly ghoulish appearance and trying to make you care about them as human beings. They say we shouldn’t transition people until adulthood because transitioning somebody is permanent. They seem to forget that not transitioning until after adulthood is also permanent, and they don’t seem to notice this slip in logic even as they continue to ridicule the very predictable and unsurprising looks of transwomen who didn’t have the chance to transition until adulthood.

And in the other corner, you have the liberal side, who shows their loving acceptance and tolerance of all by preaching that some people just aren’t okay the way they were born, and need surgery on their genitals to be acceptable. They lump people struggling to learn to accept the way their bodies truly are in the same category as closeted homosexuals who are trying to pretend their brains work differently from what they truly do. They tell them they will never be happy unless they can do this thing to themselves, and seem to imply in the process all those teenagers hanging from the ceiling whose parents or government wouldn’t let them transition made the right call on what to do about it. Because hey, it’s your only chance at ever being happy, right? Don’t even try to be happy unless you can do this! Now there’s some of that brandname liberal body positivity in action! And it’s not just about looks, but what lab-made chemicals a corporation can charge the government to give you. Because even though an adolescent biological male naturally has higher estrogen levels than a postmenopausal biological female, estrogen is clearly key to validating a female identity, and you clearly need to take it to live!

So if we decide we don’t want to blindly follow either perspective as an expression of tribal allegiance, and want to instead actually think about the problem and the people suffering from it, is there another way forward to deal with this? Mayyyybe. It has to do with all that unnatural sciency stuff everyone is so scared of – medicine. Maybe instead of a big government nanny state, 100% fueled by impulsive, evidence-free, moral panic outrage, deciding what someone should be doing or not doing irreversibly to their genitals, it should be up to experienced, licensed psychiatrists to figure that out. Maybe instead of arresting them for deciding someone needs a transition, or arresting them for deciding someone doesn’t need a transition, people should actually let them do their jobs, and maybe both sides of the debate should defer to their judgement about what their patients need. And if people think they are making a mistake because something is broken about human scientific knowledge, maybe they should work to fix that by gathering more scientific knowledge and building more accurate empirical studies and data for the psychiatrists to work with, rather than creating a chilling effect that makes conducting those kinds of studies in good faith almost impossible.

And maybe once you have a solution for the existing people who have already suffered so bad, you can work on figuring out what made them suffer in the first place. Because no one seems to be really asking that question. Conservatives seem certain it has to do with the adult biological males all being perverts and wanting to cum harder, and the adult biological females and children just being naïve and stupid and impressionable enough to be manipulated into developing feelings by liberals. Liberals seem certain it has to do with the way they were born, even though there’s no evidence of that at all. Could there be anything else causing this maybe? Maybe I can go ahead and speculate without evidence, because that’s still better than making assumptions without evidence, right? So let’s do some speculating!

Maybe the reason why all these people keep killing themselves isn’t because their bodies are wrong, or because their brains are wrong. Maybe it’s because the human reaction to these body/brain combinations is wrong. Maybe if people weren’t caring so much about how these teenagers look, the teenagers wouldn’t learn to care so much either. Maybe if people weren’t limiting and restricting young humans’ personal growth based on the bodies they were born with, these young humans wouldn’t be seeing those same bodies as a miserable prison keeping them from becoming themselves. Maybe it’s a problem with society that needs fixing – the same problem that makes them look at a badly-passing transwoman with disgust – the same problem that makes them see a huge football player with tree trunk arms in a cute lolita dress and laugh at what seems to them like an absurdity. Maybe it looks like an absurdity to them because they were taught that it is, and maybe that’s why no child too young to have learned that yet will ever laugh at it or notice that anything is wrong. Because maybe there isn’t anything wrong. Maybe, just maybe, it’s ironically the very people who are so repulsed, disgusted, and horrified at the existence of transpeople who can be blamed for “grooming” children into developing gender dysphoria in the first place, through the highly gendered, nightmare dystopian world they’ve built for their victims’ young, naïve, impressionable, vulnerable brains to experience and irreversibly internalize forever.

Just some observations from a silly purple demon on the Internet. Think what you will! 💜