“Are traps gay?” and the organs without a body – understanding subjectivity and identification

       What is subjectivity? What does it mean to be a conscious human being experiencing life? What is consciousness and is the mind the same as the brain or the body? Who are you, really? What makes you, “you”? Do we have a “soul”, separate from our body? If psychology, theology and philosophy want to answer these questions, I think we must also ask ourselves some questions about how sexual attraction works. Despite being seemingly unrelated topics, I’ve realized that the question of whether “a man attracted to a pre-operation trans women” is gay or not (the infamous “Are traps gay?” question) has profound philosophical and psychoanalytic implications about the nature of subjectivity and identification: what makes us human and what makes me “me” and different from others? But first, we must define some terms:

 

PART 1: Partial vs. full identification

 

      FULL identification is the process of ascribing an equivalence between the self’s sense of being and existence (the “sense of self”) and an external object/concept/phenomena/person. Full identification occurs whenever we look at something and we say “this is me!”. Full identification, in the English language, is inherently related to the verb “to be”. For example, I can point towards my Facebook profile, with my name and my profile picture, and tell another person: “this is me!”, despite the fact that it is technically a representation of me (and hence, an external object) and not me per se.

      PARTIAL identification is the process of ascribing an external object/concept/phenomena/person as a subset of the self’s sense of being and existence. Partial identification occurs whenever we look at something and we say “this is mine!” or “this is part of me!”. For example, we partially identify with each of our organs: I look at my leg and I say “this is part of my body” or “I have a leg”.

      POSSESSION is a subset of the process of partial identification (possession is a specific type of partial identification). Possession occurs whenever we look at something and we say “this is mine!”. Possession, in the English language, is inherently related to the verb “to have”. For example, a car may be part of my abstract sense of “propriety”, so I can say that I ‘possess’ it (“the car is mine”).

      Possession is only a proper subset of partial identification; in layman terms this means that possession is always partial identification but partial identification is not always possession (i.e.: you can have a specific type of partial identification that is not possession). For example, identification with a group is one type of partial identification that is not possession (and obviously not full identification either). We often partially identify with certain groups we are part of: race, ethnicity, age group, nationality, sex/gender, economic class, people who share the same music interests or hobbies, etc. For example, a person can partially identify with the group “Americans”. We know it is partial and not full identification because they say “I am an American” and not “I am Americans” or “I am America”. Hence, partial identification is almost always represented by a subset relation in speech: either I am part of “Americans”, or “America”/”American-ness” is part of my identity, you can view it in either way, but the “part of” signifier is almost always implied.

      There are certain few exceptions in which identification with a group can look like full identification instead of partial identification. For example, Joe Biden in the 2020 US presidential elections said “I am the democratic party”. This form of identification with a group is at the border between full identification and partial identification, I’d more precisely say it is a literal partial identification paired with a metaphorical full identification, so at the metaphorical level we may represent it as a full identification but per se it is still more of a form of partial identification. In other words, he didn’t literally mean that he is the democratic party (hence, what he did is still partial identification, using full identification as a metaphor), what he actually meant was:

1.           He speaks in the name of the democratic party

2.           He represents the “archetypal democrat of 2020” – his views are the summary of what the typical democrat stands for, and thus Joe Biden himself stands in as a symbol for “democrat” as a whole

      We see the interesting play that in this specific case of identification with a group (and thus, a specific case of partial identification), Joe Biden was not “possessing” the democratic party, but rather more so being possessed by the democratic party. By this I am not referring to any sort of spiritual or paranormal phenomena like you’d imagine in demonic possession, but in that he is being used as a tool or puppet by the democratic party (“I represent the democratic party, the democratic party speaks as if through my body, and therefore all sense of agency and subjectivity is lost, I am not an individual with separate views from the democratic party, I am simply used as the object of the party’s desire”). So we see how in certain cases, partial identification doesn’t need to be possession, but quite actually the opposite of possession: being possessed by a superior power.

 

PART 2: The mirror stage and the organs without a body

 

      Lacan postulated that what I call “full identification” is developed between 6 and 18 months old, when the child first recognizes his reflection in a mirror (or any kind of reflective surface). He called this stage of development the mirror stage. However, we are not interested in the scientific validity of whether he got the ages right or not, for all we care about, it could be between 1 and 2 years or between 3 and 6 months when the child first recognizes themselves in a mirror, we do not care about that now. What we care is why the idea of recognizing your reflection “makes sense” to be related to the idea of full identification.

      For Lacan, the body is an illusion, it is an abstract concept that we have created only in able to give us a stable sense of self. The body is not a “thing”, but a lack. On one hand, it is like an imaginary border separating our organs from “everything else”, like our surrounding reality. On the other hand, it is what we may understand as the product of the idea that “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”. We never say “I am a liver”, “I am a heart” or “I am a limb”, but we often ascribe partial identification to all of our organs: I have a heart, I have a liver, I have a limb, but I am more than that. However, where is the speaking subject located in space exactly, “where” is consciousness, “where” is the mind, “where” is the soul?

      We often ascribe partial identification between the body and its organs as well: we do not say the body is a heart, we say the heart is part of the body or, more importantly, the body has a heart. It is this latter statement that is of utmost importance to Lacanian psychoanalysis, because this is what it would suggest that would occur after the mirror stage.

      Successfully passing through the mirror stage, according to Lacan, would imply successfully managing to believe in the illusion of bodily integrity. Before the mirror stage, the child doesn’t feel like they have a body or that they are a body and that this body itself possesses multiple organs. No, without the mirror stage, we feel like a bunch of organs without a body: “I am a heart and a liver and a skeleton and some limbs put together”. Passing through the mirror stage gives us the illusion that we are more than the sum of our parts, that the body “has” a heart, the body “has” two lungs, but after you mention all of the parts that the body “has”, you end up realizing that what is left is nothing, it is nothingness itself that is the body for Lacan: an abstract sense of unity that is more of an imaginary border supposed to “hold” all these organs in place.

      Using our terminology, not passing through the mirror stage implies treating partial identification as full identification: one feels partial identification as if it is full identification. It is the same thing that often happens in the attempt at full identification with a group: one could say “I am American”, an example of partial identification, and yet still internally confuse it for full identification whenever they are not capable of mentally separating themselves from such a concept. What ends up happening as a result is that any attack on Americans or America itself is treated as a personal attack (“If you have a problem with America then you have a problem with me!”) – this is responsible for what we often commonly call “taking things personally”.

      It should now make “common sense” why recognizing yourself in a mirror should be a prerequisite for being capable of full identification: it is the time where we first notice something external (“Other”) as “I” (self) simultaneously: I am my reflection in the mirror and I am not my reflection in the mirror at the same time. The reflection in the mirror represents the illusion of bodily integrity par excellence, it mimics our reactions so well that it is as if it were us. Our image in the mirror is „perfect” and „whole”: our reflection in the mirror is not made up of multiple organs, it is made up of a single piece of glass and its interactions with its light source, so we can notice how our entire sense of self can be represented by „a single object”; which stands in clear contrast with our lived experience as „not-whole”, our sense of self made up of multiple, separate objects interacting together (organs, bones, etc.).

      It should also make „common sense” why a failure of the mirror stage is one of the possible preconditions for psychosis/schizophrenia. Psychotics perceive their thoughts as external observers instead of as the source/initiator of their thoughts. In the cases of a psychotic break, a person may hallucinate voices: they will not imagine a voice, but will literally hear voices in the same way as we’d hear a recording if we were wearing earplugs. However, these voices are not part of reality, they’re part of the psychotic person’s mind.

      Non-psychotics, on the other hand, are capable of experiencing the concept of „having voices in your head” metaphorically, where we actually imagine a voice narrating our thoughts while not literally hearing them, and still partially identifying with our thoughts. Your „inner voice” that you imagine is paradoxically you and not you: you are the source of your inner voice, and yet you can also detach from it and observe it as if from an external perspective. This is analogous to the process of viewing yourself in a mirror, since we see our reflection as „me”, and we are also the source of it, and yet we can also observe it as if from the perspective of another person, as if it wasn’t us. And when we imagine an inner voice, say, a critical one („you’re not good enough, nobody loves you”), we observe it as we would observe ourselves in a mirror: it’s mine, but I can also view it as if it wasn’t mine. Schizophrenics do not get this experience, they get the experience of actually hearing their voices as fully external, without having the capability of paradoxically experiencing their thoughts as both „mine” and „not mine”.

      Without a surprise, psychotics experience a lack of a sense of bodily integrity as supported by empirical evidence (Klaver M, Dijkerman HC. Bodily Experience in Schizophrenia: Factors Underlying a Disturbed Sense of Body Ownership. Front Hum Neurosci. 2016 Jun 17;10:305. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2016.00305. PMID: 27378895; PMCID: PMC4911393.).

 

PART 3: The body and the transgender experience – common attitudes

 

      There are more politically-charged attitudes that people have towards transgender people and how we should define men and women. What may come as a surprise is that both conservatives and progressives on this issue often have something in common: they view the body as separate from its „soul”, and they both believe that you can have a masculine/feminine „essence” (ex: „soul”) trapped in a female/male body. Despite only progressives admitting this, conservatives show a strong support for the belief of the incongruence between soul and body too, only in an opposite way, trying to mask this with biological essentialism.

      The progressive viewpoints on this issue postulate that „man” and „woman” are somewhat like „souls”, they are not rooted in biology, but are complex „senses of self”, and we have a term for the sense of self in psychoanalysis: identity. Hence, man and woman become identities: they are not biological, but are an abstract sense of being and experience that are hard to pin down and properly define. In progressive ideology, you just „feel” like a man or a woman (or perhaps neither or both!). Hence, under this paradigm, most people’s genders („souls”) match their bodies, but there are a few exceptions in about 1% of the population or less, where you can have „a man trapped in a female body” or „a woman trapped in a male body”. According to progressive ideology, a person with a 100% male body, even if they haven’t undergone any surgical procedures or hormonal treatments, may still be a woman simply due to the fact that their „immaterial abstract essence” is feminine, which they simply feel, and they call them transgender women (and vice-versa for trans men).

      Conservative paradigms on this issue are more varied. But as a convention, I will refer to „the conservative view” in this article not as the view of all or even most conservatives, but simply the one that I see most commonly across conservatives on this issue. This conservative paradigm may sometimes claim to root the words „man” and „woman” in biology but ultimately still believes in a masculine and feminine „essence” that can not be modified. In other words, they still low-key believe in man and woman souls. This is evidenced by the fact that if a person is born in a male body, and they undergo surgeries and hormonal treatments to match their body to their gender identity, they are perceived not as women, despite their body now being more closely aligned with female than with male biology, but „a male who changed their body to look like a woman”. So, a MtF (male-to-famale) trans person who underwent medical procedures to have a feminine body is now secretly viewed as „a man trapped in a (mostly) female body” by conservatives. Wonderful!

      Hence, this conservative ideology becomes like a conquest of displacing the biological essence of sexual identity to something that is currently immutable with our technology, in order to hide the fact that they do not believe in such a biological essence in the first place. A person who was born in a male body can get hormones and end up having a face that looks like a woman and grow breasts? Then the definition of a woman is someone with a vagina. Does technology evolve such that you can now surgically create a vagina? Then the definition of a woman is someone with a uterus. Maybe in a few dozens of years technology will evolve such that we can now implant a uterus in the body of MtF people, and they will change the definition to „person with XX chromosomes” (as is often seen even now). If in the even more distant future we manage, hypothetically speaking, to find a way to change your chromosomes, then they will change the definition again to something immutable, and so on. This is why I say that a huge proportion of conservatives do not actually believe in biological essentialism, but use biology to hide the fact that they also believe in „male and female souls” trapped in female or male bodies. But they always place the soul as congruent with the body at birth. Therefore, where a progressive will state that a MtF is „a woman in a man’s body” at birth and „a woman in a woman’s body” after medical transition, the conservative will silently believe that a MtF is „a man in a man’s body” at birth and „a man’s in a woman’s body” after transition. But what they will say out loud is that they’re „a man who has alerted their body to look like a woman but is still a man” which is virtually the same thing as saying „a male soul in a female body”.

      What both positions share in common is that if a body acts like a woman, looks like a woman, feels like a woman, then it may still not be a woman – both positions are marked by a profound skepticism in physical reality and a faith, not in biological essentialism, but in a sort of pseudo-spiritual essentialism: „man and woman” are abstract essences that are more than the sum of their parts. This is inherently related to Lacan’s mirror stage: both positions can be viewed as proponents of full identification over partial identification with your organs. We can see how gender identity under both ideologies develops as an imaginary illusion of an abstract sense of self separate from your organs – hence gender itself being a product of the mirror stage and its sense of bodily integrity that it produces. Both conservatives and progressives (in the way I’ve described them) on a deeper level believe in „a body without organs”, that a man and a woman are not the sum of their body parts, but a metaphysical essence. It is just that the former displaces this view upon biological essentialism which they only half-assedly believe in.

      There is a third way you could position yourself to the transgender debate. This position can be summed up as a belief in partial identification and an actually honest faith in biology and physical reality, unlike the conservative view. Under this view, the whole (of the human experience) is not more than the sum of its (body) parts: if it looks like a man/woman, talks like a man/woman, feels like a man/woman, acts like a man/woman, then it is a man/woman. Let us call this view the „nominalist” viewpoint of the transgender debate, since it is quite compatible with the philosophical concept of nominalism. The nominalist viewpoint removes all illusions of bodily integrity and „souls”: you are just a bunch of organs, and your ability to change your sex depends on technology/science.

      Hence, the nominalist viewpoint is at a centerpoint between the way I defined the progressive and the conservative stance, so with a little exaggeration, we may also call it a „centrist” stance: it could state that, for example, a MtF person is a man at birth, and becomes a woman only after they medically transition. This is contrasted with the progressive view that „they were always and will always be women” and the conservative view that „they were always and will always be men”. Hence, this nominalist perspective is the only one that allows you to change your status as man/woman throughout life. How far in their medical transition they need to be is a detail: we could define ‚subtypes’ of this nominalist view depending on how they define man and woman. For example, one nominalist could define woman as „person with estrogen levels over X amount and testosterone levels under X amount” and would be more permissive in allowing you to change your sex only through hormone-replacement therapy. Another nominalist viewpoint could be a bit more strict and define them in terms of their genitals, thus requiring sex-reassignment surgeries (vaginoplasty, phalloplasty, metoidioplasty) for the change of sexual identity.

 

PART 4: How do we define sexual orientation?

 

      Your sexual orientation is who you want to go to bed with while your gender identity is who you want to go to bed as. Almost all definitions of various sexual orientations (heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual, pansexual, etc.) in some way rely on a priori definitions of either sex or gender, so it was impossible to talk about them without first discussing the various ways in which we view the gender and its relation to our body/body parts, as done above. It is uncontroversial that „a homosexual man is a man that is sexually attracted only to other men”, for example. Yet we still find controversies around what is „gay” and what isn’t „gay”, because while we technically agree on our definition of homosexuality, we don’t agree on our definition of „man”, and our definition of homosexuality relies on our definition of „man”. So in practice, we don’t actually agree on what is gay and what isn’t.

      One popular phrase (and even meme) that became (in)famous on the internet culture is: „are traps gay?” – in other words, if you are a man who is attracted to a person that appears like a woman, but has a penis (for example: a MtF trans person who underwent hormone therapy but not vaginoplasty), does that make you gay, or at least bisexual, or can you still be straight (heterosexual)?

      The different ways in which we could view gender, as outlined in the previous section, could give us some insight into their natural implications for how we view sexual orientation. However, it appears very quickly to me that both the progressive and the conservative viewpoints of viewing gender as „essences” and not as „a bunch of organs” lead us to horrendously absurd conclusions about sexual orientation.

      Under the progressive viewpoint, if a person was born in a male body, did not undergo absolutely any hormone treatment or surgery, still has a 100% male biology, a penis, no breasts, facial hair, etc; but identifies as a woman, then they are a woman. A natural logical conclusion of this assumption is that I can be a man and be attracted to this person and still be straight, which is absurd. More so, if I am attracted to someone whose body is 100% biologically female (high estrogen, breasts, vagina, the fat is distributed on the body such as to make them look like women), but they later confess to me that they actually identify as male, I was gay/bi all along, which is absurd.

      This progressive trans ideology is also what created the category of “pansexual” (person attracted to all genders) as somehow different from the category of “bisexual” (person attracted to at least two genders) – which even they know it serves no practical purpose.

      Under the purely conservative viewpoint, this is again absurd for the same reasons: if I am a man and I am attracted to someone who was born in a female body and has transitioned into a male body with an artificially constructed penis, no breasts, facial hair, etc. then I am actually attracted to „a woman who looks like a man”, so I am attracted to a woman, so I am again not necessarily gay. Again, this is absurd. Both of these ideologies imply that sexual orientation is primarily caused by the other person’s “soul”, abstract essences or feelings of self-perception, and not by their body, which is mostly false in real-life experience: human sexual orientation clusters around our perception of the other person’s body more than around our perception of the other’s self-perception (progressive) or what their body was like in the past (conservative).

      As a quick note, I know that this is not what most progressives and conservatives believe in practice about sexual orientation, but this is the result of their own cognitive dissonance – I am simply explaining what the natural logical implications of their views on gender are. If they don’t believe that we cluster around our perception of the other’s self-perception/the other’s past-body (their “soul”), then they are logically inconsistent in their beliefs.

      Hence, I initially took this as evidence that the nominalist viewpoint of gender proves more practically useful if we transpose it to sexual orientation, and thus more logically consistent if we want to have a holistic view of gender and sexuality in general. From this conclusion, the verdict is clear: if you are attracted to “traps”, then you can’t be either straight nor gay, but bisexual, since you are attracted to a person with both breasts/feminine face/etc. (female biology) and a penis (male biology). In order for you to enjoy both of them, you need to be attracted to both the female and the male biology simultaneously, therefore “traps are bi”, q.e.d.

 

PART 5: The strap-on argument

 

      But is this really it, should we really just confine to our view that our body is just a bunch of organs put together, and our status as man or woman is simply the sum of our body parts? Maybe being attracted to pre-op trans women isn’t bi, maybe there is a counter-argument I can give to my former conclusion. There is more to this.

      We see numerous cases of people with different sexual attractions depending not on the other’s self-perception, but on the other’s self-possession. This is where our prior definitions of possession and partial identification come in handy. In the general population, we see people who are sexually attracted to cis/biological women with strap-ons that look like realistic penises, but not to trans women with penises, and vice-versa. Hence, we are presented with two possible sexual partners that look almost identical, and yet we see people who are strongly attracted to one and strongly repulsed by the other. What is going on? This might come in support of the view that sexual attraction and sexual orientation is perhaps more than attraction to body parts, and that abstract concepts such as “the Other’s sense of self” may partially play a role in sexual attraction, that the nominalist view is not enough? We are not only sexually attracted to how the Other looks, but more generally to how the Other is?

      We can differentiate between “cis woman with realistic strap-on” and “trans women with penis” less so aesthetically, and more so in their relation with the “extra organ”. For the cis woman with a realistic strap-on, the penis is not part of her body. Partial identification with the instrument is weak or non-existent in the view of the person who is(n’t) sexually attracted to her: we could say, to a limited extent, that the woman may hold possession over the instrument (“I own the strap-on”), but since sexual attraction is unchanged depending on who bought and legally owns the strap-on, this is irrelevant. Hence we can say, with a little exaggeration, that the woman with a strap-on doesn’t even possess the phallus in the viewpoint of the sexually (un)attracted self: the phallus is not hers, but is attached to her. This could prove as a sort of defense mechanism or rationalization/justification of the sexual attraction towards her, either consciously or unconsciously (“I am not gay as I am attracted to her, not the strap-on, and the strap-on is not part of her”). Here, the strap-on is viewed more so as we could view clothing: attraction towards a woman wearing a dress is not equivalent with attraction towards the dress, since the focus is not on it, unless we are talking about a fetishistic subject.

      The situation with the trans woman is different. Here, if she has not undergone sex-reassignment surgery, she will still have a male penis. Now, many subjects may view that penis as “part of her body”, and subsequently, part of her, part of her identity. The partial identification with the phallus now is strong.

      Now the argument comes: if being attracted to the pre-operation trans woman makes you bisexual, does being attracted to the cis woman with a strap-on also make you bisexual? If not, why? Way more people would agree that being attracted to a woman with a strap-on doesn’t necessarily make you bisexual or gay (if you’re a man), and if we’d accept such a statement, we’d get even more problems: how realistic does the strap-on need to be? Where do we draw the line between “penis” and “cylinder”, etc.

      Thus we can see how our abstract perception of the Other, beyond their physical body parts, can influence sexual attraction. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the “phallus” is not always the real penis, but a larger archetype that may use the penis as a metaphor, but is actually representative of all unattainable objects of desire and signifiers for power. The “(big, capital ‘O’) Other” is also the general archetype of the idea of “everything else that is not me”, “radical otherness”, as Lacan puts it. Hence, we can sum up the two positions as follows:

1.       Being attracted to the woman with the strap-on means that you are attracted when the Other doesn’t have the phallus

2.       Being attracted to the trans woman with a biological penis means that you are attracted when the Other “has” the phallus, or when the phallus is part of the Other somehow

      Archetypes such as the big Other and the imaginary/symbolic phallus are important concepts in our resolution towards the Oedipus complex. Maybe our sexual preferences say something about our personalities and the way we were raised? Maybe the people who want the Other to not have the phallus do not want to be given objects of desire (material goods, money, etc.) by others who already own them (ex: a person attracted only to cis women with a strap-on may be more likely to reject gifts by a rich person?) and the opposite for the other group? Who knows.

 

PART 6: Extending the argument towards necrophilia

 

      We see that sexual attraction is not strictly mediated by body parts, but also by abstract concepts like “soul” when we notice that many people who are positively predisposed to having intercourse with hyper-realistic sex-dolls are negatively predisposed towards necrophilia, even when the corpse is fresh. I propose a thought-experiment/imagination exercise: maybe in a few decades technology will evolve so much that we could produce sex dolls that are almost indistinguishable from the human body – from the way they look, to the way they physically feel when we touch them. Then, you would do a hypothetical unethical experiment: you take a person who is attracted to such dolls, you give them a fresh corpse and you lie to them that it’s a doll. They will not notice a difference because we already assumed that they are physically indistinguishable. At the end, you reveal to them that they actually fucked a corpse, and not a doll. They’ll very likely have a negative emotional reaction, not only due to ethical considerations, but their libido in general might also slow down. If you want to test their libido specifically, maybe you could reveal it to them in the middle of the sexual act.

      Regardless, I don’t think we would actually need to do such an experiment to imagine what the likely outcome may be: with some exceptions, most people’s sexual attractions are based on our abstract concept of what life and human experience is in general – therefore our libidos distinguishing between a corpse and a sex doll who look identical. Now the verdict is the opposite: sexual attraction is more than the sum of some physical body parts. How do we integrate this into our conceptions of gender and sexual orientation? It is still a mystery so far to me.