Unconscious Belief, Transgenderism and The Current Thing - Will you ever be a 'real' woman?

 EDIT: This article is longer than usual. If you do not have time to read it all in one go, an alternative reading order is to first read the last section ("XIII") and then read the entire article from start to finish, thus re-reading the last section at the end.

I: INTRODUCTION

 

            In this essay we will explore the concept of unconscious belief, Lacanian perspectives on gender, borrow some things from Hegel and Zizek, and see how all of them relate to the modern “hot debates” around transgender people.

 

II: UNCONSCIOUS BELIEF

 

            DEFINITION: We shall define “unconscious belief” here as the belief that is played out in behavior by a subject, regardless of whether the subject denies it or not or is even aware of it in the first place. We say that a person “unconsciously believes X” if they act as if they believed in X even when they do not consciously think they agree with X. We could say, with a little exaggeration, that unconscious belief is the lie that you tell both others and yourself; but we have to be careful with what I just said in this sentence as this requires an a priori definition of “lying” that may not be clear, hence the “with a little exaggeration” part.

            One example of unconscious belief popular in political debates is one of the pro-choice takes in abortion debates: “if you are a man/if you can’t give birth, you should shut up about abortion”. This is the conscious belief of the person who said it (assuming that they are not outright lying and genuinely consciously think that they agree with such a statement). How do we discover the unconscious belief of the person? It is pretty clear from how I defined it: if we look at their behavior.

            We first generalize the statement into “If you are part of X group of people, you should shut up about Y”. How does a person who claims such a thing usually behave? You would expect them to play out this belief in behavior by making more of an active effort to silence X group of people when the topic “Y” comes up than the active effort they make in silencing “non-X” group of people. If we particularize the statement again, this becomes: a person who genuinely believes that men should shut up about abortion, should make more of an active effort in silencing men whenever the topic of abortion comes up than they do in silencing women (or in the worst case, make an equal effort, so that we also include the edge cases where a person is not so disagreeable and confrontation as to silence people in the first place, preferring instead to judge them internally).

            Now, we look at the permutation of the four possible situations: pro-choice men, pro-choice women, pro-life men, pro-life women. Do the people who claim that “men should shut up about abortion” actually make an effort in silencing or moralizing pro-choice men in a condescending way? No, often times they themselves are pro-choice men. Do the people who claim that make an effort in silencing or moralizing pro-life women in a condescending way? Usually, more than the effort in silencing pro-choice men. The two other situations (pro-life men, pro-choice women) are to be as expected however, they silence and moralize the former more than the latter.

            What we have here is a person whose behavior is causally determined more by the other’s political beliefs than the other’s gender. If we set the other’s political belief as fixed, we see that the other’s gender actually has no causal impact upon their behavior: a pro-choice man is silenced as much as a pro-choice woman, a pro-life man is silenced just as much as a pro-life woman. However, if we set the gender as fixed, the other’s stance on abortion has the true causal effect. Thus, we see that the true unconscious belief guiding their behavior is “people who disagree with me on abortion should shut up about it”. Despite the claims of this specific subset of the pro-choice population, their stated “belief” has no causal effect on their behavior so we cannot call it a genuine, authentic belief; it is a fake belief (a lie even they themselves believe!) masking the true unconscious belief that is guiding their behavior: pro-life people should shut up about abortion (because I don’t like civilized discussions with people with opposing beliefs)!

            It must be understood that the way I am using the word “belief” in “unconscious belief” is a tiny bit metaphorical, in a way. Usually we define belief as a conscious act, as “what a person consciously thinks is true”, or something among the lines of that. From this perspective, unconscious belief is an oxymoron. But I am not talking about that kind of belief. I am talking about a particular discord, a “rupture”, between conscious belief (what we usually understand by “belief”) and practical action. “Unconscious belief” is simply may way of naming “the discrepancy between what a person consciously thinks is true and what a person does in behavior, in action”. But, I admit, many arguments could be made as to how this is not the best term for that, perhaps we should come up with a different term for it in the future, since it is not what we usually understand by “belief”. For now, I am sticking with “unconscious belief”, however.

            The concept of unconscious belief is not new. Slavoj Zizek introduced it in his 1989 work “The Sublime Object of Ideology”, in relation to the concept of fetishistic disavowal, Pascal’s wager and how it operates under capitalism. His example was more related to how we claim to believe that money is just a social construct with no inherent value and so on, but that this belief has no causal effect on our behavior because we still behave as if we didn’t believe what we just said, and that it’s our behavior that truly drives capitalism further, not our claims. What Zizek (not Lacan) often calls “fetishistic disavowal” is just people’s desperate last attempt at defending themselves when their unconscious beliefs are exposed, by the formula: “yes, I do believe in X, but…”. One example of such fetishistic disavowal (covering up for unconscious belief) is in the popular “critical race theory” that many so-called “anti-racists” in North America nowadays follow: “yes, I do believe that race is a social construct, but… (it is still “important”, we still need to treat people differently based on race despite the fact that we just said that it is made up, everything should be analyzed through the lens of race, all people of a certain race have a unified experience in society with no exceptions and thus we can make generalized statements about them, and other mental gymnastics, etc…)”. In other words, critical race theorists unconsciously believe in race and that it is “real” while claiming the opposite (they act as if it is real, just like the “biological race realists”). The way their unconscious belief “slips” inside speech is what Zizek terms “fetishistic disavowal” (yes, but…).

 

III: UNCONSCIOUS DEFINITION

 

            DEFINITION: I will define “unconscious definition” as a short-hand for “the definition of a word that a person or a group of people unconsciously believe is the correct one”. If a person’s unconscious definition for X is Y, then the person behaves as if they really believed that the correct definition for X is Y, regardless of what they claim or think to believe.

            Here is one example: the unconscious definition of “racism” in almost all people in almost all societies is “something related to race that I don’t like”. The unconscious definition of racism is not “prejudice and discrimination against people based on ethnic or racial background”, neither “power + prejudice”, these two are just masks of a deeper unconscious belief driving everyone’s behavior: “something that I don’t like (that has to do with race at least a bit)”. This definition is consistent with the behavior of everyone: we can see that regardless of what a person claims to believe, it is both a set of necessary and of sufficient conditions for them to not like something and be related to race that they will call it racist.

            It is possible to be argued that my definition is either a bit too general or a bit too specific under certain conditions and contexts or for certain people. It’s true that it could be re-worked, maybe you can find counter-examples where those conditions are either not necessary or not sufficient; maybe the unconscious definition of racism guiding people’s behavior is instead “an opinion related to race that I disagree with”, or maybe it’s “an opinion related to race that I heavily disagree with, and the more I disagree with it, the more racist it is". Or maybe it’s something else entirely. Regardless of whichever of those three above definitions is the closest to the unconscious definition of racism in society, I think all three are pretty close enough that I made my point clear in exemplifying how an unconscious definition looks like.

 

IV: THERE IS NO “CORRECT” DEFINITION OF A WORD, BUT THERE IS AN UNCONSCIOUS ONE

 

            Languages are a social construct and this is obvious to most. There is no “objective correctness” in me calling an apple “an apple”, nor in the concept of grammatical correctness, nor in the concept of semantic correctness (the correct definition of a word): the word “apple” is simply a more or less arbitrarily chosen set of letters (in writing) or sounds (in speech) that signifies the concept of an apple. Thus, strictly from the viewpoint of efficient communication, two people might as well use the word “apple” to signify what we mean by “car” or “fish” or something else entirely, and if both of them are on the same page on their definitions, it is perfectly valid.

            Some definitions can be better or worse, strictly from a value-judgment perspective: for example, some definitions are more useful, some definitions have a better impact on society, etc. but definitions cannot be “true” or “false”. Philosophy can, however, concern itself with the various ways in which the language we use can change reality and thus consider certain definitions as superior from an ethical/moral perspective (ex: “It is useful to have consistent definitions” vs. “It is better to change old definitions more often”, etc.), I just argue it will simply never be a debate about truth.

            More than that, we know ever since Hegel that any such statement about objective or absolute knowledge (the “correct” definition of a word, the “correct” way to speak grammatically, etc.) relies on an inherent paradox or contradiction, and it is sufficient to read the introduction to The Phenomenology of Spirit to see this. The proof would go something like this: there is no correct definition of a word, because in order for me to provide such a thing, I need a system of distinguishing between correct and incorrect definitions in the first place. In other words, I need a correct definition for the term “correct definition”, and thus the very claim to have absolute knowledge over semantic correctness is circular reasoning. This is only an extension of Hegel’s refutation of absolute knowledge about objective/physical reality (a “radicalized Kant”, so to speak), because if I claim to have a system that can judge whether everything is true or not (ex: “science”), how do I judge whether it is a good system of distinguishing between true and false in the first place? Don’t I need a meta-system of judging systems of judging truth? And who will judge that meta-system if not a meta-meta-system of judging meta-systems of judging systems of judging truth? This can go on to infinity.

            It is at this point that my article becomes a bit “meta”: despite everyone agreeing with the first paragraph on this section (language is a social construct, the relation between word and meaning is often arbitrary, etc.), not everyone acts as if they really believe it. We can really say that people only claim to agree with me, but they do not really unconsciously believe in what I just said, else they wouldn’t fight about what the “correct” definition of racism is and whether this person is racist or not, what “real” communism is and whether this regime was communist or state capitalist, what the definition of a woman is and whether this person is a woman or not, what “real metal” is and whether this band is real metal or not, what “real music” is and whether hip-hop is real music or not, etc. The very existence of grammar Nazis is another example: they unconsciously (and occasionally even consciously) believe in a “correct” way to speak.

            I will not go over why people do this or how to decipher the “mask” of the claims of the people who believe in a certain definition of a word over another in general (what does it mean when someone claims to believe that one definition is “correct”, how do you decipher it?): I already did this in chapter V of my book “Brainwashed by Nothingness” (the summary is this: any claim about a “correct” definition is a value-judgment disguised as truth-judgment). Instead, I will extend my former analysis with the concept of unconscious definitions: what are the unconscious definitions of “man” and “woman” in society?

 

V: THE UNCONSCIOUS DEFINITIONS OF GENDER IN PROGRESSIVE IDEOLOGY

 

            NOTE: I am using “progressive” and “conservative” in this article in very rough and somewhat vague ways. I am simply observing two common attitudes people have towards gender that are strongly correlated with “social progressivism” and “social conservatism” in the world, especially in the United States. I avoided the terms “left-wing” and “right-wing” since I prefer using those terms for economic positions (more vs. less state intervention in the economy, bigger vs. smaller government, more vs. less wealth redistribution, etc.). Since transgender people are now a political topic, they are not an economic topic, but a “social issue”, so I was lazy and instead of coming up with two new terms for these ideologies I resorted to “what the progressives believe regardless of their economic takes” and “what the conservatives believe regardless of their economic takes”. Obviously, not all people who label themselves “progressive” believe in what I call “the progressive ideology on gender” and not all people who label themselves “conservative” believe in what I call “the conservative ideology on gender”, there is just a very strong correlation.

            As we established in section IV of this article, there is no “objectively correct” definition of “man” or “woman”, but certain definitions should still definitely be superior in terms of value, not truth. One definition of “man” might have some better influence in society than another, for instance. If your base for discriminating between definitions in terms of value is strictly communication, then any definition is equally good as long as all speakers in a social interaction agree with it. If you have another base for doing it, then more disparity starts to arise.

            With all this said, most progressives still insist on a “correct” definition of gender: a woman is someone who identifies as a woman, a man is someone who identifies as a man. As is the case with anyone claiming they have access to “the correct definition”, it is a value-judgment disguised as a truth-judgment, and actually a crypted way of saying one or more of the following statements: “if we define gender in my way, society will be better”, “if we define gender in my way, I will feel better”, “I wish a man/woman was anyone who identified as a man/woman”, etc.

            You can see from the start that I am diametrically opposed to any conservative (Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, etc.) claiming that “this is an issue of truth and they are trying to make it about feelings”¹. There no such thing as a “true” definition! It is the exact opposite: it is an issue of feelings that both political camps are trying to make as about “truth”. It is never about truth when people argue over semantics, instead, here is what it is often about:

1.     Whose feelings do we hurt more? Whose feelings are more important?

2.     What tribe (read: political camp) do you identify with more? What is the dominant political ideology of your friend group? In which political camp do you feel more “at home” and less alienated and how can you manipulate semantics so that you can make your own tribe feel better and “own” the other one?

3.     Who do you want to virtue-signal to more?

4.     What hidden bias/political agenda do you want to push over people’s throats as “objective judgment”?

5.     What subjective value-judgments are you so afraid to take responsibility for such that you are also arrogant enough to pass them as “objectively correct”²?

It is here that I must inform Matt Walsh that hisefforts in travelling around the world, asking people to define what a woman isand receiving “a woman is someone that identifies as a woman” are in vain unfortunately, since no one genuinely believes that. Everyone who is saying that has another, unconscious definition that is actually guiding their behavior, the tautology (“circular definition”) is only a mask that hides their “true” belief, so to speak (the unconscious belief).

Here is the unconscious definition of gender of most progressives: “a woman is someone who would prefer to be a biological female over a biological male and a man is someone who would prefer to be a biological male over a biological female”. In most cases, that is an actual biological female/male (what we call “cisgender people”). To be more precise and specific, you could say “a woman is someone who prefers living with a vagina over a penis, someone who prefers living with breasts rather than without, someone who prefers having their fat distributed over their body the way estrogen does it rather than the way testosterone does it, etc.”, and the opposite for “man”. Of course, they rarely say this definition out loud, but it is what is actually driving their behavior: it is exactly the set of necessary and sufficient conditions that they use to distinguish between men and women (thus, a definition).

Do they lie to themselves when they tell themselves that a man/woman is someone who identifies as a man/woman? In this case, I’d say not actually! I argue instead, that it is not the definition that’s guiding their behavior, which they (they = progressive/trans-rights activists, etc.) are hiding (from others or even from themselves). This is because any concept can not be defined circularly, but however, it can have circular proprieties (ex: mathematical functions, etc.).

For example, here is a mathematical function: f(x) = sin(x). One recursive propriety of the sinus function is this: sin(x) = sin(x + 2pi). Is this true? Yes! Is this sufficient to define sin(x)? No!

Similarly enough, when progressives say “a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman”, do they unconsciously believe that (is their behavior consistent with this belief)? Yes, actually! Do they unconsciously believe that is the definition? Not at all, they have another set of necessary and sufficient conditions that is actually driving their behavior when distinguishing between men and women. The “lie” is not in the statement, it’s in the claim that it’s a definition.

What do we see in their definition if we further analyze it? The catch of it is this: your status as a man/woman is determined strictly based on your desires, wishes, likes/dislikes. In other words, if sexual orientation is the desire for the other (how you want your sexual partner to look/be), your gender identity is the desire for the self (how you want yourself to look/be)³. It shall be made clear, as an additional comment, that sexual orientation and gender identity are indeed a “preference” but are not a choice, in the classical sense of the word, because we do not usually say that we “choose” what we want/like (with very few exceptions for when people use classical conditioning to make themselves want/like something⁴). You did not choose to like this type of food more than another, you did not choose to want to wear blue clothing over red clothing, etc. Similarly enough, progressives believe (but do not realize that they believe, hence “unconscious” belief) that gender is also a preference: what makes you a man or a woman is not your biology, but whether you want a penis or a vagina, whether you want high levels of estrogen or of testosterone, whether you want to be called by “he” or “she” inside language, etc. In other words, what progressives believe, but do not admit or even realize they believe, is that gender is a wish.

 

VI: WHY DON’T TRANSGEDER PEOPLE ADMIT WHAT THEY REALLY BELIEVE?

 

            We have established that what I call “progressives” or “trans activists” or who are so-often called “gender ideologues” unconsciously believe that gender identity is a wish, and yet none of them wants to say this out loud, or at least not anymore. For progressives, you must say out loud that gender is something that you are, not something that you want to be, despite me quite clearly showing in the previous section that in behavior, in practice their actions (ex: the action of distinguishing between men and women) are guided by who you want to be, not who you actually are. They believe that gender is who you want to be but they do not realize that they believe this. Why hide it? In order to understand why progressive trans rights activists conceal their “real” beliefs with tautologies, we must first understand why transgender people do it, who are a proper subset of trans-rights activists, as those include both trans and cis people.

            There are two common understandings of the unconscious in psychology, of why things are “buried” (repressed) in the unconscious in the first place (why the mind “hides things from itself”). The first is that the information may be redundant and unnecessary for the present moment, especially considering that the conscious mind (“ego”) can only experience a limited quantity of information at once. Thus, a certain part of the information turns into an automatism in order to not overload the brain all at once (think of how after you play a musical instrument enough times, you do not consciously think of each note, or how people with a high typing speed do not consciously think of each letter they type on the keyboard, etc. – all these tasks are automated and done by the unconscious). This is known in psychology as the procedural unconscious of cognitive psychology and neuropsychology. There is another unconscious, however. The other theory is that certain information may be hidden from conscious awareness (“the mind hiding things from itself”) because it is personally repulsive, socially unacceptable or somehow unpleasant (information that you do not like to know): if a certain realization causes emotional pain when held in conscious awareness, the mind’s defense mechanism will hide the information from itself. This is known as the dynamic unconscious of psychoanalysis. In our case, it is definitely the latter.

            If we return to transgender people, we might better understand why they hide from others (or even unintentionally, from themselves) the fact that gender is a wish: they do not like this realization. The realization that a man/woman is something that you want to be and not actually something that you are is so traumatizing in of itself that they cannot accept the fact that they themselves can even believe in such a thing: it must be the other evil people, the transphobes themselves, that believe in such a thing!

            The realization is unpleasant because it implies that they are not actually who they want to be, which is the actual painful source of discomfort at the heart of gender dysphoria. In other words, transgender men/women do not want/like to know that they are not a cis man/cis woman, and the belief that gender is a wish and not a thing you “are” implies this this realization (“I am not who I want to be”).

            However, the realization that gender is a wish and not a physical reality also produces pleasure simultaneously with pain, since it implies that you can become a man/woman with enough effort and medical interventions, or at least get close enough to it (“I am not who I want to be… therefore I can change, and become who I want to be, or close enough, since the current scientific/medical developments allow this”).

            We see here how the realization that gender is a wish is a source of both pleasure and discomfort for the transgender person. Freud has a specific term for this - ambivalence: when someone has “mixed feelings” about something, when something is both good and bad⁵. Freud had another term for the defense mechanisms that solve ambivalence: “compromise formations”. Compromise formation includes the sum of all defense mechanisms in psychoanalysis (projection, introjection, repression, foreclosure, splitting, reaction-formation, etc.) that seek to „get the best out of both worlds”, to find some way to enjoy the pleasure of a stimulus/thought/etc. while also avoiding dealing with the negative aspects. For example, procrastinating a task brings pleasure because you engage in something more fun while avoiding the boring work you are procrastinating, but unpleasant because you constantly worry about the thing that you have to do. One thing that could happen is you quite literally „forgetting” that you have to do the task, thus procrastinating it „accidentally” (the mind made you forget, such that you can have an even more pleasant experience while doing it and „suck out all the pleasure” out of the act while also avoiding dealing with the short-term consequences, thus getting the best out of both worlds). This example I just gave is an example of the most commonly-studied example of compromise formation in psychoanalysis: repression (the so-called „accidental” forgetfulness, „accidental” absent-mindedness, etc.).

            Through this perspective, we can easily see how a transgender person can lie to themselves that they even believe in the tautological definition in the first place as definition („a woman/man is someone who identifies as a woman/man”): because it is a form of compromise formation. This tautological definition makes them get the best out of both worlds: I can get closer to the body of a cis man/cis woman, while pretending/role-playing that I already reached my goal. The conclusion is this, in my opinion: playing with definitions of man and woman is a symptom of gender dysphoria itself.

To be clear and precise about what I am trying to say, we must turn back to my own definition of unconscious belief: behaving in a way that is discordant with what you consciously think is true and not realizing it. Thus, we have to understand, that repressing the unconscious belief is not a sort of “forgetfulness”, here; it’s not that that transgender people all believed in a definition some time in their childhood but they “forgot” it, and they also forgot that they forgot it, or something like that. That was the early Freudian understanding of repression. The Lacanian view (and even the view of the “late Freud”) is that what is often repressed was never conscious in the first place. We can clearly see this here: my point is, basically, that transgender people (and later on in the article, other groups of people) are not realizing that their actions do not line up well with their words and my theories as to why it happens, that’s it. It doesn’t mean that they initially knew that it was discordant in the past but something made them “forget”, or that it was concordant but something “stopped” them, it was repressed from the very beginning!

 

VII: WHY DON’T TRANSGENDER ACTIVISTS/PROGRESSIVES ADMIT WHAT THEY REALLY BELIEVE?

 

            We have established why an actual transgender person, suffering from gender dysphoria, might end up saying one thing, thinking they believe it and having their behavior/actions driven by another definition (unconscious belief). But there are numerous cisgender people, who do not suffer from any gender dysphoria, who do the exact same thing! Why does this happen?

            It is here that I must define some terms again. I will define identification as the process of attributing external traits and object to your own sense of self. We identify with the personal pronoun „I”. We identify with our bodies (with the exception when we are experiencing depersonalization). We can identify with many labels, and the object of identification is whatever comes after the phrase „I am...”: I am a patriot, I am an American, I am a white person, I am a man, I am a woman, I am the cool guy at school, I am the nerd of the group, I am the artistic shy quiet kid, I am the class clown, I am a model student, I am beautiful, I am rich, I am annoying, I am smart, I am a burden to others, etc.

            I will define indirect identification as the process of indirectly attributing external traits by identifying with someone who identifies with them. This is what results in „the enemy of my friend is my enemy, the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, etc. For example, Michael at school might identify as both a patriot and a nerd, and I only directly identify as a nerd, but since Michael is also a nerd, I might start acting or thinking of myself as a patriot as well, partially. The indirect identification “chain” can get really long, with lots of nodes and lines connecting it.

            Thus, I argue, progressives get to inherit some of the symptoms of gender dysphoria from transgender people because, even if they do not identify as that respective gender, they identify with something else that the trans person identifies with (ex: “leftist”, “vegan”, “Tumblr user”, etc.) and the rest is tribe mentality. This is what I believe goes on in anything that we call tribalism, tribe mentality, etc. A long chain of indirect identification happens in each person to the point where what causes their behavior and beliefs is doing whatever “my people” are doing. In the case of progressives, transgender people are “one of us” for various reasons, so the transgender activists started showing the same symptom of compromise formation: “I can’t say I believe in a biological definition of man/woman or say out loud that gender is a wish, because this would hurt the feelings of one person from my tribe which is bad, but I also need to keep behaving as if gender is a wish, because if you do it but do not say it, this is what does not hurt their feelings, which is good”.

            One counter-argument might be: why did they inherit only this symptom of gender dysphoria and did not become fully transgender themselves? I argue that they often do inherit all of the symptoms, just not in the way that you usually would imagine, since the experiencing subject of the symptoms is always projected outside. The concrete example is that almost all progressives are engaging in what I called in chapter I of “Brainwashed by Nothingness” the ghost of the spirit of the law. Their conscious goal (“the spirit of the law”) is not strictly protecting the feelings of transgender people, that was the initial spirit of the law, but now the spirit of the law is “dead” and they continue to follow the letter of the law in its absence. Therefore, if I talk in private one-to-one with a trans activist, I still have to be careful to not misgender a third transgender person that is not even there to hear us talking, because I am hurting the feelings of the progressive (“What do you mean you don’t agree with my political beliefs? Are you not one of us?”). I can talk in a private conversation with a trans rights activist and say “Bruce Jenner” instead of “Caitlyn Jenner” or “Ellen Page” instead of “Elliot Page”, and even when there is a 100% guarantee that these celebrities will never hear me (not that they’d give a shit anyway), the trans rights activist will still be offended. They are experiencing the exact same symptoms of gender dysphoria, what we could call a “secondary gender dysphoria”, so to speak. It is just that they do not get offended when you misgender them, they get offended when you misgender someone else. So it is not that the cisgender trans rights activist identifies as a woman when they are a biological male or vice-versa, instead they identify with someone who identifies as a woman, so a misrecognition of the “missing trans person’s” identity is indirectly a misrecognition of the trans rights activist’s identity.

 

VIII: WHY TAUTOLOGY, OUT OF ALL THE WAYS TO HIDE IT?

 

            Out of all of the ways to repress the unconscious definitions of men and women driving the behavior of progressives, why is the “surface-level definition they claim to believe in but that does not line up with their behavior or even make sense” (what we call in psychoanalysis the return of the repressed) a circular one (a man/woman is someone who identifies as a man/woman) and not something else? On this one I am less sure, but one interesting idea is that the return of the repressed in psychoanalysis is often a symbol/metaphor for what was initially repressed. If we consider this, the tautology/circularity itself might be a metaphor for what they actually truly fear (“I will not obtain what I want!”). In psychoanalysis, desire (wish) also has a circular propriety! Lacan states that we desire to desire, so when we get close to our goals, we often self-sabotage ourselves unconsciously (the unconscious is “teasing” you, making your life harder, so that you have to struggle more for what your current goals are). Therefore, we can say that what we “truly” want is not this or that specific thing, what we actually want is to want itself, we wish to wish, we desire to desire. This might be the traumatic realization of gender dysphoria (and subsequently, progressive ideology) that is also symbolized as tautology in the symptom: the realization that you will never be fully satisfied, that you will always want more and more, you will always want to be “more” of a woman or “more” of a man, you will always need more plastic surgeries, more make-up, etc. and you will still feel like you are not “enough” of a woman or a man (desire to desire – permanently unsatisfied). But more on this later.

 

IX: LINGUISTIC POSITIONING – A FOURTH CATEGORY DIFFERENT FROM SEX, GENDER AND GENDER ROLES?

 

            DEFINITION: I will use “sexual difference” to denote the reunion between sex, gender, gender roles, as well as the fourth category I am about to introduce (linguistic positioning).

            Sex is the biological reality of your physical body right now.

            Gender, or gender identity, is a personal feeling and a wish (how you want your body to look/be like right now and how you want to be called).

            Gender roles are societal expectations of how men and women should behave. It is what we often call by “masculinity” and “femininity”. Gender roles are different from both gender identity and from sex. Gender roles are when we say that men are tough and aggressive and do not cry easily and that women are gentler and more compassionate and caring for children. Or when we say that men should go to work and bring in an income and women should take care of the house and children. Or when we say that pink is a “girl color” and skirts and make-up are “women’s products” and not men’s. Gender roles are different from biological sex because any sex can act in a feminine or masculine way. They are also different from gender identity because people of any gender can be masculine or feminine. You can have the body of a biological male, the gender of “woman” (an internal wish to be a biological woman) and act in either a masculine or a feminine way. Gender roles are only partially a social construct, some of them are expectations based on evolution that have been consistent throughout history (“men are tougher than women, on average”) while some are strictly cultural and change every few dozen years (“women wear high heels but not men”).

            These three compose the triad of how we usually think of gender and sexuality in society: sex, gender identity, gender roles. They line up pretty well with Lacan’s triad of real, imaginary and symbolic, respectively. The imaginary order is whatever is personal and “in your head” (gender identity). The symbolic order is whatever is in society, language, culture and in interpersonal communication (gender roles). The real is whatever is left out and is neither imaginary nor symbolic, which is an entire discussion in of its own, but for the moment you can think of it as physical reality, even if contemporary Lacanians will usually disagree with this description. The real of sexual difference is biological sex.

            Is that it? Are there only three ways of categorizing sexual difference? I argue there is a fourth one that is going to be useful to our analysis, different from all the other three. I will name it linguistic positioning. Linguistic position shall be defined as whatever a person claims to be inside language. The linguistic position of a woman/man is anyone calling themselves a woman/man and telling others they are a woman/man.

            Linguistic position differs from sex (the real of sexual difference) because my physical body has nothing to do with what I claim to be.

            Linguistic position differs from gender roles (the symbolic of sexual difference) because what society thinks of me or wants me to behave like has nothing to do with what I claim to be.

            Linguistic position differs from gender identity (the imaginary of sexual difference) and this one might be the hardest to realize at first glance. Linguistic position is not gender identity because how I feel inside/how I wish my body to be can be different from who I claim to be in a social situation, even if they are often strongly correlated. For example, a Male-to-Female transgender person, before coming out as trans, will take up the linguistic position of “man” (tell people they are a man, use masculine pronouns, etc.) while still having the gender identity of a woman (wishing to be a biological female). Or, alternatively, anyone can do a social experiment and take up any linguistic position at any time to see how people react, record them and post them on social media or whatever.

            Why is the concept of linguistic position important? Because I argue that the way society treats us, even to the point of sexism, has more dimensions to it. On one hand, there are experiences in how society treats you based on how well you pass as either one of the sexes (sexism, prejudices, etc.), but there is another, based on linguistic position. We could very well make a 2x2 matrix of the various experiences you can have in society related to sexual difference:

 

You pass as a male and you call yourself a man | You pass as a male and call yourself female

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You pass as female and you call yourself a man | You pass as female and you call yourself a woman

 

            Thus, we must understand that what we call sexism against men or women shall always be split into two. For example, misogyny is half a prejudice against people who pass as biologically female and half a prejudice against people who call themselves a woman. If I look 100% like a man but call myself a woman for a social experiment, I will experience half of the misogyny. If I take estrogen and dress like a woman in order to look 100% like a woman, but call myself a man, I will experience the other half. Do both and I will get the full experience. Same for misandry.

            Jacques Lacan’s obscure writings on what he called “sexuation” and all his statements about men and women shall probably be understand through the lens of linguistic position as well, despite me making various failed attempts at viewing them through the lens of either gender identity or gender roles. In fact, he wasn’t talking about gender identity, he barely even mentioned transsexuality in his writings, and nowhere did personal feelings and wishes towards your body play a part in his own theory of sexual difference. Viewing his statements in terms of gender roles applies only partially. It is only if we understand his theory based on linguistic positions that even more stuff checks out as valid. This includes everything from “woman is a symptom of man” to “woman is the Other sex” to the stronger claims like “the woman does not exist” and “there is no such thing as a relation between the sexes” (“Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel”). This will become relevant later on in the article.

 

           

X: THE UNCONSCIOUS DEFINITIONS OF GENDER IN CONSERVATIVE IDEOLOGY

 

            I will argue now that a big subset of the people who we usually call “conservative” on this specific issue are driven by unconscious beliefs as well, because their actions do not line up with what they say that they believe either. I will argue that while conservatives state/claim to believe in various biological definitions of gender (person with these chromosomes, person with these genitals, etc.), their actions do not usually line up with their words (they unconsciously believe something else). Next, I will argue that this tendency of denying biological reality is projected onto the progressive crowd, when in fact it is also that conservatives unconsciously believe in abstract metaphysics and “souls” of a gender trapped in another person’s body. Next, I will argue that what I describe here by this “conservative gender ideology” is actually on a spectrum/axis of “intensity”, where the more conservative you are (on this issue), the less you unconsciously believe that women even exist. At the extreme end of the spectrum (the “most” conservative take on the issue of sex and gender), you have people who unconsciously do not believe that women even exist (who, in behavior, act as if everyone is a man and no one is a (“real”) woman).

            Let us go back a bit in history (or in space, to the east… because travelling in time to look at the US 50 years ago or travelling right now in Eastern Europe are equivalent from a political perspective) and notice another unconscious belief that was/is prevalent inside conservative-ish circles: “lesbians are not women”. Did this ever get said out loud? Not really, but there absolutely are crowds of people behaving as if they believe in it. I can recall many anecdotes from lesbian teenagers in more conservative countries who were not allowed in the girl’s changing room by their other classmates when changing for Phys Ed class (after coming out). Regardless of whether they called them women and by feminine pronouns or not, they behaved as if lesbians are not women: lesbians should go into men’s bathrooms, lesbians should change in men’s changing rooms, etc.

            The unconscious belief of conservative gender ideology that’s more prevalent now in the west is “trans men are real men”! What a progressive statement, you could say! A conservative will never admit they believe in that however, they will say how FtM people, no matter how many surgeries and medical procedures they go through, are still “woman who altered their body to look like men”, etc. while behaving as if they are men. My point is that conservatives behave as if all transgender people, be them MtF or FtM, are “men” (they unconsciously believe that all trans people are men).

            Let us analyze another belief of contemporary conservative gender ideology: “the difference between men and women is purely biological”. They sure claim that, but do their actions line up with their words? Here I only need to quote a previous article of mine, the “Are traps gay?” one:

 

“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 cannot 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 [feminine] 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-female) 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 science 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 they already often do 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 unconsciously 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”.”

(Source: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2022/08/are-traps-gay-and-organs-without-body.html)

 

            Or, like I say in chapter XII of Brainwashed by Nothingness, conservatives do not care about your body in the present, they care about your body in the past. Who would’ve thought that conservatives are always stuck in the past? Just like progressive gender ideology can allow for seemingly absurd statements like “women can have penises, men can have vaginas”, conservative gender ideology can allow similar statements like “women can have neopenises, men can have neovaginas”. Just like progressives believe that men can have breasts (in the case of FtMs), so do conservatives, but for the opposite reasons (in the case of MtFs)! Both of them believe in men with breasts, but in the opposite cases. In conservative gender ideology, there is no biology, there are only abstract metaphysics disguised as biology. The biological essentialism is only a mask (“the return of the repressed”) to cover up their actual unconscious definition of sexual difference that is guiding their behavior (“the repressed”).

            If they actually “believed in biology”, then transsexual⁶ people would be neither men or women, since after medically transitioning, any transgender person has biological characteristics of both male and female biology. This is not the case in conservative gender ideology. Some self-identified conservatives may state similar things, but I’ve rarely encountered them. Hence why the label “conservative gender ideology” is perfectly warranted, this is an ideology of gender, of “male souls trapped in female bodies” and “female souls trapped in male bodies”, just in the opposite ways of the progressive variation. New chains, same shackles. Or, how we often say in Romanian: aceiași mărie cu altă pălărie.

            This is why we must understand that, in the most ironical way, what conservatives usually mean by “biological sex” is a social construct, even more of a social construct than gender identity (which is personal, based on subjective desire, and hence neither ‘real’ nor ‘social’ but an imaginary construct). Biological sex in the conservative viewpoint is based NOT on your biology now, but on your biology in the past, since they do not care about how your body looks, they care about how it looked at birth. It is very similar to the concept of virginity. It has actually been debunked for a long time that female virginity is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a broken hymen, but if it actually was, hypothetically speaking, it would be equivalent to how conservatives use chromosomes right now to define sex: not indicative in any way of how you are right now, but a remnant of a long-forgotten past. However, “physical sex”, a term invented by myself a longer time ago, is actually “real” and rooted in biology, since it is based on your biology right now, taking into account not only chromosomes, but everything from levels of testosterone and estrogen in the body, various surgeries, etc.

            In society right now, the position of being a trans man (FtM) is the ultimate way of being forgotten and ignored. In a metaphorical way, the position of being a trans woman (MtF) in society right now is the position of being “the exception” or “the edge case breaking the system”, the “wrench in the system” that pushes the limits of the current systems of sexual difference, challenging us to rewrite it in some way. Trans men, on the other hand, are exactly what is left out and ignored in the process of accommodating for trans women by any political side. The position taken up by trans women is called “the symbolic phallus” in Lacanian psychoanalysis and the position taken up by trans men is called “objet petit a” in Lacanian psychoanalysis.

            To make an analogy with programming: if your algorithm is your current system of classifying men and women, then “trans woman” is that edge case input that crashes the entire program such that it does not compile in the first place, giving you an error (“segmentation fault”, “cannot divide by zero”, “stack overflow”, etc.); and the “trans man” is the bug that is created in rewriting the program, that no one observes, but that silently changes the output of the program, giving you unwanted results. For those who are unfamiliar with computer science: an error is something that doesn’t make your program run in the first place, while a bug is something that lets your program run but in a bad way. For example, an error is when your video game crashes at startup, a bug is when your game runs in an unintended way (you can play your video game, but characters are glitching, some levels don’t load, etc.).

            It is interesting to notice here how the “default sex/gender” changes and simultaneously does not change in the transgender social positioning. In the case of cisgender, biological men and women, man is the “default” sex and it is equivalent with “unisex” or “agender” when it comes to gender roles: clothing is either feminine or unisex, you either have make-up (feminine) or lack of make-up (unisex), etc. In the case of hot political debates about transgender people, it is in some ways the same: people are either arguing about transgender women, or transgender people in general, but never about trans men, which is similar to the position that cisgender men are put in socially. However, there is also a reversal: since by “transgender people” there is a subtle (unconscious) implication in conservative discourse that it is only trans women which are targeted. Thus, “trans people entering into this bathroom” is like a sort of euphemism for “trans women entering into this bathroom”, a euphemism that the user of the euphemism is not often aware of in the first place (unconscious). If you look at it from this perspective, however, it is now the trans women who occupy the “default” or “universal” position, not the trans men.

             Back to the analogy: trans men are treated just like programming bugs and trans women are treated like programming errors. While everyone is having hot political debates about whether trans women are “real” women, trans men are just like “Okay, since no one is talking about me, I’m just gonna sneak my way into the system and change the output of the program… he he he”. This is what Lacan calls “objet petit a” (and what I call “the metaphorical programming bug”) – the thing that, the more ‘hidden’ it is (or the less people talk about it), the more power it has.⁷

            Thus, to reveal the inconsistency of conservative gender ideology, one strategy you can use is to always turn the conversation from trans women to trans men. If conservatives complain about MtF in women’s sports, ask them if they are okay with FtM in women’s sports instead. If they complain about MtF entering women’s bathrooms, ask them if they’d prefer FtM entering women’s bathrooms after a full transition. Their true unconscious beliefs guiding their actions will surface: “all transgender people should go to men’s bathrooms, men’s sports, etc.”.

            From this perspective, conservative gender ideology defies biology even more than progressive gender ideology, from the viewpoint of unconscious belief (what is played out in behavior)! From the behavior of conservatives, we can deduce that all transsexual people are men (since they want all transsexual people to go into men’s bathrooms/locker rooms/etc.), which includes almost all the possible permutations of the biology a human can have: vagina, penis, neovagina, neopenis, boobs, no boobs, high in estrogen, high in testosterone, people with deep masculine voices, people with high-pitched feminine voices, people who are 1-3 months into HRT⁸ and look in every way androgynous, etc. All of them are treated as “men” under conservative gender ideology.

            So, what is really going on here, after all these examples? A longer time ago you had people behaving as if cisgender lesbians aren’t women, now you have people faking a belief in biology but behaving as if all transsexual people are men. Half a century from now, maybe bringing transgenderism into political debates will not be trendy anymore and there will be some other “hot topic” to “own the libs” about that brings conservatives the opportunity of gatekeeping the “woman” signifier. Maybe it we will argue about intersex people, or human cloning, or whether genetically engineered catgirls are “real women”. So, what is the unconscious definition of “woman” or of “man” in conservative gender ideology?

            I argue that the “tautological infinite loop” of defining the terms in relation to each other (a woman is someone who is not a man, a man is someone who is not a woman) does NOT take place here. Instead, only the latter is guiding the behavior/actions of conservatives: “a man is anyone who is not a woman”. Conservatives put that in practice: ‘man’ is the “leftover trash”, the “default” place you end up in by virtue of not being something else. In other words, “man” and “agender” is synonymous under conservative gender ideology – the “neutral space”. But “woman”, on the other hand, has an actual definition that does not rely on men. How do we figure it out? Here are some necessary but not sufficient conditions to be labeled as a “woman” by a conservative:

1.     Women are fragile

2.     Women are weak, and must be protected

3.     Women are “pure”

4.     If someone stops being “pure”, they stop being a woman

5.     The label “woman” must be protected from “intruders” and “contamination” – it is the heaven we must “gatekeep”

6.     A woman is someone who must be protected by someone who is “not-woman” (man) – and this protection creates a state of dependency of women over men. Thus, another necessary condition for someone to be “woman”, is to be dependent on someone who is “man”. This dependency creates a power-imbalance between the genders (what Hegel called the “master-slave dialectic”).

Thus, all six of them are (either some, or all of the) necessary conditions in order for conservative gender ideology to label someone a “woman”. If any of the six conditions fails to be validated, the person is not a woman anymore. The idea of lesbianism was first a shock, the “true reason” for the conservative women to kick them out of the changing rooms (the reason that had an actual causal effect on their behavior) being that it was perceived as a claim of independence from men, even though the stated reason was that they might creep on other women, making them uncomfortable.

Keep in mind that in conservative gender ideology, the master must ‘protect’ both “women” and “woman”. They must protect the humans they call “women”, who they view as weak and helpless and inherently dependent on men, as well as the word “woman” itself, which is also a word that is anthropomorphized into an actual weak and helpless woman. For conservatives, the word woman is sort of a woman itself, in the sense that it’s also a helpless and weak word that must be protected from “intruders and contamination” – a word that, if left alone, by itself, will be ‘killed’ (reduced into non-existence). Under conservative ideology, an independent “alone” woman is a dead woman, and any woman needs the “intervention” of a man in order to exist (ex: “a woman must be protected by a strong man so that she is not raped/robbed/murdered/etc.). Similarly enough, the word “woman” is a dead word if left by itself, without active intervention and effort to make sure that people use it “properly” (“We can’t let everyone be a woman, otherwise the word woman will lose its value and mean nothing anymore!”).

This patriarchal attitude towards sexual difference must not be understood in the “mainstream modern feminist” way: “men have power over women, men hate women and want to control them, women are strictly oppressed, there is only misogyny with no misandry, the patriarchy only hurts women but not men, life is way better as a man”, etc. No, this constructed relation between the sexes is sado-masochistic⁹ in nature, it hurts men just as much. In this case, love and hate are two sides of the same coin, one does not go with the other. Conservatives love women through their apparent hate, and they hate men through their apparent love¹⁰. Ultimately, conservatives treat women as childern¹¹: just like abusive parents may over-control their child or even beat them because they love them, this is the conservative’s attitude towards women (“My child/my woman cannot be trusted to make decisions on their own, I must control every part of their existence!”). In this way, both women and children are valued. Men, on the other hand, in conservative ideology, are viewed as “leftover trash”, no one wants men. Men are on their own, they do not need any help, they must be strong, if they are weak it’s their fault. Under sexist, patriarchal gender roles, men suffer from being forgotten, unwanted, unvalued, unloved, ignored and lonely. In other words, men are the desiring subjects, women are the desired objects. Everyone is equally fucked over.

The same attitude they have towards men and women subjects, they have towards the signifiers denoting them. The word “woman” must be protected from intruders such that it doesn’t lose its value and become meaningless. The word “man” has no value and meaning from the start under their eyes, it is a leftover place for all the trash they do not like: cisgender/biological males, cisgender lesbians, transexual men, transexual women, intersex people, etc. “Man” is the recycle bin of conservatives – under this term, they throw out any ‘garbage’ that is impure under their eyes, and “woman” is reserved for purity.

 

XI: JACQUES LACAN: WOMEN DON’T EXIST???

 

            How do we read Lacan’s work?  His statements were often ambiguous, leaving feminists undecided as to whether he is on “their side”, or a defender of the patriarchy. For example, his statement that “woman is a symptom of man” has a double-meaning: on one hand, it could mean that women should be a symptom of man, or simply a descriptive statement about the current state of affairs (“women right now are treated as the symptom of man”). The former is pure sexism, the latter is a sharp critique of the patriarchy. Which one is it?

            Here is another one, not from Lacan, but that I’ve heard from somewhere else: “women don’t have any rights”. Any such statement is infused with an ambiguous double-meaning. An essentialist reading of the statement would mean “women shouldn’t have any rights”, while a more, say, existentialist reading of the statement would mean “women right now don’t have any rights, unfortunately”. The latter is a pure truth judgment, the former is a sexist value judgment disguised/stated as a truth judgment.

            Lacan’s work is infused with all sorts of statements like this: women are dependent on men (woman is a “symptom” of man), woman is the “Other” sex, etc. If you read them in the latter way, as a pure truth judgment, his work becomes a sharp critique of the patriarchy and of sexist gender roles: right now, society treats women as inherently dependent on men in order to even exist (as can even be seen in the story of Genesis, where Eve was made out of Adam’s rib), right now society treats women as “Player 2”, the “not-default sex” (the “Other” sex), etc.

            But let’s get into the spicier stuff, what does he mean that “woman does not exist”? Has it all been a simulation? Will I wake up from the matrix and find out that everyone is actually a man? All of those women I see on the street every day, are they all femboys in disguise? Not quite.

            In my opinion, it shall be viewed as a sharp critique of conservative gender ideology. In the eyes of a conservative, “woman” is constituted of an inherent paradoxical dialectic between being and non-being. On one hand, a woman “is” a woman, is called by the signifier “woman” and is often treated differently from the “not-women” (from the men). On the other hand, while some people are women, no one is a “real woman”. Thus, we see one of the inherent dialectics inside conservative ideologues: half of the population is a woman, but 0% of the population is the “real” woman.

            The starting point of conservative ideology is the protection of “purity”. For conservatives, purity is an “other”, not the self, like in leftism. Since the purer something is, the more valuable it is, the aim of conservative ideology is to take whatever is rare and make it even more rare, something that is pure and make it purer. The mentality inherent in conservative ideology is scarcity. Therefore, the less women there are, the more valuable they are. In the case of sexual activity itself, sexual activity must be limited, because the more sex you have, the more it loses its magic. In the case of economics, the more money you print or spend, the more it loses its value, and the value of the dollar must be protected. In the case of borders, the more immigrants we let in, the more our country loses its ‘purity’. Here is the slogan in terms of sexual difference: “Women must not lose their value”. This manifests in both an obsession over the virginity of women and in the transgender debates themselves where the word “woman” must be protected just as the individual women themselves.

            This panic about both particulars and universals losing their value (particulars such as individual women, universals such as the word ‘woman’) has one resolution: the setting up of high standards that are doomed to fail. We have a word for that in psychoanalysis, the ego-ideal. The ego-ideal is that little voice inside your head that always tells you that you are never good enough, you could have done even better, it tells you “more, more, more”, because it wants perfection. Did you get an 8/10 on the exam? You could’ve gotten a 9. Did you get a 9? Your deskmate got a 10. Are you at home? Look at all your friends at the beach, enjoying themselves! Are you at the beach? Look at all your friends at your beach with money to spend, while you are poor and depressed in the same location. Did you get rich? Get richer. Did you lose weight? You’re still not good enough, you need to look even better. Did you get more likes on social media? There is someone with even more likes than you so you will still feel like you’re not good enough. Did you gain muscle? It’s not enough, you could be even more muscular. (Often times this ‘inner voice’ is introjected from a figure we once had in our childhood telling us similar stuff.) One of the fundamental principles of Lacanian psychoanalysis is that you will never achieve full satisfaction, you will always want more and more, you will never feel fully content and whole with yourself, there will always be some annoying voice in your head telling you that you are not good enough. The ego-ideal is the agent responsible for this: it is what tells you “keep doing what you are doing, but more!”.

            In conservative ideology, an overbearing ego-ideal is constantly placed on women. Men are not expected to do anything other than avoid acting feminine. This is because the unconscious definition of “men” under conservative ideology is “not a woman”. Women, on the other hand, must actively engage in all sorts of activities in order to keep their status as “woman” alive: shave your legs, wear make-up, dress this way, be elegant and “pure” and don’t use swear words, etc. This sheds light on the inherent paradox that women are submitted to: on one hand, we enjoy women, so keep being a woman. On the other hand, we will never be satisfied, so be more of a woman! This is how, seemingly paradoxically, and this is where I get into the meat of the subject, conservatives unconsciously believe that neither cis women nor trans women are “real” women. They will call the cisgender ones the “real” women, but pressure them to conform to rigid standards in order to keep their status as “women” alive and not be treated like men are treated, in the same way they have those standards for transgender women.

            This is how, through certain lenses/perspectives, transgender women can be both “less” women than cisgender ones (biologically, etc.) while also being “more” women than cisgender ones through other perspectives. One such perspective is the experience of this overbearing ego-ideal. Most cisgender women experience the constant pressure of constantly having to “perform” for the straight male patriarchal gaze, even when it is invisible, or even when it is carried out by sexist women in the absence of men. Transgender women not only also experience that, they experience that multiplied by 10. The feeling that you must constantly “prove” your status as a woman and struggle to “maintain” it is the ultimate experience of femininity itself, and it is where transgender women (MtF) manage to outweigh cisgender women in their femininity.

            It is here where we encounter another Hegelian dialectic: the more of a woman you are, the less of a woman you are. How come? It is because of the presence of opposing ways in which you can measure “womanhood” or “femininity”, that the more you increase your “score” in one framework, the more you “decrease it” in the other one. And it is here where I apply the concept defined by me previously: linguistic positioning. Conservative gender ideology does not treat “women” like how I just explained in the sense of biological women, or in the sense of “people with a vagina”, nor in the sense of “people with breasts and high levels of estrogen”, nor in the sense of “people who act femininely”, nor in the sense of “people who internally feel like women”. Instead, this specific kind of treatment, or I could even say sexism, is directed at the linguistic positioning of woman. Hence, anyone who claims to use the word “woman” to define themselves will encounter this treatment. You do not need a specific gender identity (wish to have a certain body), nor a specific way you present yourself (gender roles: clothing, make-up, etc.), nor a specific biology/physical body to encounter this treatment. All you need to do is to start using feminine language to talk about yourself and to call yourself a woman. The moment I say, even as a social experiment, “Society, I am a woman, what are you going to do about it?”, I will experience this.

            Let’s get back to my initial point - where is the dialectic? The dialectic is this: on one hand, being a woman means “feeling the pressure that you have to maintain this status”. On the other hand, being a woman can also mean other various things for different people: having a vagina, having breasts, having XX chromosomes, wearing this and that clothing, etc. Different strokes for different folks, everyone has their own definitions and expectations. Hence, the more you fit into the former definition of a woman, the less you fit in the latter definitions, and vice-versa.

            This is why the more you are a woman biologically and in terms of gender roles (a feminine cisgender/biological woman who speaks in a feminine way, acts in a feminine way, dresses in a feminine way), the “less” of a woman she is, in the sense that she now experiences less pressure to maintain her status as a woman. On the other hand, the less of a woman you are biologically and in terms of gender roles (a person with male biology, masculine clothing and masculine behavior who nevertheless claims to be a woman publicly), the “more” of a woman they are, in the sense that they now will have a crowd of people angry at them because they did not make enough of an effort in proving that they are a ‘real’ woman, which is the ultimate experience of womanhood itself.

            Here is where we arrive at the “real”, unconscious definition of a woman in conservative ideology. It is not “adult human female” that drives their behaviors and actions, nor “XX chromosomes”, nor “person with vagina”. Here is the unconscious definition: a person who will never be themselves in my eyes. Conservatives constantly divide the human population into two subsets: the people whose existence and experience match circularly (“the more they are themselves, the more they are themselves in my eyes”) and the people whose existence and experience are in a contradiction/discord (“the more they prove themselves to be themselves, the less they are themselves in my eyes and vice-versa”). They have chosen to call the former group “men”, “males” or “biological males” and the latter group “women”, “females” or “biological females”. Any other stated definition based on biological essentialism is only some correlation with the real definition that has a causal effect upon their actions.

            To elaborate further, if I am not clear enough, the conservative unconscious logic is this: “we enjoy when women are feminine, we want them to keep doing it, or even better, do more of it, so as a way to incentivize this, we will threaten their status as a woman, hoping that they will keep being more and more feminine out of the fear that if they don’t, they will become a man”. It is the paradox of “exist even more or you will stop existing!”. Here are some other examples:

1.     Your boss telling you that if you don’t work harder, you’re going to be fired and stop working at all.

2.     Your school telling you that if you don’t study harder, you’re going to be expelled and stop studying at all.

3.     The CIA agent who kidnapped you telling you that if you don’t “cooperate” with them, they are going to kill you and you won’t ever get the opportunity to “cooperate” with them at all.

This is conservative ideology – behavior is incentivized through punishment, not reinforcement. And the punishment is the removal of the behavior that is to be incentivized in the first place. And it is the same when it comes to sex & gender: “if you aren’t more of a woman, you will become a man”.

So, to get back to Lacan, does the woman exist? Not in the eyes of many. Through the lens of conservative ideology, no woman is a real woman, since your existence as a woman is defined through non-existence: the more you are yourself, the less you are yourself.

Thus, when conservatives speak that “trans women are not real women”, this is not a dishonest, they just missed out the part where they behave as if cis women aren’t really “true women” either. The indirect conservative message is actually this: “neither of you two are real women, and both of you will hate yourselves for it!”.

Take a moment to examine this paragraph from Lacan:

 

“Your money or your life! If I choose the money, I lose both. If I choose life, I have life without the money, namely, a life deprived of something. I think I have made myself clear.

It is in Hegel that I have found a legitimate justification for the term alienating “vel”. What does Hegel mean by it? To cut a long story short, it concerns the production of the primary alienation, that by which man enters into the way of slavery. Your freedom or your life! If he chooses freedom, he loses both immediately — if he chooses life, he has life deprived of freedom.

(Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis”)

 

What is being shown here is that, in language, we can talk as if we are talking about disjunctions when what is really pushed down people’s throats is one option. People may use the word “or” when they don’t mean an “exclusive or” / ”XOR” (either this or either that but not both) and they don’t mean an “inclusive or” / ”OR” either (the infamous “and/or”, either this, or that, or even both). No, it is not even a choice, in fact: money or life, freedom or life. Not only you are forced into giving up your money/freedom, you also have to pretend that it was out of your own free will (“You will obey me, and you will do it out of your own free will! Not only are you forced to obey, you are also forced to enjoy it!”). Pure ideology. It is a similar situation that people under the label “women” are put in by conservative ideology: either give us your freedom, or you will stop having your existence recognized (as a woman) in the first place!

 

XII: CASTRATION ANXIETY IN CONSERVATIVES

 

            Youtuber Julian de Medeiros once explained Freud’s concept of castration anxiety like this: it is the opposite of the ghost limb syndrome¹². In ghost limb syndrome, the person loses a body part (an arm, a leg, etc.) but still feels as if it is there sometimes (maybe they experience pain in the left arm without having a left arm anymore, for example). Castration anxiety is the opposite: you have the penis but you feel like you don’t. In translating Freudian theory into Lacanian psychoanalysis, we must understand that the phallus is not (only) the male sexual organ, but a larger symbol for objects of desire (imaginary phallus), and means of obtaining them (power; symbolic phallus). Thus, castration anxiety is not a purely male phenomena, it is the universal experience of feeling “impotent”, powerless, at a loss, that you lost something.

            It is now that we see even more clearly the fact that trans women/MtFs are placed in the position of the symbolic phallus in society. At a more, rather, metaphorical level, let’s say, I explained why trans women are the symbolic phallus of sexual difference: it is the exception that crashes the system causing us to rework it in order to accommodate for the new edge case, “the programming error”, etc. However, we also speak of the symbolic phallus as “the signifier for the missing phallus”, so at the more “literal” level, let’s say, trans women often literally cut their penises off.

            Thus, in how trans women are the ultimate embodiment of castration, at both the metaphorical level (castrating, or “cutting” the signifiers of sexual difference that were tying everything together, causing chaos in the entire system), as well as at the literal level (sex-reassignment surgery), it causes anxiety in the conservative: “not only do they not fear castration, they enjoy it???”.

            This is at a clear contrast to the average conservative, which is not the embodiment of castration, but the embodiment of castration anxiety: the insecurity that if I do not make active, constant efforts to keep my status as a „man”, I will lose it. This, however, we know does not happen, since „man” is synonymous with „agender”; what is „masculine” in society is exactly that which is neutral, so the most masculine experience is doing literally nothing (we have feminine clothing and unisex clothing, feminine make-up and the unisex ‚lack of make-up’, etc.). Hence, this insecurity that you have to constantly be „manly” in order to not get your dick cut off metaphorically (castration anxiety) is unjustified in every way, you do not have to do anything to be “masculine”, if it’s that important to you for whatever reason, do nothing all day and you will be the most manly of men. The pressure that men feel to conform to masculine gender roles is real, do not get me wrong, and it is often destroying their mental health, but it does manifest as affirmation, but as negation: “do not cry, do not wear make-up, do not wear pink, do not do anything remotely feminine”.

What happens when the one fearful of castration (conservative), and the metaphorically + literally castrated (MtF) meet? The conservative who fears castration is horrified: “not only do they not make frantic desperate efforts to be a “real man”, like I do, but they do the opposite???”. This is an even bigger blow to their insecurity and it may manifest as anger and hate, which could explain the constant hatred towards trans women in society.

It is also important to notice how the conservative’s castration anxiety is not only metaphorical (“What if I accidentally have sex with one of them and I become gay, am I less of a man?”), but also even literal (“They are coming to cut the penises off of our sons!”).

 

XIII: “THE CURRENT THING”

 

The first conclusion of this essay is this: People’s actions often do not match up with their words. While the media or various personalities may be more focused on whether you are doing a strawman or not, sometimes it is irrelevant in the first place as to whether you are doing a strawman or not (as to whether your accusations are matching up their stated claims) in the first place – perhaps what they say doesn’t even matter in the end. What are their actions, instead? If they are behaving in a way that is inconsistent with what they “believe” in, if you can even call that belief, then isn’t their own behavior the ultimate strawman of their own thoughts?

The second conclusion of this essay is this: overcome “the current thing”. What is the current thing? It is whatever is trendy now. Maybe the hot political thing to debate is the pandemic and the vaccines, maybe later it is the Russia-Ukraine war, everyone forgetting that the pandemic even existed, maybe later it will be something else. But there’s one more way in which “the current thing” manifests, and that is discourse. The current thing doesn’t only come with its object of conversation (what is debated), but also its correspondent discourse, its method of conversation (how is it debated). Hence, it must be made perfectly clear that while gender dysphoria may not be a cultural phenomenon (this is a more complicated conversation and an entirely different topic), its politicization is the current thing. Gender dysphoria is an older phenomenon, but debating transgenderism and making everyone have an opinion on it is 100% the new cultural obsession that we will get bored of in a few decades.

The obvious way in which you can prove this is the existence of intersex people. Intersex people are people who were born outside the M/F biological binary. This is different from transsexual people, who were born inside the M/F biological binary, but altered their body artificially, escaping it. Yet, ultimately, both minority groups break down the M/F classic binary of sexual difference just as much. Intersex people are just as much of an “exception to the rule” as transsexual women are. Then, the question lingers, why aren’t people having hot political debates about them as well? Everything that can be debated about transgender or transexual people can be debated just as much about intersex people: what bathrooms should they enter? Should they be allowed in women’s sports? What is the role of consent in intersex children when it comes to various surgeries and procedures? Yet this is very rarely the topic of any popular debate, despite intersex people making up just as much, if not even a bigger percentage of the population. Just shows how much of a cultural fixation transgenderism is now. In a few decades we will get bored of arguing about transgender people and we might start having the same debates about intersex people and we are back to where we started. Then in a few more decades we will get bored by that, but we might have human cloning, so we will ask: is the clone of a man a “real” man? Is the clone of a woman a “real” woman? Or do we now have four sexes (non-clone male, non-clone female, clone male, clone female)? Then we’ll get tired of that as well and instead have debates about genetically engineered interspecies beings: if we manage to create cat girls, we will ask, “are they real women, or are they a third sex/gender?”. Well, cat girls will have a vagina and breasts, but they will not be able to give birth. But they also have ears and a tail, so their biology will be different from human females. Are they real women? Maybe more centuries pass and aliens will invade us and we will bother more about what bathrooms they should use as well, or if we should make separate bathrooms for them.

“The current thing” is very often part of what Zizek calls ideology. Ideology is the water surrounding the fish – hard to even realize you are in it and not hard, but impossible to escape. It presents itself as “universal”, “normality”, “objectiveness”, “facts”, “always has been”, “standard practice”, “inevitable”, “unavoidable”; but there is always some sort of hidden subjective bias or “particularity” in it. It’s what progressives do by “the science says…” and what conservatives do by “facts don’t care about your feelings”. And it must always be understood that in public conversation, it manifests not only as what is discussed, but also how it’s discussed.

With all this in mind, the question lingers – what should we do? How should we position ourselves towards “the current thing”? In “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema”, Zizek makes this point about the blue/red pill metaphor in the “Matrix” movie: he wants a third pill. The red pill will make you wake up from the simulation (from ideology) to “reality”, the blue pill will make you continue to live inside the simulation (inside ideology) while not knowing you are inside it. The third pill that Zizek wants is the pill that allows you to live inside the simulation while knowing you live inside it. The attitude is this: I will continue to live in the “fake”, while knowing I am doing it.

What does this mean about “the current thing”? One common attitude that people take towards it is to intentionally be “outside the loop”: stop consuming all this media, stop debating this, I do not care about the current thing, I will live my “real life” without talking about what you are making me talk about, or in the worst case, go into the woods where the current thing can’t reach me. This is the attitude of the “red” pill¹³, and it is equivalent with what we call in psychoanalysis “psychotic foreclosure”. The other common attitude that people take towards it is to be “inside the loop” without realizing it, always talking about the current thing inside the confines of the current thing, borrowing from it both what is talked about, as well as how it is talked about. This is the attitude of the “blue” pill, and it is equivalent with what we call in psychoanalysis “neurotic repression”.

There is a third way, equivalent with what we call “perverted disavowal” in psychoanalysis: talk about the current thing outside the confines of the current thing. In other words, engage in it, but keep a healthy distance from it. What this means is talking about the same topics, but with your own rules. What shall be borrowed from the current thing is only what is discussed, not also how it is discussed. When it comes to what is discussed, you engage with the current thing, but when it comes to how it is discussed, you bring in your own material. In this way, you are simultaneously both “inside” and “outside” the ‘loop’: you are engaging in the conversation, but also in the meta-conversation, in the “conversation about the conversation”. You only borrow the conversation itself, but you do not conform to the meta-rules about how the conversation should take place.

In a way, if we call the “blue pill” of repression being “inside the loop”, and the “red pill” of foreclosure being “outside the loop” (don’t know, don’t care) – then this third attitude of disavowal that I am proposing here could be described as being “over the loop”. So, be over the loop: engage in the current thing while looking at it from above, not letting it absorb you. Make sure that it is you which has power over the current thing, do not let the current thing have the power over you. The “red pill” psychotic foreclosure (being “out of the loop”, indifferent towards politics, etc.) does not have power over the current thing but also does not submit its power to the current thing. The “blue pill” neurotic repression (being “inside the loop”) has more power over the current thing but also submits its power to it (a state of “mutual influence”). The third way of perverted disavowal (“over” the loop) is the way of not making this compromise in the first place: you do not need to give up your power to have power over it – hence, it is the sweet spot where you keep watch over the current thing without letting it absorb you. Think of “the current thing” of political debates, or the “loop” (ideology) as a boxing ring. You would not want to be inside the ring (blue pill), or outside the loop (outside the stadium) – you want to be with the spectators, to know what is happening, but from your own perspective, without getting punched.

It is exactly in the same way we need to view racism. One popular way of approaching issues of racism is psychotic foreclosure, the "red" pill (let's stop talking about racism and it will disappear, I don't know and don't care about it, if I don't see the problem, it's not real, let's just ignore the issue, etc.). Another popular way is neurotic repression, the "blue" pill: to talk about racism and race, discussing racism through the very lens of race, i.e., through the lens of the very system that was invented in order to be racist (and this way is the way that, ironically, is more racist that the very racism it claims to fight, the "fighting racism with racism" kind, it is "the medicine which creates the illness"). We should reject both approaches: the third way, that of perverted disavowal (being "over" the loop) is to talk about racism without talking about race. Our approach should be "Yes, racism is real, a real issue that affects people, but race is not, so I will analyze your issue but not by your own rules, I do not need to use your system of grouping people in order to understand the problem it is causing". Another way to put it is this: we can talk about Nazism without talking about Aryans (disavowal), so why can't we fight White supremacy without talking about White people all the time?

This article could be considered an attempt at this third way, when it comes to sexual difference. Whether it is a successful attempt or not is not up to me but up to the reader to decide. But what it attempts is analyzing gender ideology (of any kind, progressive or conservative) outside the confines of the usual discourse around it. The topic is the same (gender, transgender people, etc.), the way of analyzing it is different (ex: “How about we don’t analyze what people say about gender, how about we instead analyze what people do?”?” or the very concept of linguistic positioning that I introduced).

I hope you enjoyed reading this article, have a good day, and be mindful of ideology.

 

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 FOOTNOTES:

1: This interview is one place in which I heard something like this, I don’t remember the exact time-stamp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cndA-al0bkQ

2: The process of pushing a subjective biased statement as “objective” is closely tied to Zizek’s concept of “ideology”: a clear political agenda that is passed off as “universal”, “standard practice”, “normality”, “objectiveness”, “unavoidable”, “inevitable” etc. It is what progressives often do when they say “the science says…” and when conservatives say “facts don’t care about your feelings”.

3: Transgender activist Jennifer Finney Boylan once quite correctly pointed out in a non-circular way that sexual orientation is who you want to go to bed with and gender identity is who you want to go to bed as. It would have been fabulous if progressives stopped at this.

4: More on the topic here: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2022/08/introduction-to-judgment-means-to-end.html

5: In behaviorist terms, when a stimulus is both reinforcing and punishing: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2022/07/blog-post.html

6: Transsexual = a transgender person after starting their medical/physical transition

7: What Zizek calls “taking the substance out of the substance” is whenever an unintended consequence/side-effect of something becomes the new purpose/essence of the thing. Programmers have a joke about it: “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” (coffee without caffeine, soda without sugar, beer without alcohol, sex without reproduction, smartphones that you cannot make calls from, watches that you don’t know how to read the time of and that you wear only for looks, etc.).

8: HRT = short-hand for “Hormone-Replacement Therapy”, when someone who was born male takes estrogen or someone who was born female takes testosterone.

9: More on unconscious sado-masochism: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2022/08/unconscious-sado-masochism-chronically.html

10: This is how any Hegelian dialectic works, as two “opposites” that reinforce each other instead of cancelling each other out. For example: when you lift weights at the gym, is the weight an obstacle to your goals or an aid to your goals? It is both: it is an obstacle to your short-term goal of lifting the weight, and an aid in your long-term goal of gaining muscle. Therefore, we must not think of it as a spectrum where the more you are on one end of the axis, the further you are from the opposite end, like in personality tests or political compass tests (“the more of an obstacle it is, the less of an aid it is, and vice-versa”). NO, it is the other way around: the more of an obstacle it is, the more of an aid it is, and the less of an obstacle it is, the less of an aid it is! Similarly enough, love and hate is a dialectic in conservative ideology: the more they love women, the more they them; the more they love men, the more they hate them.

11: Because they place women in the archetype of the “imaginary phallus” from Lacan, which is also known as the “object of desire”. Guess what is the equivalent for “the imaginary phallus / the object of desire” in Jungian psychology? The eternal child (“puer aeternus”). What all three have in common (object of desire / imaginary phallus / eternal child) is that it is a place of being objectified, it is a person without agency over themselves, who cannot consent about anything without an authority doing it for them (a parent being responsible for their child and having power over them, a man being responsible for a woman who is thought of not being able to make decisions on her own, etc.).

12: Julian de Medeiros - Guide to Žižek: Masculinity is Fake (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJYbNGhxsTs)

13: By the “red pill”, I am referencing the one in the Matrix movie, it is unrelated to “The Red Pill” movement about misogynistic dating advice for men and the like.