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- Gender Dysphoria Contradicts Both Conservatives and Liberals
Gender Dysphoria Contradicts Both Conservatives and Liberals
One of my favorite things to observe and study is how reality breaks models, and Gender Dysphoria is a strong example.
Liberals and conservatives often have extreme views around gender identity that conform to their own rigid life view.
Conservatives think boys are boys and girls are girls, and that any time you see one acting like the other it’s because they were poisoned by bad parenting, bad culture, or Satanas—the demonic angel cast out of heaven by the creator of the universe.
Many liberals are now fond of thinking the exact opposite, which is that there’s no such thing as boys and girls, and that any time you see someone acting like one or the other it’s because of bad parenting, bad culture, and ultimately the institutionalized sexism that caused both.
Gender Dysphoria shatters both of these myths with a single backhand.
It shatters the conservative model because many of the children who experience this suffering the strongest are those who have the most gender-aligned culture in their lives. They’re told from birth that boys do boy things and girls do girl things, and their entire culture and existence reinforces that message via family, friends, peers, music, etc.
In short, if it were all about the culture, you wouldn’t have Gender Dysphoria in places where the culture strongly pushes gender role models.
On the other side, it shatters the liberal model because the fact that someone could be one thing physically and feel extreme suffering because they’re not the other clearly indicates that there are two different things in the first place.
In short, if there’s no difference between boys in girls at a fundamental level, then it wouldn’t matter to little girls or boys which gender they were, and they wouldn’t experience the pain and struggle of being the wrong one on the outside.
Summary
If it were all culture then you wouldn’t have the effect in places where people only get the programming of their external gender.
If there weren’t strong differences in how people want to look or behave based on being masculine or feminine, then it wouldn’t matter to anyone which they were externally.
The only conclusion that seems to fit here is that there are obviously core differences in how people want to look and behave based on how masculine or feminine they are, and that trying to oppose this truth by willing the opposite is both futile and harmful.
There is such a thing as masculine—which produces the desire to look and behave a certain way—and there is such a thing as feminine—which produces the desire to look and behave another way. And it appears abundantly clear from people expressing gender traits almost immediately after birth that this is a fundamental biological reality.
Also, if it weren’t true that the genders want to emote in different ways then you wouldn’t have millions of people expressing overwhelming relief to finally look and behave in the opposite role.
The gender politics that we see in both forced gay conversion therapy and in attempts to remove the concept of gender differences are mistaken in the same way: they oppose obvious truth because they don’t want to accept the policy changes that would follow if they admitted they were wrong.
If conservatives are wrong (which they are) they would have to accept that some kids are actually the opposite gender than they appear on the outside. And if liberals are wrong (which they are) they would have to accept that there is a biological foundation to differences in male and female behavior, and that it might be ok for some of those differences to play out in culture and society.
Neither side wants that, and that’s why they oppose the evidence.
Notes
When I say “conservatives” and “liberals” I’m referring to the subset of those groups who hold these traditional or mainstream views of these topics. There are obviously many who might self-apply these labels who don’t hold these same views on gender.
This in no way says that this is a binary issue. Hormones aren’t binary, and neither is culture, so it seems obvious that everyone exists somewhere on one or more scales related to these issues.