"trans is not the same as gay"

It all started with this image, posted earlier:

1950s, not 1950's. Hyphenate the phrasal adjective body-altering. Comma after Thankfully.

My buddy Charles commented:

Come on... you can't tell me you really support that first [meme]. You and I both know that trans is not the same as gay.

I promised a reply, so here it is.

Is there a disanalogy here, or isn't there? The people using chemicals on homosexuals decades ago (and even today) were most likely moral/religious conservatives. I'm sure left-liberals back then would have agreed that chemical treatment in an attempt to turn a homosexual into a heterosexual was A Bad Thing. Nowadays, though, it's the left-liberals who are advocating for chemical treatment for trans people. If anything, it would seem both sides have altered their stances on chemical treatments (or maybe they haven't; maybe only one side changed). Of course, researching this online is no use since search engines have a leftward slant and are likely to provide left-leaning search results that brand "conversion therapy" as pseudoscience—and frankly, I agree that such "therapy" is pseudoscience—but are unlikely to say the same about left-leaning search results touting chemically enhanced "gender-affirming care," which the left will claim is based on solid science backed by study after study. Personally, I'm not convinced. We'll get into why in a bit.

The next phase of this ongoing argument is when the left contends the 1950s-era "conversion therapists" were illegitimately attempting to alter people's sexual orientation while today's doctors merely wish to affirm an already-ingrained orientation—not the same thing at all! There's your disanalogy! In other words, the left argues, it matters why the chemical treatment is being done: forcible conversion based on pseudoscience or legitimate succor based on real science.

I'd agree with Charles, at least superficially, that "trans is not gay" (so would Dave Chappelle) but you do have to admit that the border between the two conceptual labels is fuzzy. The 90s argument was that, if you were gay, then your orientation was hard-wired that way. After all, if you're hetero, did you choose to be hetero? You didn't. You were born that way. By parity of reasoning, people didn't suddenly choose to be gay or, more crassly, choose to "go gay." For decades, I've found this argument convincing. Hard-wiring is real. My gay little brother didn't choose to be gay. But at the same time, the labels gay and trans can be seen as kindreds insofar as they refer to orientations.

Unfortunately, after all of the decades-old ructions about homosexuality—which young conservatives these days couldn't care less about because they generally accept the now-venerable party line about hard-wired sexuality (it's the older conservatives who still balk at things like gay marriage, which they refuse to see as "real" marriage)—the trans crowd comes along and offers, from my remote and admittedly confused point of view, an equivocal message in the form of two distinct schools of thought: On one hand, one school of thought says that being trans is also a hard-wired orientation. I can understand this. But on the other hand, the other school of thought says that while your chromosomal sex might be "assigned" (presumably by nature if not by God), you are free to choose your sexual identity. And identity overlaps significantly with orientation. From my perch, it's a tossup as to which message is louder these days, and the question of whether gay and trans are disanalogous rests on which message ultimately wins out.

I've written respectfully about the "hard wiring" crowd: if people really have a bone-deep, cellular conviction that they are in the wrong body, to the point where they're willing to get surgery and take hormones to alter their physical selves, then my hat is off to them for having the courage of their convictions. And if these people—the ones in the hard-wiring school—are otherwise rational in their everyday lives, I can't say that they're mentally ill. Let them live their best lives as long as they're not competing in sports of their still chromosomally opposite sex (by which I really mean: trans women in cis women's sports*). But as you'll see below, my views on this are evolving, especially regarding the it's-not-wiring crowd.

I'm also not totally convinced of the innocent beneficence of the scientific community and its chemical "help" for trans people, especially the it's-not-wiring school of trans people. I'm not convinced that such "help" shouldn't raise suspicions, for any number of reasons from Big Pharma's love of money onward. While I think that trans people, as long as they're of an age to do so, should be free to choose their path in life, one area where my thinking has been changing is the topic of it's-not-wiring trans folks and their mental health.

If we focus on suicide rates, two paradoxical results seem clear: (1) the majority of trans people experience post-transition satisfaction (i.e., only a minority of trans folks regret the decision to transition, or so say the left-leaning online sources), and (2) suicide rates of trans people are far higher than for non-trans ("cis") people. The stats for suicidal ideation, attempted suicides, and successful suicides in the trans community are frighteningly high.** Is this the result of ingrained mental instability, chemicals, or a combination of factors? I would need to delve more deeply into what the studies say (keeping in mind the ambient leftist bias in modern "science"), but it would be premature for me to rule out the effect of chemical treatments on mental stability. True, maybe there's no connection at all: maybe the high post-transition satisfaction rates mean the chemicals (hormones, etc.) are doing their job. But then, how do you explain the high suicide rates?

All of this is fairly muddled, partly because I've merely scratched the surface of this topic and partly because the topic itself seems to be an evolving, amorphous thing. So while I might agree on a superficial level that trans is not gay, I'm not sure that I or anyone else has license to declare there to be a neat and clean separation between the two. Given that vagueness, I think the meme I slapped up speaks to its crowd of supporters, and any memes going in the other direction (send 'em my way!) speak to their crowd of supporters. The debate goes on.

So your takeaway from the above frazzled musing should be:

• True, there might be a disanalogy between chemical "conversion therapy" for gay people and chemical therapy for trans people, who often choose to have treatments. (I say often because the vague word trans covers everything from people who merely think and act as if they're in the wrong body to people who go all-out and get body-altering surgery plus hormone treatments for hair loss—i.e., facial hair, etc.—and the growth/shrinkage of sex-linked traits.) However—
• —while the left-leaning science and media factions have been quick to denounce chemical conversion therapy as pseudoscientific (and I agree), they don't seem to see any problem with the chemical side of trans treatments despite the extremely high suicide rates in trans communities.
• Trans folks seem to subdivide into two major schools: (1) the hard-wiring school ("I can't help how I feel") and the not-wiring school (you can choose your sexual identity/orientation: if you think you're X, then you are X). I'm much more sympathetic to the hard-wiring school because it's consistent with what I know from personal experience, having a gay brother.
• There might not be much or any correlation between chemical treatment ("body-altering chemicals" per the meme) and trans suicide rates, but as long as chemical treatments are part of the transitional process for so many trans folks, then the possibility of there being a connection can't be dismissed.
• Reconciling high trans suicide rates with low post-transition regret rates is, for me, impossible. Someone somewhere has to be lying about something.
• In the end, I still think the meme could be making a point. As long as the left refuses to budge on the issue of the chemical side of "gender-affirming care," though, people on the left will continue to see their therapies as benevolent and therefore disanalogous with homosexual conversion therapy.

One further, quasi-philosophical point: homosexuals who received (or are receiving) conversion therapy—right or wrong—do so by choice. No one holds a gun to their head. If so, what's the difference between choosing conversion therapy and choosing trans therapy? You might counterargue (as Google AI does) that homosexuals undergoing conversion therapy are under immense social pressure to do so (from friends and family and community), which makes their "choice" an illusion. But I could argue that trans folks live in an environment where they face their own sort of social or sociocultural pressure—one where alternative possibilities ("maybe I'm not really trans") are rejected outright in favor of a narrow vision that corrals the trans person into the operating room and post-op chemical therapy. There's no social pressure to be trans? There's no social pressure on rich, out-of-touch Hollywood stars to proudly show off their trans kids? How many of those kids think they're trans because their parents (read: mothers) kept telling them for years that they were trans? Why the explosion of trans kids today? Because it's only now socially acceptable to reveal one's true nature, or because it's simply a trendy "choice" (if young kids can make such "choices" for themselves) enforced by social pressure? And if we're moving in the direction of choose-your-orientation, what does that mean for the generations of homosexuals who had fought so hard to be accepted as being "born that way"? Are we now saying they weren't born that way, that they had, in fact, made a conscious choice? If so, that plays right into homophobic religious conservatives' hands (reminder: not all religious conservatives are homophobic).

But as always, when I step back from this trans issue, which ultimately doesn't concern me much personally, I can say I've been anticipating the increasingly polymorphic nature of human sexuality for decades now—thanks to a long, sustained diet of science fiction, where all sorts of sexual permutations and combinations are explored in hypothetical environments. Conservatives go nuts on this issue, but I've seen this as a long time coming, and it's just another example of why the gods punished Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans, who gave birth to technology, which has proven to be both angel and demon. Humans will play with fire—in this case, their genes. It might go well, but more likely, it'll end in disaster. The gods' punishment for messing with creation.

Yet here's the thing about sex and having two sexes: biologically speaking, humans are sexually dimorphic, not a spectrum.*** Both sides have monoploid cells—spermatozoa and ova—that must come together to form a diploid. So for there to be a "third sex," you have to show that there's a new way in which three sexually different people are necessary for conception. Ever since the appearance of hominids, we've only ever needed A to get with B. For there to be a "C" sex, you need to show how A and B are incomplete without C. So for C to exist and make sense, A and B would have to fundamentally change as well. And you can't change them, because the system is closed, having already reached an evolutionary optimum: A and B have been sufficient since forever. That's just biological reality. 

All that being said, I can imagine clever genetic engineers in the future creating humans or humanoids out of whole cloth who must form sexual triples in order to reproduce. So who knows? Maybe the dream of a third sex (or, really, a separate set of three interlocking sexes) is achievable. But it won't happen in my lifetime. As for "nonbinary" folks (i.e., not A and not B, therefore not half of a reproductive pair)... I think we have such people already—they've been around all this time. They're reproductively irrelevant, and we call them sterile.

__________

*Ever notice how it's never the other way around? Gee, I wonder why.

**Google AI, essentially a fancy search engine, says this:

Transgender people, both adults and youth, face significantly higher rates of suicide attempts and ideation than their cisgender counterparts in the United States. Research has not focused on measuring suicide deaths specifically among transgender people, so most statistics reflect attempts and ideation. The elevated risk is often linked to "minority stress," which includes societal discrimination, violence, and rejection.

Suicide statistics for transgender adults

Studies from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law provide a direct comparison of suicidal behaviors between trans and cisgender adults. 

Contemplating suicide: Transgender adults are seven times more likely to contemplate suicide compared to cisgender adults.

Attempting suicide: Over 40% of transgender adults in the U.S. have attempted suicide in their lifetime, a rate four times higher than among cisgender adults.

Recent attempts: A July 2023 study found that 7% of transgender adults had attempted suicide in the past year, compared to just 0.4% of cisgender individuals in a 2022 study.

Suicide statistics for transgender youth

Data from The Trevor Project's annual national surveys on LGBTQ+ youth mental health show a large disparity in suicide risk among adolescents. For the 2024 survey, which covers suicide attempts in the past year: 

Transgender and nonbinary youth: 14% of transgender and nonbinary youth attempted suicide.

Cisgender LGBTQ+ youth: 7% of cisgender LGBTQ+ youth attempted suicide.

Further breakdown by identity:

Transgender boys: 18% attempted suicide. 

Transgender girls: 14% attempted suicide. 

Nonbinary youth: 13% attempted suicide.

Disparities between trans and cisgender youth are even more pronounced in federal data. In a first-of-its-kind 2023 federal survey of U.S. high school students: 

• 1 in 4 transgender students reported a suicide attempt.
• 11% of cisgender girls and 5% of cisgender boys reported a suicide attempt.

Factors associated with increased suicide risk

Research consistently shows that experiences of minority stress increase suicide risk for transgender people. These factors include: 

Discrimination and victimization: Studies indicate that transgender adults who experience discrimination or mistreatment at school, work, or in healthcare settings report a higher prevalence of suicidal thoughts and attempts.

Lack of social support: Transgender people with a strong support network, including from family and peers, have lower rates of suicidal thoughts and attempts.

Mental health care access: A lack of access to gender-affirming medical care and mental health services contributes to higher rates of suicidal ideation.

Anti-transgender laws: Recent state-level anti-transgender laws have been associated with statistically significant increases in past-year suicide attempts among transgender and nonbinary youth.

***And as I've written many times before, don't talk to me about supermales (XYY chromosomes) and chimerism (one body containing a combination of cells of both sexes) as if these were "exceptions" to the binary. They aren't. Being a supermale just means you're still male; having chimerism just means you possess traits of both sexes—you're not a third sex.