Preamble: mostly talking about socially learned gender dysphoria in this post, separate from the medical body dysphoria people sometimes have from birth. I want to define three types of dysphoria to hopefully give you a clue as to where I am coming from:
Types of dysphoria: social dysphoria (misrecognition),
aesthetic dysphoria (norm conformity),
somatic dysphoria (body-schema mismatch)
Do you ever have a sneaking suspicion that the term “gender affirming” care is sneaking a little Telos into the conversation? To affirm one’s gender inherently implies the target gender is some objective thing that one can change into, but this seems contradictory to the idea that gender is simply a social construct, not a representation of reality.
What is the utility of the ‘trans’ prefix in a social context today? Clearly there is very real utility when it comes to medical treatment, and legal protections, but it also seems contradictory to the belief that trans women… are women. We don’t say someone who is nationalized is a “Nationalizing Citizen”, we don’t consider christian converts to be “Converting” Christians… They're just christians.
The trans prefix, used in a social setting, only semantically exists to distinguish Trans Women from Cis Women, which actually reinforces the concept of a hierarchical gender binary.
This doesn’t even apply to exclusively trans ideology. Someone getting gender affirming care because they want larger/smaller breasts is increasing their womanly-ness in a hierarchical fashion. They could probably quantify how more “womanly” they feel, but obviously that cannot be objective. This may be a form of body dysphoria, but to say it is gender dysphoria seems like you’re giving a lot of weight to the word gender. There is nothing inherently found in the definition of a “woman” that dictates the form of their breasts. To categorize a woman as “with breasts” is to make all women without breasts inherently less womanly… nonsense.
This ties pretty handily into Sartre’s Le Regard. What we are actually trying to achieve in our “gender” affirming care, is not to get ourselves to some Ideal state of a Woman… it is shaping our bodies to be what Society’s gaze deems to be a woman. Only through killing this gaze will we ever actually be liberated from these social definitions of Gender. Now we can either kill the gaze by stabbing all of our eyes out, or we can get rid of the gender framework as a concept. Will the gender framework wither away while capitalism is still there to reinforce it? Not sure on that. Stay tuned…
Talking with some trans comrades with medical body dysphoria, they’ve explained to me that “sex reassignment surgery” is actually a better definition of what they need to feel better than any form of gender dysphoria. They actually feel as though they are missing their third leg. This to me suggests that a great amount of dysphoria felt today is due to Le Regard… which I guess is just a nerd ass way of saying “social construct” The root cause of this pain being the gender framework that society continues to uphold, even as it relentlessly twists its own form to stay relevant.
Every time I try to discuss this in less radical spaces people seem to be really opposed to Gender Abolition as a concept… so bless Hexbear.