A good friend, who could probably write at least this much in a cleaner prose style on the subject, asked what my thoughts were on the current swirl of issues surrounding several different things classed under the heading “transgender” in our current public discourse.
My answer, slightly edited:
What makes it really hard is that this one gets all the way to the bottom of “why metaphysics matters.” I’m not sure I have a lot of specific insight, but I’ll see what I can do.
I think I would just start by pointing out that we have really good evidence that giving people what they want doesn’t make them happy, in a case like this:
And I think there’s a pretty straightforward line of reasoning from that evidence back to what I would consider the default position, anyway: that the complex of organs, hormones, etc. that make up biological sex have a reality that is not peripheral to our total human being–it is neither unimportant nor transcendentally important, but essential. Social constructions and individual psychological/social development surrounding biological sex have a great deal to do with how that essential humanity, which is always sexed, is lived and understood integrally or in a state of fracture and alienation. Obviously, [here original sin], we do all experience fracture and alienation–and human compassion and divine mercy alike orient themselves to integrate each of us within ourselves and among the various societies of which we become a part.
What is dangerous, however, is to confuse integration of the self with doing whatever the fractured and alienated self wants. In Catholic Catechism-speak for same-sex attraction we have the term “disordered,” here, though given 20th Century clinical terms I feel it is important to talk about the way one thing is “ordered to” another–has the other for its telos–when using it. We don’t just mean “deviant” in a pejorative sense ( http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c2a6.htm#2351 and 2357-9 ). One might say “out-of-line” or “disoriented” as near synonyms.
What is necessary, perhaps, is to unconfuse several situations in which we find difficulty in helping people with disordered desires. This is where people get offended, I think. (I’m going to say a lot of things you know, because being systematic helps me reduce my fear of being misunderstood or just being a jerk.)
Disordered desires can be on the order of starvation or desperation that result from deprivation of a good. Someone who’s been traumatized by starvation (or by yo-yo dieting) has both neurotransmitter and metabolic urges that are not suitable for daily living, and has a “story” that makes it hard to argue against those urges. Once an eating disorder has reached the dangerous stage, even someone in the process of recovery is pretty much perpetually struggling with that. In this case, with the aid of divine grace, we have to help people realize that the “story” doesn’t fit the circumstances, and help them practice doing self-consciously what someone else might do more automatically; and if there is some reasonable way to make it more automatic, we may help (cognitive behavioral therapy has some limits, but seems sane).
But note that in this kind of situation, we are dealing with a known good and a disordered desire; we cannot use the evidence of the desire as grounds for inferring the good. That creates a vicious, misguided circle (“I must always need food because I always feel hungry” –> diabetes).
And even in a crisis, we know that urges need to be governed (one doesn’t tell someone who has just collapsed from heat prostration to “drink as much as you want” on day one).
Disordered desires can be on the order of addiction, as well, which is basically the same as traumatic response to deprivation except that there is not necessarily a known good and deprivation is not necessarily the cause of the trauma. In fact, excess is likely to be the cause, as well as certain substances that mimic things we need/want and are easier to get (or fit our “story” better). I am happily not addicted to cigarettes, but I did smoke enough of them back in grad school days that thinking about them right now reminds me that I would like very much the feeling of ability to concentrate and ignore the asthmatic irritability of my chest, a feeling smoking cigarettes gave me (while, of course, exacerbating almost every one of the problems they temporarily soothed). There’s a key habit-forming mechanism that is triggered by any behavior that we perceive as a “reward,” and when those rewards are ill-adapted to our biological being and social situation, they lead us into vicious cycles.
These cases are both easier and more difficult, because in cases of addiction straightforward abstinence from the “reward” behavior may be possible. AA works because AA creates a social situation in which avoiding the addiction trigger is rewarded, and it works for people who are able to become humble enough to accept their need for that social situation. Part of the reason Jesus Christ did not choose to save each of us individually, but in a Body, is that He created us as social animals in the first place.
More difficult, of course, because when a disordered desire has become one of the major drives in life, it is biologically very hard to counterprogram it; and because some things people get addicted to are, in their place, good things (even necessary things, like sugar) or incredibly hard to avoid (like, in our debased culture, porn).
And as the porn example shows, addictive things are often twisted variants of essentially good things; that “twist” and the addictive potential have everything to do with a lot of cases of psychological dysfunction about sex, from marital sexual dissatisfaction to gender dysphoria. Untangling the “twist” is so hard that often even a dissatisfying abstinence is less traumatic–I don’t say it’s better, just easier.
[a lot of porn-addiction discussion frothed around this confessional incident–this is actually a follow-up to his first: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/06/was-i-actually-addicted-to-internet-pornography/276619/ ]
Disordered desires can be the direct results of personal sin–typically by deliberately or negligently causing one of those first two when it is perfectly obvious that doing so is wrong. Masturbation, for example, short-circuits the workings of sexual biology (which tie in to every other part of our biology); it invokes the same “reward” mechanism. The shortfall between this “reward” and its proper aim provokes a need for a self-justifying “story,” and this “story” falsifies our self-understanding. Once this falsification becomes part of an addiction cycle, it is likely to diverge wildly from the facts of our existence. Obviously this and porn together create a toxic mix.
Disordered desires can also be the results of “faulty wiring,” which although it does partake of the character of original sin (like all of our built-in occasions of sin, our concupiscence) must be plainly distinguished from any consequences of personal sin. As we all know by now, there are a variety of factors that can predispose someone to alcoholism. There is a modest but real amount of evidence that same-sex attraction in males is partially caused by epigenetic factors (because there’s a strong birth-order effect), though as of the last time I looked over the state of the evidence (a few years, now) there was no evidence–and a dearth of studies–dealing with same-sex attraction in females.
Even desires disordered by “faulty wiring,” however, either promote the integral good of body and soul (in which case they’re not disordered, after all) or they contribute to fracture and alienation within and among humans. In some cases, we will discover that a tendency (perhaps a “soft” masculinity, or Asperger’s, or pronounced asexuality, etc.) is not “faulty wiring” or social deviancy, but is just difference among humans.
Even then, sometimes a great deal of mutual adjustment is required to integrate someone with a pronounced difference–it is not realistic or just to demand that everyone pretend that all humans, no matter how unusual, are *interchangeable* in society. That we have to adjust to each other’s difference is both a cost and one of the goods of society.
In many cases, we will discover that “faulty wiring” influences toward a whole range of behaviors and desires, but that some of those are sinful, and that sin-exacerbated falsification of the self–even addiction–has created a false “story” around the sufferer. Obviously, any trauma (including, likely, abuse) that someone who feels sexually “odd” may have suffered is likely to justify not only overreaction (as in cases of deprivation) but positive defiance. Clearly we have to deal with exacerbating factors as we come to them, but in order to do so, we will have to remember that nobody is helped by having self-justifying “stories” enabled by well-intentioned but cheap/easy substitutes for compassion (in fact, taking that short circuit past compassion to enabling becomes its own kind of vicious cycle).
And in some cases–and here take it from an epileptic, asthmatic, now arthritic fellow with painfully bad arches and multiple other health problems, who had traumatic childhood experiences being bullied at school, that I both understand the feelings of some people and would not dream of trying to set up an exchange rate between their suffering and mine–there are people who find that some really destructive desire or preoccupation remains a constant struggle even when they are really confident their intentions are pure. That’s just plain suffering, and it’s terrible, and we should be kind and help them to compound the good, not the harmful, in their lives.
And only after we go through all those cases, in roughly descending order of prevalence, do we get to the very tiny number of cases that people who claim “gender is assigned at birth” try to rest their argument on–people with atypical or partially unformed organs. Obviously, the trauma frequently experienced by those born this way in later life is greatly exacerbated by the “surgical fix” and the hyper-attention to “making” the child have a particular sex, with drugs and all, that goes with it. (Just as obviously, this trauma contraindicates intentionally doing this to biologically typical children for ideological reasons!) So it probably is quite important to oppose, in most cases, the literal surgical assignment of gender–mutilation of healthy atypical tissue to seem more “typical”–and to promote care and understanding in families and societies where these extremely rare people dwell. Treating a very real physical anomaly as a mere disposable example in an ideological drive to put every element of our anatomy at the command of the atomic individual rendered naked to the totalizing secular regime, however, is in my mind an insanely cruel and abusive practice of the kind that only a Pol Pot or an American secular academic could come up with.
As I see it, my goal as a teacher–like the goals of parents, or pastors, or good neighbors–is always to promote the integral good of each human in my care, which always includes due concern for the common good.
Obviously, a real *teachable* and *intergenerational* communication on these things requires getting down to the nexus of biological being and the formal principle–the soul–of a free human creature. We will have to quit oscillating between “it’s all determined by physical laws, ergo moral judgments are just evolutionary byblows” and “it’s the thought that counts, so technology trumps biology.” Challenge one is getting people who affirm both of those things with alarming regularity to tear down the wall in their brains that permits them to ignore the fact that those statements are mutually exclusive, not legitimate dialectical steps. They are the swinging of the pendulum, and we had all better hope there are rats in this pit.
