There are still a few of those tools around. Currently, my favourite one is Pixton, which has a free version with horrible avatars (and uses Flash, which will be discontinued later this year) as well as a new-generation tool with vector graphics that has contemporary-looking cartoon characters — in fact, these are very similar to the style used by the last incarnation of Bitstrips, shortly when they shut down their comic-drawing tool and replaced it with Bitmoji. To be honest, I like the look of Pixton’s characters slightly more, but obviously it’s all a question of personal taste…

Sadly for me, though, the non-free Pixton version is… well, not free! It allows you to do a few trials with limited content to get you going and drooling for more; unlike Bitstrips, which allowed you access to all content and all character poses and expressions, as well as design your own (inside the tool itself) and share it with others, Pixton is much more limited, although the fully unlocked version will come pretty close to what Bitstrips offered. Unfortunately, it will set you back some US$99 per year, which is more than I can afford for casually doing the odd comic strip when I’m in the mood. There is only the free version left — the one with the ugly avatars.

I have no clue what ‘pricing model’ I’d be willing to accept (probably none, at this stage); in any case, Pixton is also changing the way their free version is going to work — because it also uses Flash and it looks like they’re not going to replace it by something else and keep offering it for free. Instead, after replying to one of their surveys, it seems that they’ll use only the vector-based, non-Flash editor version around, but somehow limit even more how people can use it for free. We’ll see. In the case of webcomics, I’d say that visual impact is important, thus the move from ugly characters with a Flash engine behind them to a visually more contemporary look using vector technology (SVG) with a non-Flash editor is the way to go.

Here is a sample of what you can do with Pixton. It should be super-sharp both on a desktop computer, a tablet, or a smartphone. Yay for vector graphics!

Since I last wrote on my blog, I’ve lived in four different apartments… moving three times in less than 10 months! I know, it sounds awful, but the only reason for those multiple moves was… bad timing! Let me explain briefly: after my dad died, I sold the tiny apartment where I used to live and moved back to the City (where all conveniences are available at the distance of a 5-minute walk — even public transportation!) with wife & cats. Only… the timings were all wrong! There is a concept called ‘bridge loaning’ where a bank sort of holds your new home as escrow so that you can safely sell the old one, do all needed restoration & improvement work, and move in leisure. Unfortunately, that financial service is not available in most (if not all) banks around here — they certainly know about it, they just don’t offer the service…

So what this meant was selling the old house while at the same time buying a new one, and renting a place to live while the restoration work was underway. That was the original plan at least. But it didn’t happen that way, mostly because I bought the new place with cash (and not a mortgage!) but the money I had from my father was not enough — I needed part of what I got from the sale of the old house first. Well, I’m not going to dwell upon the details, but everything went wrong in the worst possible way (Murphy’s Law!), I ‘lost’ the apartment we wished to buy because I didn’t have all the money available yet, then, when we finally started looking at other places, the original owner wondered if we had already bought something else, because — for various personal reasons — they didn’t manage to sell the apartment we wanted… so we could still buy it if we wished. Of course, the money I had given as deposit would be lost (because I failed to fulfil the timeline set in the contract…), so the place would actually be bought for a higher price than before, but… it would eventually solve all our troubles (we did really enjoy that apartment!). So we went ahead… but in the meantime, the place we had rented temporarily from a friend’s sister-in-law was not available for the amount of time we needed, so we need to move once more… spending in total ten months or so of rent, waiting for finally being able to move to the new home.

Whew! No, it wasn’t my easiest year by far. Now, fortunately, all that mess is over, we’re in the new place — about a year after we first saw it! — and slowly (very slowly!) we fell back into our routine…

The main change from our previous routine is basically having access to all amenities and public transportation (the subway) practically across the street. This is important because, if you remember my earlier posts, my wife does not drive (and now that self-driving cars are just around the corner, she completely gave up the idea of getting a driver’s license), which meant that I was her personal chauffeur (or rather, Uber driver — she would message me and I’d go pick her up wherever she happened to be). She would mostly need me to drive her to work, to university, and to go shopping for food… which would practically take all my spare time. This was incredibly tough on me and I didn’t cease to complain to my psychologist about it!

Now, however, things are a bit easier. We barely use the car these days — 99% of what we need on a regular basis is available, as said, within a 5-minute-walk-radius (and this includes more esoteric things, like the day I wanted to buy a new keyboard — not a computer keyboard, but rather one to play the piano! — and I found an amazing shop nearby. By mere coincidence, across the street where we live now, there is a recording studio… a very discreet one, we didn’t notice it until we read some signs posted on their doors… small world indeed!). We mostly use the car to drive to my mother-in-law (as well as my father-in-law too, of course… he sadly passed away a month ago. Long story. Really long story…); it remains parked within sight of our wonderful veranda most of the week. Sometimes, of course, there might be an ’emergency’ requiring the car; and although I can easily go to my psychologist by public transportation, I take three times as much to reach his place (it’s not far away; it’s just that public transportation around here is not necessarily the best option in terms of speed); because most of the time I’ve spent way too much time in ‘dressing up’, I’m always late, and tend to use the car instead (also, my wife, for some reason, does not like the idea of using public transportation while crossdressed — as if I haven’t done that before, several times in fact, without her ‘official stamp of approval’…).

I would, therefore, expect that I’d be able to dress much more, now that so many things are, in a way, much ‘simpler’ now. In fact, in this new house, I got many ‘special’ places to store all my stuff — my wife was very generous in allowing me a slot on the wardrobe, for instance, but I got more space besides that. So, instead of having all my stuff stuck into the weirdest places, and having to gather everything together before even starting, now things are much more practically disposed and organised. Also, it pays off having an architect designing one’s renovation — architects are very good at creating ‘space’, even when space seems limited, and the result was that there is way more storage room for everything, as well as being much, much easier to do all my stuff inside the bathroom, where there are convenient places — shelves etc. — to temporarily keep my things around at an arm’s reach while I’m using them, and easily store them away when I’m finished.

Alas… Time, the big conspirator, is always working against me. I thought things would be easier in this new apartment. I thought I’d have way more free time as a result. But, in truth, sometimes it even feels that I have less time overall.

Let me try to explain why I have that feeling. In the past few years, my wife would spend one or two days per week away the whole day — leaving by mid-morning and returning after dinner. Those days would very often be used for me to dress up in leisure, have lunch, and then enjoy the rest of the day with whatever I wanted. At nightfall, I would return home, start the undressing, and be ready for dinner when my wife eventually arrived. While such days were actually a bit rarer than I wished for, they happened perhaps once or twice per week.

Now, thanks to much easier access to her workplace, and not needing me to drive her around, my wife just works a part-time of about 6 hours, and only in the afternoons. Her current academic studies — writing a thesis — also do not need her physical presence at the university, so this year she decided to take the mornings off (which she mostly spends buying food). As a consequence, this means that I only have the afternoons free for becoming Sandra — and, since my wife is returning home much earlier than before (sometimes even arriving before 8 PM!), it means that my ‘time window’ has shortened considerably. Assuming that I’m able to do the ‘basics’ in the morning (which mostly means having a bath and shaving very closely) — which sometimes I cannot, for various reasons — I nevertheless still require around 2 hours to ‘get ready’ to go out as Sandra. Assuming that we finish lunch (and subsequent cleaning up, which is my home chore) around 2 PM, it means going out at about 4 PM, but returning at 7 PM, since I will need at least one hour to ‘undress’, remove the makeup, wash the underwear, and basically store everything in its proper place.

I have managed to do so several times — in fact, things went so smoothly that I have often the impression that my wife never even noticed that I spent the whole afternoon as Sandra — but usually things do not go that smoothly. There may be external interruptions, like someone calling me on the phone (in some situations, I might be able to put them on the speaker and continue to do the makeup, but this is not always possible), or an urgent e-mail which has to be sent because a client really needs it now. Often, however, I fall prey to self-sabotaging (something which requires another full article, which I’ve been writing about and not finished yet); and, also quite often, sometimes things simply ‘go wrong’ when dressing up, and I take way longer than planned.

For example, since I’ve ordered a bespoke corset (actually, a pair), I started to lace myself in the back. You’d think that would be the most normal thing in the universe — that’s how corsets are supposed to be laced, after all! — but in order to save time, I simply used to tie them at the front instead. It’s so much easier (and way faster)! However, a side-effect is that this ruins the corset in the long run — the laces are not supposed to be constantly chaffing at the corset’s exterior. With off-the-counter corsets, mostly ordered cheaply over the Internet, I couldn’t care less. With a custom-order, bespoke corset, which costs an arm and a leg (and is worth every penny!), I have to be much more careful and follow the instructions precisely. One of them, of course, is that the laces have to be tied at the back.

Fortunately, with a custom-order corset, which fits like a glove, it’s much, much easier to do so than I thought. Well… to a point. Usually, the final knot is something I accomplish easily in a minute or less. But sometimes… I keep doing it wrongly, over and over, and I might have to try a dozen times (sometimes more!) until I’m satisfied with the result. Now instead of taking less than a minute, suddenly twenty minutes have elapsed — twenty precious minutes when my time as Sandra is at a premium!

This happens a lot with any step in my preparation… getting the eyeliner ‘just right’ might be just a question of drawing the ‘perfect’ line on the first time around (one minute), but so often I need several attempts, ‘erasing’ the line and drawing it again, and again, and again… until eventually I’m happy with the result… and another twenty minutes have been wasted. The same can be said about the lips and so forth. Not to mention figuring out half-way through with my makeup that, after all, the clothes I had picked do not fit any more or have some stain (or hole!) which I cannot ‘disguise’ in a hurry, or suddenly the weather changed and it’s way hotter than what was predicted and I have to change to lighter clothing… or, well, at the very last step — usually, glueing the fake nails — I realise that the set of ten nails is missing one, and there is simply no time left to get some polish and paint a replacement; it’s far faster just to get a different set, but, still, more minutes get wasted… and, of course, sometimes I notice at the very last moment that the heels I’ve picked for the day are in need of repairs and I cannot wear them… anyway, you get my point. There are hundreds of things that can ‘go wrong’. And all those minutes add up very quickly.

The result is that sometimes I’m just finished and ready to go out by 6 PM. But by then it’s too late: I might have to be back at 7 anyway, to start the whole process of undressing to be ready by 8. I resign myself to take some pictures and that’s pretty much all I do. A whole day gets wasted that way, and for what? A few minutes of pleasure.

But wait, you might say; wasn’t my wife ‘tolerant’ about Sandra? So why don’t I start the whole routine early in the morning, to be able to go out after lunch, with several hours of free time?

Well… as time has passed, my wife changed her views about ‘transgender’ people. As I’ve mentioned in the past, she is a deep thinker and follows her reasoning until the last possible consequences. She is now fully convicted that most transgender people are just ‘activists’ of a ‘lifestyle’ — people that have been able to create a mostly political movement to get them certain ‘rights’, including many which are completely ludicrous, such as the right to change grammar (and force others to change grammar, too) in order to defend their ‘identity’. Activists have infiltrated themselves simultaneously in political circles but also among scientists, who are only allowed to publish research that validates the activists’ view — which, in turn, is used by activists as ‘proof’ that their views are ‘correct’ and, therefore, place pressure on politicians to make them pass laws that favour the trans community.

My wife has absolutely no issue with people dressing as they want (so long, of course, that such people are fully willing to embrace the consequences of their particular choice of clothing). She is fine in viewing crossdressing as a harmless hobby (as long as it remains harmless, i. e. no unnecessary risks are taken while crossdressed — such as taking the subway, for instance); just as some people are completely fanatic about sports and can be wholly irrational about it, my wife can agree that the same applies to ‘crossdressing’ in general. She may have just a few qualms about the insane amount of time it takes to ‘crossdress’ and the very little pleasure that is derived from it (considering the amount of time spent in ‘dressing up’ and later in undressing), but, in general, she agrees that there are way worse ways of waste time.

However, shifting the concept of ‘crossdressing’ towards a glorified form of ‘hobby’, or ‘habit’, or ‘lifestyle’ — as opposed to crossdressing as a gender expression — means emptying the whole package that comes with ‘being transgender’, and crossdressing becomes just another activity, one that is merely tied to leisure, but has no more philosophical strings attached. In other words: the whole ‘transgender narrative’ is nothing more and nothing less than, well, BS — convenient for some activists to impose their views over others and be very vocal about it. Oh, and incidentally, it’s also a way to escape the usual treatment for a very specific form of dysmorphia, which is avoiding cosmetic surgery. By relabeling their dysmorphia as ‘gender dysphoria’, transgender activists are able to get access to cosmetic surgery (in fact, they have been able to persuade doctors that it’s the only alternative to ‘cure’ their gender dysphoria).

You can see how my wife thinks — in fact, it’s not much different than what most heteronormative people think about so-called ‘transgender people’. The main difference is that my wife does not use classic arguments such as ‘it’s a question of biology’ or ‘God wants humans to be male or female and not change as they wish’ — my wife is several degrees above such simplistic (and easily falsifiable) arguments. Her own arguments are much tougher to debunk: if one points out current research on transgender issues, she will always shrug it off as ‘activist BS’ (or at least activist-inspired, or activist-promoted research, in areas that are wishy-washy pseudoscience anyway — according to her, of course). If one points out the historical background — there have always been transgender people around, in all societies, in all epochs — she will argue that each culture has dealt with the ‘wish to crossdress’ differently (sometimes simply suppressing it and imprisoning or killing those who ‘indulged’ in the ‘vice’ of wearing cross-gendered clothing…), and it’s just our culture and our civilisation, which has access to amazing technology, which allows human beings to physically change their bodies, via hormones and surgery, so that they can ‘pretend’ to be of a different gender than the one they’ve been assigned at birth — and therefore, because this is a possibility today, activists have embraced the technology allowing them to change their bodies, and developed a very convincing narrative to justify being ‘allowed’ to undergo such changes (in many countries for free, thanks to welfare states funding all required surgeries, therapy, and often even voice coaching or some of the necessary drugs).

Usually, my last argument is pointing out that intersex people do exist; and what about non-heterosexuality — is that the result of ‘activism’ as well? Here my wife swiftly changes sides: she even admits that there are people who are born in the wrong body and that this manifests itself at 3 years of age or so so that such people ought to be allowed to go through puberty appropriate to the gender they identify with. In other words: sure, intersex people, homosexuals (or other forms of non-heterosexuality), as well as what used to be called ‘primary transexuals’ (nowadays a horrid term which has been stricken from all literature about the subject), all these kinds of people exist, are allowed the ‘right’ to be or become what they identify with, and their sexuality is a personal issue which is part of one’s private life. She is naturally also quite tolerant of all sorts of sexual fetishes: while she doesn’t understand why crossdressing ought to be so pleasant as a fetish, she admits that most fetishes are impossible to fathom to anyone who does not share them, but, sure, such fetishes are ‘natural’, all humans have them in a form or the other, and so long as nobody gets hurt or forced to engage in sexual intercourse against their will, she’s fine with all that.

She would even be fine if I admitted to a crossdresser fetish, but it would be totally wasted on her since she’s not attracted physically to ‘men in women’s clothes’ — but she can certainly believe (and accept) that there are such women who might find the crossdressing fetish attractive (and, obviously, the same applies to female-to-male crossdressing fetishists).

However, she draws a red line at activists’ claims that someone in their adult life, enjoying crossdressing as a hobby or a fetish, ‘suddenly’ realise that, after all, they have been assigned the wrong gender at birth — and promptly start to ruin their lives, cutting all ties to family, friends, and colleagues at work, to start a ‘new’ life from scratch, poor, stigmatized, and subject to transphobia — and remember that ‘transphobia kills’. Such a ‘transition’ is beyond her ability to understand in a rational manner — why someone would seriously wish to undergo all that trouble just to be able to wear clothes that will fit them better (after hormones and surgery) — and the argument that gender dysphoria is not rational at all (if it were, psychologists could ‘out-reason’ people suffering from dysphoria and ‘cure’ them) fails to earn some compassion with her. Using Occam’s Razor, she thinks that self-delusion and a very specific form of body dysmorphia, fiercely stimulated by activists, is a far better explanation which does not require such a complex narrative as the whole ‘transgender baggage’ — and, therefore, in a scientific and rational manner, the more complex and confusing mainstream explanation of what ‘transgender’ is should be rejected.

Now, as an exercise to the reader, I leave you with the task of refuting and debunking my wife’s arguments (hint: there is a very specific difference between body dysmorphia and gender-dysphoria-related body issues; a trained psychologist can very easily spot the differences with a few simple questions). But place yourself in her shoes: this is what she believes to be true, and, consequently, her reactions to me as Sandra are driven by those beliefs. She will always fall back to her argument that activists have pretty much ‘invented’ what we call today ‘transgender’; and psychology and psychiatry, while often being able to cure patients, are soft sciences with many errors (see this article on the Smithsonian Magazine explaining why it’s so hard to replicate results in psychology); and, of course, she claims that many studies in the area of gender identity and gender dysphoria are sponsored or promoted by activists and their allies, so the results are, at best, skewed/flawed; at worst, they’re just pseudo-science…

Anyway… I’ve presented my wife’s theories a few times now. The whole point is that I’m pretty sure that she regrets having given me a certain freedom, a few years back, and now fully believes that if she doesn’t keep me on a short leash, I’ll really do something drastic (such as entering transition). So she wants to persuade me that I’m not really ‘transgender’ — just a ‘regular’ crossdresser (I’d argue that all crossdressers are ‘transgender’ to an extent) with some crazy ideas read on the Internet and influenced by online (trans) friends, activists, and activist-inspired doctors.

This allows her to convince herself that I don’t ‘need’ to crossdress as much as I wish; after all, if it’s ‘just a hobby’, it can be relegated to ‘reasonable’ schedules (say, a few hours per week).

My psychologist is flabbergasted by that — because he knows that gender identity issues don’t simply go away by waving a wand and speaking some magic words. But he’s also stumped at how he can help me further…

It will be an interesting year for sure!

As you will see, some are purely philosophical; others have political implications; and others may aid people to figure out where exactly they are in the transgender spectrum and how to deal with it.

‘Transgender’ is changing definition… again!

Here is the dilemma: I started reading about crossdressing and transexuality in the mid-1990s. Back then, we were at the end phase of a ‘tolerant, inclusive’ period: in other words, there was a genuine effort to figure out a new theory — based on feminist theories and queer theories — which found the common points among all people who somehow did not fit in the classical cisgender, heterosexual narrative. By the mid-1990s, it was clear that there weren’t simply ‘fetishist crossdressers’ on one side, and ‘true transexuals’ on the other; we have been influenced by Harry Benjamin’s classifications on the various kinds of people with gender issues (he had six types), made thirty years before, and we had already fought Blanchard and his wacky theories; by this time, the word ‘transgender’ was being used as an umbrella term designating everybody who struggled with all sorts of gender issues.

This was also a time when ‘gender’ started to get a more precise meaning, and when it was assumed that it had three separate components: identity (what every person deeply feels in their intimate to be), role (the social behaviours and place in society), and presentation (the outwards appearance in public). It became quite clear that these three were distinct, different from each other (although they certainly influenced each other, too), and separate from what we would call ‘sex’ (in the physical, biological term, i.e. mostly the outwards genitalia and overall physical look) or ‘sexuality’ (the choice of romantic and/or sexual partners). Cisgender and heteronormative people — the vast, vast majority of human beings — would have a standard ‘template’ where all these variables were perfectly aligned (at least in theory, and certainly ‘imposed’ by society to be so). Non-heterosexuals would have a different sexuality, but the remaining variables would be the same as for heterosexuals (with possibly the appearance variable having some nuances, as in some expressions of gay culture, but that was not necessarily a requirement). And what we used to call ‘transgender’ would have some variance in all gender variables; ‘intersex’ people would of course have some variance in the ‘sex’ variable, and possibly all others as well.

This model was explained with the theory of the ‘gender core’, a non-identified area of the brain conjectured to ‘produce’ gender identity. In cishet (cisgender heterosexual) people, that gender core would be perfectly aligned with one’s (genital) sex. But sometimes this did not happen. The number of people with a discrepancy between their gender core in their brains and their physical sex was far too large to be merely a statistical anomaly or an occasional gene mutation; it was so large that it required an evolutionary explanation (as most important things in biology). The gender core theory had all that, it had the largest possible explanation power with the least amount of requirements, and could be experimentally verified (or falsified), so it was accepted as the current state-of-the-art of scientific thought in this field. It still has a fundamental problem, namely, the lack of precise data to actually locate the ‘gender core’ somewhere in the brain, and/or which genes/biochemical reactions actually affect it. I’ve repeatedly written about the subject and given some pointers on the current research in this area; I won’t do it again, since this is just an introductory summary

The point is that by the mid-1990s we had a reasonably good and solid theory to explain ‘gender variance’, or departure from the cishet norm; it was really seen as an expression of diversity in the human species; it had evolutionary validation; and it seemed to be consistent with the theoretical models we had to explain what we could observe. And, from the perspective of human rights activists, we had something to fight for, namely, ‘transgender rights’, which were inclusive of all the community — from drag queens to transexual children, including even fetishist crossdressers and intersex individuals, even if they didn’t apply the ‘transgender’ label to themselves.

What was written and published by people in this community reflected the conceptual idea that we all share common points, even if we express them diversely; online forums, for instance, would be open to all, from fetishists to those struggling through transition, and, even if they had separate subforums to address their particular issues, everybody would participate and mutually respect each subgroup. You can still see some of this happening on the forums on Susan’s Place: it’s not uncommon for, say, transitioned trans women to give tips and advice about washing wigs on the crossdresser forum, even though they clearly belong to totally different subgroups. Nevertheless, in this particular case, both struggle with gender presentation, and that means they have at least that in common — enough to mutually respect and help each other.

But — and here comes my own struggle! — things have changed. After two decades, the so-called ‘transgender community’ has been polarised and split; even the meaning of the word transgender changed dramatically, as Cristan Williams has so well documented. Most significantly, as we moved out of the 1990s, what would formerly have been called ‘transexuals’ started actively to replace that classification (which is loaded with negative connotations, originally sprung from the medical community) with simply ‘transgender’, just as Christine Jorgensen used it to describe herself in her later years (the word ‘transexual’, with the meaning that Harry Benjamin assigned to it, was only defined a dozen years after her transition).

While replacing a negatively-connotated word such as ‘transexual’ with something having no such negative connotations (‘transgender’) is certainly understandable, it confuses the issue further: when an activist is demanding gatekeeper-free medically-assisted transition for ‘transgender people’ who want it, are they referring to the very small and tiny subgroup in the enormously vast spectrum of transgender people who are, in fact, transexual (in the clinical sense of the term); or do they mean that all kinds of ‘transgender’ people should be allowed to get free transition if they choose to do so?

As I’ve learned, the issue is more complex than that. Most activists with an ideological agenda that I personally know (and many more which I read about, but of course I cannot say what these really think about the issue!) deliberately ‘confuse’ the meaning of ‘transgender’: on one hand, they defend the notion of ‘transgenderity as a spectrum’; on the other hand, they prefer to consider only giving legal protection (and the right to transition) to those who transition from male to female or vice-versa, and are rather suspicious of those who do not ‘fit’ into the classical description of transexuality. The usage of ‘transgender’ to refer to those who want (and need!) transition just broadens the definition a little more, allowing, for instance, for people to transition irrespectively of their sexual preferences (which is entirely legitimate); and this term also allows a legal transition without requiring a full transition (i.e. hormone replacement therapy and ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ surgeries), as it was necessary a few decades ago. In other words: activists have created a new narrative of ‘transgender’ which includes those who are transexual but do not fit into the 100% classical narrative for transexuality (i.e. that all transexuals exhibit physical characteristics of the gender their identify with; that they are romantically and physically attracted to persons with a gender opposite to the one they identify with; that they want to anatomically change their bodies to match the gender they identify with as closely as medically possible).

All right. So, sure, meanings of words change. The problem here is just one of politics: by subtly changing the meaning of what ‘transgender’ means, it implies that ‘some’ transgender people are included in the Good Fight (the ones who are covered by legislation protecting them and giving them access to medically-assisted transition), while others — the majority, in fact — are confined into the category of ‘gender non-conforming’, who essentially have no rights (except the right to breathe and pay taxes). This is where I wrinkle my nose, and this situation makes me uncomfortable — mostly because I’m not quite sure if this ‘relabeling’ of ‘transgenderity’ is deliberate (as so many things related to politics tend to be) or a sad consequence of the way things change over time. Sometimes, by subtly making some changes, we leave people behind — unintendedly. Was this the case?

Perhaps. Not so long ago (a bit over a year or so, I think) I was amidst a conversation including researchers in social sciences and some activists (most of them transgender, if I recall it). At some point, one of the activists told me that she wanted to have a nice little chat with ‘me and my friends’ because she felt that she ought to establish a bridge to ‘crossdressers’ and hear what they had to say as well. My first impulse was to say, ‘hey, we’re as transgender as you are’ but my good manners refrained me to comment — especially because by then I was already aware that the word ‘transgender’ really meant for activists what ‘transexual’ used to mean. Naturally, at the end, I thanked her for the opportunity and, yes, we did agree to meet afterwards, and keep somehow in touch over time. But it quickly became clear that ‘we crossdressers’ had no ‘interesting’ issues, or had little to contribute, to the overall discussion around gender issues. And this happened on more than one situation, i.e. the notion that ‘we crossdressers’ were essentially good and nice people, but really not part of the serious transgender population, just marginally outside the cisgender heterosexuality (and thus always worth to listen to, briefly), but certainly not enough to warrant us any rights, or public opinions, or the inclusion under the ‘transgender’ umbrella.

I keep getting annoyed at that, and I even remember a more dramatic public discussion around the application of the word ‘transgender’: did it only apply to gender identity, or also to gender role and presentation? During that discussion I was pretty much told to shut up because ‘of course it applies only to gender identity!’; but the more I think about it, the more I believe it applies to all three elements of gender issues — identity, role and presentation — and everyone who is outside the established cisgender heteronormative ‘standard’ in any of those three should be labeled as ‘transgender’.

Is this so important to ‘fight’ for? Well, there are many reasons for doing so, but I can point one good reason: there are far more people who fit under the old classification of ‘transgender’ who are essentially being ignored, or left out, or even deliberately excluded (because they challenge several established assumptions about how a ‘real’ transgender person should feel, act and behave).

And how do I know that? Let’s move to the next point!

Confound those statistics: where are 99.9% of all ‘transgender’ people?

Transgender people are very rare; depending on the estimates, they can be as high as one in 10,000 or one in 100,000. A rough estimate places the number at about 1:30,000. It’s very hard to estimate the overall transgender population, because there is no official census for them. Most of them are still suffering in silence; some very few — a minority among a minority! — actually pop up under the statistics because they officially change their name and gender markers, and this is the only ‘official’ number we have for them. For my country, for instance, the number of people who did a legal transition is about 1 per 28,000 inhabitants, although this number may go up a bit because there are still many who are at the final, bureaucratic stages of their transition and may not have been counted yet; it’s not impossible to believe that if all people who wish to transition did so, the number would go down to 1:10,000; it’s however to be expected that many will not transition even if they have all reasons for doing so. In any case, the 1:10,000 to 1:30,000 interval seems to be a reasonably good estimate based on available country data.

When I first started to read about transgenderity, I actually thought that the transgender population was much, much smaller — in fact, like thousands of others in my country, I imagined I was the only one around here (yes, really). Of course I was aware that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of transgender people worldwide; but I thought that this would vary enormously between countries, and that we were simply too small to have any transgender people. I know this is silly, but that’s how I thought back then in the mid-1990s! And even by the late 1990s, when I was aware that there were, indeed, a lot of crossdressers around, I grossly estimated them to be ‘just a few dozens’ based on the ones I could find online.

My big mistake was to confuse the amount of transgender people with the amount of those who participated in the early forms of social media! On top of that, even in those early days, people were already aware of the danger of sharing pictures of themselves online. So, even though we could postulate that the percentage of transgender people online would be equivalent of those who were not online, I failed to take into account an even bigger mistake: I assumed that transgender people wanted to be found online!

Well, that’s clearly not the case. Even today, in spite of activism promoting the opposite view, most transgender people simply want to be invisible, fade into the background, disappear from sight. Many are still anxiously worrying about their self-image and consciously desiring to ‘pass’. And among those who ‘pass’ to an extent, there is still the fear of discovery – by family, friends, or, even worse, colleagues at their job. As a consequence, the amount of transgender people who had public profiles on social media was far below the expected percentage for them; and this, in turn, simply meant that one could not rely on social media for statistics on the transgender population.

This is still true as of today. Even though current-generation social media allow a much more fine-grained approach to security and privacy, this still requires a bit of knowledge to properly set up, and many transgender people simply do not trust social media enough. To make matters even worse, transphobes can easily flag transgender people’s profiles as being ‘fake’, and in this era of corporate censorship, such profiles are deleted first and questions asked afterwards. The consequence is that transgender people are often forced to switch accounts and create new profiles all the time; that, in turn, means making it hard to track friends and keep in touch with the community.

There is still a further catch. In spite of being advertised as something completely different, most people still look at social media as the ultimate dating site. Transgender people are not different (why should they?). Both cisgender and transgender people often have secondary accounts to join dating groups, using nicknames, and keeping their ‘online social life’ separate from their online dating. Why this should be surprising or underrepresented is really beyond my understanding – except if we take into account that journalists love social media, because it allows them to remain online during working hours and chat around and call it ‘research’; so they praise social media for their, uh, ‘ability to connect with people with similar interests, worldwide’ – something which social media companies are eager to hear and to share with stakeholders, of course, thus feeding the positive feedback cycle, and giving social media more and more praise for certain characteristics that they certainly have, but which the majority of people don’t really use it for. The Internet is all about sex, and while it’s convenient to hide that from decision makers and the mainstream population, when discussing the role of the Internet without the need of being politically correct, we simply must acknowledge that one of the fundamental and most widespread usage of the Internet is related to sex and dating, sometimes at a subconscious (or even unconscious) level, such as taking selfies to show potential partners how cool we look.

But let’s move on. For about a decade, I got my numbers from studies guesstimating the amount of transgender people, based on all sorts of surveys and data that could be gathered. But it was only when ‘gender dysphoria’ became a clinical term with a precise meaning that such data became more reliable; for instance, data from the US Armed Forces, which can force people to answer truthfully to such questions, revealed that the amount of transgender people was incredibly higher than even the most optimistic guesstimates imagined! This was later shrugged off in the belief that way too many transgender people join the military simply to cover up their transgenderity; and, in fact, it’s not uncommon for MtF transgender people to work on ‘very male’ jobs, from construction workers, plumbers and electricians, truck drivers, and, of course, the military. What this does not explain is the high number of FtM transgender people in the military as well – unless they are very open about their transition, in which case the reason is similar (getting a ‘male’ job to ‘prove’ they’re ‘real men’ even if they weren’t born with a penis…).

Statistics from the military encouraged researchers to believe that the amount of transgender people was much, much higher than believed; the problem was that only a tiny fraction would be accounted for, when they contacted doctors for their transition. So there was still no way to accurately guess the numbers of those vast masses of transgender people who were ‘out there’ but invisible to surveys and census. How many were they, and where were they? It’s like the discussion of dark matter and dark energy in astrophysics: it allows scientists to explain a lot about the universe (namely, why its expansion is still accelerating) even though we have no clue if such things actually exist or not, since, by definition, they are invisible (they don’t emit light, nor reflect it, so we cannot know where they are, except by conjectural approximation which happens to ‘just fit the observed data’). We can therefore argue if those ‘invisible’ transgender people exist at all, or if they are as numerous as researchers in social sciences expected them to be.

For many years I had no easy explanation for this. Then I started my own therapy with specialists in clinical sexology – mostly to get rid of a depression – and at some point, when I had to take some blood samples, I decided to ‘come out’ to my family doctor, a GP. It surprised me that she was so knowledgeable about transgenderity; but the explanation was simply that she had come across ‘thousands’ of cases, and her own colleagues had seen as many.

This baffled me completely and I first thought I didn’t hear correctly; but on subsequent visits it was quite clear that I didn’t misunderstand her. GPs ‘routinely’ would come across ‘thousands’ of cases. But how could that be, if the official number for the number of transexuals (a legal/clinical term designating those who had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and went through transition) was merely ‘a few hundreds’?

I researched further, and, as explained before, based on talks with doctors, I could ascertain the following: there were six official public hospitals with a ward for clinical sexology and a handful of cherry-picked doctors. All of these together produce some 30 new cases every year who are referred to surgery, which is pretty much aligned with what the official statistics show. But what they don’t show is that doctors do not refer all cases to surgery; rather, for every thousand patients or so, only one is diagnosed with gender dysphoria and goes through transition! So we can roughly say that, on average, each of these hospitals have a small team who handle, in total, 30,000 patients every year, 30 of which will fully transition.

Actually, this is a guesstimate; from what I could gather, such statistics are not made public; but sometimes doctors let slip through how many patients they are; and there are plenty of ‘generic’ statistics about the ratio of doctors to patients. In my country, depending on the speciality, this goes from 1:1,000 to 1:5,000. It’s also plausible to admit that not all patients in clinical sexology are transgender; and, last but not least, some of the hospitals have more than one team taking care of transgender people. Because the actual number of patients and diagnostics is not really public, it’s hard to tell exactly how many they are, But the rule of thumb of having about a 1,000 transgender patients at all times, one of which will eventually transition, is a good estimate, and it’s also consistent with the numbers my family doctor told me (there is naturally an overlap, of course).

Now, it has to be understood that the 30,000 people are not the whole transgender community in my country; rather, they only represent a small fraction of the transgender population who, having difficulties dealing with their gender issues, finally talk to a doctor (often their family doctor) who then refers them to a specialist in clinical sexology. So these are the ‘extreme’ cases, i.e. those who finally break their silence and their ‘invisibility’ to get treatment – and this is by no means the norm, so many transgender people, fearing public exposure, rather prefer to attempt self-medication first; or they simply mistrust doctors in general, believing they only will attempt to ‘talk them out’ of their gender dysphoria. And of course there will be a certain amount of transgender people preferring to go through the private health system; here we have no statistics at all, except, of course, for the number of people applying for a change of their gender marker and their first name: the procedure is the same for both the public and private healthcare services, of course.

And obviously there are all other people who are somewhere in the ‘trans-something’ spectrum and who never came across the idea of going to a doctor. Again, from parochial evidence (that is, looking at my group of trans friends) I would guess that only one in ten had talked to a doctor about the issue. This means that the actual number of trans people might number the 300,000 – and that would mean around 3% of our population!

That’s a lot of people! And that also means that politicians have no choice but to address trans issues, if they actually affect so many people. Indeed, instead of endless postponing the discussions around trans issues, with the argument that they are ‘an insignificant minority’ (as portrayed by the media: only a few dozens have gone through surgery…), trans issues should be at the forefront of political discourse, as it’s possibly one of the top ten issues affecting a country’s population!

Fusion and other techniques to cope with gender dysphoria

The last issue that has worried me for quite a while is the attitude towards those who suffer from a degree of gender dysphoria but cannot go through transition for many reasons – the main ones being family and work, as well as the social environment (friends, acquaintances, neighbours, etc.).

The classic narrative is that transgender persons have ‘to be themselves’; in other words, it is expected that trans people ‘come out’ and stop pretending they’re cisgender; at least in Western societies, transgenderity is not only legal but enjoys special protection (i.e. access to clinical transition and laws against transphobic actions), so people are encouraged to transition, and, as recently as 2010 or so, clinical transition was considered the most successful medical procedure, with the highest success rate — close to 100%! — with so few ‘regrets’ or ‘failures’ that they were often misrepresented (today, there is a growing number of very vocal people who detransitioned and explain the reasons why).

Now, the issue is that, thanks to decades of very successful transgender activism, we have come to a stage where the diagnosis of gender dysphoria is equated with the almost-100%-successful clinical transition. Also, it is rare that someone goes to the doctor only due to symptoms of gender dysphoria; these are at the root of the issue, yes, but people with gender dysphoria will almost always also exhibit symptoms of depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, trauma, and so forth. Clinical transition has shown how all of these simply disappear as if they never existed once people are put on hormones and officially start the transition. Why this works so well is not totally understood at the biochemical level. Some like to point out that MtF transgender people will have their testosterone blocked, which will lower not only their libido, but also any aggressivity linked to anxiety, thus producing a ‘calming’ effect, which overall will help out with all other symptoms. Such a hypothesis, however, is easily falsified, because FtM transgender people in transition will get shots of testosterone but also feel the same calming effects of clinical transition. Some doctors and researchers are not eager to label hormone replacement treatment as a placebo for all other non-dysphoria symptoms, but essentially that’s what it ultimately is (as a working hypothesis only, i.e. until someone can fully explain what goes on at a biochemical level which gets changed with HRT). And there are also many cases where HRT might not be possible (due to pre-existing medical conditions, say, hypertension combined with a propensity towards blood clots) but surgery is, and surgically changing one’s body during transition seems to alleviate not only dysphoria (which totally makes sense) but all other issues as well. Again, we cannot explain why ‘getting boobs’ implies ‘no more depression or anxiety’ — there is simply no biochemical mechanism that can explain what is going on. And, finally, some people do not modify their bodies in the least (for whatever reason) but simply go through transition towards the gender they identify with, no matter how they look like beneath their clothing; and in such cases, gender dysphoria is also ‘cured’, or at least controlled, and we have good solid evidence from research showing that the change of gender role and presentation, even without surgery or hormones, can be 100% effective in many cases. Also, there is a mix of all the above — people might start transitioning without any medical treatment, immediately start feeling better; then they get hormones, and their overall mood and attitude improves even more; finally, totally confident that they are doing ‘the right thing’, they go through surgery, and whatever remaining symptoms still existed are dispelled forever.

Doctors look abstractedly at so-called ‘clinical transition’ as a complex therapy involving a mix of counselling, psychological therapy, change of attitude/habits/social role (including presentation), as well as the more ‘physical’ changes produced by hormones and surgery. It’s a full package involving psychological changes, behaviour changes, and physical changes — and they have to go together when the diagnosis is gender dysphoria. Interestingly enough, the physical changes might be the less important ones for doctors, while the psychological changes and behaviour changes matter most. In other words, it would be very strange to prescribe hormones and/or surgery to someone who is not willing to undergo a change of gender role; from the perspective of some doctors, someone who is acutely dysphoric regarding their body but not their social gender role might not be diagnosed with ‘gender dysphoria’ but rather with physical dysmorphia, which is something entirely different and not to be confused.

Or is it? The truth is that the transgender narrative is not necessarily singular; there might be several ‘transgender narratives’ (ultimately, an infinity of them, since every transgender person has their own narrative…); and is a doctor really able to tell the difference between a ‘genuinely trans’ person who needs hormones and surgery to lead a normal life (as a member of the gender they identify with) and one who does not physically identify with their gendered body and wish to change it to conform to the gender they identify with, without, however, having any intention to change their social gender role? And what about those people who simply feel symptoms of gender dysphoria due to completely different issues — from schizophrenia to escapism, to dealing with trauma, etc.?

Now… ‘genuinely trans’ people will usually scorn at all others who do not share the same narrative (more on that later!) and sometimes even be afraid of those ‘unconventional trans narratives’ because they secretly fear that these become widespread and known by the mainstream, cisgender, heteronormative society, and, because such narratives are even stranger than the ‘genuinely trans’ narrative, the fear that everybody is thrown into the same bag and denied access to transition is real. In other words, it’s far better to deny access to clinical transition to anyone who does not fit an ‘acceptable’ narrative (and we may agree that even the mainstream Western societies start to exhibit some tolerance towards those who are ‘true transexuals’) and even exclude them from the ‘transgender’ label in order to protect those so-hard-to-get transgender rights. Thus, everything which does not conform to the ‘acceptable trans narrative’ is scorned, downplayed, or simply ignored — by both activists and doctors alike.

Consider a very, very typical example among MtF crossdressers. A surprisingly high number of them fully identify as male, present themselves as males for most of their time, and, while acknowledging that there is an ‘inner female’ which occasionally has to physically manifest itself (by crossdressing and presenting as a woman) — denying such manifestations for a prolonged time will cause psychological disturbances such as depression and anxiety — they have no wish to transition. They very often are happily married and have children.

But some of them (and the number is by no means small!) have a very specific wish: they want to have boobs. This is not merely ‘wishful thinking’, or an obsession, or something they ‘just wish’, similar to people wishing to win the lottery or getting the perfect romantic partner. It goes really very deep within themselves; they strongly and thoroughly believe that their continued happiness will only be possible in full if they ‘grow’ boobs. And the prevention of any treatment or surgery which will give them breast enhancement causes them symptoms very similar to gender dysphoria.

Now, how would we fit such people in the transgender spectrum? Clearly, they do not want to transition, at least not fully; they do not want to abandon their wives and children, and many are even aware of their male privilege which they do not want to give up. They do have some sort of dysphoria regarding their bodies — or perhaps dysmorphia — which is clearly related to gender: their bodies feel ‘incomplete’ unless they get boobs. Note that having a vagina is rarely expressed by these MtF crossdressers — they might dream of how it would feel like, but, at the end of the day, they’re very happy with their penises and the pleasure it provides them and have no intention to change. Oh, and we cannot even assign a ‘classic’ sexual orientation: such MtF crossdressers might be straight as arrows, others bi-curious, others very openly bisexual, and a few even homosexual (but maintaining some sexual activity with their wives or girlfriends in the name of pretense). From my personal experience I would say that most would be somewhere between the bi-curious and bisexual spectrum, but by no means that is the case with all of them.

From a strictly activist point of view, such people are regarded merely as fetishists with an obsession with boobs, and totally disregarded and excluded from activism discussions. Doctors might agree that they are in a class of fetishists who suffer from their fantasies, and they are more compassionate than activists: such people need some sort of ‘treatment’ because they are suffering, they might exhibit symptoms of gender dysphoria, they might get depressed and anxious just because they are not allowed to grow boobs. The reason why some crossdressers are obsessed with this idea and others are not is most certainly not fully explained — and it involves a relatively large group of people (among my own friends and acquaintances, there are far more crossdressers who want to have boobs than transgender people in transition or wishing to begin transition) which is simply not studied enough.

This has some consequences, namely, if someone is so depressed about lacking boobs that they go to the doctor and admit their inner secret wish, they might be discarded as merely having some delusional behaviour or a complex fetish. It would be hardly reasonable to expect them to find a friendly doctor who would, indeed, ‘give’ them the desired boobs. In fact, it’s hardly illegal to graft some silicone prosthesis to otherwise healthy male individuals — a plastic surgeon might raise a few eyebrows, but they might be willing to do that for a price (it’s also the kind of surgery which is relatively easy to reverse). So it’s not really a complex ethic issue regarding the surgery itself (unlike, say, gender affirmative surgery, which involves a non-reversible procedure). It’s more a question of understanding if such a procedure would, indeed, give that person the ease of mind and happiness they imagine they would get. And that’s something that a common plastic surgeon might not be adequately trained to figure out.

I have brought up this particular example because it’s so common; with very few exceptions (I personally don’t know any), such people rarely get their wishes. Some will take hormones bought over the counter in the expectation that they make their boobs grow a bit; some use herbs with phytoestrogens, which are hundreds or thousands of times less effective than synthetic hormones, but might make some difference (as a side-note: a very effective way to grow boobs in a male is to get more body fat. This is because estrogen is produced in males mostly in fatty tissues; the more fat, the more estrogens; the more estrogens, the more likely there is some breast growth; and because breast growth tends to become more-or-the-less permanent, reducing body fat once the breasts have grown enough might work. Note that this is a health-damaging procedure which has all sorts of negative side-effects associated with gaining huge amounts of body fat and hardly a healthy way of ‘getting boobs’ — and the results vary a lot among different males, of course). In this particular aspect, the behaviour is very similar to what ‘real’ transgender people tend to do before they start consulting with doctors.

But is it really? Just because the conduct might externally be the same (seeking hormones or other drugs and treatments to produce gender-related physical body changes) does it mean that internally such people are transgender? The answer, of course, is complex, and definitely not ‘yes/no’. And the first lesson to be learned is that just because someone exhibits the same symptoms as someone with gender dysphoria, that does not mean that they are gender dysphoric.

This affirmation is perhaps a bit baffling. If we assign the clinical label of ‘gender dysphoria’ to a specific set of symptoms, and conclude that transition is the best (or even the only) way to deal with them, how, then, can we ‘treat’ someone who has the same symptoms but the therapist suspects that they are not gender dysphoric whatsoever? As you can imagine, these issues have plagued activists for decades, as doctors persisted to call gender dysphoria symptoms as merely ‘delusional’ or aspects of schizophrenia or something equally able to produce the same symptoms — thus falsely diagnosing ‘true’ transgender people and giving them the wrong treatment (there has been a recent, sad case in my country where this is happening as I write this article).

But the reverse is also true: many (well, quite a few, but not a huge amount) of people ‘regret’ their transition and figure out that, after all, transition did not help them out with their issues. While such misdiagnosis are rare, they do exist, and they are caused by doctors listing all symptoms as being caused by gender dysphoria when they might actually be related to something else. Perhaps the main reason for so few cases of detransitioning is simply because of what I’ve written in the previous section: there might be a huge amount of transgender people out there that doctors (and activists!) simply have no clue about; only a very few ‘come out’ to their doctors to get treatment; and among those, only one in thousand will go through transition. Thus, the percentage of those having being misdiagnosed with gender dysphoria is really, really very small — so small, in fact, that number only becomes apparent when looking globally at all people who have transitioned. In other words: if the chance of misdiagnosis is, say, one in ten thousand, that means that you need at least to have 10,000 people transitioning to find one who was misdiagnosed (in my country, as an example, we just have a few dozens who have undergone all procedures of clinical transition — none were ever misdiagnosed, but that’s just because the probability is so tiny compared to the actual sample). Note that I’ve just come out with a number out of my head, I have no real data to show how often people get misdiagnosed with gender dysphoria (although I suspect that it’s slightly higher than actually reported, and that is due to what will go into the next section!).

To come to the point: there is a chance of misdiagnosis that doctors have to take into account. There are many ‘transgender narratives’, some of which are anything but classic, and who might also benefit from transition. And there are several conditions producing symptoms exactly like gender dysphoria but which might not be gender dysphoria at all. We also have all sorts of cases of people not fitting any plausible narrative but nevertheless suffering from some issue related to gender identity. And finally there is a large number of people exhibiting symptoms of gender dysphoria to several degrees, from moderate to very intense, but who, for all sorts of reasons (social, work-related, family…) simply cannot transition.

What should we do with all of the above?

While I have my ideas about what kinds of rights and protection such people might need (and that will have its own article… soon… or rather… soon-ish because I’ve been neglecting my writing…), it’s perhaps even more important to consider what kind of treatment such people need. Consider the following two hypothesis, which are taken for granted by most trans-friendly doctors:

1. Gender identity issues producing gender dysphoria cannot be treated by any means (drugs, therapy, etc.) because this is not a ‘disease’ or ‘condition’; rather, the only way to alleviate symptoms of gender dysphoria (and usually eliminate them) is through transition;
2. People who suffer are fully entitled to any sort of relief as far as doctors are able to give (this is part of their oath!).

In other words: just because someone does not fit in the ‘classic transgender narrative’, they nevertheless suffer, and their symptoms, identical to those of gender dysphoria, will very likely not be ‘treatable’ in the conventional usage of the term. However, it’s unclear if transition is the only choice for all cases, especially those that do not fit in a classic narrative.

What alternatives are there? We know that so-called ‘aversion therapy’ simply doesn’t work, no matter how often ultra-radical religious and conservatives repeat that it does work (note how they never produce actual data on such ‘miraculous’ claims…). There are ‘coping techniques’ — not unlike what is used to help people deal with things like terminal diseases such as cancer — but these have not shown to be very effective, either. Mental issues are simply different for those who suffer from gender dysphoria, and, like personality traits, you cannot simply wish it away — it doesn’t work like that.

One alleged technique that might bring some results is fusion. There are several different ways of explaining how it works, and I particularly like the way Felix Conrad explains it, but I will focus instead on what my psychologist told me.

Suppose that you’re not 100% sure that you’re transgender (the idea that all transgender people know exactly what gender they are is a fallacy; most will have doubts during most of their lives, but of course there are exceptions). All you know is that when crossdreaming (which may or may not have a physical manifestation such as crossdressing) you feel much better, you feel a complete person, while when facing ‘the real life’ you just feel that you’re pretending to be something you’re not.

Something which is typical of crossdressers is the description of their feelings when crossdressed (note: many crossdreamers who do not crossdress, but engage in creative activities, report the same feelings) is how wonderful it feels to present yourself as a woman. If there is a tendency towards object fetishism, it may be just the feeling of the textures of the clothes, or how a dress or a skirt moves when you move, or simply the light touch of long hair on your bare shoulders. Sometimes it goes way deeper than that, and the best way I have to explain it is that people react and relate to me when crossdressed in a totally (and surprisingly) different way than when I’m in ‘male mode’, and that way actually feels ‘right’. In other words: when in ‘male mode’ I feel like I’m something that the cat has just thrown up and get as much attention as that, while as a woman, I’m treated as a princess (not quite — there is always transphobia to deal with — but the sensation is certainly the total opposite).

What do crossdressers do? While ‘in the closet’, they dress up for themselves in their leisure time, and enjoy this special time they’ve got. In their minds, there is a close association between ‘leisure time’ with ‘crossdressing’, while at the same time the busy, stressful daily routine is associated with ‘male mode’ (I’m taking MtF crossdreamers as an example, but obviously the reverse situation is the same). The more the crossdresser engages in this behaviour, the more it associates crossdressing with something pleasurable, while the ‘male mode’ is connected with everything that is stressful, boring, or troubling.

This goes a few notches up when the crossdresser engages in a busy social life while crossdressing. What do crossdressers when they are together? They party. They go out and have fun. They dine on fine restaurants and drink in bars. Some may even go together to enjoy their vacations. Again, this only reinforces the idea that ‘male mode’ is boring and stressful, while ‘crossdressing’ is all about partying and having fun.

There is a deep split here, and this can become extreme. Some crossdreamers actually have multiple personalities in the psychological sense of the word: they don’t merely act and dress differently, they become different people, with different personalities. This can go all the way down to sexual intercourse and romantic relationships (which is particularly hard when dealing with bi-genderity, or so-called ‘double heterosexuality’, i.e. a transgender person who is attracted to males when dressed as a woman and attracted to women when dressing as a male). But this is the kind of positive biofeedback loop that reinforces itself: the more the MtF crossdreamer engages in this kind of behaviour, the more they feel that they hate being male and love being female because it’s so fun. I can speak for myself: for the past few years, when going out for the night with friends, dressed as a male, I have not even a thousandth of the fun and pleasure I’ve got when dressed as a woman.

Fusion is therefore the process of bringing the two sides together, i.e. not do all the fun stuff as a woman, but also as a man; and do some boring, hateful things as a woman instead of leaving it all for the ‘male side’. Ultimately the goal is to keep both parts in check by realising that there is no ‘perfection’ in either being a male or a woman, both have its pros and cons, and once they’re realised and internalised, a balance is achieved, and that balance will quench the toughest feelings of depression, anxiety… and even the other symptoms of gender dysphoria.

In other words: the trick to cope with feelings of gender dysphoria is by realising that neither ‘male’ or ‘female’ are completely free from disagreeable things; while at the same time recognising that both gender roles also have their ‘fun’ part as well. That way, each gendered aspect checks the other one. Felix Conrad even goes so far as to explain that, for someone being born a male, it’s no problem to groom yourself, get rid of your body hair with laser, or even have some corrective surgery to enhance your features — all of these are totally acceptable for both males and females. It’s just when you start doing things that go too far to one of the extremes that there is a problem, i.e. if you’re a middle-aged, overweight male and decide to get some Triple-D breast prosthesis, that won’t help you in any way — it will make you ridiculous as both a male or a female. But having, say, a tummy tuck or a face lift will benefit you in either gender presentation.

The way therapists deal with fusion is often by giving the patient some homework: list all things they love and hate in either gender, and then think deeply about it to let it sink — are those things that dependent on the gender you present as? If not, well, the idea is to engage in some ‘crossgender’ behaviour: like go out to have some fun and parties as a male and not only as a female; or go for a shopping spree as a male, patiently and thoroughly combining colours, shapes and patterns as you do when shopping as a female; go to a beauty salon as a male and get pampered; and so forth. These days, all of that behaviour is acceptable for males; not to mention that male actors, politicians, and celebrities often use makeup on a daily basis. Metrosexuality in males is not the dirty word it used to be.

The reverse has also to be done, of course: going out for shopping or paying bills as a woman; cleaning up the house in heels and a hot wig during summer; doing all sorts of hateful and boring chores when presenting as a woman. Obviously this requires a certain attitude and the willingness to expose yourself as a crossdresser in public; but the more you do it, the more likely the ‘fusion’ technique is going to work.

Note the difference between fusion and ‘aversion therapy’. With fusion, the goal is not to figure out all the hateful things done when presenting as the ‘wrong’ gender, or to shame you into submission to your assigned gender. Instead, it is a pragmatic technique to realise that there is no ‘perfect’ gender role, that both are equally pleasant and valuable, but both have their nightmares as well. Also, aversion therapy is supposed to stop one’s crossdressing behaviour, while fusion encourages it — the issue here is that crossdressing is to be experienced as just another activity, neither ‘better’ nor ‘worse’ than not-crossdressing. In other words, the goal is to enjoy yourself independently of what you dress; and to do things you hate no matter what clothes you’ve picked up for the day. People who fusion successfully can crossdress all the time they want and they won’t suffer from gender dysphoria; while they can also spend long periods without crossdressing and that doesn’t cause them anxiety in the least. And finally, note that fusion does not necessarily mean that you have to embrace and accept a genderless (or genderfluid…) society, or forfeit gender roles altogether, or ‘blend’ both genders in the way you present yourself. Instead, it won’t affect the way you think about gender polarity; you just accept that you’re free to present yourself as you wish, either fully as a woman or as a man, and either way is fine.

Obviously, fusion should be done under the orientation of a therapist, or you might simply do everything wrong. Doing it with a therapist is also not a 100% sure thing. I can say that I have started to do as many boring and hateful things as possible while presenting as a woman; to the extent that I hardly ever go out with friends to dinners and parties as a woman, but go to the supermarket instead, stay in queues to pay bills, or ask bank clerks for loans — that kind of thing. I was expecting to realise that ‘being Sandra’ when doing boring stuff would, well, also be boring, and give me a fantastic insight in how I’m actually not transgender but just use ‘Sandra’ as a pretext for escapism. Unfortunately for me, the more I do ‘boring stuff’ as Sandra, the more I like ‘being Sandra’ — in other words, ‘boring stuff’ stops being boring because I do it as Sandra. I’m not quite sure if this helps or hurts me, or if it eases the depression or makes it even worse, if it shows that my presentation as a woman is linked to some obscure perversion deep in my subconscious mind or if it’s just the natural consequence of being transgender and enjoying myself all the time I present as the gender I have more affinity to. It’s complex, and certainly it has several nuances, and may not be the only solution and/or alternative to transitioning. In any case, it seems to work for many people.

What is so ironic to me is that, these days, I do tons of things as Sandra which usually ‘crossdressers’ would be absolutely scared to do; and I’m quite aware of several friends of mine, many of which going through transition, who are not yet as ‘bold’ as they think I am (this has nothing to do with ‘being bold’ but rather by caring less and less about what people think of me), even though many have absolutely gorgeous feminine bodies, enhanced through hormones — while I plod along with all my prosthesis, corsets, and makeup tricks, but couldn’t care less about what people actually think of me. And no, I have long ago dropped the illusion that I ‘pass’. Instead, I just try to be nice, polite and friendly — attributes of my personality that come naturally to me, no matter how I’m dressed — and not to scare away others by ‘shocking’ them in some way.

Overseeing my own admittedly complex case, the issue remains: transition is not for everybody. What alternatives are there if someone suffers from gender dysphoria but cannot transition?

The role of social pressure to ‘conform’ to a transgender narrative; the case against the ‘gender identity core’ theory

I have to start with a disclaimer: these are not my original thoughts. This is a theory forwarded by my wife, or, if you prefer, an unproven conjecture which, however, explains a lot of things and it’s far harder to disprove than you might think.

First, some background about the scientific method. When researchers make an affirmation about what they observe, such affirmations can have several levels of ‘scientific truth’ (we’ll come to that soon). Figuring exactly where some affirmations fall — even outside science! — is not always crystal-clear, and it’s easy (for an untrained mind) to reach the wrong conclusions.

Usually, based on the observed data, scientists start affirming a conjecture. This is a statement about what their own experience as researchers intuitively tells them how Nature behaves according to rules. At this stage, the conjecture is unproven — it can be a hint, a suspicion, an insight, or perhaps something eventually leading to solid knowledge. But it’s important to understand that a conjecture is unproven, it’s not ‘scientific truth’ yet, but nevertheless it’s much more than just a guess based on observed data — it is an affirmation with a certain degree of confidence that comes from both the researcher’s training and the data being observed.

The next step is formulating a hypothesis. Here, scientists will include a way to prove or disprove their theories, usually through an experiment or a potential mathematical proof (or disproof). In other words: if a certain affirmation can be proven or disproven by subsequent work, then it is a hypothesis. If there is no known way to prove or disprove it, but, in general, the affirmation ‘makes sense’, then it’s merely a hypothesis.

If a hypothesis gets validated over and over again, and in spite of being always possible to devise a counter-experiment to disprove it, then it becomes a theory. Sometimes it can take a long, long time until that happens. For example, Einstein’s theory of relativity was merely a hypothesis because when he formulated it, there was no easy way to set up an experiment to prove or disprove it. But such experiments existed — like measuring how the Sun bends light during a solar eclipse — and soon many different researchers tested several affirmations of the theory and found them to be correct. One of the last ones was the unquestionable proof that gravity waves existed — long predicted by Einstein, but discovered (or ‘proven’) a century after his predictions. In spite of being called ‘a theory’, it is one of the most proven theories in the domain of science. The next most proven one is the evolution of species through natural selection — formulated a century before we even understood that genes carry hereditary information, and subsequently validated not only at biological levels, but at biochemical levels as well.

Sometimes theories that have been proven again and again are called laws, and this is mostly a matter of semantics, and more typical of previous centuries. Newton’s theory of gravitation is encoded into ‘laws’ because they are validated in all possible domains and experiments — within a certain degree of confidence. If we go towards much more precise measurements, then Newton’s laws do not apply any longer, and we have to resort to Einstein’s relativity equations instead. But within a certain domain, Newton’s laws are universal. The same can be said about the Three Laws of Thermodynamics (amusingly known as ‘you cannot win the game’, ‘you cannot get even’ and ‘you cannot leave the game’ — referring to how entropy always grows in a system, and that no matter how you set up an experiment, you will never get 100% efficiency in terms of energy — some will always be lost due to entropy).

But in scientific terms, what best describes the observed universe (universe meaning ‘all that we can observe’, either directly through our senses, or indirectly through tools designed to enhance our senses, such as microscopes and telescopes) is a proven theory. Technically, if a theory is unproven, or proved to be false, it’s not a theory any longer — it simply gets dropped, such as the theory that the postulated medium for the propagation of light was ‘ether’, something which was disproved by the Michelson–Morley experiment (1887). In other words: the ether theory was a hypothesis turned into a theory because it explained a lot of what was going on with light, but, as in all theories, it ought to be possible to design an experiment that invalidated the theory (this is known as a falsifiable hypothesis and is crucial to science. As a counter-example: science cannot incorporate ‘God’ into its theories, because the existence of God cannot be proven or disproven with an experiment — so such a hypothesis cannot be scientific), and that was exactly what Michelson and Morley did. Figuring out a way to disprove a theory, or to show that a theory does not explain all observations, is what gives scientists a reasonable degree of confidence that some theories represent ‘scientific truth’ (which is always in flux — there is no such thing as an absolute scientific truth) while others have to be rejected.

And here we should also explain how some theories are discarded in favour of others. In essence, when comparing two or more theories, they have to comply to the following rule:

The simplest scientific theory that has the most explanatory power is retained, while all alternatives are discarded (sometimes called Occam’s Razor).

What this means is that, given two theories, if one of them has less entities to deal with and is therefore simpler, that theory should be kept, while the other should be discarded; but both also have to be compared in terms of their explanatory power, which means how well they model, represent, or explain all phenomena in the specific area it addresses. A theory that explains the most is the winning one.

This does not mean that a complex theory that explains little is ‘not scientific’. Rather, such theories are sometimes stepping stones towards something else. Einstein, Hawkings, and so many others, for instance, were searching for a Theory of Everything but so far that has not been possible to discover; nevertheless, we have several potential candidates for such a theory, none of which, however, have acquired the ‘proven’ status, since some of their testable claims require setting up experiments with an amount of energy that we still haven’t got on Earth.

Ok, so let’s focus back again on the issue of gender. Now, I’m not an expert in the field, but I can at least tell you about some pointers. When the notion that transgenderity was dropped as a mental disease — since, unlike mental diseases, gender dysphoria is not susceptible to be ‘treated’ by drugs & therapy — researchers had to figure out how exactly ‘gender’ works, and how they could explain that some people have a deep and profound feeling that they have a body that is incongruent with their gender.

This made them formulate a conjecture — which we know today as the gender identity core theory. The idea was that there was a specific area (or areas) of the brain where the gender identity is developed, and such an area would, in most cases, be influenced by the very complex biochemical balance that defines gender development. Sometimes, however, there would be an imbalance in the biochemical soup and the brain would develop a gender identity core that would not be congruent with the rest of the body. As a conjecture, this had a lot of explanatory power — namely, it explained why the ‘gender experience’ wasn’t affected by drugs or therapy: it was embedded or encoded in the brain in a way that cannot be changed (there are several areas in the brain which we actually know that work that way, so it was plausible to believe that the ‘gender identity core’ was another one of those special areas). The proponents of the conjecture were not really worried if this ‘core’ was not visible, or detectable, or if it was just an epiphenomenon of the brain as a whole and not an actual structure per se, and that meant that the gender identity core, at the beginning, was just a plausible conjecture.

Two things changed its status over time. The first was that there were several ‘competing’ conjectures to explain the same phenomenon (transgenderity); one of them is, of course, Blanchard’s autogynephilia. When confronting the two conjectures, the better candidate for a theory was the gender identity core, basically because it was a simpler explanation (Blanchard had to posit at least two measurably different kinds of transexuals, while the gender identity core theory only needs one kind of transexual — that means that it’s a simpler theory) and it had much vaster explanatory power (Blanchard wanted only to explain so-called secondary MtF transexuals, or late on-set MtF transexuals, which he called autogynephilic transexuals, and separate them from so-called primary MtF transexuals or homosexual transexuals as he labeled them; he totally ignored at first the existence of FtM transexuals or transexuals that did not exhibit any symptoms he associated with autogynephilia). In essence, the two theories could exist side-by-side, just applied to different samples of people — a bit like we can describe the orbit of planets using Newton’s laws of gravitation, but if we want to measure how light is bent by gravity, we have to use Einstein’s relativity because it’s far more accurate; but that doesn’t mean we have totally discarded Newton, we just use it according to the domain of astrophysics we’re studying.

However, Blanchard made several flaws in the statistical analysis of his data — he was trying to prove that there are two and only two types of transexual people, but his analysis was incorrect. In fact, his own data disproves his theory, but he was not aware of it due to miscalculations when he started publishing his theories. Lawrence, one of his followers, still sticks to autogynephilia, but admits that there are not only two different and separate kinds of transexuals, but rather a spectrum. Unfortunately for Blanchardians, by questioning the existence of ‘only two kinds’ of transexuals, Lawrence is indirectly refuting some of the base tenets of Blanchard’s own theories, thus disproving it even further.

The point here is to show a bit how science works. Researchers are not always greedy bastards seeking to undermine a competitor’s theory by showing its flaws; while researchers are also human, and compete with each other for fame and glory, they also know they have to stick to certain rules when affirming the superiority of one theory over another. The reason why we still talk about Blanchard and his followers is that they have subsequently refined their theory more and more, to try to encompass more variants of transgenderity. One peculiar explanation for so-called autogynephilic transexuals is the erotic target location error, proposed in 1993 by Blanchard: his idea is that autogynephiliacs, instead of focusing their erotism on partners, focus it on themselves (as females).

Now, why hasn’t Blanchard’s own theory caught on? From an activist/community perspective, it’s obvious: it labels late on-set transexuals as ‘sick perverts’ (even though Blanchard recommends transition for them as well) and only contributes to discriminate them further. But from a scientific perspective, the problem with Blanchard’s theory is that it simply lacks explanatory power — he has focused on just a very specific kind of individuals (male autogynephilic transgender people) and has no explanation for all the diversity among transgender people — while the gender identity core theory encompasses them all. But Blanchard’s theory also fails the Occam Razor’s test — it posits two different kinds of transexuals (even though his own published data actually disproves that hypothesis), while the gender identity core theory claims that there is just one type of transexuality — it just comes within a very broad spectrum, but it’s not different in kind, just in degree.

In other words: because Blanchard’s theory is more complex and has lesss explanatory power, it ought to be rejected in favour of a better explanation. And here the gender identity core theory is the prime candidate!

But it’s not the only one!…

I’m going to ignore for a moment the many alternative theories and just present my wife’s pretty puzzling one. She, like Blanchard, divides the trans population in two kinds: transexual and transgender.

Transexual is easy to explain: these are people who have a very strong gender identity which is opposite to the one assigned at birth (note that my wife’s theory doesn’t really account for ‘other’ genders; she believes that gender is mostly binary, and the exceptions have an explanation – we’ll see that in a bit). Those cases are so clear-cut that they require no profound diagnosis: such people will even physically look to the gender they identify with (which is easier in this generation where both males and females are skinny and underdeveloped because they spend way too much time indoors in front of a TV or a tablet…) or at least androgynous; they will exhibit all sorts of behavioural traits typical of the gender they identify with; and in general they will be strongly attracted to the opposite gender they identify with.

These are the people that my wife does not hesitate to refer to transition; and she has no qualms in getting them to do the transition as early as possible.

Everybody else in the trans spectrum is ‘transgender’ but with a slight twist. You see, instead of devising a ‘gender identity core’ area of the brain — an area, mind you, that we cannot locate with the current technological means we have (and my wife is aware of that limitation!), although we might have some hints on some brain sections that contribute towards identity in general — my wife simply suggests a process of social positive feedback. Not unlike a cult — or the identification that happens with a sports club (or a city, or a country…) if you prefer something more ‘softer’.

Here is my wife’s proposal for the transgender narrative. It starts with someone who is a crossdreamer — with or without external manifestation. Such a person gets a nagging feeling that something is ‘wrong’ with them, and notices that other people do not have the same ‘dreams’ as they have. This kind of feeling is more likely to occur close to the beginning of puberty, during or immediately after intense traumatic events (note that they don’t even have to be sexually related; it could be the death of a parent, getting fired and realising that now you’re bankrupt, or figuring out you’ve got a terminal disease), or closer to the so-called ‘mid-life crisis’ (a non-medical term to describe certain types of depressive behaviour associated with the realisation of one’s aging, which in women might coincide with menopause, while in men it often comes with the end of the peak sexual behaviour in one’s life). Certainly other major stressful and traumatic events might trigger these ‘strange’ dreams.

At the beginning, a sense of shame settles in — because crossdreaming is unusual and hardly mentioned in the mainstream media. The person tries to avoid to think about what’s going on, and often engages in denial and/or escapist activity (usually, work!) to suppress and repress such feelings and dreams. This will not only not work but eventually ‘burst’ — the crossdreamer will feel almost compelled to manifest somehow their strange dreams, and one possible outcome is crossdressing.

This has one consequence: it triggers an adrenaline rush — a very intense one — which is experienced as extremely pleasant. In some cases, it might be erotic/sexual in nature — i.e. on top of the adrenaline rush comes an orgasm — but in many cases it’s merely what we called ‘exciting’ outside a sexual context. But there might be an erotic undertone as well as the thrill from ‘doing something forbidden’ (this is how it is imagined and perceived, according to one’s social conditioning). Because Western society ‘condemns’ sex in so many stupid ways, it might be often impossible to figure out the difference between an ‘erotic thrill’ and a ‘doing-something-forbidden thrill’ since so often doing erotic things is seen as ‘forbidden’ by society as well (and most certainly in the case of crossdressing!).

There is now a moment of extreme shame and doubt about one’s mental sanity. This experience of the manifestation of crossdreaming multiplies by thousands the mere ‘dreaming’ phase. As said, crossdreaming can involve merely doing consistent gender-bending at games and social networks, just to give a very common kind of manifestation of crossdreaming, and which triggers the same kind of adrenaline rush as in persons who actually crossdress — in other words, this is not dependent on the actual manifestation itself, but rather as a consequence of having manifested the crossdreaming in something ‘physical’ (as opposed to ‘merely thinking about it’); although there are certainly cases where such a manifestation might even be totally mental, in the sense that the person focuses for a long while in their dreams, shutting themselves out from the rest of their activities, and experiences the full adrenaline rush just by imagining a crossdreaming experience with extreme clarity. I’m not going to dwell in this point much, because it will be experienced quite differently from person to person, although what is common to all of them is the degree of intensity. In other words: while crossdreaming might always be close to the surface of conscient thought, it might be easily brushed away through an effort of engaging in denial/escapist strategies; the crossdreamer is conscious that their dreams are ‘unusual’ and feels uncomfortable and shameful about them, but that’s all that happens; while when this crossdreaming experience is suddenly manifested (and many crossdreamers describe that it is something overwhelming in the sense that it seems to happen against their volition — there is no free will involved in that first experience — it’s just something that has to happen no matter what), this causes a minor traumatic event where the person questions their mental sanity and their identity.

Now, in the ancient, pre-Internet days, what would eventually happen is that such a person would by chance come across some transgender person — very likely not in the streets, but possibly by a picture in a magazine of someone crossdressing, or the announcement of a drag queen show, or something in the news. This will suddenly trigger a new thought in that crossdreamer: there are more people than me out there.

The realisation ‘I’m not alone’ is usually a moment of relief (the crossdreamer, after all, is not mentally insane — or at least they are as insane as any other crossdreamer, which means there is a bond between them) accompanied by some curiosity (sometimes, a lot of curiosity). The mere realisation that there are other crossdreaming people can, by itself, trigger a form of excitement (and, yes, it can be of the erotic kind) but also one of loathing (depending mostly on one’s education and social conditioning): because ‘transgender people’ are hardly portrayed in the best light (fortunately things have changed a lot in the past decade or so — and this makes a difference, which I’ll shortly address later), the notion that ‘I’m one of them‘ might not be totally a positive experience. It can be one of fear, of rejection (‘I do not want to be one of them!’), and therefore how this affects the crossdreamer has much more to do with the social conditioning they have received than with the experience itself. Notice, though, that the mere notion that there are more crossdreamers these days implies a change in the crossdreamer’s conceptual self-perception: instead of the fear of being unique, the only one with this ‘problem’, the crossdreamer contextualises their feelings within a group of people who (at least outwardly) seem to ‘be like them’.

The way the mainstream media so often portrays anything related to crossdressing as ‘sexual perversion’ does not help, either — one’s social conditioning might be threatened by the realisation that one is a ‘sexual pervert’ and that has consequences on one’s mental health. Again, following the realisation of being part of a ‘group of people’, the feeling might be one of intense relief (mixed with curiosity in knowing more about the ‘other crossdreamers’) or one of profound loathing and rejection (i.e. refusing to be ‘part of the group’ or even remotely associated with ‘one of those persons’…) which has consequences on one’s behaviour.

Eventually, however, there will be some positive feedback from the realisation of belonging to a group. I haven’t listed all possible cases of what happens, but the two most common — and this is based only on parochial evidence, i.e. my own crossdreaming friends — are the satisfaction of acquiring more knowledge about the subject, either to understand that crossdreaming is ‘not unnatural’ (and thus increasing the sensation of relief and curiosity), or to learn that others have coped with the ‘negativity’ and the association with ‘sexual perversion’, and this increases a certain degree of confidence in the ability to cope with crossdreaming (‘if others managed it, then I’ll manage it, too!’). In other words: crossdreaming is either pictured as something wonderful to possess, or something terrible that society condemns but that we can deal with and evade the social stigma — namely, by ‘entering the closet’ (manifesting crossdreaming in absolute secrecy) while still optionally keeping in touch with others who have done the same. Naturally enough, in these days of the ubiquitous Internet, it’s way easier to keep in touch with crossdreamers across the world.

How the situation progresses naturally depends on the individual, and all I can point to is the work of sociologists such as Richard Ekins (who I’ve thoroughly reviewed seven years ago), who points out several possible ‘paths’ for crossdreamers to follow (the book deals with MtF crossdreamers only, a shortcoming Ekins admits on his later writings). My wife, however, generally speaking, limits those possibilities to one major event (which can encompass several different expressions and/or manifestations) — the realisation of ‘belonging to a group’ motivates getting in touch with that group, either directly and in person, or indirectly, reading about them — and possibly a mixture of both. Depending on the degree of either social affinity (an extroverted way of getting in touch with others) or academic-like curiosity (the desire to read everything about the subject and see how it relates to oneself), this will create an image of how society deals with crossdreaming from the perspective of the crossdreamers themselves.

And now this is where the feedback loop starts to settle in. The crossdreamer meets (or reads about) others like themselves; who, in turn, will encourage them to express or manifest themselves more freely — claiming, very correctly, that ‘there is nothing wrong’ in that — and to explore further their own feelings. Depending on the group, of course, this may push the crossdreamer more towards crossdressing fetishism or its opposite, i.e. late-onset transexuality with little erotic undertones (there will always be some erotism; we humans are erotic animals, after all, and sex is natural for us, in spite of what society says or perceives). In my wife’s theory, it’s really not relevant which group will support and encourage the crossdreamer to do more crossdreaming because all of them will tell them the same — it’s only the motivation or the explanation that will be different. And, in fact, as Ekins and others have remarked, it’s not unusual for the crossdreamer to jump from group to group, rejecting some and accepting others, but always getting positive feedback from them. Eventually, they might settle on a particular group — or label, in the case of those who do not physically meet their counterparts but just read about them — and consider them ‘right’, when comparing what they feel and think about themselves.

My wife posits that all groups in the trans* spectrum behave in the same way, i.e. actively promoting positive feedback on one’s ‘transgenderity’ or ‘crossdreaming’, providing relief against any ‘negative’ ideas about the subject (or even dispelling the fear of any negative consequences) and encouraging to explore one’s ‘identity’ and manifest it more fully and deeply. There are obvious differences between the many groups: many will promote things like ‘the perfect crossdreamer’ or ‘the true crossdresser’ and list a series of attributes that a member of such a group should possess, or else, be excluded from them; this makes the crossdreamer gravitate towards the group which shares the most similarities with them and which therefore reinforces their sense of identity. Groups split and get back together, discussing irrelevant ideas or opinions on certain aspects which are often not even related to transgenderity at all. For instance, at least until recently (I didn’t check, so I’m not naming the group), a large transgender organisation in the UK would expell members if they mentioned ‘sex’ in any of their (many) public events – they had always kept apart from so-called fetishist crossdressers and to gain acceptance from society, they bound their members to an oath of celibacy – at least within the group. Such denial of one’s sexuality might be seen as extreme, but one has to consider that at the very top of the list, clinical sexologists will use ‘erotic pleasure’ as a tell-tale sign that someone is a fetishist and not someone with a gender identity issue, so if a group wishes to be taken seriously, they enforce strict rules (if you ever feel an orgasm while dressed as a woman, you’re a pervert; note that natal women are allowed to get erotically excited while they’re ‘dressing up’ and that is considered perfectly normal…).

But I digress. The point here that I try to make is that, sooner or later, either online or on the physical world, crossdreamers will get in touch with others with similar ideas and concepts about the subject, and tend to gravitate towards those groups which accept them more easily, and, most important, give them positive encouragement; sometimes this comes only after accepting fully the ‘rules of the group’ and incorporating them into one’s own attitude, behaviour, and (very often) outside appearance. The variety of such groups and communities is not different from, say, sports clubs – each cater to the tastes of different individuals, each sets some rules (like what colours to wear when watching the club playing), and radical fanatism to a club is encouraged, often through positive feedback given to those who truly wear the colours. We can argue if the underlying mechanism is very different or if it’s just a coincidence, but at least you will agree with my wife that looking at the issue as an external observer, this seems to be a similar mechanism.

Now, of course my wife has read a lot about the subject, and not necessarily agreed with most of what she read; also, like me, she’s not a sociology expert in trans* issues. Instead, she followed trends in academic or activist publications about the subject, as well as my own ‘progression’ (if I can call it that way) and those of some of my close trans friends. My wife is naturally aware that one does not become a ‘transexual’ but it’s something one has been born into; no amount of ‘social conditioning’ can ‘turn someone into a transexual’, so to speak — such a thing is impossible, and my wife acknowledges it. However, she thinks that there are ways to present an otherwise crossdreaming person that transition is something desirable for them, or, at least, living in the gender they identify with for as long as possible — with the exclusion of all the rest (i.e. ignoring what ‘society’ has to say about the subject — and that means also ignoring what friends, family, and colleagues think about the subject).

You can see why I have described this behaviour as similar to cult behaviour. When examined by someone like my wife, who is not in the transgender spectrum, this is what she sees: someone (a crossdreamer!) questions their own feelings about crossdreaming. They come in contact with a group of similar-minded individuals. These will now strongly encourage them to manifest and express such feelings fully, even by crossdressing and going out in public, to start taking hormones and doing a full transition. They will also strongly contest everybody else who disagrees with such a worldview. In other words: the community closes within itself — a ‘defense’ against the intolerant ‘outside world’ — and gives crossdreamers a ‘safe space’ where to freely manifest themselves, in the middle of not merely an ‘accepting’ or ‘tolerant’ community, but one that actively encourages their members to go further and follow ‘all the rules’ which can include a full transition.

The diversity of the transgender community is seen by my wife as merely a vast variety of expression, which is also tied to a concept of ‘building identity’ – by acquiring a label which includes a set of attributes, a specific group becomes ‘autonomous’ in the sense that it establishes an identity different from other possible identities, in a tribal sense. Now all this is anthropologically and even evolutionarily explained; it has little to do with whatever ‘gender identity’ one really and truly has, but rather an attempt to self-justify a set of attributes, behaviours, etc. – which is not unlike so many other such ‘tribal gatherings’, from sports clubs to religious cults to ideologic political parties and so forth.

Let’s take an analogy. Consider the ‘homosexual community’. Broadly speaking, one could oversimplify the subject (and thus get it totally wrong!) by simply saying that someone is homosexual if they feel sexually attracted to someone of the same gender. But there is so much more to it; in particular, a considerable amount of homosexuals are proud of their sexual preferences and quite willing to externally manifest themselves as a member of a group which is connected to homosexuality. But here we see a similar mechanism in effect. A considerable amount of homosexual people are externally undistinguishable from the mainstream, cisgender, heterosexual community. Some homosexual men prefer to exhibit an effeminate image of masculinity; they form the core of the original ‘gay culture’; but by no means are the only alternative. From drag queens to ultra-masculine ‘bears’, homosexual males gather together in all kinds of groups with their own very specific identity, rules of behaviour, and even external appearance. And of course the same happens among the female homosexuals; from ‘butches’ to ‘lipstick lesbians’, the diverse community adopts all sorts and kinds of appearance and types of behaviour – many of which absolutely unrelated to the actual sexuality itself, but merely as an act of identification with a specific subgroup of the LGBTQI+ community.

I’m aware that this is a gross oversimplification, and one that might be used as an argument by right-wing conservatives to disregard the actual ‘existence’ of the LGBTQI+ community. This is dangerous, because it totally fails to understand what is cause and what is consequence. One does not become an ‘effeminate gay’ by choice and then start engaging in homosexual intercourse; instead, one has been born homosexual, and, among the vast variety of homosexual groups (or ‘tribes’ if you wish), one identifies with a specific one, adopts their rules, their behaviour, their external manifestation… their identity.

It is also wrong to say that these rules, behaviour, appearance, etc. are merely ‘external’ manifestations and as such unworthy of being taken seriously! These go much more deeper to be casually brushed away as if they could simply disappear by sheer willpower. Also, of course, we citizens of Western democracies are entitled to the right of presenting ourselves as we wish while pursuing the expression of our individuality. And, again, we must never forget that such rules, behaviours, and so forth are not just an external cloak over our bodies, but rather a deep expression of our identity. And here is where the analogy with identification with sports clubs, religions, or ideologies breaks apart.

While a sociologist may argue that the trappings of tribal behaviour become our identity by identification with them, LGBTQI+ issues work the other way round: they begin with the identity, and its manifestation is a consequence (not a cause!!) of that identity. In other words: you’re not born as a fan of Manchester United; you just find out about that soccer club at some point during your existence on this planet, and, once found, you wish to belong to the fandom of that soccer club, to the point that it becomes part of your identity. Naturally enough, several conditions may trigger that ‘wish-to-belong’ — education for one thing (if your parents are avid fans of Manchester United, it’s likely you will be, too), and physical location or nearness to the source of the tribal behaviour (while MU fans exist all around the world, it’s far more likely to become one if you live in the UK, especially if you live near Manchester).

But with LGBTQI+ issues, the causation effect is exactly the opposite one. You are born LGBTQI+. You may just find out about yourself at a later stage (or maybe even never, in extreme circumstances), and deal with that ‘discovery’ in many different ways (utter rejection and suppression being, of course, one of them), but the gender identity core theory considers that there is no way to ‘un-become’ LGBTQI+ — you can just pretend you’re not LGBTQI+.

Here is where my wife’s theory contradicts the accepted explanation. She says that the notion that some people have been born transgender (she does not emphasize the issue about sexual orientation) is acceptable for her for an incredibly small number of people — those who are ‘true transexuals’. Everybody else has just incorporated transgenderity in their identity, but it wasn’t something that they have been ‘born’ with.

She even accepts notions such as ‘the urge to crossdress’ (just to take an example). We humans have all sorts of uncontrollable urges, she says; some of which we clearly know that come from a genetic propensity (others we suspect about it, but still haven’t found a definitive explanation). A few typical examples: while IQ properly speaking is not hereditary, the potential to develop a higher-than-average intelligence seems to be genetic, so long as it is properly conditioned and a suitable environment is found for that specific person to thrive in it and thus realise their potential. We have also figured out that different brain wiring leads to people being politically more progressive or more conservative. Similarly, it’s now known that the propensity to take unnecessary risks or even to become addicted to a particular substance is somehow encoded into our DNA; that’s why some people can become social smokers (and give it up any time) while others cannot (once they get ‘addicted’ to tobacco consumption, they are ‘hooked’ for life).

Her argument, therefore, is that there is also a propensity (genetically encoded somehow) for ‘crossdressing’ or at least to engage in gender non-conforming behaviour. In other words: some people are ‘wired’ for sticking to the gender binary (or else, bye-bye reproduction and the survival of the species), while others are not. These ‘others’ may never realise that they are gender non-conforming — all depends on appropriate conditions, triggers, education, opportunity, and so forth. In several societies and environments, they may never ‘come out’ — and they will probably have weird dreams and fantasies, try their best to cope with it, suppress and repress their feelings, possibly develop all kinds of mental issues such as depression and anxiety — but even if they get treatment for those, they will never tell their doctors anything about their ‘weird dreams’, because, well, these are just plain weird and clearly not to be taking seriously.

So what happens when some of these ‘differently wired’ people get in touch with a trigger? This is where my wife’s theory comes in. Experiencing that there are other people ‘wired’ the same way, and most importantly, that they are out there having fun, will ring all sorts of alarm bells in their heads. And, as said, in the past, this could be a picture of a transgender person on a magazine or a transvestite on TV or on a movie. All of the sudden comes this realisation: ‘oh, that’s what my dreams mean!’

And the next step is trying to get in touch with this community. Of course such a process is hardly easy and only rarely done ‘immediately’ – it may be years until they get in touch with them. It has become so much easier these days, thanks to websites and social media. At the same time, there are a gazillion articles about the subject that can be read online: people can prepare for their ‘first encounter’ with the community, even if it is just online.

There is also a lot to learn. As any transgender person ‘newbie’ has experienced, the community has a lot of rules. There is the whole complicated nonsense about pronouns. There is the concept of a nickname, or pen name, or in the case of MtF transgender people, the femme name. There are conventions and even grammar to learn: transgender people are not trangendered, for instance, and they are globally referred as ‘they’, not as ‘he’ or ‘she’. Grammar rules are bent; and even ortography changes (that’s the case in my own mother language, Portuguese, because Portuguese has far more gendered words than English).

As you can see, entering this ‘transgender community’ is not much different from joining, say, the freemasonry or a secret cult with its strange conventions and rules. There are norms of ‘acceptable behaviour’ once you’re ‘one of us’. Transgender people are expected to behave in a certain way; they’re even expected to subscribe to left-wing identity politics (and preferably be atheist, too). The list goes on and on… and it certainly has little to do with what ‘being transgender’ actually means.

Instead, there is tribal bonding. In order to be accepted as ‘one of us’, there is a lot to be absorbed and incorporated into one’s behaviour. Once you show that you’re a well-behaved member of the community, you earn respect from your peers, and are unconditionally loved, or at least protected, by all of them.

This has a lot of consequences – which, again, have little to do with ‘transgenderity’. However, it certainly has to do with identity. To be ‘part of the community’, it means to be proud of being different from the mainstream, cishet society. And that pride is manifested in many ways: in behaviour, attitudes, the places you go and those you avoid, the friends you make and the people you scorn and reject, and even in the way you dress and present yourself. All that in return for ‘acceptance’.

Tribal acceptance is rewarding in itself – quite a lot, actually. Suddenly you’re surrounded by people who think like you and who supports you and who you are fully and inconditionally. Or, well, almost: you’re accepted if you comply with the rules. But because such rules actually conveys identity, most transgender people will submissively subject themselves to those rules, rarely (if ever!) questioning them. In fact, the more time transgender people are in constant touch with ‘their’ community, the more and more all those rules make sense, and the less they’re questioned. This is a behaviour, again, not unlike what happens in sports clubs – or fanatical religious cults.

Now, I’m not saying that the ‘transgender community’ is some kind of cult! Not even my wife goes that far. Instead, I’m just drawing parallels in behaviour and attitude with tribal behaviour. What happens among the transgender community is similar to what happens with all tribal grouping – and that includes geeks working for Microsoft or Google, as well as rocket scientists, or the military. All these groups have their rules for belonging to them. All of them expect from their members some sort of ‘group loyalty’ which is expressed by sticking to the rules, adopting certain behaviours (or abandoning others), sometimes even clothing (the military wears uniforms!). We can go as far as claiming that this is true for all human groupings and that it’s a hallmark of our species; indeed, homo sapiens started as a gregarious species grouping together along clans or tribes, each of which had distinct ‘rules’, behaviour, even language, to distinguish themselves from the ‘others’. This kind of behaviour is hard-coded in our genes; we might just have access to more sophisticated technology these days, but we still form our tribes, clans, gangs, crews… groups of fellow humans who share something with us and who have a common ‘identity’.

I’m loosely using the word ‘identity’ here, because I’m not a sociologist, and I’m pretty sure they’ve got a very precise definition about ‘group identity’. But even using it in its more loose and informal version, there is something that we can note about ‘group identity’: members share something in common which is somehow unique and distinctive (making them different — even visually! — from ‘other’ groups); there is an ‘admission’ system — call it a ‘rite of passage’ if you wish — which requires displaying some skills, abilities, or at the very least the willingness to conform to the rules and standards of the group. And then the bonding begins — all members influence each other, they develop their own common groupthink, and this, in turn, is what gives the group as a whole its ‘identity’. But there is identity working at the individual level as well: struggling to become a ‘full’ member, be totally and unconditionally accepted, requires working hard at shaping our thoughts to be the same as the thoughts of the group; and this, in turn, will shape how we think — in other words, we become part of the group when we think in the same way as the rest of the members; and at that moment, our own identity is re-forged as being part of the group.

We can see this working very well at all levels of grouping and bonding, and it’s even something that happens at kindergarten. As time passes, our groups just become more complex and sophisticated — ultimately, if you will, this will lead to something we could call ‘patriotism’ on a good day and ‘nationalism’ in a bad mood: the full and total identification as a member of a vast group of people sharing the same country or nation, and which has aan infinitely complex cultural legacy, which we absorb totally and make it our own. We say, ‘I’m American’, and we that we equate our ‘being’ (I am) with the relationship we have with all the millions of human beings happening to live in the same geographic area between arbitrarily set borders. Our identity is ‘American’, in the sense that we have absorbed all that cultural legacy and make it a part of our identity. Of course, we can be both American, and, say, Portuguese; or American and a fan of Manchester United; or Portuguese and a fan of bullfighting, a member of Google, and so forth. We are complex creatures, and what defines us — what makes our identity! — is an amalgamation of tribes, clans, groups, at many different levels, often intertwined (can you be Brazilian and hate samba and soccer? Well… yes, but you will be seen as a lesser Brazilian by your fellow citizens), and, most importantly, rarely clean-cut and black-or-white. Ask 28 different people from each of the countries of the European Union what it means to be ‘European’ and you will get 28 different answers: our world is so complex that there is a vast room for dealing with different ways of identification with a specific grouping.

We draw identity from the group(s) we belong to.

I’m well aware of the difference of ‘being transgender’ versus ‘be a fan of a sports club’: to recap, in the first case, there is no choice – one is transgender (or, as my wife would put it, one has the potential of manifesting themselves as gender non-conforming) due to biological factors, while one becomes a fan of a club by choosing to become one. While both classifications confer identity – and that is undeniable! – this fundamental difference is certainly acknowledged by my wife’s theory. Exactly because it is not a matter of choice, my wife also supports laws to protect the rights of transgender people (which go far beyond the right to dress weirdly and yell the anthemn of your sports club in the middle of the street…). What she does not acknowledge is the notion that the propensity or the potential for being gender non-conforming automatically means that one has to follow one’s biological constrains. In other words: if you have been assigned male as birth, but identify as female, that does not automatically mean that you have to do something about it – the actual decision to go through transition, according to my wife, is a question of personal choice. One can choose to ignore one’s biological urges, and lead a perfectly normal life presenting as a gender with which one does not identify with and even be happy – so goes her theory.

In fact, one might even argue that one major trait of the human species is the agility to ignore their ‘animal urges’ – although I’m personally not very happy about such an argument; after all, our cats also learn how to suppress some of their ‘animal urges’ and behave according to a set of rules established by their human companions; surely even in the animal kingdom such things are not that ‘black & white’ either – and our cats are perfectly aware of a lot of ‘instincts’ they have to overcome in exchange for living with us humans. If cats, not being the most obedient pets domesticated by humans, can learn how to override their basic instincts; if dogs, a much more obediente and trainable species can go way further on doing that; than clearly we as humans should be able to overcome all our animal instincts. And this is certainly true for a lot of small things, such as being able to decide to starve to death or just urinate on designated places – and all sort of artificial rules which condition us against our own basic, animal instincts, in exchange for living in what we call ‘civilisation’.

How far this ‘overriding’ can go is obviously a matter of discussion. But unfortunately we have reports of the most horrifying cases where people were forced to override all their instincts of self-preservation in order to do the most abominable things ever. There is an example that we all know about: the military. Their training includes an objectification of the enemy, so that it becomes ‘less than a person’ and therefore can be killed. Such brainwashing is so well accomplished (or we wouldn’t manage to train professional armies) that it leads to the old saying that anyone can be made to kill a fellow human being, given the right circumstances. In reality (and thankfully so!) most of us are conditioned to empathise (at least to a degree) with fellow human beings so that killing them is abhorrent to all cultures. But we can override that empathy.

This also applies for small stupid things. Smokers, for instance, learn to override the gag reflex which sets in when we inhale smoke. That’s a natural instinct, hard-wired in our genes, because smoke means fire and fire means death, so the gag reflex is something we need to have in order to survive forest fires (namely by coughing in an attempt to keep the lungs clean of particles that will harm them). But all smokers learn how to override it – it’s not necessarily very hard to do so, but it’s not something ‘automatic’ which can be done with the first cigarette ever smoked. It takes a little bit to be able to override the gag reflex, but, once that trick is mastered, smokers never think twice about it again (and before you ask, yes, the gag reflex still kicks in during a forest fire – smokers are just aware of the distinct quality of the different kinds of smoke, and just override it when burning tobacco).

Anyway, the whole point here is to understand that we might, indeed, be hard-wired to do a lot of things without thinking (take breathing, for instance!), many of which are crucial for our survival as members of a species. However, we have a will power that allows us to override quite a lot of those ‘instinctive’ behaviours, no matter how hard-wired they are. I’m not claiming that you can override them all, but you can certainly override far more than most people believe.

But there is more. Some forms of ‘hard-wired’ behaviour is acquired, through education (either formal or by imitation), inside a specific social context. Sociologists are well aware of those ‘unwritten rules’ which happen ‘automatically’ even though they may not have any rational explanation. For instance, there is this classical example of jaywalking, which is typically forbidden in most jurisdictions, but most human beings still consider that ‘law’ to be something they can safely ignore; by contrast, we learn early on about the ‘elevator etiquette’ (you stand in silence among strangers and face the door) even though there are no formal rules to forbid us to stare at the walls instead. Elevators are certainly not around for long enough for ‘elevator etiquette’ to be hard-coded in our genes, although we all observe that etiquette without ever questioning it.

This means that we can effectively ‘brainwash ourselves’, in the sense of ‘forcing’ our neural pathways to acquire certain kinds of self-imposed conditioning which ‘feel’ like they’re inborn, or reflexive. In reality, they have been acquired after our brain came out of the womb.

It’s not as if humans are the only beings able to do that, either. I got for the first time non-adult cats, which came to our home as kittens; before that, I was just familiar with adult cats. So I read a bit about how to train felines and canines when they are young. It’s important to understand that these are domesticated animals, and what this means is that they have a predisposition to be at ease around humans (we artificially selected them that way) and to ‘trust’ us.

But small kittens are born in a world full of strange sounds and sights (caused mostly by humans). In the wild, other felines will learn how to recognise which sounds are ‘dangerous’ (i.e. meaning that you should run away from them), which are harmless (you can safely ignore them), and which mean something special or impòrtant (like the sound of a prey which becomes the next meal!). Kittens learn which are which by imitating the behaviour of their mothers. At first, all sounds are strange and dangerous; but as the kitten grows, it learns what sounds the mother ignores and which are impòrtant and so forth. The interesting bit is that felines are not exactly hard-wired to know which is which – they have to learn them. And so, we humans, living in a cacophony of strange noises, have to tell our little pets what is dangerous and what is not. A car squeaking its tires in the street below is not dangerous. A sledgehammer on a construction site is not dangerous. The many noises of all the machines we’ve got at home are not dangerous (no, not even the dreaded vacuum cleaner!). And so, once a cat reaches adulthood (around a year of age or so), they will have a pretty thorough understanding of what noises are to be ignored and might signify something important – such as the noise of the cat biscuits being dropped into the bowl!

Once they learn to evaluate those noises, it becomes second nature to them. They will safely ignore all non-dangerous noises – for instance, sleeping peacefully even if someone is turning on the blender or the coffee grinder.

Now, humans are fundamentally the same: a lot of what we call ‘natural instincts’ is acquired behaviour; while some is clearly inborn; but we also learn how to override the inborn behaviour and replace it by behaviour that is more conforming to the society we live in.

Let’s get back to what ‘transgender’ means to my wife. She sees it as another form of group identity emerging from a set of rules and behaviour which are established semi-artificially by those who are part of the ‘community’ (which is, in essence, just another social environment, with rules directing behaviour). As those behaviours are incorporated and assimilated, they become more and more natural, in the sense of getting familiar with them triggers this ‘assimilation’ behaviour, through which we incorporate new rules and new behaviour – acquired externally – but which becomes ‘a part of ourselves’, as natural as sneezing.

In fact, my wife goes further and states that the symptoms of gender dysphoria, which are well established and published, and relatively easy to diagnose, only manifest themselves after the transgender person comes in touch with the community. In other words: just as the ‘middle-age crisis’ does not formally exist, but is merely a complex interplay of depressive and anxious states which triggers certain behaviours more frequently at a certain age (and thus psychologists do not ‘treat’ people for ‘middle-age crisis’ – they treat them for depression, anxiety, trauma, etc.), my wife argues that ‘gender dysphoria’ does not exist by itself, but only as the sum of a lot of mental states that are bundled together after the person identifies with ‘transgenderity’ – even if they don’t even know the meaning of the word.

Now, you might counter-argue that at the core of those rules & behaviours is something we will call the ‘gender core identity’ and that all the rest comes next; my wife, however, is not so easily persuaded: she says that it can be very well the opposite, i.e. one may have the predisposition to be ‘gender non-conforming’ in some way, but it is only through the bonding happening inside the ‘transgender tribe’ that the full potential of ‘being transgender’ is realised. If the ‘potentially transgender’ person never comes in contact with a ‘transgender community’, well, then they won’t ‘be’ transgender at all: they just will be a ‘normal’ person with some weird ideas, dreams, and fantasies — nothing more and nothing less.

Here, of course, she departs drastically from the mainstream thinking about it; and, in so many cases in science, it’s not often easy to figure out which is causation, and which is merely correlation. The supporting arguments for my wife’s theory are many, but I’ll point out a few of them. First, her theory is ‘simpler’ than the gender identity core theory, exactly because it does not require us to ‘invent’ something invisible hiding in our brains, which we currently cannot visualise with our imaging techniques, nor after dissecting the brain. This, according to Occam’s Razor, would be a better explanation than the gender identity core theory – after all, we have a vast accumulation of knowledge about group identity and how it works, and (so would my wife say) there is no fundamental external difference between that and so-called ‘transgender culture’, so it doesn’t make sense to treat it as something ‘different’.

To be a better theory, though, my wife’s theory needs to have at the very least as much explanatory power as the mainstream gender identity core theory. She thinks she has that, mostly because she can look at historical data and point out that in the not-so-very-distant, intolerant past, ‘transgender’ people may have existed (since they left writings about their feelings), but they have effectively suppressed their urges and feelings and lead conforming lives. Some, of course, have killed themselves when they couldn’t handle their situation any longer; but the vast majority of transgender and non-heterosexual people simply had to display an outwards appearance fully conforming with their ra requirements. Many certainly became depressed or anxious, before such mental states could be correctly diagnosed. Many might have ended their lives in lunatic asylums, or put to death for their ‘perversions’. In other words: to explain the ‘rise of transgender expression’ in our current society, my wife simply says that there was not a coherent transgender narrative in our recent past. Lacking such a narrative, transgender people had nothing to bond with. They didn’t even suffer from ‘being in the wrong body’ (because that would be called insanity in those times) or ‘being forced to adopt a gender role they loathed’ (because conforming to social expectations and norms was so much more important in the recent past than it is today).

I should point out the subtle change of focus here. Instead of using a classical psychological theory, or a behaviourist one, my wife proposes something a bit more contemporary: that of the narrative. Ekins, who I have mentioned before, also focuses on ‘transgender narratives’ – without using ‘classic’ labels, Ekins follows transgender people in their paths – essentially a narrative, which varies according to the starting point (discovery of the love of crossdressing, going out, then taking hormones, going through transition, and so forth). Ekins is a sociologist, not a psychologist, so he’s more interested in studying how transgender people interact with society, and how that interaction changes over time, affecting how the transgender person views themselves, and subsequently pushing them towards one path instead of another.

My wife follows a similar theory. What activists call ‘transgender people’ are a consequence of their individual narrative. As said, they might be born with the latent potential of following a transgender narrative – similar to how some people have the potential of following a sports career, or consider an intellectual lifestyle, or wish to become artists. There are a lot of so-called ‘inborn attributes’ such as talent, intelligence, dexterity, and so forth; some people figure out which of those attributes will fit their identity – their self-image – best, and develop themselves accordingly, so long as they are in a favourable environment: society rules, morals, religion, or financial issues may prevent some of those developments to occur, others may be encouraged. All humans differ in the set of attributes or potential they have, and, depending on the environment and interactions they have, they may lead a specific path or another. Someone with a perfect pitch may become a singer; feedback from the audience might encourage them to pursue that career further, and to think of themselves as ‘I, a singer’. The same is true for most of human pursuits: we can argue that we are born with some characters for a narrative and a certain setting where that narrative occurs, but how the narrative actually unfolds depends on a ton of factors, both internal and external. For instance, the utter lack of any artistic talent may not discourage someone to pursue an artistic career in spite of that; eventually they might have a much harder time, or not a very successful career, but ultimately there might be a ‘driver’ for such a narrative which is independent of actual musical talent: for example, someone might desire the lifestyle of a professional singer and have the potential for such a lifestyle, but unfortunately lacking other attributes (namely, being able to sing!)

Therefore, my wife considers that this applies to so-called ‘transgender narratives’. Consider a classic, late-onset MtF transexual. At birth, he or she will have the ability or attribute to question gender roles, for instance; and they might also have a lot of attributes more typical of socially conditioned girls. So (s)he identifies strongly with girls, not boys. (S)he starts building a personal narrative where they are somehow ‘forced’ to follow a path in that narrative which is against their will. As time passes, though, social conditioning sets in, and this person will learn that most people have no freedom to pursue their narrative according to their wishes, because they – as everybody else – is socially conditioned to follow a path that is suitable to their physical appearance, social standing, education, wealth, and so forth. So this person will effectively build a narrative for themselves against their wishes; their first narrative (‘I like girls and wish to be part of their group’) is suppressed and the person tries to adapt to a male life according to an ‘expected’ narrative. According to some psychologists, the long-time suppression of such emotions will have consequences at some point: due to some triggers (unhappy family life, work troubles, sudden death of someone close to them), the suppressed narrative comes back with a vengeance, and starts affecting one’s mental health – anxiety, depression, ultimately gender dysphoria.

Our sad late-onset MtF transexual now faces the building blocks of a different narrative: (s)he can go back to their childhood narrative, because they learn that others did exactly that. They ‘borrow’ bits from narratives of others who have transitioned and incorporate in their own narrative. And as they explore their ‘other’ gender role, they start getting a lot of positive feedback (from others such as them); they read all sorts of things related to the ‘transgender narrative’ (which is so surprisingly similar to others…!) and possibly get encouragement from their therapist or some close friends to switch to a different narrative – what we call ‘transition’.

What my wife has to say about this particular point is simple. On one hand, she considers that transgender narratives ‘contaminate’ each other, often thanks to activists or doctors or academics providing lots of data regarding such narratives – we learn today in this 21st century that transgender people are as valid as cisgender ones, and their narratives are as valid (and worthy to be legally protected!) as any other. It’s therefore impossible to ‘isolate’ a specific narrative and consider it ‘pure’, free of any influences. Certainly today it’s much easier to ‘taint’ personal narratives, because there is so much more information available, and transgender people (for the better or the worse) are more visible in society. The ‘rise of transgender’ people feared by the far-right is simply the triggering of a ‘transgender narrative’ inside a specific person with the propensity, or potential, to adopt such a narratie;  and because it’s so much easier today than decades (or centuries!) before, it seems as if all of the sudden it became ‘fashionable’ to be transgender! Actually it’s just a consequence of higher visibility – the same argument was used, a few decades ago, when homosexuality was considered ‘acceptable’ and ‘tolerated’ (at least at the legislative level!). One in ten human beings have always had the latent potential for homosexuality, but during most of human history, they had necessarily to suppress that potential and adopt a ‘fake’ heterosexual narrative instead. Transgender people are not different in that regard, we have just not have had enough time!

My wife’s explanation, therefore, does not ignore the existence of ‘transgender narratives’. Such narratives condition the way transgender people think, and, in most cases, can even inflict much suffering or even mental distress and the inability to function in ‘normal’ society because they refuse a mainstream, cishet narrative for themselves. The suffering is real – but my wife proposes that the actual narrative is not: like everything else, it’s a mental construct, which ‘becomes’ so real that it causes acute suffering. So, instead of suggesting transition, except for some very few isolated cases, my wife considers that the best option to stop the suffering is to change the narrative.

Her argument is simple. There are lots and lots of medically researched conditions where the relief for them is almost always a change of narrative. A typical example: people with body dysmorphia acutely seek all sorts of plastic surgery to ‘correct’ what they see as imperfections in their body (which, however, are not apparent to anyone else). They seek a certain ideal of perfection, which, however, is never achieved: with each successive surgery, they come nowhere near that ‘ideal’ image of themselves. The therapy for such cases is not to encourage people to do more surgeries, but rather to change their own narrative so that they accept that what they see in their mirror is not what others see, and the alleged ‘imperfections’ are merely an imagined element in a narrative; with the help of a therapist, that element can be replaced with a more ‘healthy’ narrative.

Similar examples exist for almost all mental conditions that can be treated by modern medicine. My wife asks therefore: why is ‘gender dysphoria’ different? What makes it so special and different from all other narratives that cannot be changed?

One might be tempted to answer ‘the gender identity core forces that narrative into existence, and the gender identity core cannot be changed’. But that is circular reasoning: remember, my wife starts with the assumption that there is no such thing as a ‘gender identity core’ which works differently than any other known mechanisms which produce a narrative. Because there is no direct, physical evidence of the existence of a ‘gender identity core’ with the characteristics attributed to it, my wife prefers to replace it merely by a special attribute or potential to create a ‘transgender narrative’, but such potential is just like any other, not more, nor less.

My answer to that was that there are, indeed, similar theoretical mechanisms that explain certain conditions better than other theories. Homosexuality, for instance, is ‘real’ in the sense that there is no mechanism to make a person change their sexual preferences; we’re born with a specific preference, and if society constrains us to seek different kinds of partners, we suffer.

Well, to that, of course, my wife replies by saying that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are a spectrum of attributes, most of which socially attributed, some being physical. The same is true for sexuality: there are no 100% pure heterosexuals or 100% pure homosexuals; she claims that we are all a bit bisexual by design, but, due to a lot of circumstances, we may fit better into a specific sexuality narrative than in others. If that narrative coincides with accepted social norms, even better; but, again, she doesn’t see sexuality, or the choice of sexual partners, as being something fixed and immutable and set into a ‘sexual preference identity core’. Rather, we have the potential to be more attracted to a gender or other (or to both!) and we build our personal narrative based on that potential.

Now, I’m quite aware that my wife’s theories are politically incorrect, because she places things like sexuality and gender in the realm of personal choice – when such ideas have been thoroughly rejected decades ago. In other words, you cannot choose not to be homosexual if you prefer partners of the same gender as yours; if that potential exists, then you have to follow a ‘homosexual narrative’. You can pretend not to be homosexual but that will only lead to mental distress. You can also take some vows of celibacy and become a monk – therefore excluding the issue of sexuality from your life. Nevertheless, these are just functional responses when living inside a cishet society – not a change of ‘narrative’.

Again, my wife also subscribes to the notion of functionality. Being MtF transgender if you’re 1.78m tall with a wide frame and some musculature and a very masculine jaw is simply not functional – you will never be able to live a life as a ‘woman’. You will just live a life as transgender – and therefore be subject to transphobia, which in turn will make all your life miserable (unless you wish to be a sex worker and desire that lifestyle for yourself!). So, in that scenario, the transgender narrative is not functional, and it causes twice the suffering: first, the suffering from gender dysphoria; and second, the suffering due to self-ostracism from a transphobic society. Why, asks my wife, should such a narrative be functional? What suffering exactly is being ‘removed’ through transition? A set of problems is just replaced by a new set of problems; both cause suffering; what’s the point in sticking to a transgender narrative?

So what is my struggle here? At this point, when observing my wife’s theories and her very strong argumentation, I have two options. The first is to say, ‘you’re wrong because a group of experts in the field — which you’re not — have a different theory, and there is a consensus among these experts that their theory is correct and everyone else’s is wrong’. Well, this is arguable in the sense that science is not done ‘by consent’. Or at least it shouldn’t. There are two famous exceptions which threaten the way science is done and who are well-known: the first, of course, is climate change. Because the arguments for man-made climate change are based in incredibly complex models and simulations, and which are very hard to validate, it’s always questionable if the models are ‘correct’ in the sense that they perfectly model the past and give accurate predictions for the future — something which happens in all other sciences. Unfortunately, we don’t have a ‘perfect’ model, which can be validated independently, and which can be proven to describe reality precisely (in the sense that we can do that with, say, relativity). Instead, what we have is an increasing number of hundreds of researchers in the field having evaluated independently all available data and roughly agreeing that the current models, while not perfect, come very close to model and predict what will come. But there are always a few that disagree; and there are always people refining the existing models, or even proposing new ones that hopefully reflect reality even better. There is no ‘independent proof’ in the sense of other sciences simply because all models are merely approximations. All, however, point to similar conclusions (i.e. that man-made climate change is real and that it will only get worse unless we refrain from harming the environment), and therefore the consensus is built around a more abstract level — namely, that it’s not absolutely fundamental to know if the average temperature of the globe will rise by 10ºC or just 3ºC until 2100, it’s just important that it rises, and that there are consequences due to that (i.e. extreme weather becomes more common because there is much more energy in the system).

The other ‘famous’ consensus is gathered around the interpretation (i.e. the philosophic implications) of quantum mechanics, which describe a very strange world at the microscopic level, and which does break away from all we admit to be ‘common sense’. There are currently nine (if my memory doesn’t fail me) distinct theories trying to explain what quantum mechanics mean in terms of the worldview we have of the universe. The first consensus, established some decades ago, is known as the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ (basically because it was in that city where the interpretation was first disclosed), and it can be briefly resumed in this way (with apologies to all of you who have studied quantum mechanics and are wincing from my oversimplifications — I’m not an expert in quantum theories whatsoever, I’ve just barely studied some of the easiest forms of quantum equations and have forgotten it all decades ago anyway): particles in the universe ‘exist’ only as a function of the probability of being ‘somewhere’ (and moving ‘somewhere else’), in all possible, superimposed states, simultaneously. It is just the observer that makes the wavefunction collapse and in a way ‘fixes’ (or ‘makes it perceptible in the so-called classic physical universe where we live’) one specific state, while all others disappear. This can be explained in several ways, and one of which is answering the question: ‘is light a wave or a particle?’ The answer is both — it depends on what we’re measuring. If we’re observing the particle properties of photons, then light behaves as particles; if we measure its properties as a wave, then it behaves as a wave. It’s the experiment — and the observer behind the experiment — which determines if it’s one thing or the other.

Now, while this interpretation gathered a consensus for decades, it also created a lot of problems. First of all, what exactly is an ‘observer’? Early descriptions tended to imply that it was the human in the laboratory doing the experiment; in other words, in order for this world to ‘exist’ (in order for all wave functions to collapse so that we can perceive a fixed state), there has to be a conscious mind which ‘observes’ the universe. (Note that when Buddhists first heard about the Copenhagen interpretation, they loved it, because it tightly fits into their own philosophical theories, i.e. there is no mind without universe/matter and no universe without mind; you need to have both.) This naturally made scientists wince, because all of a sudden they were thrown into a quasi-religious view of the universe, namely, that this universe apparently cannot ‘exist’ unless humans are in it observing particles. In particular, this lead to the formulation of the anthropic principle, one of the ‘least scientific’ principles around there: the notion that the universe exists only in a form that allows sentient life to exist in it (because otherwise they could not ‘observe’ the universe according to the Copenhagen interpretation, and therefore the universe would not ‘exist’, since no wavefunctions would ever collapse). Because this principle is awkward for scientists to accept (it barely scratches the domain of ‘religion’…), for decades different interpretations were applied in order to get rid of the idea that humans need to exist for the universe to exist as well — starting with the notion that the ‘observer’ does not need to be ‘human’ (so any life form could be an observer) and ultimately not even ‘sentient’, i.e. other particles can act as ‘observers’ as well. Again, this creates a few more problems of its own, namely, defining what ‘observation’ means, since the verb ‘observation’ requires an ‘observer’ and something being ‘observed’, and the ‘observer’ has to be conscious that he or she is making an ‘observation’. A particle, therefore, either cannot make an ‘observation’ (because it’s not sentient) or has to be sentient to make observations, which is clearly absurd. This lead to proposing a so-called ‘mathematical observation’, an abstract concept which postulates a method for non-sentient objects to be able to collapse the wavefunction. It gets complicated!

Every year or so, a team of quantum mechanics experts join, analyse what papers have been published in the field during the past year, and cast their vote on one of the most plausible interpretations of quantum mechanics based on what arguments have been brought by those scientific publications. For decades, the Copenhagen interpretation predominated, with the Many-Worlds Theory coming relatively close — the theory that there is no actual ‘collapse’ of the wavefunction where one state is fixed and all the others rejected, but rather that each state splits our timeline in several different universes, in which each of the possible states become ‘real’. This avoids the concept that the observer causes the collapse of the wavefunction — rather, each observer traverses a specific timeline (i.e. the one we are in right now), without interfering with any of the others: the role of the observer thus becomes passive in the sense that they merely ‘follow’ the subsequent states along each timeline, they do not cause those states to become fixed. The trouble with the Many-Worlds Theory is that it is not falsifiable, i.e. because we are ‘stuck’ to this timeline, we cannot — by definition — look at any of the others; which means that we cannot prove or disprove their existence, and thus there is no means to ‘prove’ that the Many-Worlds Theory is valid or not. But because it is so useful in itself to get rid of those annoying ‘sentient observers’, it has many followers.

Recently, however, a different interpretation has become more popular: introduced in 1970, quantum decoherence explains that particles naturally collapse the wavefunction on their own, without needing an ‘agent’ to do so (i.e. no observer is needed). To be more specific, this is not actually what happens — rather, the state of particles ‘leaks’ into the environment, thus losing coherence, and allowing observers to experience a specific state and not others. Those ‘other’ states still technically ‘exist’ simultaneously and superimposed, but observers will experience the decoherent state in which particles have fallen. I believe that my attempt at simplifying an extremely complex (and precise!) mathematical formulation may have failed, but the point here is to understand that quantum decoherence avoids the pitfalls of both the Copenhagen interpretation and the Many-Worlds Theory: you don’t need observers as agents (sentient or not!) to observe the universe as we know it at a macro level, but you also don’t need to argue that all possible states are always present and splitting timelines ad infinitum (but which we cannot ever access and thus cannot ever prove these to exist). Because of that, in recent decades, physicists have voted for quantum decoherence as the de facto explanation, and the other explanations and interpretations have lost votes and  therefore have been abandoned — for now. Who knows, in the future, some scientists may come up with new evidence that one of the other interpretations may be ‘better’ than quantum decoherence and swing the vote once more.

I apologise this foray into the fascinating world of quantum mechanics — something I actually understand far less than the previous paragraphs may have implied! In fact, I, like Jon Snow, know nothing. However, I wanted to give these examples just to show that science — and scientists! — are not ‘perfect’ in their claims that the scientific method can easily provide one theory that explains a certain field of science perfectly and completely, by abolishing all others (through proof, lab experiments, logical reasoning, etc.). While science-by-consensus is abhorred by most scientists, the truth is that we have it in some cases, when an ‘absolute proof’ is difficult to obtain or unlikely to exist. Scientists shyly shuffle their feet in those cases and are in general embarrassed by the existence of such examples, but the truth is that we have accepted them as facts of life and go onwards in the hope of limiting such cases to the barest minimum.

I mention all the above because the gender identity core theory is one such example. In the field of the ‘soft sciences’ — social and political sciences, economics, psychology, and so forth — it is often hard to provide undeniable ‘truths’ about a specific matter; there can be a lot of subjective issues involved in a certain field of research, some of which cannot be overcome merely by presenting ‘hard data’, because such data may not exist. Here are some classic cases: all surveys based on self-reporting (typical of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and so forth) are always biased by the perception of the person(s) being surveyed. For example, imagine an article trying to figure out how many people have the ‘flu out of a specific population. The scientist may ask each participant: ‘Do you have the ‘flu?’ and make a note about the answer, and try to reach conclusions based on those answers. But even if the statistical analysis is flawless, there is a problem with the survey: most people are unable to distinguish the symptoms of influenza (the ‘flu) from those of the rhinovirus (the common cold) or simple rhinitis (just a running nose); in fact, most cases of ‘sneezing and running nose’ will be some form of rhinitis (which is not an infection!), while 1 in 5 people will have contracted the rhinovirus and believe it to be the ‘flu (which is actually very rare compared to the common cold!). So such a survey based on self-reporting will ultimately result in garbage — non-meaningful data. It would not even be useful to determine how many people were not ill (i.e. assuming that people don’t know if they’re infected with the influenza virus or the rhinovirus, but at least assume that they know if they’re feeling ill or not), because many strains of the influenza virus and the rhinovirus don’t even cause the usual symptoms on the upper respiratory tract, but infect other areas of the body — like the stomach or intestine, for instance — and thus have other symptoms. You may have the rhinovirus wreaking havoc with your bowels, but have no running nose, no coughing or sneezing, etc. and therefore answer the researcher that you do not have any ‘flu, just ate something that disagreed with you — thus falsifying the results! As a consequence, a paper relying on self-reporting for determining how many people came down with the ‘flu would be scientifically worthless.

Now, of course we can make that paper much more valid, because we have devised tests that will exactly determine if you’re infected by the influenza virus, the rhinovirus, or none of them (in which case the running nose might come merely from a rhinitis). Because such tests are objective and independent of the perception of the subject, they will be rigorous and scientifically sound.

The problem is that the above is valid only in those areas of medicine that are subject to, say, blood tests, or some sort of imagery (X-rays, CAT scans, and so forth) which can unequivocally determine what ails the subject. It starts to become more complicated if we’re trying to determine mental states.

Consider the case of determining if someone is schizophrenic. We actually have an array of questions that can be asked from someone and, based on their answers, give a reasonable diagnosis of schizophrenia in most cases; also, there is some objective testing that can be done, namely, administering certain classes of drugs such as anti-psychotics which will have a measurable effect on a schizophrenic subject. This means that, while we can know for sure, with 100% certainty, if someone is infected with the influenza virus by taking a blood sample, with schizophrenia we cannot have such a high certainty: whatever ’causes’ schizophrenia is embedded in the neural network of our central nervous system, and we don’t know how to ‘read’ it (at least not to a degree that we can figure out if someone is schizophrenic or not). Instead, what we have is a series of differential diagnosis based on questions, observations of behaviour and so forth, that can lead the doctor towards a ‘correct’ diagnosis, or at least as close to it as possible, in order to propose a method for treatment and cure (whenever possible).

Unfortunately, the ‘mind diseases’ are not all easily figured out. For instance, a very clever sociopath may have read enough about the subject to know beforehand what questions will be asked from them in order to diagnose them with sociopathy; they can therefore trick the doctors in order to believe that they have empathy towards others (for example) and thus lead them away from the true diagnosis. This is true for a lot of cases, and the cleverer the patient, and the more they fear the social ostracism for being labeled as a ‘mental case’, the easier will be for them to trick their doctors — especially nowadays, since all those studies, articles, papers, etc. are easily available online. Well, perhaps not that easily, but easily enough. So much, in fact, that I’ve heard the rumour that certain airways have forfeited the regular psychological tests made to their pilots simply because the pilots, fearing to lose their jobs, were able to provide the ‘correct’ answers tricking the doctors into believing that they were fine. At some point, the expense of figuring out who was mentally inapt to fly a plane was not justified, when all pilots knew beforehand what answers to give. I’m not sure if this is really true (I’ve certainly not confirmed it in one case or another), but it might be true because it makes some sense.

Similarly, we have all heard about stories on how people with lots of mental issues were able to join companies or buy weapons, simply because they were cleverer than those who interviewed them. The trouble here is that such interviews usually have a limited time — you’re just seeing the person once, for an hour or so, and have to make a diagnosis based on just one conversation. The reverse is also true: some people are able to convincingly ‘fake’ certain mental symptoms very successfully in order to avoid jail or not to report to work.

We can argue that most people are actually honest and true (some statistics place that number at 95% of the population — but since these are also based on self-reporting… it’s hard to say!) and will not try to trick their doctors or employees, but of course there are exceptions: good reasons for attempting to lie (and being successful!) to doctors or interviewers in order to gain an advantage. The story about the pilots sounds true just because it is conceivable that a pilot would try everything to keep flying — and they would know that any visible signs of anxiety, depression, etc. would exclude them immediately, so it’s in their interest to lie to keep their jobs.

A good example for that is exactly the transgender community.

Back in the mid-1980s, medically-assisted transition with hormones and surgery was available to transexuals wishing gender reassignment and new documents under a new name and gender marker, but there were strict rules and limitations to get those. There was this concept of ‘true transexuality’, based on the early work by Dr. Benjamin. For instance, you had to at least look a bit like the gender you wished to transition to, exhibit a lot of personality traits and behaviours common to that gender, be physically and romantically attracted to someone of the same (assigned) gender, and so forth. You could not draw the least emotion from putting on clothes of the gender you allegedly identified with, and you had almost to be celibate (and, of course, unmarried and without a regular partner, no kids, and be willing to undergo sterilisation).

These requirements were hard, even if the goal was just to get some hormones to feel a little better; so, naturally enough, transgender people would simply blatantly lie to the doctors and give them the answers they wanted to hear. It was even irrelevant if the doctors found out the truth after transition — once you got what you wanted for, you wouldn’t care any more, the doctors would be helpless in ‘forcing’ you to de-transition. As such harsh requirements continued into the 1990s, with the advent of the Internet and a more widespread network of trans support groups, the list of questions and ‘acceptable’ answers to get access to hormones, surgery, and transition were circulated among the community: people got scripts for what they ought to say, and how to make it sound as the truth. This is where things like ‘feeling as if born in the wrong body’ became common; for many transgender people, this is not how they actually feel (even if it may be true for many!), but they have just adopted that narrative for themselves, because they know it will give them access to transition. Being too honest with the doctor — desiring transition, but giving the ‘wrong’ answers — would mean getting excluded from the process and be labeled as a sexual pervert or mental deviant. So, clever transgender people would simply lie, but lie very convincingly, to a degree that they would start believing their own narratives.

And, perhaps not surprisingly, as such information became more and more disseminated among the community, researchers in sociology, anthropology, and even psychology, would report how the community had such a consistent narrative, reflecting exactly what doctors expected them to have. The more studies were made, and the more the results of those studies were publicised, the more the community learned about what researchers and doctors expected to hear, and that’s what they started to tell about themselves. As said, there was a huge incentive to conform to this ‘standard transexual narrative’ — access to medically-assisted transition! — and a huge incentive to avoid being labeled as a pervert or someone mentally insane.

By the end of the 1990s, it became clear to doctors and researchers that this self-reporting was so often ‘fake’, and so different approaches had to be made. It’s not that doctors and researchers somehow resented being lied to; instead, they researched why the community felt the need to lie to them; and this, in turn, made researchers support the activists’ claims to make access to transition much more flexible and less rigidly stuck to stereotypes of the ‘true transexual’. Today, a good doctor will hardly stick a label to a patient coming to them wanting transition; rather, they will work with them to understand why they want transition (i.e. if the root of the issue is gender dysphoria or something else) and try to assert if transition will actually be of more benefit than harm to the patient. If the patient doesn’t conform to the ‘standard transexual’… that is completely irrelevant nowadays.

Nevertheless, old habits die hard: the study of transsexuality is roughly one and a half centuries old, and still today, transgender issues are studied under the umbrella term ‘clinical sexology’, even if transgenderity has little to do with sexuality per se (although it’s certainly connected). Gender dysphoria has been depathologised; the older designation gender identity disorder has been dropped; and doctors, following the lead of social scientists and activists, have accepted the idea of the existence of a vast spectrum of people with some kind of gender identity issues who require some help to cope with those. Some of them may require transition, even if they don’t fit what used to be a ‘true transexual’ in Dr. Benjamin’s time.

And, more worrying than that, the problem is that the overall mechanism that ’causes’ so-called gender dysphoria is not known; if it is purely biological, there is still no way to uniquely determine it with any kind of blood test or a CAT scan of the brain; if it is purely psychological, it’s not known if it’s something uniquely determined even before birth, or if it’s something triggered by a specific event or environment. As a consequence, there are many theories proposing to explain what is going on. None can be directly validated, in the sense that you can validate a cancer tumour by doing a biopsy of suspect tissue; all you can hope for is that a theory is able to provide an explanation for the vast majority of cases, and propose a way to take care of these cases that gives patients some ease.

But clearly, the gender identity core theory is not universally accepted; it’s just the most respected theory by a vast majority of doctors and researchers in the field; this is because, so far, it has had the best explanatory power, and has allowed doctors to successfully help a vast majority of cases and leaving few people behind (even those who did not transition, but who were given a different treatment instead). This is still science-by-consensus, and the vote can swing to different theories, so long as those alternatives are able to prove they can explain things better and propose better solutions for treatment. That’s one of the reasons why Blanchardians are so eager to publish as much as possible: science is dominated by those who publish most. But it is also dominated by those who have earned more respect, prestige, and a larger group of followers; and here is where the gender identity core theory has one of its pillars. Because it doesn’t try to pathologise gender dysphoria (rather the contrary!), they also earn the respect and support of the activists and the community itself; because it doesn’t try to exclude people from transition, but be as inclusive as possible, even for those who are not really ‘typical’ in either appearance or behaviour, it tends to be taken more seriously by everybody — including legislators.

But my wife’s theory (which I can perfectly believe not to be unique, i.e. others certainly might have come up with similar ideas) cannot be simply be discarded, just because it is not politically correct, by reducing ‘transgenderity’ to a personal narrative — and therefore as a mental construct, certainly based on some physical/biological triggers, but definitely more a mental state, one of self-perception, a way one thinks about oneself, than some sort of physical ‘conditioning’ that pushes someone towards a certain path or even result, without any chance of being ignored (or suppressed!) with no consequences. My wife actually believes that most cases of so-called transgenderity are merely narrative, but a narrative that is so strongly believed that it becomes ‘identity’; it is a mental construct, yes, but a very powerful construct that constrains one’s behaviour, attitude, and self-perception, to the point that it will be hard, if not impossible (in many cases) to ‘break’ or revert. In other words: psychologists say that you cannot ‘cure’ traits of your personality, you can only learn to cope with them (avoiding those that are harmful to yourself and others, while allowing the positive ones to flourish and benefit everyone); on the other hand, things that are not personality traits can be ‘cured’ (e.g. anxiety, depression, etc.).

While the majority of people in and around the trans community, believing the identity gender core theory is the one that best reflects what transgender people feel, rejects the idea that transgenderity is something outside the scope of ‘personality’ or ‘identity’, my wife questions such claims — and shows as evidence that while people are born knowing that you can be a boy or a girl (even if you are being grouped with the ‘wrong’ group), they do not know they are ‘trans’ until they hear about it. It’s like ‘being trans’ is having a round hole in one’s personality, one that we cannot fill; but when one hears what transgenderity is, then ‘transgenderity’ is the round peg that fits perfectly in the round hole, and once it sticks inside, it gets accepted as the ‘reality’ — while my wife suggests that there are many round pegs to fill that hole, it’s just that the trans community is naturally predisposed to persuade others that ‘their’ round peg is not only much better than others, it is the only one that actually fits — ignoring whatever attempt might be made to show them otherwise.

Whew. Now that was a long argument! I hope that you have at least understood the main reasoning behind my wife’s argument, and why it’s not that easy to disregard that reasoning through purely logical arguments. I did present my wife’s theories to a few people in (and close to) the community, just to see their reactions. And, perhaps not surprisingly, their counter-arguments were either purely emotional (‘I know I’m transgender! Your wife’s theory sucks!’) or simply disregarded (‘Science knows that the gender identity core theory is the only correct one, anything else is simply false!’). People don’t even attempt to figure out flaws in my wife’s arguments — the only way to disprove her theory is to either provide a counter-example that clearly falsifies the theory, or, lacking such an empirical example, proving through logic that what she presents as a theory is simply false (from a logical, not an emotional, point of view).

I know that just because I cannot counter-argue this does not make my wife’s theory ‘more correct’; it merely reflects my own inabilities and limitations, nothing more. I simply may not be qualified to look through her theories and explain why they don’t apply — again, using objective and logical arguments, not emotional or political ones. Sure, I can certainly argue that I don’t like my wife’s theory, nor do I think that, from a perspective of  social justice, her theory offers an improvement — rather the contrary, because it minimises the importance of gender dysphoria (relegating it to a very complex case of self-inflicted harm: if one accepts and incorporates the transgender narrative in one’s own identity, gender dysphoria, according to my wife, comes from that acceptance and incorporation), it will certainly be quickly rejected by activists, the community, as well as most researchers of social sciences, psychology, and medicine, who have established the current status quo based on a very popular (but not universally accepted) theory that contradicts everything that my wife proposes.

For me personally, it worries me that I don’t have better arguments to oppose her theory. Obviously my wife is also a stubborn person, and she tends to crystallise her thought patterns around something that she is deeply attached to. That makes her fiercely defensive of her theories and disregard any others — especially if she applies the acid test to them (namely, if they lead to more happiness and less suffering; and, for her, ‘suffering from gender dysphoria’ is neither functional nor helpful, and just leads to more self-inflicted dissatisfaction).

But even if she is completely wrong, she still has made me think a lot about the subject (as you can see from this huge article!), and, even though I disagree with the core assumptions, I can at least admit that, in my personal cases, gender dysphoria has been more intense the more I told myself that I’m transgender and suffering from gender dysphoria, by being constantly in touch with a community which reinforces that way of thinking about myself. So there is certainly some ‘contamination’ of thought, and I will also reluctantly admit that I have been influenced by fellow transgender people and what they think about themselves; perhaps even more so than I thought.

However, I don’t think that the ‘solution’ to gender dysphoria — as my wife somehow implies — is simply to pretend it doesn’t exist, or not allow it to affect us. In other words, I don’t think that this is a question of ‘willpower’, and my sole argument here is that I don’t think that most transgender people like being transgender — to be more precise, I don’t think that most transgender people are sadists, revelling in their gender dysphoria, being happy because they suffer from a very ‘special condition’, and leading miserable lives under the effects of depression, anxiety, compulsive-obsessive behaviour, and however else gender dysphoria makes them suffer — and do that willingly, consciously, victimising themselves just because ‘being transgender is cool and in’. While I also have certainly found a few transgender people who sounded exactly like they loved being ‘victims of gender dysphoria’ — and were quite vocal about it, too! — I still refuse to believe that these are more than just a few isolated cases, a tiny minority, such as exists in all groups in society. Here is where I strongly oppose my wife’s ideas.

Nevertheless I can understand her point of view: all she sees is a bunch of poorly dressed men in ill-fitting dresses, all pounding at their hearts and wailing and whining and feeling sorry about themselves; all protesting against society who refuses them the right to self-expression, and thinking that talking about dresses, shoes, and makeup, makes them ‘women’. She also sees us as a group of spoiled children who desire that everything they dream comes true and get depressed when our lives are not being lived as we like, but rather constrained by ‘reality’, a reality that does not take ‘men in dresses’ seriously. And finally she cannot hardly believe that any of those self-diagnosed ‘transgender people’ she has met will actually be able to go through a transition and lead a happy life as a ‘woman’ — instead, she is deeply convinced that it’s far easier to accept a little self-inflicted suffering from not being able to live one’s life as one wants, do some crossdressing now and then to ease the suffering, instead of pretending that ‘living as a woman’ will solve all problems and issues.

I can understand that, but I do not agree with it.

But I also have nothing to offer to substantially counter-argue against her theory…

You might think there is a very deep psychological explanation for this behaviour! I’m so sorry to disappoint you… the main reason is mostly technical!

For a long time, I had no smartphone with the ability to take selfies, so I used the webcam for almost all pictures (and videos) I took in ancient times (i.e. over a decade ago!). Then the company I work with presented me with a more recent version of an iPhone, with which I could take pictures with better quality than with the webcam — and it was easier to carry anywhere, on top of that.

There was, however, a catch: it was not that easy to see, on the tiny screen, if the pictures came out great or not. Sure, one can always zoom them out; but I’m old-fashioned; except on some cases, I usually can only decide if a picture is worth publishing if I can see it as others will see it, and that means on a laptop/desktop screen. So I would take a lot of pictures, carry them over to the Mac I’ve got, connect the cable, import the photos, and see which ones were worth publishing, and which ones were Just plain garbage.

You might imagine that in this age of Instagram this goes completely against the purpose of taking quick snapshots and publish them on the spot. Well, it’s not that easy. Some of the pictures I take at home (or inside the car!) have notoriously bad lighting. This meant loading them up on Photoshop and correcting them — at least, as far as it was possible to extract meaningful information from those very bad pictures. Sometimes there is really nothing you can do with a picture except discard it; that was particularly true with blurry and out-of-focus pictures, of which I invariably have lots.

A friend of mine tells me that she takes about 400 pictures to get one that she is happy with. I’m not that a perfectionist, but I totally understand her point. These pictures become public; they will be seen by hundreds; and the pressure and demand put upon us to ‘look our best’ on social media is especially true for people like us. It’s actually amazing how a slight twist of the camera angle can make me look ten years younger and much slimmer than I actually am — and that without need of using Photoshop! My face is also not perfectly symmetric, and that is especially noticeable in certain poses: I look so much better from one side than the other, but, of course, I do not always get the opportunity to catch myself on the ‘right’ side (and tmore often than not, I forget which one it is!).

Add to all that my slight body dysmorphia, and that means I’m especially sensitive to very slight changes in the angles or the lighting…

Now, all this means that it takes time to process all those images. A ‘short’ session might be a few dozen pictures, each of which needs to be carefully analyses, before I’m happy to accept some for further processing, or simply reject it because it would take too long. Usually, I would take the pictures late at night, and ‘process’ them early in the next morning, while having breakfast, and before starting to work. But as I went out more and more, this also meant more and more mornings processing images from the day before, until, well, it meant having to do that ‘every day’ (or at least that’s how it seemed!).

Technology advanced, and this brought advantages and disadvantages. For instance, Apple’s macOS comes with a wonderful tool called ‘Preview’, which is a real jack-of-all-trades, the Swiss Army Knife of image processing. It can open 3D models as well as SVG; it renders PDFs beautifully; and it allows simple image processing with just a few mouseclicks. It’s not Photoshop, not even by far — it has very limited editing capabilities — but it’s small, fast, easy to use, and does pretty much 90% of what I need. Photoshop, a heavy-weight for doing professional, studio-quality image processing, was quickly abandoned in favour of Preview which is so much more practical to use! (I still use Photoshop for complex image processing, such as creating the profile images for all social media, or creating animated GIFs, ‘fake’ images of myself — pasting my face over someone else’s body — or simply for those cases when I really want to use a picture, but the retouching needs are far beyond the abilities of Preview). And that accelerated the whole pipeline quite a lot — I could process more images in less time than before!

Still, there were many ‘rejections’ — pictures that were simply so bad that there was no hope of using them at all — but all that changed when Apple added another clever trick to their iPhone software: you could take not just one picture, but a quick succession of pictures with slightly different settings. I believe that professional cameras call that ‘bracketing’; I certainly remember a setting on one of my wife’s cameras that allows her to take 3 or 5 pictures in quick succession with different settings, and then pick the one which is best. The iPhone, by default, 10 pictures at a time, but I think there might be a way to do even more.

The advantage? Well, especially when holding the phone to take a selfie, with a shaky hand, this ‘bracketing’ trick will try to catch at least a few pictures where the focus just happens to be ‘right’ for a fraction of a second. That way, when selecting the pictures to approve, I would have far more choices, and it would be highly likely that at least one out of ten would not be blurred, and possibly even with acceptable lighting settings.

The problem, of course, is that I would have ten times more pictures to select… and on top of that, I would have ten pictures of each pose, which is even more boring to do. Oh, sure, sometimes this can be done quickly enough… but it would also mean that I might have, say, two hundred pictures to go through, most of them just slight variations but which nevertheless had to be analysed, one by one… well, you get the picture (pun intended!).

To make matters worse, I did not want my ‘Sandra’ pictures to get mixed up with the other ones. That meant transferring the images via an USB cable directly to a folder in the computer which was not used by all the other images. Oh, and it’s not as if I have many non-Sandra pictures; it’s just that the few I have I want to keep them totally separate; and, remember, ‘my’ iPhone actually belongs to a company that I work with, and my wife uses it all the time — there are certain pictures and videos I don’t want her to see and comment about.

At the end of the day, this was taking waaaaaaay too much time!

It’s just recently, after many software releases from Apple, that I finally got an easy ‘pipeline’ to get the pictures I want from the iPhone. So basically now everything gets sync’ed between all my devices, automatically, and in the background. I don’t want to sound like a cheap Apple commercial (you either love or hate their products; there is no middle ground!), but the newest software updates have brought much better handling of pictures — most notably, the ‘bracketing’ function has been replaced by a ‘Live’ function, which is a sort of mini-movie; you can later go through it, frame by frame, to pick which one’s best. But the old news is that the software will pick the ‘best’ frame perhaps 90% of the time, especially under bad lighting conditions. The current iPhone I’ve got even goes a step further: the selfie camera now has improved resolution and it features a sort of ‘flash’ — basically turning the screen white for a brief second and ramping up the intensity to maximum — which, in conjunction with the better software, manages to get far better images even in low light.

Actually processing the images is incredibly easy now. If all my devices have an active Internet connection, the pictures will get automatically sync’ed between them. This happens in the background but it doesn’t take long; usually, after just finishing a session and sitting in front of the laptop, it will have already sync’ed all pictures (and videos too). Then I can leisurely select the batch I’ve just taken and export them to a folder – and while doing so, I can even delete GPS data for the whole batch (instead of having to go through all images, one by one). If I’m not too happy with one image (because it appears blurred, for example), I can very easily enter the ‘Edit’ feature of the ‘Live’ mini-movie and replace the picture with a better one; this is incredibly easy to do. Also, the rest of the settings rarely need any change: because the selfie camera and the software which drives it are so much better, that the ‘average’ settings will work just out of the box, so to speak.

Once exported, I can delete the originals on the laptop – and they will be promptly deleted from all devices automatically. No more frantic browsing through all devices to see if any image is still somewhere on history! (I’ve narrowly escaped a few catastrophes because I forgot to delete some pictures from one of the devices! (And while I primarily use the iPhone, occasionally I use the others as well…)

So what ultimately happened was that I needed to go first through literally-hundreds of pictures – close to a thousand, in fact – until I came to the most recent batches, the ones that take just a few minutes. In total, my backlog was 1,287 pictures (well, after removing those that were not good for anything, even after retouching). And this was incredibly discouraging. I mean, I would start with some pictures, say, from last April, go through a hundred of them, finally pick the ten that would be published… and I had easily lost an hour. I kept picking up that task, get frustrated with how many pictures were left, and give up… to try again after a month… when more hundreds of pictures had accumulated… and so forth. I have literally gone through over ten thousand pictures just to select those 1,287 to upload to Flickr!

And, of course, there were still the videos to do.

The videos take even more time to process than the images, of course. Even though my videos are very short (some of you remember the days when YouTube placed a restriction on the size of each individual video), and I’ve changed the pipeline a few times (as video processing technology evolved!), there is some preparation involved.  First comes the introductory snippet, which I retain for copyright reasons (crediting the music composer, Kevin MacLeod). Because each video is different, I have to do that bit every time from scratch, based on a Keynote presentation — I have to drop the whole video into the small rectangle and trim it to just a few seconds. This gets now exported to QuickTime; and I have to take care to actually select the correct format. While most of my videos are done with the iPhone ‘selfie’ camera (so that I can have an idea of what’s happening!), some are not — I have more cameras around the place! — and each might have a different format; so, to make everything fit together properly, the intro video is always saved to the ‘right’ format for that particular video.

Then comes the ‘raw’ video. Sometimes I don’t need to do anything — just detach the audio, since it will be overwritten by the soundtrack anyway, and drop it in iMovie after the intro. But most often it needs some trimming, especially at the beginning and at the end. The lighting almost always needs an adjustment as well; fortunately, the ‘auto-adjustment’ tool works rather nicely and it’s rare that I have to use any of the other tools (which are simple enough to use but do not give the vast range of options present on the photo viewer I mentioned before). Sometimes, however, there is more editing to be done, and this may happen for several reasons, like, say, dropping the ashtray in the middle of the video, or sneezing, or something stupid like that. Also, when I’m filming in the bathroom, sometimes I cannot help myself, if you know what I mean. I know that I’m very strangely wired in the brain— but I’m not the only one!! — but I humbly admit that I get turned on by women smoking (that’s what smoking fetishism is all about!). So when I watch myself, well, uh, I see a woman smoking, even though it’s just me — and of course I know it’s ‘just me’, but I guess there is a wrong wiring in the brain which simply doesn’t care and gets excited anyway. Reflecting on what exactly is happening at that moment is something worth several dozens of articles — or possibly even a book or two! — and I really can’t explain what goes through my mind. I can’t even say that this strange form of narcissism is ‘more exciting’ than, say, watching other women smoking; I mean, an orgasm is an orgasm, and it seems ‘as exciting’ to me, with the main difference that when it’s my body, I can control what I’m doing in terms of smoking fetishism — I’m my own movie director, so to speak — and of course that means that the ‘plot’ is obviously tailored to my preferences, and that is way more exciting than watching some female models who don’t even know how to smoke showing themselves off on the camera. I’ve got absolutely nothing against watching models on camera, of course! But I always feel a little bit ‘cheated’, so to speak, when that happens; I ‘demand’ that whoever is doing a smoking fetishist video loves smoking as much as I do or else it simply doesn’t work for me (I’d rather watch good old lesbian porn instead!).

Anyway, I’ve derailed a bit…

To finish it off, the movie needs a soundtrack, which I pick among the music I like most from Kevin MacLeod (who so nicely gave us full access to his free music!); sometimes I do that randomly, sometimes the music has actually something to do with the video (even though that’s rare), sometimes I pick one music that is long enough to span the whole video. Whatever the criteria are (and I’m not very consistent!), the soundtrack almost always needs some stitching and trimming and fading out, whatever. iMovie does all that nicely and easily enough, although some versions are a bit more quirky than others.

Finally, the video gets exported. iMovie really doesn’t give many options, but the truth is that the resulting video will be huge — about 1 GByte for 2 minutes or so. It’s fine to upload that to YouTube — they will do their magic in the background, and the better the quality fed into YouTube, the better the results will be, something which I had to learn the hard way! Once I’m sure that the video has been uploaded, I then convert it to DivX, which will mean practically the same quality, but using less than a tenth of the size. At this point, the ‘raw’ video, as well as the video produced by iMovie, go into the Trash; I back it all to my home-based backup system, and on Microsoft OneDrive as well (in case something goes wrong). I’m close to the limits where it’s still free, though, so it’s plausible that I will have to find another alternative. Fortunately for me, I do have my own cloud backup system on my own server, with pretty much ‘unlimited’ disk space (well, until the 2 Terabyte disk fills up), but to be honest, I haven’t set it up properly yet (because I do do many things at the same time, I keep forgetting to do that).

Whew. And that’s it. I’m not at the point where each minute of movie takes one hour of processing, like on commercial movies, but I’d say that 15-30 minutes per video is not unusual. In more recent times, I have managed to reduce overall time by doing them in sequence, i.e. one is processing, one is uploading, one is being edited, and so forth.

Now… we all know that it is far easier to do a little bit every day than to do a mega-marathon of editing and publishing, so it’s fair to ask again: ‘why now?’ Is there even a reason?

Actually, there is. And it’s not even a very good reason, as you will see.

Recently, I got a message from YouTube in my mailbox. You might have noticed that almost all my videos will have some advertising here and there. I had no illusions about getting rich out of those ads, but when I subscribed to the advertising thingy, I had over a million views — which is quite a reasonable amount! (1.6 million as of today) You might be astonished with that number, and rightly so, because if you look up my latest videos right now, you’ll see that they have just a couple of dozens of viewers, a few hundreds at best. And I certainly don’t have that many videos online!

Well, let me explain what is not so obvious. I joined YouTube a decade ago — an eternity in ‘Internet time’! YouTube was launched in early 2005 and bought by Google in late 2006; I joined YouTube in June of that same year, before we even believed that Google would buy it! That is so long ago that most people alive today didn’t even know that YouTube existed before Google bought it; they haven’t gone through the painful experience of ‘merging’ accounts together (you’d have one for YouTube, one for Google, and these remained separate for several years) and the mess that this generated. Anyway. As you can imagine, before Google bought YouTube, it didn’t have the billion users or so. It was much, much smaller, and it lacked content, because not everybody had a webcam with good enough resolution — remember, the iPhone was only launched in 2007, so this was the pre-smartphone era! Of course a lot of people would post ‘stolen’ content (as they still do today), and YouTube would be after them very quickly, so there was a certain lack of original material. In fact, YouTube was competing with a few platforms. Vimeo, as an example, had been established in 2004, and by 2007 it was already offering high-definition videos, while YouTube was painfully struggling with anything above 320×240 (seriously!). It was not seen as a very ‘serious’ platform for video production (people would go to Vimeo or the now defunct Blip.tv for ‘serious’ content), but rather as a place where people with handheld Sony video cameras would post videos of their children falling into the swimming pool, or of cats slipping in the kitchen, or such similar, nonsensical, futile things. We still have them, of course (just with way better definition!), but YouTube grew so much that it became the social network to post videos (even though Facebook, Flickr, etc. all now support high-definition videos as well).

Before that growth became exponential, however, people struggled to find the content they wanted (before Google started indexing YouTube, it was way harder to find things that we considered ‘interesting’). So you have to consider the following scenario: few original content producers, with limited means at their disposal (YouTube also placed a very short limit to the size of the videos; I think they started by offering just five minutes maximum for free); a bad indexing system, so that it was hard to find anything; very bad definition, with most videos at 320×240 and a very few, done by people who followed YouTube’s official tutorials, who managed to get 640×480 videos to be displayed correctly (this required that you had software at your disposal that would encode the video just so).

In other words: there were few channels for smoking fetishists. Oh sure, there was a lot of pirated content — people who would join porn websites which featured videos for smoking fetishists, downloaded them, and uploaded them to YouTube. But those who were really into smoking fetishism quickly figured out that all that YouTube had to offer was low-quality copies of what they had already seen on porn websites. There was some original content, of course; and by ‘some’ I certainly mean ‘several dozens’ of channels; most of the smoking fetishist community would subscribe to all of them, and we would watch each other’s videos and make comments on techniques — and on the makeup and apparel as well, of course

With Google buying YouTube, however, YouTube exploded with new users — they came by the droves! And all these users would naturally want to see content that interested them, and that would mean that the few channels with original content would be literally swamped over with hordes of new users. And while it’s absolutely incredible to imagine this today, some of my videos easily hit 50K views (!), a few even going over 100K! And every week or so, when I posted a new video, I would once again get 10,000 users within the first minutes after releasing it, and a few more dozens of thousands over the week, until I posted a new video, and the process would start all over again; adding all that up, that’s how I very easily reached the million-views mark, with just two dozens of videos or so.

Then, around late 2009, early 2010, things started to change. Now YouTube became ‘interesting’ enough to be used by professionals, as well as very talented amateur hobbyists. The demands for quality went up; Google started to offer higher and higher resolutions; and the first YouTube celebrities started to host their channels and catch millions of views with each video (not totals!) and get some return on advertising. Google did also pay reasonably well for ads back then — I cannot quote the numbers exactly, but it was a fair and reasonable amount. Someone whose channel got a million views every time a video got posted, and did 2-3 videos per week, could easily live off YouTube with a couple of thousand dollars every month. It wasn’t a bad deal.

With more content being offered, and higher quality of that very same content, users would flock to whatever was popular. And we cannot forget that each and every YouTube channel competes for a few minutes of people’s leisure time — time they could spend reading a book, playing computer games, go out and watch a movie at a theatre, or, well, watch TV at home. This was still the time before Smart TVs could stream YouTube directly, or before people could watch high-quality video on smartphones while watching TV at the same time. Competition for leisure time is very tough, because naturally people will pick things based on moods, preferences, advertising, recommendations, and so forth.

The first decline I saw in viewers meant that most videos rarely hit the 10,000 viewer mark. And why? Well, there are simply not that many smoking fetishists out there, and my channel doesn’t really appeal to anyone else. The only reason I got so many views in the early days was because there was nothing else to watch. In other words: people didn’t find me or my channel because they wanted to, but rather because they were quasi-randomly driven to it, since, again, before Google started to apply their AIs to the ‘recommended videos’, anything could pretty much appear as ‘recommendation’, and ‘popularity’ was one of those. This is how it worked: a video gets watched, and the number of views mean that it ranks higher than others with less views. This means that this video appears more often on the list of recommendations, which in turn makes people watch them more, which increases the number of views, and therefore the likelihood of being recommended to even more people. This was why incredibly stupid videos often went viral very easily — not because people were actually sharing that specific video which they found funny or interesting, but just because the algorithm for recommendations was really very bad. It became a bit better when it took ‘tags’ into account — for a few years, the thousands of viewers I got did not come from the smoking fetishist community, but rather from the crossdressing community, since I always tag my videos with ‘crossdressing’. That means that my videos would appear on the list of recommendations for people searching actively for crossdressing videos. With a catch, of course: by then I already had a million views in total, so it was quite obvious that I would get recommended more often than others. And it even meant that my videos would appear on lists of people who had no interest in either crossdressing, transgender people, or smoking fetishism; I would just be high on the ranks just because in the past I had lots of views.

Google, of course, fixed all this. They were perfectly aware that ‘older’ users had an unfair advantage: because in the past they had so many views (since there was a limited choice of original content), they continued to gather more and more viewers because they would come at the top of the lists, while pros (or amateur hobbyists with talent and semi-professional studios) would have this wonderful high-quality, original content which nobody would see. So the algorithm was changed to favour these professional or semi-professional channels over the others; and this makes sense from a business perspective. After all, from those million viewers, only a tiny percentage are actual smoking fetishists; many would just feel insulted by my videos and had no problem telling me so; nevertheless, they would count towards my total amount of views! Google didn’t want that: they wanted engaging content, with people watching several minutes (or even hours!) at a stretch, because that gave ample opportunity for advertising — while those who would be sent to an ‘unwanted’ channel, watched a few seconds and went away, furious for being shown the ‘wrong’ content, would just screw up the numbers and give unfair privilege to older users with low-quality content (especially when it was meant for such a niche market as fetishist smoking!).

Google only makes money from ads, so most of their resources are fed into developing more and more sophisticated AIs to figure out what people really want to see. At this time, now approaching the mid-2010s, a lot of things happened at the same time:

First, Google slashed the payments for ads (that happened on Web ads too, not only on YouTube). The idea was that only top performers with incredibly good content and a very loyal fanbase of millions of subscribers would be able to make a living out of YouTube — because it was that kind of content that Google wanted to sell ads for. Nobody cares about ads on a movie with a smoking crossdresser; there are simply not enough companies advertising on that tiny niche market (except perhaps for porn websites — but Google, by that time, was also refusing to sell ads to porn companies). So ads on my channel would be ‘wasted money’ — in the sense that Google would still have to pay me a few cents, even though the ads were worthless on my channel — which Google would rather prefer to see spent on one of the really popular channels.

Then, of course, the number of channels for smoking fetishists exploded (well, all channels exploded). To give you an idea, I’ve just opened a page on a browser I never use, and I didn’t log in, so that Google does not know who I am and what my preferences are; and typed ‘smoking fetish’ on the YouTube Search box. My channel is not listed on the top 10. Not even on the top 50, nor the top 100. In fact (I didn’t actually try that!), I wouldn’t be surprised that I’m not even on the Top Thousand — in spite of having far more followers than many who are listed in the top 50 (and a bit less than half of #1), and most certainly far more views than them… while back in 2007 or 2008, well, there were perhaps just a few dozens, at most a few hundreds, of smoking fetishism channels, and I’d be listed on all those searches. Not even ‘crossdresser smoking fetish’ finds me anymore (note: if you try this out, remember to use a browser with history and cookies cleaned up and do not log in to Google — because if you’re reading this, it’s more than likely that my channel will come up on this search — because Google knows that my blog is linked to my channel, and Google knows what you’re browsing and what tabs are open and all that, so their AIs can easily spot the connection — and change the search results accordingly).

Why? Well, because nowadays I lose a dozen subscribers every week or so (most from accounts that were deleted, blocked by YouTube, or simply not active any more); the number of views on my recent videos are around the hundreds, not the tens of thousands; and I pretty much didn’t post anything in the past year, so Google naturally assumed that I’m ‘dead’ (online death, that is) and scarcely has any interest in me anymore

While, on the other hand, all those channels on the top 10 (or top 50, or top thousand…) are growing. They might not have the total amount of views and subscribers as I do, but Google pretty cleverly figured out that this means nothing. In other words: who cares if someone watches 5 seconds of your video and goes away because it has no interest for them? This barely allows an ad to be shown. No, what Google wants is people watching videos for hours, because, that way, every few minutes (just like on TV), they can sell an ad.

Thus, the new metric that Google uses to establish ‘popularity’ is not ‘views’, but rather minutes of viewing (they still give some attention to subscribers because these are potential viewers). This actually makes more sense, because it eliminates all those viewer watching your channel ‘by mistake’ — a few seconds, and they know they’re wasting their time and go elsewhere.

That’s what happened on my channel all the time (and it still does, of course, but not at the same levels as before). In fact, when one of my videos hit the 10,000-views-mark, it was almost certain that I would get hateful comments. This is not a coincidence: there are not that many people bothering to post hate speech in YouTube, even if it seems that way. In fact, the utter idiots at the lowest echelons of the human species are not many; but they spend a lot of time online, watching videos, and have a secret pleasure in annoying others (yes, that’s a mental condition). In my particular case, it would mean that: out of 10,000 views, 100-500 would come from my faithful subscribers, who know what they’re watching, and would see the video to the end (and sometimes give a word of appreciation or two!); over 9,000 would see my content by mistake, and disappear after a few seconds; and one out of ten thousand would be a jerk. Of course, the longer a video stays online, and the higher the number of views, the higher the number of jerks, but, seriously, there were never that many, even on the most popular of my videos.

Anyway. You can now understand two things:

1. How Google makes money, and how they have fine-tuned their search AIs to make sure that people’s limited time is funneled towards content where Google can place ads and earn their revenue;
2. Why my channel is technically ‘dead’ from the perspective of Google, YouTube, etc. even though apparently I’m doing fine (by the criteria of 2007!)

Now back to Google’s recent email to me. They explained to me that to keep the ads on my video, I have to comply with two criteria in the past 12 months:

1. Have more than 1,000 subscribers (easy-peasy).
2. Have more than 4,000 view hours (say WHAT?!).

To give you an idea: on the past 12 months, I have a total of… well, a little below 1,200 hours. Google has only started their viewing time statistics in 2012, and since then, the total amount of view hours I’ve got is about… 6200 or so (!). And each year I get less and less viewing hours.

I scratched my head and thought that these criteria are impossible to meet — the point being that my videos are very short (about 3 minutes or so on average; some are shorter, a few go up to five minutes). I believe that from all of my subscribers, some 400 are really active (fortunately, Google adds up the inactive ones as well). This means that each time I publish a video, I can expect, at best, 400 x 3 minutes = 20 hours of viewing time. That’s it. To be able to reach four thousand hours, I’d need to publish two hundred videos every 12 months, or very roughly, one video every working day (there are around 260 working days per year).

Of course, the alternative would be to dramatically increase the subscriber base (how?) or do much longer videos (tough! there is a limit to how long the typical smoking fetishist is willing to watch in a video! and my imagination is not that great)

You might say, ‘well, that’s tough, Sandra, but if you want to make a living of it, then you will certainly need to do a lot of videos… it’s only fair, after all!’

Really? Here is what Google owes me for January 2018 one month of viewing: $0.76. That’s right. It’s not even a dollar.

My estimated earnings for the lifetime is $85.65 (this has started in March 2013; I wasn’t eligible for ads before that; and remember that Google paid much better back in the beginning!). I never saw a cent of all of that, since Google conveniently only pays when you reach $100.

All right, but that’s just with 1,100 hours or so (for the past month). If I had, say, four times as much (to reach their criterium!), how much would I earn?

The math is simple to make: 1,100 hours earned me $9.30. I could expect, therefore, about four times as much: yay, $36 — and that’s before any taxes, or commissions, or whatever!

Assuming that I would really need 200 videos every 12 months, which would take, say, on average, half an hour of my time each… that’s 100 hours of work… for $36… or 36 cents per hour of work! There are countries where slaves earn more than that!

Ok, but that’s a worse-case-scenario — in practice, I don’t need 200 new videos every year; after all, there is a feature of the Internet era economics known as the long tail. Quoting Chris Anderson, former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and current CEO of 3D Robotics, a drone manufacturing company:

People gravitate towards niches because they satisfy narrow interests better, and in one aspect of our life or another we all have some narrow interest (whether we think of it that way or not).

What this means in plain English is that even my oldest videos are getting more views, and the longer they stay online, the more views they will generate — and all of it adds up. Why? Because smoking fetishism is a niche market, and because my videos are ‘timeless’ in the sense that a smoking fetishism video of 2006 is as pleasing and exciting as a smoking fetishism video of 2018. In fact, pre-YouTube, early-Internet smoking fetishist videos were mostly cuts from past movies, especially those in the 1940s-1960s, which all feature scenes where women would smoke in a sensual way — so, in a sense, those ‘old’ video snippets still have an audience today. Of course, when they were freshly released, they generated the most views; but after years and years, the few views they got will continue to go on and on and on, and adding up to the total.

Theoretically (as people like Anderson foresaw), and given an infinite method of distribution at zero cost (which is the definition of the Internet in general, and YouTube in particular), videos would earn ultimately more from ads on the ‘long tail’ than on the beginning (i.e. at the moment they were released) — because there will always be some people interested in a very narrow interest, and watch those videos over and over again. That this is clearly not my case doesn’t ‘prove’ that the theory is wrong; it just ‘proves’ that YouTube is not a ‘perfect’ distribution medium. And as I’ve explained, this is hardly the case: YouTube not only shows ‘recommended videos’ according to a user’s personal tastes but it is also deliberately skewed in showing recent, high-quality content, which is trending high; this naturally makes the long tail far less attractive. Still, it’s not ‘zero’. I still accrue some views from insanely old videos, which pop over and over again on people’s recommended lists. This always surprises me, when someone decides to post a comment on a video made before 2010 and says ‘I love the dress you wore today’ or ‘you’re looking better every time’ (when the gallant viewer is most probably seeing all videos in a backwards timeline…).

The point is simply that it would take me a lot of time to keep up to the standards that YouTube ‘demands’ from me. On the other hand, I decided to make an experiment: if I release around a dozen videos in a very short time (meaning that my fans and subscribers all of the sudden get their mailboxes filled up with notifications every day, or even several times per view), how will this affect the number of views?

An image is worth more than a thousand words:

In blue you have the watch time in hours, in red the number of views. As you can see, in the days before I started to post new videos, the red line begins with 273 views, it peaks at 1316, and goes down to 528. There are two distinct peaks, and one less distinct — these correspond roughly to the days where I posted more than one video per day, and that meant quickly surpassing the 800-views mark. I would now need to stop posting more videos for a while and see what happens: will my views hover around, say, the 500-view-mark, or will they slowly drop back to 250 or so?

These statistics only help me to establish the following: to reach YouTube’s minimum requirements of 4000 hours per 365 days, this means about 11 hours per day on average. I can read directly from the graph above that this is reached with around 1000 views per day, which happened on those days when I uploaded 2-3 videos. As far as I can see, to keep the number of views at that level, I would need to upload 2-3 videos every day! Of course, at some point, the number of views might stabilise at around those 1000 views per day on average, so I wouldn’t need so many new videos uploaded per day — that would, indeed, be the point of betting on the long tail to keep generating enough extra views!

So, as you see, all that work… to be ‘allowed’ to earn US$3 per month!

That’s just insane! That’s how Google/YouTube really ‘exploit’ people — they get all this amazing content for free, sell ads, share their revenue with content creators, but… at the end of the day, you get just a few cents for all your work.

To earn, say, US $3000 per month (which would allow me to live really comfortably!), with the current amount of viewers and subscribers I’ve got… it meant getting a million views per day and not across a decade… and posting thousands of new videos every single day! Now obviously this is impossible: a day only has 1440 minutes, and with each video taking 3 minutes, even if I were awake 24 hours per day and uploaded directly to YouTube without any kind of editing and post-processing, I could, at best, generate 480 videos per day… and at that amount of output, it would easily saturate the ability of my subscribers to watch… remember, they would also have to watch those 480 videos, every day, round the clock, and do nothing else in their lives. Clearly that’s utter nonsense!

The alternative, of course, would be to get a few millions of subscribers — 3 or 4 million would be enough, I think. Having a thousand times more subscribers would certainly generate more than enough views every day, even if I just created 2-3 new videos every day (which would not saturate the subscribers, since my videos are short enough). There are certainly some channels around with millions of subscribers. I’m just not one of them — simply because there are not enough smoking fetishists around there!

In conclusion: all my work is for nothing — lol! But it was an interesting experiment: my theory is that with a little bit of luck, I would reach the 4,000 hours of viewing required by YouTube, and not be kicked out of their advertising programme. I guess I really overestimated my abilities! Still, the results were an interesting exercise in understanding Google’s business model with YouTube, and it’s clear now how they make so much money out of ads — the trick is basically persuading people to work for free for them, or at least for slavery wages, having hundreds of millions of content producers (and a billion consumers — the 1:10 ratio is quite common in communities built around content production) earning nothing from Google, but allowing a critical mass of producers among which a few hundreds will emerge with the ability to attract enough subscribers — and therefore being able to make a living out of it. But because Google encourages people to ‘become one of the few’, the elite YouTubers who earn enough from ads to make that their main source of income, everybody else is eagerly trying very hard to reach that level — and utterly failing, of course. In the mean time, however, YouTube accumulates more and more and more content, all for free.

(Of course I’m well aware of the costs that they also have with their infrastructure, and it’s huge — but not that huge. Remember, investment in things — machines, computers, Internet connections… — is always way, way cheaper than investment in labour. Successful companies shift as much as possible their costs away from wages and other employee-related costs, and push them into ‘things’. Technology allows that. But nothing beats convincing people to voluntarily upload content for free — slavery will beat technology easily enough. Combine both, and you can begin to understand how Google — and no only Google, of course; Facebook is not different — can make so much money.)

There is an old adage, originally applied to the United States, but which — I think — applies universally. Among every thousand writers, 999 write absolute crap, while one will be good enough to (barely) survive with the earnings from their writing. But you need to have the other 999 as well: it’s a question of critical mass. Now, among thousand writers who can survive from their work, one will be exceptionally good, and hit the bestseller lists. Note that they don’t even have to be ‘good writers’ in the literary sense of the word: they will only need to push out books that the public is keen to read. Those people will become millionaires with their writing. But most of them will still be writing crap — these are the authors that will be seen on airport lounges everywhere, writing bad novels, but novels that nevertheless attract millions of readers. Some will be good enough to win a Nobel prize. That’s how the pyramid works! So basically what this means is that you need a million authors constantly writing — most of them never earning enough to make a living, a few hundreds barely managing to survive, and one who will be a Nobel prize nominee. And that’s also why countries with a huge population, such as the US, are able to have a reasonably large number of professional writers — while small countries will simply not have enough critical mass for that. In my own country, for example, two decades ago, there were only two professional writers — i.e. those who could make a living from their fiction novels. All others, no matter how good they wrote, were amateurs in the sense that they had to have a main source of income to survive, and write only in their spare time. One of the two who were professionals won a Nobel prize in literature and died shortly afterwards, so we’re back to just one professional author (who does not write ‘literature’ in the fancy meaning of the word, so, while he will certainly continue to live off his writing, he won’t earn any ‘literary’ prizes). That’s the best our country can expect, and, in fact, the odds were against us — the more professional authors, of course, the more likely that at least one of them will be good enough to become the next Nobel prize in literature. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the vast majority of top authors worldwide are all native English speakers, or, at least, fluent enough in English to be published in that language; no other language achieves critical mass so easily, although Spanish comes close. Chinese (especially Mandarin Chinese) authors could obviously appear on the top bestseller lists easily enough — China has certainly a critical mass of writers! — but they have the disadvantage that nobody outside of China reads Chinese. To become serious candidates to the top bestseller lists outside China, they have to be translated first; but then they will compete with all other English writers out there — the hardest market to be in, since it’s the one which, by far, has the most writers!

Musicians have it slightly more easier — music is pretty much ‘universal’ and a Finnish heavy metal band will sell everywhere in the world (even in China) even though nobody speaks Finnish. Painters, sculptors, graphic designers, etc. also don’t have the language barrier, but they have other disadvantages… anyway, I digress!

To resume it all: posting pictures and/or videos takes a huge amount of time, much more than people realise, even though (at least with pictures!) it’s now much easier for me than, say, a decade ago. The huge backlog came mostly from not really having an incentive to continue to push content out there for the enjoyment of my subscribers. Thanks to Google’s change of policy regarding advertising, I made a ‘last effort’ to try to reach their minimum requirements, and see if there was some way to achieve them. I failed miserably (I wasn’t expecting anything else) but I learned about why I failed. So there is no ‘loss’ here: Google would only pay me around $1 per month for all the video content I’ve uploaded, and, since I never reached the US $100 (accumulated) minimum for a bank transfer, I will never get anything anyway.

This means that in a handful of days all my videos will have no ads any more, and it’s highly unlikely that they will ever get them back again, since, as I’ve shown, the time requirements to push the number of views to an ‘acceptable’ level for Google/YouTube requires way, way more time that I’m willing to spend — to earn around US$3 per month, at most (and getting paid every third year…). That simply doesn’t make any sense.

Instead, I’ve done my experiments, I’ve learned from those experiences, and my videos on YouTube will become ad-free (an advantage for most of you, I’m sure) in a few days.

The End. Wow, 8000+ words just to explain all of this. And I was hoping this would be just a small ‘update’ article…

Unfortunately, as so often happens, such blogs tend to attract radicals of all kind, and while actual transphobic people have been kept somewhat away from TWT’s blog, a lot of Radical Blanchardians often populate the comments, trying to defend their point of views (or, rather, Blanchard’s); while Radical Anti-Blanchardians try to demove them from such views, which are demeaning to the trans community.

This is, of course, an endless battle of opinions which will never die as long as enough Americans are alive; it’s the same as Creationism vs. Evolution; Faith vs. Atheist Humanism; and so forth. When it’s about personal opinions, you will only be able to persuade others with your argumentation if those others are open-minded enough; but usually they aren’t and will cling to their opinions, no matter how illogical they might be. This is all about the emotional battleground; reason has little to do with it, and therefore, I usually keep out of those battles.

However, it irks me when the ‘scientific argument’ is invoked. Scientists obviously are human, have their bias, and in spite of everything, they can make mistakes. But there is a very particular meaning assigned to so-called ‘scientific truth’, and it’s not to be taken so lightly when flinging arguments around.

So I tried to reply to one comment there, made by Rod Fleming, claiming that Blanchard’s views and theories are fundamentally sound. In his own words, he wrote:

Many have tried to debunk Blanchard and all have failed. His theory is sound and is the basis of scientific understanding of transsexualism.

One must be careful of such wide generalisations! We have to explain the context in which such claims are made, or we would be just spreading a falsity.

If the above claim is made within the context of ideology/activism, what matters is the idea behind it, and one idea is just that, a thought, a mental construct. It’s not ‘true’ nor ‘false’ before enough people believe it (or disbelieve it). Thus, one may claim that the opinion of those who debunk Blanchard, from an ideological/activist perspective, is worthless, while Blanchard’s own ideas are solid and valid. Because in this particular context that particular opinion (or Blanchard’s, for that matter) is equally valid as the opinion of the anti-Blanchard activists, then such a claim would be acceptable, since it’s merely a question of how many people sustain one opinion against other. And because Blanchardians are still around defending his ideas, one can correctly argue that, in spite of everything, Blanchard’s ideas are still being spread around, they are still influential, they still persuade others to think like Blanchard did and accept his ideas — and, in that context, Blanchard’s ideas were not ‘debunked’, since they are still being accepted (as opposed to, say, believing that the Earth is flat and that the Moon is made of cheese).

But when we step into the scientific aspect of Blanchard’s theories, then the whole issue is completely different. Science obviously also starts with an idea — if that idea can be scientifically validated, it becomes a conjecture. If we actually do some tests or experiments to validate the idea, then it becomes a hypothesis. If we can prove beyond a shadow of doubt that the hypothesis is correct and that the data used and the results can be independently validated, then it becomes a theory (back in the 1700s and early 1800s it would be called a law of science; it’s same thing, it’s just that we changed terminology a little, when ‘science’ split from ‘natural philosophy’, with which it shared a common system of thought and similar methodologies to acquire knowledge, which we today call ‘the scientific method’).

So, Blanchard’s ‘theory’ began as a conjecture, and as a conjecture, it means making the question ‘Are transexuals split between two groups, effeminate male homosexuals and autogynophiliac males?’ Posing that question is scientifically correct, that is, it’s a valid scientific question to be posed, since it can be falsifiable: this is a requirement for scientific conjectures since the days of Karl Popper (a philosopher of science from the early 20th century). It means that such a question can, indeed, be put to an objective test, data can be collected and analysed, and either the hypothesis is confirmed or it is rejected. Posing any question which can be rejected through the analysis of data made through observation is a scientifically valid quesion; here, the ethics or morality of such a question is totally irrelevant: for science, all it matters is that you can answer a question by setting up an experiment to validate or reject the hypothesis; and this is certainly the case with Blanchard’s conjecture.

We can even argue further that it is an important question, because it may mean for a doctor that different treatments are needed for each case — so we are in the domain of establishing differentiated diagnosis, which crucial to medical science, and therefore the question makes sense: it is, indeed, a valid conjecture, it may have a practical application in treating patients (by correctly diagnosing them), and, furthermore, this question can be proved or disproved using the scientific method.

But here is where problems arise. The original data that Blanchard used to ‘prove’ his conjecture — thus turning it into a hypothesis, and inviting others to replicate his results so that he could claim that it was more than a hypothesis, it was a theory (that’s as close we can get to call it ‘scientific truth’) — had flaws in it. Blanchard, as a serious scientists, published all his data, and it was relatively easy to show how he had made some trivial statistical errors here and there. I’m not an expert in statistics, but basically Blanchard’s own published data disproved his theory completely. And this is what ‘debunking’ means in science: a scientist’s peers go through the same data, and find that some calculation errors are present, which induced the original author to reach false conclusions. Note that it is not unusual for such things to happen in science: the actual questions that scientists pose come mostly from inspiration, and sometimes they seem to be logically following from the scientists’ point of view, and this certainly was the case of Blanchard: after reviewing so many patients at his clinic, it seemed to him that they were of only two kinds. All he needed to publish his theory was to get the data to objectively sustain his conjecture. Unfortunately, manipulating numbers to get the results one wishes to see is not ‘science’; but because Blanchard was required to publish his original data, others could see where he committed errors in his calculations; in fact, the data he published showed that transexuals did not only not fall neatly in two groups, but that there was no reasonable argument to divide the sample in separate groups — in other words, beyond the common label of ‘transexuals’, there was no statistical evidence that you could subdivide the sample in any amount of subgroups: each of them was an individual, not sharing (statistically) enough common traits with any other. Now we could argue that this only happened with Blanchard’s original small sample, and that a larger sample might show distinctive subgrouping; but this would be another question, and another completely different article. What Blanchard’s peers could only claim was that his published data did not validate his conjecture, and, as such, the only possible answer to Blanchard’s question would be: ‘with the sample provided, there is no statistical evidence that transexuals fall into two and only two different subgroups’.

As said, Blanchard is a serious scientist, so he admitted to the errors, and what he did was what every serious scientist does: he studied more, got more samples, and published more articles. The next papers he published did not contain blatant statistical errors. But they still raised some questions; and it was only years after publication that it was found out that he left out of his statistical analysis all people which did not ‘fit’ into his theory. That is not necessarily ‘cheating’: it’s common, in science, to get rid of statistical anomalies (you can call them edge cases if you wish, or singularities, whatever), because often these are just the result of some stupid errors which have nothing to do with the methodology that was used, and are just confusing the whole picture. We can assume that Blanchard was still being honest in his approach, and therefore he shrugged off those cases that did not ‘fit’ in his theory and discarded them. The problem is that when such people are included and the same calculation is applied — a calculation, mind you, designed by Blanchard himself to ‘prove’ his conjecture — the results, once again, run contrary to the conjecture: once more, they continue to prove the opposite of what Blanchard intended, namely, that there are not two different and distinct groups. The difference between them is not statistically significant, no matter how many people are added to the samples. It can only be made statistically significant if you discard all results that do not fit in the conjecture, but, as you can surely agree, this is not ‘good science’, and it means that Blanchard’s ‘theory’, from a purely scientific perspective (and not an ideological one), does not hold water.

There are two further issues here (and this is why Blanchard is considered to be debunked in several different ways). The first one is raising some doubts about Blanchard’s own data, and the way he extrapolated conclusions from it. The second one, of course, is to independently replicate his results, using his methodology, but using different samples, and see what kind of result is achieved.

None of those attempts managed to replicate Blanchard’s conclusions. In other words: when Blanchard’s methodology of determining unequivocally who is a ‘homosexual transexual’ and who is a ‘autogynephiliac transexual’ is applied to a different sample (i.e. a different group of transexuals, not the ones Blanchard has interviewed), then the results show that, once more, Blanchard’s conjecture is not proved. And, again, the reverse is always true: instead of splitting transexuals in two neat groups, the results always show that there are no statistically significant differences between them. And this has been replicated over and over again, using different samples, different sample sizes, in different countries, and so forth. Things like tweaking the age (thus formulating a slightly different conjecture, i.e. ‘is there a point in a MtF transexual’s life where he is either homosexual or autogynephiliac?’) to see if different age groups responded differently did fail as well. Because Blanchard’s sample came mostly from his own patients, others have attempted to either broaden the samples (people from different ethnicities, different social classes, and so forth) or even shorten them (limit to the kind of sample distribution used by Blanchard, but just using different people who happened to have similar profiles than Blanchard’s samples), all of them produced over and over the same result: no matter how you measure things, no matter what sample you use, Blanchard’s results cannot be replicated in any way, except, of course, by ‘cheating’, i.e. leaving out any members of the group who do not fit in the conjecture! But that proves nothing, of course, except that such a methodology is necessarily flawed.

But there is a second aspect as well, which is different in medical sciences, compared to other areas of scientific research. While Blanchard believed that transexuals divided themselves neatly in two groups — ‘homosexual transexuals’ and ‘autogynephiliac transexuals’ — he eagerly proved to his own satisfaction that both groups would benefit from transition to eliminate their symptoms of gender dysphoria. And this, indeed, is true. When someone is making the claim that ‘Blanchard was never debunked’ they very likely mean this particular point: that the only ‘cure’ or ‘treatment’ for both kinds of transexuals is the same, i.e., transition, and that transition, in either case, has an incredibly high rate of success. And this, indeed, has been validated over and over again, and it even follows from Blanchard’s data: it should not come as a susprise that all pseudo-groups of transexuals benefit from the same treatment, since those ‘groups’ are artificial anyway and do not have any statistical differences between themselves; in other words, it would be very surprising that any artificially created sub-grouping of transexuals would not benefit from transition! Indeed, if we even want to be kind to Blanchard, he actually proved (against his own will) that no matter how you subdivide transexuals among different groups, all will benefit from transition. This, again, is a corollary from Blanchard’s work, and Blanchardians can correctly claim that he was the first to figure this out and even prove it with his own data — even though he wanted to reach a different conclusion!

There is a catch, though. In medical science, if you have a range of similar symptoms for two conditions, and the same ‘cure’ or ‘treatment’ produces exactly the same results, then those ‘two conditions’ are just one and the same. This is how, in medical science, we often see many different illnesses ‘converging’ on a single one. For instance, take a look at the discussion about auto-immune diseases, which so often all have symptoms of fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, and clinical depression. Such patients are usually regarded as suffering from ‘different’ diseases. However, it was found out that anti-depressants would also reduce fibromyalgia and minimise the impact of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS); while at the same time, treating IBS with changes of the intestinal microbioma also made fibromyalgia and depression disappear. Thus, researchers are slowly concluding that all these ‘diseases’ are very likely the same one, just appearing to have completely different causes (fibromyalgia: pain, expressed by the nervous system which is oversensitive for some reason; IBS, problems originating in the intestine; clinical depression, mostly happening inside the mind, even if it responds well to some medication affecting certain neurotransmitters). In other words: when just looking at the origin of the symptoms, these seem to be completely different areas of medical science (and, indeed, they have been first reported independently from researchers looking at the issue from totally different perspective, knowledge, and scientific research); but these seem to be very common in most anti-immune diseases, appearing all together; and what seems to ‘treat’ one of them, treats the others as well, even though they do not seem to be related at all. Now, these are still hypothesis (‘do all these diseases have a common origin or not?’) which are being submitted to clinical tests, so there is no ‘unifying theory’ for all of them yet, we just know that they are not independent variables, but correlated ones: when one of those diseases appears, the others tend to manifest as well, to a higher or lower degree; and, conversely, when one of them is treated, the others tend to get treated as well. That shows there is a correlation between them. Are they perhaps just one and the same disease, just manifested differently, and treatable by different (apparently not related) means?

Back to Blanchard. What he is saying is that a certain population, divided neatly into two groups according to his conjecture, benefits from exactly the same treatment, and the end results (a successful transition, where gender dysphoria disappears, as well as other issues such as depression, anxiety, etc. caused by gender dysphoria) are precisely the same (or, scientifically speaking, there is no significant statistical difference between the results in one of the groups and in the other), then, according to the principles of medical science, this population has just one common origin (and not two, or three, or many). Inadvertently, because Blanchard’s results regarding successful ‘treatment’ of his ‘two’ types of transexuals showed, beyond a shadow of doubt (meaning: this result was proved over and over again, by different researchers, with different samples), that they reacted in the same way to the same treatment, he has invalidated his own conjecture without meaning to do so. In other words: yes, you can split the transexual population in as many groups as you wish (why just two?). All of them benefit from the same treatment. All of them get the same statistical results from transition. So there are not ‘many’ groups, or ‘many’ types of transexuality, there is just one. And, from a purely medical perspective, it’s worthless to ‘tag’ one kind of transexual as ‘type A’ or ‘type B’ or C or D etc. since all of them will benefit from transition in exactly the same way. Thus, from the point of view of medical research, there is no valid reason to postulate that there are ‘two different kinds’ of transexual people, since all kinds will respond to the same treatment in the same way. And, indeed, Blachard was the first to prove exactly that, which is ironic! In other words: in science, there is no ‘blame’ if you accidentally disprove yourself, which is what Blanchard did; you’re still a valid, honest scientist if you show results proving that you were wrong in your original conjecture — from the perspective of science, showing a ‘dead end’ in science is also good science, even if it’s not that glamorous as discovering something new.

And now to Lawrence. To be honest, besides Bailey’s book and some scattered articles/interviews, I don’t know his research work very well. Lawrence, by contrast, has a more interesting perspective, and that’s why I read a little more about her own work. She’s still a die-hard Blanchardian, of course, but she has perceived the weakness of Blanchard’s argument when it comes to actually trying to prove it with data. So Lawrence cleverly postulated that there are not precisely two types of transexuals, but rather a spectrum of transexuality variance between those two types. While this is a radical departure from Classic Blanchardism (as Rod argues, transexuals are either homosexual or autogynephiliac, there is no middle ground, all is black-or-white), it still keeps the rest of Blanchard’s argumentation intact; the beauty of it, of course, is that this explanation fits the data perfectly! In other words: Lawrence is still able to argue that many transexuals are ‘homosexual transexuals’ (and that’s true, even though that expression is not commonly accepted among scientists and the community, since it is meaningless; but let’s use it just for the sake of the argument), and that many are autogynephiliac; the data will certainly show that; but she has no choice but to recognise that all the others are not clearly separated among the two extremes but somewhere in-between. And this conclusion is validly drawn from the data.

One would therefore think that Blanchardism, with Lawrence’s subtle modification, would be un-debunkable that way — in fact, when good, honest scientists have a conjecture that does not explain the data, then they change the conjecture; that’s good science. The truth is that Lawrence’s argumentation is fallacious, and let me give you an analogy which will be immediately clear:

Suppose you’re a scientist exploring the following conjecture: people either like the colour green, or the colour red. You set up interviews with the question: ‘Do you prefer green or red?’ About half the people will prefer green, the other half red. Your conclusion: human beings split neatly between either liking the colour green or the colour red, just as predicted, so you have now a solid theory. Correct?

Of course not. Your peers will point out: there are more colours than green or red. You have not asked for those! But you persistently claim that people still prefer green or red, all other colours are irrelevant (and it’s also irrelevant what ‘green’ or ‘red’ means: what matters is the perception of ‘greenness’ or ‘redness’ and you argue that people naturally either prefer one or the other, and it matters little if they are pointing at a colour like, say, aqua or turquoise and label it ‘green’, or orange and pink and label it ‘red’). So you set up a new set of surveys, this time asking: ‘Do you prefer red/green/none of the above?’

Now here things become a bit more confusing in the data. What the results show is that a large proportion (possibly even the vast majority) of your respondents have answered ‘none of the above’. Many have answered red, of course, and many have answered green. You assume that the unexpected number of ‘none of the above’ is due to a badly formulated question, and so disregard those answers, claiming that those who are ‘undecided’ are the ones who preferred, say, ‘pink’, but did not answer ‘red’ because they were unsure if the same colour was meant. You publish therefore the results showing that the number of people answering ‘red’ is roughly equal to the number of people answering ‘green’, and this is actually the case with your data — and discard the rest of the answers, claiming that they come from a badly formulated question.

Your publisher refuses to take that answer. So you design a new test. This time, instead of a question, you put a swatch of colours that you consider green-ish — so this will include all blue-green and yellow-green shades, etc.; and a second swatch of red-ish colours, including oranges, pinks, and so forth. And the question, once more, is ‘Do you like the colours on the first group more, or the ones on the second group, or none of them?’

The results are awesome for your conjecture. Almost half the people answered that they preferred the first group; almost all the other half answered they preferred the second group; and just a few scattered ‘anomalous’ kinds have answered they preferred none. You submit your paper again, do all the statistical calculations properly, even claim that the few people that answered ‘none of the above’ (i.e. didn’t check either group) did possibly misunderstand the question, or were colour-blind, or something or other, but they were so few that they do not interfere with the result — you can claim, with, say, 99.5% certainty, that human beings either prefer green (or green-ish) or red (or red-ish); you might even suggest that, to enhance the degree of confidence, further research could add more colours on the ‘red’ and ‘green’ swatches, and enlarge the number of participants, so as to diminish the noise from those few anomalous results, which would expect to diminish towards zero. Well, the maths seem to be solid, so that article is published.

But you see where the problem is: in fact, this test doesn’t prove anything. The more swatches of colour you place on either red/green category, the more likely someone will identify with one of them. So, someone who hates green but loves blue, for example, seeing that there are some blue-ish colours on the ‘green’ category, will answer ‘green’; while someone preferring yellow, seeing that there are some very light orange colours on the ‘red’ swatches, answers ‘red’. This just means that, given only two choices, but broadening the meaning of each of the two choices, you can neatly divide any group of people between the two. Eventually, someone could even design a test with all possible colours that humans can see and assign them to two arbitrary groups, and the results will be simply that humans, given only two choices, will pick one of them half the time.

So this is what Blanchard did. Of course, his peers called ‘foul’, because that’s just cheating. If Blanchard had created two transexual categories, one with those who like to set fires (‘pyromaniac transexuals’) and the other with those who don’t (‘non-pyromaniac transexuals’), he would come to the same conclusions: all transexuals would fit in either of those two categories (and a few would refuse to answer such a stupid question, but you could discard their rude answers from the data). But that means nothing. There is no difference in the essence of transexuality just because some like to set fires and the others do not; in other words: being pyromaniac or not is an independent variable with no correlation with transexuality itself. It’s exactly the same as trying to divide humans in ‘red-lovers’ and ‘green-lovers’ and somehow infer that there are two kinds of humans. It doesn’t work like that, this is just trying to correlate independent variables to each other and designing a phony test that will achieve that.

Now Lawrence was a bit more clever. She saw the fault with Blanchard’s analysis, so instead of asking yes/no questions regarding homosexuality and/or autogynephilia, she probably asked MtF transexuals something like this: ‘What is the degree of your homosexuality? Answer 1-5, where 1 means only drawn to men, 3 means bisexual, and 5 means only drawn to women. How often do you have autogynephiliac fantasies? Answer 1-5, where 1 means never, 3 means occasionally, and 5 means all the time’. Now, I have not seen Lawrence’s actual tests, but I can imagine such a test being given to participants. What would the results be?

Again, I can only speculate, but based on my personal experience (also known as ‘anecdotal evidence’ and not valid in science!), there would be many who answer ‘1’ for being attracted to men while simultaneously also replying ‘1’ to never having autogynephiliac fantasies; and, similarly, on the other extreme, we would certainly have lots of individuals admitting to autogynephiliac fantasies all the time but claiming to be only attracted to women. So these two extremes would, indeed, still fit into the Blanchardian model. The rest of all other transexuals would be a complex mix of both things.

So what did Lawrence do? Instead of assuming that ‘homosexuality’ and ‘autogynephilia’ are opposites of the same variable in transexuality, which was part of Blanchard’s conjecture and which he failed to prove, Lawrence admitted that they were two different variables, and went on to show that they are strongly inversely correlated, that is, when a transexual is ‘very strongly attracted to men’ it is more likely that they are ‘less prone to autogynephiliac fantasies’ and vice-versa. All that is in between can be ordered to show that the inverse correlation still holds (just with a lesser degree). What Lawrence can therefore claim is that all transexuals are, indeed, spread among either ‘homosexuals’ and ‘autogynephiliac’, but this distribution is not either/or, but rather a mix of both, while still remaining true in some cases — the very ones that Blanchard also found out — when at the same time she could provide an explanation for the data points that Blanchard had discarded: those were ‘undecided’ individuals, both homosexual to a degree and autogynephiliac to a degree, but, in general, the more they liked men, the less they had autogynephiliac fantasies. In essence, thus, Lawrence’s work still ‘proves’ Blanchardism, or some sort of ‘weaker Blanchardism’, and is more sound based on the data.

It is still faulty reasoning, of course. Let’s get back to our colour tests. Now, instead of asking people if they prefer the first or the second group, we ask, on a scale of 1-5, how much they like the colours in the first group, and how much they like the colours of the second group. This time, what we will see in the data is two peaks — those who rated ‘red-ish’ as 5 and ‘green-ish’ as 1, and those who rated things in the opposite way. But there will also be a lot of people in the middle. Perhaps even the majority will not immediately clear what they prefer most (i.e. everybody who likes violet, indigo, or pastel blue, creamy pink, whatever…. they might have rated both groups as ‘1’; while many people will be indifferent, i.e. rating both as ‘3’). But it might still be possible to reach two conclusions: that humans are divided mostly among those who prefer red and those who prefer green, and that even when they don’t, there is an inverse correlation among the rest of them: the more they prefer green, the less they prefer red, and vice-versa. Such a study (albeit still stupid and faulty!) would have a much higher chance of being published. because, mathematically, it’s more sound.

But in all these cases the issue is not really only in the math. It’s in the assumption that humans can fit in just two, and only two, categories. While this can happen in some trivial cases, e.g. ‘humans who had a higher education and humans who do not’, or ‘humans who suffer from the flu and those who do not’, it’s simply not provable in other realms — unless you cheat in the original questions. More precisely, if the classifications are vague enough to encompass a lot of quite different people, while giving little choice to give an answer that does not fit in either question, then we can ‘prove’ almost everything we want, and we can mathematically show in almost all cases that each category is inversely correlated to the other (in the cases of either/or categories, this will always be true to a degree). The problem is that humans simply may not fit in either category, or fit in both at the same time, and the tests designed by Blanchardians simply do not account for that.

Also, it’s easier to describe ‘redness’ or ‘greenness’; even so, we have some difficulties with it: while we can give the precise nanometer wavelength of ‘red’ and ‘green’ and design a test giving some variance around those precise limits, people’s perception of red and green vary, so it’s hard to know how a particular individual rates a colour as ‘red’ or ‘green’. The exact same shade (if it’s somewhere in the middle of red and green, in terms of wavelength!) can be classified by some as red, and by some as green. So, essentially, asking about a subjective perception of a given conceptual idea (colours are just names, and different cultures have different names for colours; for example, there are far more names for ‘red’ colours in the West, because the pigments for red colours were more easily available than those for green colours) means that the results cannot be evaluated in the simplistic matter that Blanchardians do; it won’t work that way. And even though ‘the degree of homosexuality’ can, to an extent, be asked (after all, Kinsley did that in the 1950s), ‘autogynephilia’ is a far more complex concept — we certainly know that it exists, but the issue is how ‘strong’ it is in each individual (since each individual will internally rate it differently…) and how much it is connected to either transexuality, some sort of sexual paraphilia, or merely a normal and healthy sexual fantasy.

When you pick up two concepts out of thin air, and wish to tag them to human beings, and try to ‘prove’ anything based on them, the results are usually very complex, and they rely much more in the kind of questionnaires handed out to participants, and how each participant is motivated to reply, than about the validity of those two concepts in the first place. There is a good reason why older ‘psychological profiling’ tests are now viewed with suspicion, since many come from social prejudice of the time they were made, and even if the researchers were genuinely interested in the question they formulated and the kind of answer they got, and even did the math correctly, the problem was that the original assumption was based on prejudice — not science! — and this influenced the way the questionnaire lead people to answer according to their prejudice, or, even more likely, according to their perception of what prejudice the researchers had. So we have layers and layers of abstract conceptions here, which are difficult to correlate to a concrete question and a concrete answer that satisfies the question.

This is the problem with the Blanchardian autogynephilia ‘theory’ (between scare quotes, because it would be only a theory if it had been proven beyond a doubt by Blanchard’s peers, replicating his tests and reaching the same conclusions — which they didn’t). It relies upon assumptions that are conceptually complex and that may make no sense at all. It also implies that such concepts are, indeed, related to transexuality, but although it is clear that they are present (everybody has a sexuality, even being asexual is a kind of sexuality; everybody has sexual fantasies, even very boring, vanilla ones; but there is a huge difference between what is merely a healthy fantasy, and what is a seriously disturbing paraphilia which prevents that person from performing functionally in society), it’s by no means obvious (and has not be ‘proven’ to be obvious) how they exactly influence what we call ‘transexuality’. And, of course, from the purely medical perspective (and not ‘pure scientific research’), coming to the conclusion that two different ‘kinds’ of transexuals have to be ‘treated’ the same way just disproves directly the initial assumptions, that is, that there were two categories in the first place. So from a clinical point of view, Blanchard is just saying: ‘no matter what categories or tags we stick to transexuals, we can only ease their gender dysphoria through transition’. We can all agree with that. Why bother to divide transexuals in two (or more) categories at all, since that categorisation does not lead to different ‘treatments’, nor even a better understanding of what transexuality actually is?

Does that mean that we should scratch Blanchard (and Blanchardian followers) out of the history of science, and forget all about them? Many would claim yes (the activists certainly would!), but I’m a bit more tolerant. I think that Blanchard has made two important contributions to transgender studies. First, he was the first to name ‘autogynephilia’. While this word is now too politically loaded to be useful any more, it’s quite true that some people assigned male at birth (and a handful assigned female at birth) do, indeed, have frequent erotic dreams as themselves as women (and some natal females also have frequent erotic dreams as themselves as men, although this group is substantially smaller). This was not apparent to, say, Benjamin or early researchers in clinical sexology. Recognising that such individuals actually exist was a big step, and an important one. The trouble is just relating autogynephilia to some kind of ‘special transexuality for older men who do not remotely look like women and are physically attracted to women besides having weird dreams’. But just having a name, a category, for psychologists to probe into their patient’s mind, was important: some kinds of so-called autogynephilia may be caused by traumatic experiences which can be addressed by therapists, for instance (and in that scenario these people are not even remotely transexual and would thus not benefit from transition — unlike what Blanchardians claim); recognising them is important.

And the second contribution is actually involuntary. While Blanchard wanted to claim the contrary, he actually proved that, no matter what ‘label’, ‘tag’, or ‘category’ we place transexuals in, they all benefit from transition in an equal way. That is actually a very important contribution, because it means that, no matter what the prejudice of the clinical sexologist is, and how they wish to ‘morally’ categorise transexuals, transexuals will nevertheless always benefit from transition — no matter how they look, how old they are, and what kind of sexual fantasies they entertain. This is actually a breakthrough in the sense that up to the 1970s it was thought that only very feminine-looking (i.e. androgynous) natal males attracted to males, and believing in a binary gender, would benefit from transition, excluding everybody else. After Blanchard, we learned that all transexuals benefit from transition, not just those the doctors think that they are ‘fit’ for transition. That was an important accomplishment, and in that particular conclusion Blanchard was right and continues to be right.

Unfortunately, it also disproves his own assumptions that there are only two kinds of transexuals, but that’s ruthless science for you.

Taxonomy defines identity? No, but…

The first question regarding this issue that one should ask is: why should I bother about what label is tagged to me?

This is, indeed, what I would call a typical Buddhist question — in what sense can a simple word define one’s identity? Is one’s identity limited to a certain amount of labels? But such labels vary with time and location — what does that say about one’s identity? In fact, when we speak of ‘identity’, we somehow think of something immutable about our personality, our traits, our behaviour. But the truth is that we are in a state of constant change: the way we thought about ourselves when we were teenagers hardly has anything to do with the way we think about ourselves today. So even that ‘identity’ is changing; it’s not fixed; it’s hardly ‘immutable’. Why, then, should we bother at all about defining our identity with a word (or a phrase) if it’s highly likely it will be changed in the near future — perhaps even tomorrow?

On the scientific side of the issue, this would also be a good question to pose. Knowledge about what actually constitutes ‘identity’ is also changing, as new researchers pose questions that nobody has thought about before, and try to give the appropriate answer. Different researchers, coming from different backgrounds, or asking questions in a slightly different way will come up with new answers. In fact, ‘constant change’ is what science is also about: we’re constantly coming up with new questions and new answers to old questions; we skeptically analyse the knowledge gathered by those who came before us, and try to see if we can reproduce their results and conclusions — or discover new knowledge to add to the vast amount of scientific publications that we have: since 1665, we have published 50 million academic papers, and every year we add at least 2.5 million new ones (and this amount is very likely also growing over time!).

What this means is that an idea, a concept that was brought up for the first time a few years ago will quickly be studied by hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people, many of which will question the same concept, and add new knowledge and information about it. This, inevitably, means that the concept changes. Most of the time, the change is merely incremental, but sometimes we have a few paradigm shifts. Let me give you a typical example, which I’m fond of quoting.

After the pioneering jobs of people like Dr. Alfred Kinsey, and more specifically, Dr. Harry Benjamin, we came to understand what we would today call the ‘classical’ models of transexuality vs. transvestism, and how the old notions (that there were only ‘sexual perverts’, namely, transvestites) subtly started to change. Dr. Benjamin is usually credited as having started to give credibility to the ‘theory’ that transexual people ought to go through transition (hormonal and surgical) in order to alleviate their suffering — after examining a child (at the request of Dr. Kinsey) in 1948 who, in spite of having been assigned male at birth, wanted to be a girl. Because children, at that time, were seen as non-sexual entities, clearly such a ‘wish’ expressed by a child must have a different origin. While it’s arguable if Dr. Benjamin was the ‘forefather of transexual studies’, he certainly was seen not only as one of the most prominent figures defining the whole scientific background behind transexuality and its only ‘cure’ (e.g. transition) to alleviate suffering, and, even today, what we know as the WPATH Standards of Care — a guide for doctors to help transgender people to go through transition — which have originally been proposed by him; but he also was known by his patients as being a caring, loving doctor who only had the interests of his patients in mind, and who helped them to transition (referring them for surgical procedures outside the US, since they were forbidden there), which, in the 1950s and well into the 1960s, would be rather the exception than the rule.

It’s thanks to Dr. Benjamin that psychiatrists and psychologists still look at the clinical issues as being mostly split among two major categories, transvestic fetishim and transexuality. I’m retaining their original, clinical names deliberately — since the whole aspect of ‘political correctness’ will also be dealt with later on this article — because they are still used today. For a good reason.

If you’re a transgender activist or an ally, take a deep breath. Transgender (and intersex) issues are a bit more complicated than other forms of social activism, and we have to turn the clock back half a century to understand that.

Nowadays we’re happy to bundle everything into the ‘alphabet soup’ — I mean the acronym LGBTIQ+ which is growing with more and more letters every year — and see it mostly as an issue of human rights — echoing the words of feminists who are not only defending women’s rights, but actually human rights. This is the same stance taken by political activists coming from the LGBTIQ+ communities (I’m abbreviating the ‘alphabet soup’ to LGBTIQ+ for now; feel free to imagine, in your head, all the other missing letters — taking only in account that I wish to be inclusive with that acronym and not leave anyone behind, but I cannot keep up with the growing pace at which new letters are added to the acronym): we’re not talking merely about the ‘rights’ of a specific group of individuals, but of human rights which apply to all individuals.

The major problem with this huge acronym is that the individuals covered by it have very different needs.

For instance, the issues purely associated with one’s sexuality (L, G & B) are mostly social issues — getting universal acceptance of the right to have a partner of whatever gender you feel romantically and/or sexually attracted to — and legal ones — having the right to marry or adopt children, no matter what gender each parent identifies with, and all the consequent legal rights (e.g. inheritance laws, or the right of partners to legally enter a country if just one of them gets a resident’s card, the right of taking care of children belonging to the couple, and so forth). There is a slight issue of public health as well: guaranteeing, for instance, good health care access to people regardless of their sexuality (i.e. no discrimination about treatments given to individuals engaged in same-sex partnerships in the case of STDs). And there is even a slight issue regarding mental health: due to homophobia/biphobia, individuals with a non-heterosexual orientation may suffer from trauma, depression, anxiety etc. due to the fact that they had to repress their true sexual orientation in fear of not being accepted.

So far, so good, but when we come to the letter ‘T’, things become much more complicated.

‘T’ stands today for transgender, but it used to stand for ‘transexual’, not so long ago — in the sense that transexuals were seen as people who suffered from having a body that was not aligned with the gender they identified with, and therefore required clinical help — from mental health specialists, to endocrinologists, and cosmetic surgeons — to be able to live successful lives. Because this also included fighting against backwards morality and giving transexual people the right to live in the gender role they identify with (which required changing many laws), the cause of transexuals was quickly picked up by activists who were already defending similar (but not equal!) issues regarding one’s sexuality.

In fact, there is some overlap in the activist fight. For instance, also not so recently ago, married transexuals who were allowed to transition would have to be forced to have a divorce, since same-sex marriage was not universally accepted; in some cases, this even required mandatory castration. By fighting for the right of same-sex marriage, LGB activists allowed T people to keep their marriages even after transition — so the fight for same-sex marriage was ‘common ground’ for the totality of the LGBT community.

By also separating ‘gender’ from ‘sex’, transexuals and intersex people were able to fight together for the right of deciding over their own bodies — namely, what kind of surgeries they would be allowed to get in order to align their bodies to their gender identities. And, working together with the LGB community, they were also able to forfeit the requirement (still in place in a few countries!) that post-op transexual and intersex individuals are forced to have heterosexual relationships (or none at all).

So it can be seen that there are a lot of points of convergence among all these communities, and it’s only logical to join forces together into a common agenda, especially one that promotes a very important buzzword in our times: diversity.

Nevertheless, the needs of each group (or even subgroup, as we will see later on) are quite different.

Consider the ‘classical’ MtF transexual case. Assigned male at birth, she wants to live her life as a woman, have a body that at least externally is female, and live a relationship and contract matrimony with a male partner, even adopt children. In this classical scenario, such a MtF transexual might even be a very strong supporter of binary gender (we’ll see why this is important later on as well) — she was just born with the wrong body for her gender and wishes to correct it.

Such a scenario had already been identified by Dr. Benjamin, and, in fact, it’s still one of the most common ones, followed closely by the reverse case, i.e. of the FtM transexual who wants to live as a male, get a male body as closely as possible, marry a woman, and have children together. Those cases are in fact the easiest to explain to the society at large, and especially to lawmakers, as well to doctors: after all, we live in a bi-gendered, heteronormative society, and someone wanting to change their bodies to fit into the ‘opposite’ gender is far more easily accepted than any other situation.

It’s also not surprising that this ‘classic’ scenario, being also the oldest one that has been recognised as such, and the one that has been more (and better!) studied, has far more chances of success to get some rights being recognised as the other, much more ‘confusing’ cases which we will analyse shortly. Indeed, in most LGBTIQ+ activist groups, it’s the ‘classic’ transexual who will be most vocal, and the one who will also be more represented, and, therefore, their needs will be quicklier established through appropriate laws. In a sense, because this is also the most common case, and the one that has better chances of success of being accepted and tolerated socially (even by a conservative, backwards-thinking society), it should come as no surprise that such cases were the first which were enshrined in law and transexuals were the first group to get their needs and rights recognised.

Incidentally, this is also why the medical profession still has the word transexual in their lexicon — it’s because it has a very specific meaning attached to a very specific scenario. More importantly, the followers of Dr. Benjamin have recognised that in transgender studies there are two completely different cases, both of which require medical intervention (in the sense of easing suffering). One, of course, is the ‘transexual’, and its associated condition, gender dysphoria, which can be treated only through transition. It is a medical case needing the collaboration of several specialities — general practice, mental health, endocrinology, cosmetic surgery — and they need to follow a specific protocol (the WPATH Standards of Care) to ensure that the patient gets the best treatment possible and can lead a normal, healthy life after transition. In this particular scenario, doctors, politicians, activists, and the community in general are all aligned towards the same goal, and work together with a common purpose.

The second case, which I have mentioned before, is the transvestic fetishist. Once the shackles of morality have been discarded, decades ago, there still remained a clinical case to take care of: while the vast majority of fetishist crossdressers have no issues about their crossdressing, some of them do, namely, anxiety (fear of getting discovered or exposed publicly, and consequently fearing the loss of a relationship or a job; shame because they were educated as children to consider crossdressing ‘wrong’; etc.) or compulsive-obsessive disorder or even depression (from a lack of opportunities to engage in sexual activity while crossdressed, for instance). Such issues fall neatly in the mental health realm of clinical sexology and are all treatable via therapy (and sometimes medication, if anxiety/depression are also present); note that in this case, unless the actual activity is somehow harmful to the person (which would be rare indeed!), the therapists will not try to ‘persuade’ a fetishist crossdresser to ‘give up’ their fetish — rather the contrary, they will teach how to enjoy it without feelings of fear, guilt, shame, etc., accomplished through learning to cope with such emotions and feelings that actually detract from the enjoyment of fetishist crossdressing, and accept it as a perfectly normal and healthy form of pleasure/sexual fantasy/whatever.

So clearly the approach towards transvestic fetishism is totally different from the one towards (clinical) transexuality. That’s why, for therapists, it is important to clearly separate those two conditions; that also means to be able to clearly identify between both in order to make the correct diagnosis and determine the appropriate course of treatment. You should think of this process precisely as the kind of thing that a doctor needs to do to figure out if you suffer from the common cold (rhinopharyngitis), influenza, a form of rhinitis (allergic or otherwise),  or something else that also affects the upper respiratory tract — all of which share many common symptoms but are treated differently. Laypersons tend to discard ‘transvestic fetishism’ as being ‘just a fetish’ and therefore unworthy of the attention of the doctor (unfortunately, many activists think precisely that way…), but from the perspective of a clinical sexologist, it can be a valid condition that requires diagnosis and has a treatment — assuming, of course, that the fetish in question does, indeed, produce discomfort, unease, or actual suffering. As said, this is not the case for the majority of fetishists.

Now, we’re not in the 1950s any more, so, even though these two ‘conditions’ are still recognised (and embodied in the DSM and other medical classifications/taxonomies), we have gone far beyond the simplicity of the ‘two-condition’ model.

First and perhaps foremost, around the 1980s, people like Blanchard (no matter how wrong his theories actually are) have ‘discovered’ that there are different ways of transexuality to express itself, which do not fit easily in this ‘classical’ model. While the so-called ‘classic’ transexual was relatively easy to diagnose when caught at a very early age — the reason why Benjamin took it seriously was because a young child was exhibiting signs of transexuality, and these could not been linked to ‘sexual’ issues, according to the prevalent opinion of those days — an increasing number of people showed pretty much the same symptoms as ‘classic’ transexuals, but they were exhibited in adult life, very often around middle-age or even beyond that. Figuring out what exactly these people were suffering from was, at the beginning, a bit difficult — especially because so many of them had tried hard to ‘fit in’ their assigned role at birth and had lived decades in that role. On top of that, they exhibited next to none of the physical (and most often not even the mental) traits of the gender they identified with. Weren’t they simply transvestic fetishists?

In the 1980s this simple diagnosis was starting to be questioned. Blanchard proposed a model of a ‘deviant sexuality’ — what he called ‘autogynephilia’ — where the sexual object of desire of certain men was drawn inwards towards one’s fantasy of having a female body. He based his conjectures on the fact that many similar cases had already been reported before, and usually discarded as ‘paraphilias’ by previous researchers, without taking the cases very seriously. Blanchard considered the hypothesis that such people would actually also benefit from transition, just like so-called ‘classic’ or ‘primary’ transexuals (or, as Blanchard himself so mistakenly put it, ‘homosexual transexuals’), but he considered (and still considers!) them a different kind of transexuals, one that has somehow a completely wrongly-wired sexuality. Ironically, in spite of all that, he suggested the same course of treatment as for ‘classic’ transexuals (which directly contradicts his own theories: if the same treatment produces the same results — in this case, a reduction of gender dysphoria — then it is the same condition, not a different one; treating it as a different condition is just prejudice, nothing more), in which he was a pioneer.

Blanchard made many mistakes, some deliberate (his own data does not sustain his hypothesis that there are two kinds of ‘transexuals’, but rather proves that those non-classic transexuals are, in fact, transexuals like the ‘classic’ ones, just having a different narrative – this allowed his clinic to ‘treat’ many more cases of ‘transexuals’, by including so-called ‘autogynephiliac transexuals’ as worthy candidates for medical interventions), some due to prejudice (namely, the difficulty at that time of accepting that transexual people could have any sexuality, for instance), some due to pragmatism (it’s far easier to go through a successful transition if one’s transexuality is diagnosed before puberty takes place; or if someone happens to be already androgynous when starting the hormonal treatments). In spite of the debunking of his theories, and even of some of his followers accepting some revisions of Blanchard’s original premises (namely that there might be a wider spectrum of transexuality, and not only two, distinct types), his theories, thanks to his own reputation in the field, have been widely disseminated and still have an influence in the minds of doctors. In other words, prepubescent children are way more likely to be accepted for transition than middle-age fathers with a solid career in a predominantly male job, for example. Similarly, androgynous males who are romantically and physically attracted to other males are much more likely to be referred to transition than ugly, very masculine-looking MtF transexuals in their middle-age, who are attracted to women and possibly married to one and having children. While this is clearly prejudice, it also reflects a certain pragmatism from the perspective of the doctors: even though both cases might have the same diagnosis, and possibly react similarly to transition, it’s much more likely that the first case will be perfectly accepted by society (mostly because they will be ‘invisible’, i.e. not noticeable externally as being trans), while the second case will have a very tough life during and after transition.

Thus, doctors do not only figure out a diagnosis. They also act as gatekeepers, in the sense that some subjective arguments — the ‘fitness for living as a person of the gender identified with’ — are also counted towards the final conclusions. And here we leave the field of purely clinical issues to enter the realm of subjective pragmatism and ethic/moral issues. Because doctors have acted for decades on behalf of newly born intersex children — chopping away at their genitals according to what was more desirable to the doctors — they also feel comfortable about taking the moral road when discussing transition options with an adult transexual. This, of course, is one of the many issues that activists have with doctors, as we will shortly see.

Now, around the 1980s, there was also a new ‘movement’ (if that can be described that way) under way. The Internet was still not widespread, but the crossdressing community kept in touch, as far as it was possible, through newsletters and magazines and similar ‘low-tech’ ways of information dissemination. And there was clearly a new pattern emerging, one that had not yet been described by medical research.

While a lot of magazines and even mail-order catalogues were clearly targeted to crossdressing fetishists, it now seemed that not all crossdressers were, strictly speaking, fetishists — a problem in classification that persists even today. Even though non-fetishist crossdressers existed for all time — there are documents and records from all epochs showing this, and perhaps one of the most notable examples was Casa Susanna in the 1950s — there was no clear dividing line between so-called ‘transvestites’ who were mostly crossdressing for sexual pleasure, and those who were mostly crossdressing for other purposes, without, however, wishing to transition (assuming that such an option was available for them!).

This lead (and still leads!) to a major source of confusion. Why should a perfectly normal, healthy husband and father, with a successful career and a bright outlook in life, feel the ‘urge’ to dress himself as a woman, unless it’s for sexual pleasure? Why would such heterosexual males wear women’s garments and adopt their behaviour and speech, even if temporarily, if they had absolutely no intention to attract a male partner? Such questions were not easily answered, and for generations, society in general but doctors and researchers in particular would throw all kinds of crossdressers in the same label — ‘transvestites’ — and just consider that some would be more shy in engaging into sexual activity than others, but they would essentially be part of the same group: it was a question of degree, not of kind.

But by the 1980s (at least!) it was clear that this was not the case. Also, groups of non-fetishist crossdressers started to become far more organised, creating their own communities, and forcefully distancing themselves from fetishist transvestites, by adopting strict rules of conduct for their events; they also started publishing lists of ‘acceptable behaviour’ for non-fetishist crossdressers, and what their goals and aims were; and they also started an attempt at creating a typical profile of the non-fetishist crossdresser.

They mostly identified as male, but with a so-called ‘inner female’ which needed to ‘come out’ and express itself. For many, while such an ‘expression’ was an unquenshable urge, it was not even sexual in nature (even though it might have been at least ‘erotic’); but the urge ‘had to be satisfied’. These crossdressers knew about transexuality, but they clearly thought that this label did not apply to themselves. After all, most of them did not really want to go through surgery to have a feminine body, nor did they want to live full-time as women. Most had family and children anyway; or even a job with a responsability that they couldn’t easily discard to ‘become’ a woman  (note that this was the actual language used, which would have not been politically correct today).

A few might actually suffer from the ‘urge to crossdress’ to the point of actually becoming non-functional in their daily lives, and therefore seeked out professional therapists to deal with their ‘urges’. But the vast majority had no such issue, they kept their urges well under control, and saw these mostly as a form of escapism, a fantasy, or little more than a hobby, albeit a very strange and unusual one.

Because they sort of ‘transitated’ between the male and the female gender, and back again, they coined for themselves the term transgender. It’s no coincidence that this word is similar to ‘transexual’, but there is a distinct difference: transexuals do not change gender, they always identify with the same gender; instead, they transform their bodies (and that includes their sexual characteristics) in order to appear physically to be of the gender they identify with. Whereas the 1980s transgender people would keep their bodies (and their sexual characteristics) but change genders, or, more precisely, temporarily adopt a different gender role than the one assigned at birth – and go back again.

Some of those ‘transgender’ people were what we would call today gender non-conforming; most, however, shared some characteristics with transexual people – like them, they believed in binary gender, they felt they belonged to one gender but sometimes had to express themselves as the opposite gender, and, regarding their identity, they would still label themselves as mostly male but with a female side. Some might even go as far as admitting to be bi-gender, i.e. Having both a male and a female gender identity, and switching between both at will. Today, such people would be called gender oscillating, or fluctuating, or sometimes bi-gender and even two-spirit, depending a bit on context. Again, in general, the characteristic of ‘being two genders

at the same time’ and switching between them at will (without surgery or hormone treatments) would not include any form of clinical suffering. As such, this particular group rarely, if ever, gets mentioned in the transgender literature (even though ironically they coined the name!), since they neither appear at a doctor’s office for an appointment regarding their situation and are much less willing to answer surveys, interviews, etc.

Transexual, however, was a word that quickly acquired a negative connotation. I have not read about all the reasons why that happened, but I can imagine a few: in the 1990s, Blanchard was actively promoting his own theories, and using the words ‘homosexual transexual’ and ‘autogynephiliac transexual’ to designate his alleged two different kinds of transexuality. The community was not happy about the strict meaning given by medical science to transexuality, namely that, to be considered transexual, and therefore eligible for surgery and HRT, you had to:

• Assume that there are only two genders (you were just assigned the wrong one at birth)
• Be physically and romantically attracted to people of the opposite gender (coming first out as homosexual was not a requirement, but it showed goodwill)
• Willing to lead a ‘normal life’ as a member of the gender identified with (at that time, the porn industry was full of so-called she-males, and some doctors, based on their own moral prejudices, would refuse to grant surgery to them, not believing them to be ‘true transexuals’ but somehow sexual deviants seeking uncommon kinds of surgery…)
• Unmarried at the time of transition (but marrying afterwards with the ‘correct’ partner acording to heteronormative sexuality was strongly encouraged); if married, willing to get a divorce before transition completes)
• Willing to undergo sterilisation
• Be good looking enough as the gender one identified with so that ‘passing’ would not become an issue
• In general, conforming in thoughts, attitudes, temperament, behaviour etc. to stereotypical members of the gender identified with
• Willing to undergo all surgeries (i.e. top/bottom) and continue the hormone therapy all their lives (meaning that detransitioning was not an option)

This was often seen as excessive by the community, especially those that did not conform to all the above stereotypes; for example, lesbian trans women would simply lie about their sexual preferences in order not to be excluded from transition. In fact, lying to the doctors became so extremely widespread that many communities, having members that had ‘passed’ all questioning, would eagerly share the ‘right’ answers with the rest of the community, so that people had a better chance at getting a favourable recommendation for transition. With the advent of the Internet, such lists of ‘right’ answers became even more popular and widespread.

On the other hand, activists started to question the whole role of doctors to impose morality and gender stereotypes upon those that were deemed to be ‘true transexuals’ by them. Because there was clearly a huge part of the community that did not conform to the ideas that doctors had about transexuals, doctors started to be seen as the conservative gatekeepers who defended a society of two genders only, and only admitting sex reassignment surgery to those who would match the ideal stereotype of a person of the gender they identified with – while leaving all the others stuck with their gender dysphoria, classified as ‘transvestites’ or ‘deluded fetishist crossdressers’, or labelled as suffering from paraphilias (‘why do you wish to keep your penis if you’re going to live full-time as a woman, and you have already said that you prefer to have sexual relationships with men anyway?’)

The right for doctors to define who is a ‘true transexual’ (and thus allowed to transition) and who was not (and thus condemned to a life of suffering from gender dysphoria) remained polemic ever since, and has only very recently been settled by the handful of countries allowing an administrative change of name and gender without the need of ‘consent’ from anyone (surgeries are another story).

This also lead to serious discrimination according to wealth – rich transexuals could always travel abroad and find a less ethical doctors in a less ‘controlled’ county and get whatever surgeries they needed: it was just a question of being able to afford the right price. From Casablanca in Morocco to Thailand, rich people always were ‘above the law’ in what concerns deciding for themselves what to do with their bodies – and often regretted their decision and detransitioned, but, again, they could afford to do so.

While poor transexuals had no choices but to submit to the rules set by prejudiced doctors.

Things started to change from the 1980s onwards when the social sciences began to become interested in studying transexuality as well. Sociology and anthropology had quite different approaches – and therefore also came to different conclusions – towards their research about the phenomenon. I have obviously not read everything, not even the most important textbooks in the field, but nevertheless I saw that things started to become different in the approaches and attitudes towards transgender people. While the community continued to argue for their own right to self-label themselves, the social sciences started to evaluate these labels and contextualise them, and compare them to what was the norm with the medical sciences. And there were clear differences, the most important of which being diversity, and the notion of gender as a purely social construct. In other words, scholars started for the first time to question a ‘black-or-white’ world, where people were either born as what we call today cisgender (but possibly transvestites) or ‘true transexuals’ – there clearly were quite a lot of people who defied either classification, some of them suffering from ‘not fitting’ the appropriate label in order to get some treatment and relief.

So, to answer this (long) chapter’s question… labels are important for doctors, in the sense that they make a diagnosis and, based on that diagnosis, they recommend a person for treatment (or not). In the case of gender dysphoria, being labelled as a ‘true transexual’ was the only chance of having any hope of getting a friendly ear from a doctor; everything else was pushed into the realm of paraphilias and simply forgotten by doctors. It’s thanks to activists, but also to social scientists, that doctors started to realise that transgenderity was much more complex – and diverse – than they thought.

Labels change, confusion begins

We come now to the start of a complex process when the community (and later the scientific community and the lawmakers) started to change all taxonomies. But to make things more complicated, they reused existing labels and categories and gave them new meanings.

‘Transvestite’ and ‘transexual’ were the first to be abandoned. While they are still in use by doctors today (and possibly lawmakers) – and have specific meanings, diagnosis, and treatment options – they have mostly been abandoned by everybody else. Instead, the word crossdresser, to designate ‘someone who wears clothes predominantely associated with a gender different from the one assigned at birth’, started to be used as a replacement for ‘transvestite’.

This complicated matters for many reasons. First and foremost, crossdressing is an action, crossdresser is a person who crossdressers. Such a label does not mean anything else. A Kabuki player (all of which are male) playing a female character in Japan is technically ‘crossdressing’, because that’s what the word means; but a Kabuki player is not a transvestite! Crossdressing (and female impersonation in general) is an art form taken very seriously by Kabuki players and requiring years of training (usually starting before puberty); calling them ‘trannies’ would be extremely rude!

However, by employing the word ‘crossdressing’ to designate mostly an action, we lose the previous meaning, which was applied to MtF crossdressers who wore female clothing either for sexual/erotic pleasure or for ‘expressing their inner female self’ (which usually, but not always, isn’t linked to sexual activity). This confusion still persists to this day: in most contexts, when talking about ‘crossdressing’, most people — including those of the LGBTIQ+ community! — immediately think about crossdressing as a fetish and not simply as an ‘action’. More specifically, transexuals do not ‘crossdress’, strictly speaking: they dress in the clothes of the gender they identify with, no matter what their physical body actually looks like. This naturally even creates more confusion, this time outside the LGBTIQ+ community: most heteronormative cisgender people will think that someone wearing clothes of a gender that is not aligned with their physical body is ‘a crossdresser’ and therefore a fetishist, or, worse, someone having a paraphilia (this is also one of the many reasons that a few transexuals quote for not ‘crossdressing’ in public before formal transition).

This was the main reason why the word ‘transgender’ was introduced in the mid-1980s: to create a new term, not previously used by any community (nor by scholars, academics, or activists), to specifically designate those who go ‘between genders’ in some form, a behaviour that they were compelled to do with a certain amount of regularity, and which was separate from eventual sensual/erotic/sexual pleasure, or arousal, or adrenaline rushes induced by the actual act of assuming a different gender role from the one assigned at birth. This word was powerful in the sense that it was sufficiently specific to separate those people from transexuals and transvestites — the two classifications still used by psychiatrists and psychologists today — as well from drag queens (or kings) and crossdressers (mostly fetishists), which were taxonomies used by the community as well.

The ‘transgender’ word was very successful. Suddenly, people in the community understood that what we now call the ‘transgender spectrum’ included far more people than the doctors thought — but also way more than even the LGBTIQ+ community included. In particular, it allowed to include under that term those who had not begun transition but might eventually do so — and drop the ‘pre-op/post-op transexual’ distinctions, which was so often an issue of discrimination even inside the community, designating those who hadn’t made their bottom surgery a being ‘lesser’ transexuals in some way.

This had important implications. The ‘transgender’ word was more neutral, more political correct, simply because it was ‘new’, more inclusive, and people didn’t have a prejudice against it. The small, very specific community of crossdressers which used the term to describe themselves were mostly politically inactive – in the sense that they were not visible at the activist arena – and surrounded by a certain degree of secretism (most of them did not want to be seen publicly, after all); also, they wrote well about their own situation and condition, they were reasonably good at explaining transgender issues (namely, the difference between fetishists, transexuals, and ‘those in between’) and of organising themselves into support groups in order to help others. As a consequence, they had a rather positive attitude towards their own small community, and this carried over to the word they had chosen to represent themselves, transgender. But they had a wonderful advantage over other communities: in spite of their relatively strict guidelines (which differentiated their subcommunity from others) they were actually very inclusive and open-minded about who joined their groups – so far as one was willing to follow a few rules and guidelines, what they were ‘inside’ or whatever their reasons were for having a non-conforming gender presentation, one would be always quite welcome in the group. Thus, in effect, they let others co-opt the word describing their own community – which eventually changed meaning and became something entirely different (even if related).

So, what is a transgender person?

This is now 2017, and if you just type the word ‘transgender’ on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, or wherever you prefer (even on adult sites!), you will get a gazillion hits. Never as before people are transitioning all the time and being very open about it. Some transgender YouTubers, stars in their own constellation of admirers, direct complete documentaries on their own transition; they not only answer to the uncountable questions about all possible issues regarding transition, but they even hold sessions of live streaming, where they answer directly, with sincerity, what they have been through, what self-discoveries they made, and what experiences they went through, positive and negative. It is therefore not in the least surprising that transgender people of all ages and all over the world get nowadays access not only to a wealth of information, but, much better than that, they get in touch with real, living transgender people, who are more than willing to answer every question they might have. This is by far the best option today for someone who is uncertain about their own gender to find all relevant information, well before they join a support group or talk to a doctor – things that require an extreme amount of courage to do, but it’s so much easier when one knows that one is merely walking in the heels of others who did precisely the same. And the sheer amount of transgender people willing to share their experiences is simply staggering!

Most of them are (comparatively) young, many of which still in their teens; most are millennials and therefore much more accessible to the younger generations and having a different mentality from the older ones; and most also share a characteristic in common: they are all beautiful.

Leaving that last (subjective) comment besides, we can see that most of these people have a very consolidated, uniform message, which they are quite good at transmitting to others. In essence, they describe themselves as ‘transgender’ and go to explain that this is a word that replaced the old ‘transexual’ classification; signs of ‘being transgender’ pretty much follow the descriptions given by Dr. Benjamin for the ‘classic transexual’, but with a little more leeway: in other words, you can be transgender but not do any surgeries (and still change your name and gender on your documentation); and your sexual orientation doesn’t matter. The rest of the narrative, however, is pretty much the same, and I’m sure that those people are not even aware of those similarities…

Perhaps one interesting aspect of contemporary transgenderity is the abandonment of the concept of gender dysphoria. In other words, transgender people tell to others that they did, indeed, go through depression and anxiety because other people did not allow them to transition (either the parents, their family, the social pressure, whatever). This is consistent with a contemporary thought about the self: we’re becoming much more individualistic and selfish, and all the blame is pushed to external causes, most commonly other people.

The actual words in the narrative are not totally relevant. What is relevant, however, is the exclusivist description of transgenderity. Like the ‘classic transexuals’ before them, contemporary self-styled transgender people associate ‘transgenderity’ with two things: having a different gender identity than the one assigned at birth, and going through a process of formal transition to live their lives according to the gender they identify with.

We have to tread carefully when examining these narratives. Yes, there is an element of open-mindedness which was not present in the 1990s – the issue of surgery being optional, for instance, is totally accepted; and all kinds of sexuality are also tolerated. However, those that self-style themselves ‘transgender’ do not see that word as describing a much vaster community. Instead, they consider that community to be of non-conforming gender (identity), which they believe to be something entirely different. And as the years pass, I confess that I have seen this happening more and more: the word ‘transgender’ is, once again, used to describe a very exclusive community, one which defines very clear rules about who is part of the ‘transgender community’ and who is not. They see ‘transgender’ as the 21st century label that replaces ‘transexual’, with a few added details (but very slight ones), and not as a vast community (in the sense that I use the word!) which includes pretty much everyone who is non-gender conforming in any way, including gender identity non-conformity as well as gender presentation non-conformity.

Perhaps in my own enthusiasm about the open-mindedness of the so-called transgender community I also misread a lot of definitions that I happened to read about. Indeed, it was only after many (online) discussions with several hundreds of self-styled transgender people that a new picture of the community started to emerge. Those who defend the rights of transgender people believe that transgenderity is strictly limited to a specific classification (which allows little margin of flexibility) which does not admit the inclusion of a lot of people in their category. In particular, transgender activists are fond of explaining that transgenderity only applies to gender identity, and not to gender presentation, which they assume to be ‘part’ of gender identity — which it’s not. This confused me for a long time until I understood their point of view: those who cross the gender spectrum regarding their presentation include the ‘dreadful’ drag queens/kings as well as the (fetishist?) ‘crossdressers’, two groups which the activists do not see as worthy of their attention — in fact, they would rather prefer to have them wiped out of existence, since they are seen as a source of prejudice against their activism. The more tolerant activists (I have met personally a small handful of them) might accept their existence, but they are clueless about what ‘rights’ they ought to fight for them.

I’ve talked about this issue on one of my previous essays. Legislation, in most Western countries, includes ‘freedom of expression’, which is not necessarily limited to speech (or the written word, of course), but also the way one presents socially — in other words, nobody can tell us what to wear in public. Well, to a limit: like freedom of speech is restricted, for instance not allowing hate speech, label, defamation, and so forth, freedom of expression is also restricted: you cannot run around naked except in designated places; and technically you should not present yourself in swimwear or beachwear when working as a teacher or something like that. So, there are a few rules here and there to limit one’s freedom of expression, but they tend to be very few and very restricted to certain contexts — in fact, there are more rules for private spaces (where the owners set the rules, e.g. demanding gentlemen to wear a tie and ladies to be in proper evening dress to attend a fancy restaurant) than for the public one. More specifically, in the Western world, there are no rules to prevent ‘crossdressing’, in the sense of choosing to present oneselves as a person attired with clothing usually worn by a different gender (no matter what the intent). Each country might limit this more or less, and of course I have only experience with my own country and its separation of the various kinds of places as ‘public’, ‘private’, or ‘private with public access’, where freedom of expression is just guaranteed on the first kind — but that includes a lot of spaces: it’s not just the outdoors or the streets, but all public buildings, including schools, universities, museums, all kinds of buildings bought by the local municipality (for instance, some theatres and opera houses), and of course all places where you can contact civil servants. Theoretically you would also have full freedom of expression inside a courtroom, although the judge might have a word to say on that, if they believe that your attire shows contempt or disrespect to the court, and demand you wear something different (I would have to check that, so don’t quote me on that!).

In fact, even if your intent is not ‘pure’, you would still allowed to dress as you wish; for example, you’re allowed to dress pretty much as you want to deliberately provoke others (say, to push them to accept a certain lifestyle, ideology, or even religion). Again, I’m speaking for my country; the question of wearing burqas, which is slowly being forbidden all across Europe, one country at the time, might also be posed in my own country as well (although we aren’t victims of radical Islam terrorists — there is really nothing around here that might ‘provoke’ them in some way, and we’re insignificant enough for the world not to care much if they blow away a few buildings — and we are, at least culturally, in part ‘descendants’ of the Caliphate, even though I’m also aware it was the ‘wrong’ Caliphate, it split up during the Middle Ages, oh well, it’s all so incredibly confusing, but anyway… our most holy place of Christian worship, attracting pilgrims all over the world, and possibly on the top 5 holiest places for Catholicism, is named… after the daughter of the Prophet. The irony! ). That means that one day certain attires might be also ‘forbidden’ in my own country, although currently this is not the case. You can even go around dressed as Hitler if you wish, and with a group of followers in full SS uniform sporting swastikas all over their attire, so long as you do not engage in any activity that might be considered hate speech, racism, or whatever sort of prejudice and discrimination — and no, we do not have crazy guys walking around impersonating Hitler just because they’re allowed to do that, but my point is that crossdressing is very mild compared to all the extreme cases that are allowed around here, and which, in fact, nobody actually does that.

In any case, the problem here for activists is that ‘crossdressers’ (and remember that they have drag queens/kings and fetishists in mind!) do not require ‘extra rights and protection’ — they are fully protected by existing laws, and therefore they are seen as being outside the transgender movement and unworthy of any activists fighting for you. In fact, they even see such ‘outsiders’ as being examples of the kind of people (and behaviour) that they wish to eradicate from the mainstream’s minds, because the public in general, when they hear about ‘transgender’ people, immediately think of drag queens (rarely drag kings!) and fetishists!

This raises a huge problem. You can see the dilemma: on one hand, we have the so-called ‘true transgender people’ (according to the new definition of ‘transgender’), fighting for their rights and their acceptance into society, and who despise drag queens/kings and fetishists, because they see them as an obstacle in most people’s minds to increase tolerance towards transgender people; but on the other hand, it’s exactly those who are most hated and ostracised by the transgender activists that are in the minds of the mainstream as being ‘transgender’! So if you eradicate them from people’s minds… people don’t know what a ‘transgender’ person is.

It’s complicated. But it gets worse. What about those who are not labeled ‘transgender’ according to the current definition of the word, but are neither drag queens/kings, male/female impersonators, or fetishist crossdressers?

Oh, those pesky gender non-conforming individuals! Well, they are outside every group — which was something which did confuse me a lot, especially because I was so familiar with the former usage of the word ‘transgender’ and its inclusivity. Note how we started with the notion of ‘crossdressing’ for purposes other than performance, lifestyle, fetishism/erotic pleasure, etc. and had to ‘invent’ a new name, ‘transgender’, to apply to those who were neither transexuals (‘true transexuals’, that is!) nor part of the ‘other’ groups — those who had non-conforming gender presentation — but who also had a ‘gender issue’. In particular, such individuals, which also form a large spectrum, but are mostly male assigned at birth, nonetheless have ‘true transexuals’ at one extreme and ‘true crossdressing fetishists’ at the other extreme — somewhere in the middle, however, there is a huge group of people who crossdress for the most different reasons. Almost all, however, will at least consider that they have a ‘female inside’ in some form or other; some have narratives that are absolutely indistinguishable from ‘late onset transexuals’, even though they don’t label themselves that way, and for them, transition is just a dream; the pragmatism of a hard life of labour prevents them to take any step in that direction.

Interestingly enough is this notion that there are ‘rules’ for the ‘true crossdressers’; I have to say that I have rebelled now and then against the idea or concept of ‘rules’ to tell people what their identity and presentation should be, but, as time passes and I reflect more and more on the subject (while at the same time having met more such people over time), I think that I understand the point of those ‘rules’. In a sense, they are a speculum mundi, a reflection of the ‘gender role stereotypes’ that are evident and clear for those who have been born in those roles and identify with them — but which are a mystery for the ‘other’ gender, who has been raised according to a completely different set of rules and behaviour. So the issue here is the notion that ‘gender role’ equals ‘following (social) rules (and behaviours)’; in other words, in those groups of so-called ‘true crossdressers’ there is this notion that you can crossdress for whatever reason you wish, but if you go out with us, you will have to behave like a lady — and that means learning to behave like one. Either you agree and like it, or you’re out.

It sounds horrible and I’ve discussed this point several times, but what I actually find interesting is that, among the ‘non-conforming gender’ groups, this group — the one that originated the word ‘transgender’ in the first place! — actually demands conformance! How weird can it be?

Well, it turns out, it makes a lot of sense. Consider cisgender people — in particular, women — today: they can be whatever they want to be, without being subject to prejudice (this is what advocates, activists, and allies call cisgender privilege). But interestingly enough, this starts to be true about transgender people as well — namely, those that were formerly known as ‘transexuals’. They have actually broken the stereotyped concept that transexuals are just frustrated males who want to have gorgeous female bodies and become models — or prostitutes. Or, failing that — because they don’t have ‘good genes’ and no amount of surgery will turn them into good-looking women, much less women with gorgeous bodies — they just become advocates for their cause, join the ranks of activism, and just speak out for the rest. In truth, and in a very stereotypical way, the most visible transexual people in my own country are just in those two categories — either they are activists, or they become models or singers. Anyone who is neither… has no voice.

But this is not what we see on the YouTube channels. Sure, as I mentioned, only good-looking transexuals (especially MtF transexuals) are willing to expose themselves publicly; but they are not so ‘stereotypical’ any more. In fact, the younger generation is really indistinguishable in their looks, behaviour, and expectations for their lives from other cisgender people of their own age and social milieu. They have the same goals — it might be to go to university and study to become a doctor, for example — and even the same anxiety and stress. They talk much less about ‘transgender issues’ (although this varies from case to case, of course!) but pretty much about all sorts of issues that young people go through, cis or trans. And they don’t feel that they have to be ‘different’ in their goals and expectations — if they are free to choose like a cis person of the same gender, then they will do exactly that. And this also shows in the comments of their followers: unlike what happens on activist channels, this new generation of trans people attracts mostly cis people (after all, they’re so many more than us!), and their comments and conversation is focused on all sorts of issues that are not specifically trans — like relationships, dealing with anxiety at school, or with stress at their first job, and so forth. Typical issues that affect all sorts of people. ‘Being trans’, in a sense, is just felt to be a condition they had, something that was wrong with their bodies, but they quickly found a way to deal with that (i.e. hormones, surgery, transition…) and get on with their lives, just like everybody else who had to deal with a complex issue in their pasts. One very interesting aspect of the narrative of this new generation is that the concept of ‘gender dysphoria’ is not even present: there is nothing wrong with their minds. They just had a problem with their bodies, and got it fixed, and that’s all there is. They can accept that they have been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and who knows what else, but they shrug it away: it was just ‘a thing’ that had to do with having the wrong body, just like someone who has a physical defect that harms them and makes them suffer unnecessarily, but, once they get it fixed, they can go along with their lives.

This new narrative is interesting in plenty of details, and of course I hope that sociological studies start to take note of the differences, but the way these people express themselves, there is much less angst than with the previous generations. In other words, we didn’t even know that you could have been born transgender (in the current definition of the word). We had to figure it out on our own, sometimes with luck (in pre-Internet times it would really require a lot of luck!). We certainly knew that something was terribly wrong with us, mentally speaking, because we could clearly see that others were not affected that way. To give a very simple example, i.e., my own — by the time I was in my teens, and had absolutely no idea what transexuality was (and even homosexuality was thought to be a lifestyle, a choice…), I could nevertheless know that ‘the other guys’ didn’t masturbate themselves imagining themselves as being girls — which was absolutely normal for me. They did not entertain any dreams or fantasies about ‘living inside a woman’s body’, and the mere thought of that was repugnant to them; I learned that very quickly, and was rather confused, because I thought that all boys who were into girls did think just like me. Discovering that this was not the case just increased my confusion; in a sense, I struggled very hard to ‘become a man’, in the sense that I didn’t really feel I was one (yet), but since that was what everybody expected from me, it was clear that I had no real choice in there: I just had to work harder in behaving as a man ought to behave. And, of course, if you do that time and time again, over the years and the decades, it becomes your personal narrative, and you believe in it, i becomes part of what you are: your identity.

This might explain why many of the older transexual people I have met are so often very angry persons. They are mostly angry at society, of course, who forced them to be something they weren’t, and they are resentful of that, and will never forgive society for what it did to them. But often they are also angry at themselves, for not having transitioned earlier and experiencing the gender role they have always identified with; they are angry with friends, familiars, colleagues, etc. for their lack of support, or even their lack of understanding of their condition. And because so many (at least in my country) will never get a job again, they are angry because they are poor, driven to dependency from a caring parent or other family member, or sometimes dependency of a partner, simply because the alternative is to live on the streets as a sex worker. And not everybody is willing to do that (even if it’s such a common stereotype!).

So, are these Generation-X transexuals, full of their anger towards society, the ‘true transexuals’ — the ones who believe in stereotypes even for transexual people — or is it the Millennials, with their relatively careless attitude towards Big Transgender Issues  (they take for granted the rights that others have fought for), and who are far more concerned with ‘normal’ issues that young adults face —regardless of being cis or trans? Note, again, that there is a big difference between those who ‘pass’ perfectly as the gender they identify with, and those who will never pass (which is especially true of many — if not most! — MtF transgender people)!

I’m raising this point here to show how the ‘transexual narrative’ (today we call it the ‘transgender narrative’, of course) is also changing. Age does make a difference — but not only in the way hormones may modify one’s body, but rather in terms of mentality. While certainly some Millennial transgender people are also angry, even aggressive, and not necessarily happy about their situation, it’s also true that much of that anger comes mostly from anxiety (both emotions have the same cause), and, as the transgender person progresses through transition and acquires more and more self-confidence in their ‘new’ role in the gender they identify with, that anger/irritation/ ‘rebel’ outlook starts to fade into the background, and the result is a person who is absolutely indistinguishable from any other person of that particular gender. Whereas the Generation Xers continue to be angry and resentful, even after what doctors would call a ‘successful transition’. And, in fact, it is mostly the Generation Xers, with some notable exceptions (Caitlyn Jenner, a Baby Boomer, conservative and Christian, comes to mind), who have been ‘fighting the good fight’ all along, and continue to do so, and have as their main goal and purpose in their lives to keep on the fight.

Indeed, I’ve often read about the claim — which I also share — that ‘transgenderity’ as a clinical condition, or, more precisely, a mental condition — gender dysphoria — might simply cease to exist in a generation or so. Not because people suddenly became more tolerant, but simply because, like doctors have for decades chopped bits off intersex babies and nobody would know what kind of genitalia they have been born with (except for possibly their parents), the same might happen with transgender kids routinely in the immediate future, as parents and school teachers are more alert to the signs of transgenderity — in other words, a girl born with a boy’s body might simply ask her parents what’s wrong with her and why she does have that dangly bit of flesh between her legs while other girls haven’t, get taken to a pedopsychiatrist and pedopsychologist, get diagnosed with transgenderity (possibly even before the mental condition described in medical literature as ‘gender dysphoria’ starts to set in and adversely affect her mind!), do the necessary surgeries and hormone replacement therapy, and start grammar school as any other girl. By the time she’s an adolescent, she might be surprised not to menstruate like the other girls, but their parents would just explain to her that she had a rare genetic defect at birth, doctors did the best they could, but they cannot give her the ability to bear children, so she will have to live with it — just like those unfortunate cisgender women with XX chromosomes and normal hormonal levels who sadly have some genetic deficiency preventing them to be fertile.

This is naturally the utopian (immediate) future for transgender people: the ability to make transgenderity, as a ‘condition’ or even as a ‘social issue’, disappear. The good news is that we are ‘almost there’. The bad news is that this still leaves many people without access to basic rights and protection.

And here we have to come back to why it was so important for ‘crossdressers’ to adhere to rules. What was their real purpose? General acceptance. And this requires a bit more explaining.

Accepting your own ‘label’, be accepted in turn? Not really, but…

A common misconception is that ‘labels matter’. This makes sense when we consider how hard transgender people fought for having the right to be called… transgender.

This seems paradoxal, but we have to go back a few decades… in fact, to the civil rights movements of the 1960s. What happened back then (and this was especially visible among people of colour in the USA) was the notion that discrimination would be much easier to overcome if one could pass the message that they were conforming to the rules, behaviours, and, well, stereotypes of society. In the concrete case of the rights of black people, the idea was if they dressedm, behaved, had the same tastes, routines, and habits as any other American, then they would be accepted as Americans as well. In short, the idea is that accepting society’s values will lead to better acceptance in tun.

Today, as identity politics have tried to create the notion that ethnic groups, sharing common values which, however, are different from those of the mainstream community, should have the same level of acceptance as any other group. Here the idea is that non-conformity is also protected as the right of personal self-expression – and that also means adhering to a set of values, costumes, behaviours, appearance, even religion of ideology, which is not commonly accepted by the majority of the society.

This generates an obvious problem, which comes from our ancestral built-in reaction to ‘strangers’, or, more correctly, ‘others’. Humans evolved by living in extended families, clans, or tribes, which might have recognised the existence of different tribes, but would (usually) be at war with them. Because physically humans were humans, and therefore indistinguishable on the basis of appearance alone, ‘something else’ had to be artificially created to distinguish one tribe from a different one, so that a member of one tribe, unfamiliar with someone they had not met before, could easily figure out if they were friends or enemies.

I’ve addressed this before, from the angle of the shaman or medicine man as the person who would embody a culture, in the sense of orally transmitting what would make a particular tribe or clan unique – a set of rules, behaviours, commonly shared values, external appearance, and, yes, gender roles and so forth. So we humans created stereotypes for our own societies in order to distinguish ourselves from our enemies. This is ‘wired-in’ in our brains; after all, we spent dozens of thousands of years doing that over and over again, across generations.

So we’re still equipped with what I would call ‘inborn xenophobia’, the natural fear of someone who is different from us. This ‘difference’ can be expressed in a myriad ways, but as it is obvious, the bigger that’s difference becomes, the more intensely this xenophobia is triggered.

This is not to say that everybody is a xenophobe. That would be a very wrong generalisation to make. What it says is that we all have a potential for xenophobia, but, because we are intelligent beings, and can learn new things, we can be educated in becoming more or less tolerant. ‘Tolerance’ could here be pointing at something we also have inherited from our remotest ancestors: altruism and collaboration. In other words, there are circumstances where the ‘greater good’ of the human species is more important than the small bickering among different tribes – consider, in pre-historic times, how populations of small tribes, all of them enemies of each other, reacted to a common threat, such as a forest fire or an earthquake. It’s very likely that in those occasions we were able to manage to overcome our mutual distrust and work together for the benefit of the survival of all.

Indeed, we could further argue that the growth of civilisation – literally, starting to live in cities – comes from our ability to overcome xenophobia, and are able to live with ‘strangers’ in the same crowded space (compared to the vast savannah where our ancestors live). And we have lived in cities for many generations now.

The city developed therefore its own culture, on top of each individual tribe’s cultural values. Thus, citizens (inhabitants of cities) acquired new values, new behaviours, new forms of appearance, just because they had somehow to create a sense of belonging towards a much greater structure, namely, the urban population living inside a city. And we had cities like Rome at the height of its glory with a million inhabitants, lots of which came from the fringes of the Roman Empire – where they had their own culture! – but became ‘romanised’ as they came within the sphere of influence of Rome, its language, its culture, its way of thinking. In China, a vast bureaucratic empire, something even more intriguing happened: they were invaded by several other populations and successfully conquered by them – one example everybody knows are the Mongol invasions and conquests, but even Tibet managed to conquer the Chinese Empire once or twice (something which today is absolutely impossible to imagine!). But what happened to China as a civilisation? Their new leaders, instead of imposing their values and cultures, became instead Chinese – they adopted the Chinese language and culture to become fully integrated and therefore more accepted by their subjects; after a few generations, those dynasties would look as Chinese as any other, their remote non-Chinese past long abandoned and forgotten. ‘Becoming Chinese’ was the notion that barbarians had of the ultimate degree of sophistication.

Something similar obviously happened on other civilisations; Germanic barbarians who were integrated into the Roman Empire quickly adopted their habits, learned Latin (or at least a dialect of it…) and tried to behave ‘as Roman as possible’. This lasted even after the collapse of the Roman Empire. The Iberian Peninsula, once the Roman Legions were disbanded after the collapse of the Roman Empire around the 5th century or so, were soon invaded by Germanic people, namely, the Goths (or more precisely the Ostrogoths), who quickly established their own kingdoms here. But they had already been Christianised, as the Romans were by that time; so even though their ways of thinking, their habits and costumes, their tradition, the way they looked, etc. were all different, they shared the same religion, and, of course, they had been in contact with Roman civilisation for many centuries, so that they were not ‘pure’ Germanic tribes any more.

But we do not need to go back as far as that. At least until WWII, it was common practice for US immigrants to change their names to a more ‘anglicised’ form of their names (both first names and surnames); ‘Drumpf’ eventually became ‘Trump’ over the generations. Even today, Chinese business persons living in mainland China are very quick to adopt at least English first names, because that will aid Westerners dealing with them (in English!) to remember their names. Some simply do business as an alias, with a full English name – and unless you’re transacting business over Skype or so, you won’t really know the race or culture of the person behind the keyboard.

Such examples show how pragmatic people deal with ‘acceptance’. The barrier of xenophobia is often bridged if one adopts the culture, behaviour, and way of dressing of the region where one lives. My own country is a typical example: there are twice as many emigrants than inhabitants in Portugal, but there are no ‘Little Portugal’ communities in any other country, or Portuguese neighbourhoods. Except perhaps Newark in the US (which I have never visited), most Portuguese living abroad simply ‘blend in’, trying to learn the local language and customs and habits as quickly as possible, and dropping all the culture baggage they brought from Portugal – except perhaps for subtle things in the privacy of their homes, like what they cook, or what soccer club they favour. Recently, in the news, I came across a name of a typical second-generation Portuguese immigrant woman in France, who was the speaker for a small town there who protested against Muslim immigrants which were scheduled to arrive at that town. The irony is that a second-generation Portuguese – her own fathers immigrants in France – was at the forefront of a nationalist rally to claim ‘France for the French’. In fact, after a few more generations, such Portuguese lose all connections to the ‘home country’, and it’s often just by coincidence that they find that one of their grandparents or grand-grandparents were immigrants and try to figure out something about their country and customs… but this happens much more rarely than with other nationalities.

Portugal is also a good example of the opposite issue: immigrants coming from Slavic countries such as the Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, Moldova, or Bulgaria, (and a few from Russia as well), very quickly ‘fit in’, in spite of their different cultural background, and, of course, a totally different language (except for Romanians and Moldovians, who also speak a Romance language). After a year or so, they speak Portuguese with the fluency of a native, and often with merely a hint of an accent; they have adopted the culture of the country they now live in, and quickly establish friendships with the ‘natives’, who, in general, love them. Why? Because they make an effort not to look like strangers. Obviously their Slavic features will stand out in a Mediterranean crowd; but because they all make such an effort to ‘blend in’ we consider them ‘ours’. This is shown by sharing the strange tastes in soccer: it’s almost as likely for Ukranians to support the Portuguese national soccer team as having Portuguese joining the Ukrainins when they watch a game sporting the Ukrainian national soccer team. Generalisations always give a wrong idea of what’s going on, but such spontaneous events occur with frequency. People from the Slavic countries, as well as those from all over Europe and Brasil, do not live in ghettos – they live among all other Portuguese, and blend in completely. I believe I have once pointed out how quickly the Brazilian girls adapt to Portugal – there are obviously a lot of similarities (even if everybody denies those… just to find out there is much more in common than it’s usually remembered), and having a common language helps, but Brazilian girls will stand out immediately in the way they dress, do their makeup, their hair, and so forth; Brazilian society is far more sexist than the Portuguese one, and this is also shown in the way Brazilian girls look and behave. But give them just a year settled here and they are impossible to distinguish from a native Portuguese – after all, they will shop at the same places, and check what other women wear, and quickly make the change. Also, of course, they stand out much less than the Slavs – even though the Brazilian population is a huge mix of ethnicities, ours  is also a big mix, and even though the origins of those mixes are possibly different, the result, genetically speaking, is similar. In other words: it’s very easy for Brazilians to fully blend in. Slavs will stand out in a crowd, but, in a sense, sometimes they blend in so well, culturally speaking, that we often ‘forget’ their pale skin, blue eyes, very light hair and being on average taller than the average Portuguese – and that is especially true after getting a nice tan at the beach and being able to speak fluently with barely a trace of an accent.

I’m sure you might all have similar examples, where populations who belong to a particular ethnicity or culture, for pragmatic issues, simply ‘blend in’ so well that they are completely accepted – mostly because they are not even perceived as belonging to a different ethnicity or culture!

Now, this can be true for a relative majority of transgender people. Most – but by all means not all! – prefer, for pragmatic purposes, to ‘blend in’ so well that there is no practical way (short of using an X-ray machine!) to distinguish them from cisgender people: they will adopt precisely the same behaviour, form of language, and attire as cisgender persons of the same gender they identify with.

There is ‘safety’ in stereotypes: if you don’t draw attention to yourself, it’s far more likely to ‘get accepted’. One typical example is that of Lynn Conway, a pioneering computer scientist, who did seminal work on several areas in her field. One of her masterful inventions can be traced back to her work around 1965, when she worked at IBM; by then, she still tried very hard to live as a man, under a male name, but after reading Dr. Benjamin’s book, she contacted him and went through transition (hormonal and surgical) in 1968 – when she was immediately fired by IBM. In those days there were no laws to protect transgender people from discrimination, and the idea that the popular media had of ‘people changing sex’ was closely tied to female impersonators and prostitutes, and of course IBM could not allow such a person to work for them – no matter how important her work turned out to be.

Lynn did not despair. Instead, she entered into ‘stealth mode’ – becoming absolutely immersed in her role as a woman and cutting all ties with her past, starting her career from scratch as a lowly programmer, on a different city and under a different name. She was such a talented professional, however, that she quickly skyrocketed in her career and eventually became a computer scientist working for Xerox’s Palo Alto lab, where a lot of incredible inventions that we consider today absolutely commonplace – like the mouse and a graphic interface on the computer screen, using the window metaphor; or sharing files across a common computer network; or even using tablets inside the office for taking notes, each connected to a wireless network spanning the whole office space. We take all these things for granted, but they were all developed by Xerox in the 1970s and 1980s – and inspired companies like Microsoft and Apple to develop their own software and hardware products, a decade later or so. The main reason the mainstream public does not connect most of the technical gadgets to the brand ‘Xerox’ is just because, although Xerox spent lavishly in research and innovation, they had no incentive from their board to release any product which was not a copying machine. A lot of their technology eventually appeared on their high-end copiers and printers, but not the mainstream gadgets… anyway, I digress. The point here was just to show that Lynn, hiding her past, was able to be at the forefront of technological development in computer science, and got a lot of recognition for her work – eventually being invited to become a university professor and teaching about her own achievements.

It was just in 1999, 31 years after she entered ‘stealth’ mode, that some colleagues of her accidentally traced her work back to the astonishment development made by her – under her male name! – at IBM; until then, it was thought that her accomplishments were the fruit of several teams of researchers in different areas, all working independently and coming to similar research results; it came as a surprise to learn that it had been all the work of a single person, and it was not too hard to figure out who that person was.

In 1999, of course, society was much more tolerant about transgender people, and so Lynn ‘came out’ and became one prominent activist for the transgender community.

But it’s very likely that people like Lynn never came out – this was especially true in the past, when society was even more intolerant towards those who were perceived as ‘different’. In fact, even if they are not required to do so, several adult transgender people not only transition, but actively change their whole lives, severing their ties with their former lives, and starting from scratch in a new city with a new name. They might even have been very active in the community until they finish their transition; and then, one day, they simply disappear from sight.

Now, such ‘blending in’ is not only common to post-transition transexuals. Indeed, many transgender people, especially those that still believe in a mostly binary gender (they just identify – totally or partially – with the other gender), make a serious effort to ‘fit in’, no matter if their physical appearance is ‘all wrong’. This is also true for those who are genderfluid, or, more precisely, those who are gender fluctuating or oscillating; and of course it also applies to most non-fetishist crossdressers as well.

My own wife is constantly nagging me about this point in particular: why do so many MtF transgender people present themselves as very stereotypical women? The answer was the subject of one of my essays, and the simple answer can be ‘aesthetics’ (i.e. we like to look that way), but the more complex and pragmatic one is simply ‘to better fit in’, to be better accepted, to attempt to blend in and somehow escape (or at least diminish) transphobia, by showing that we can, if we wish, present ourselves as a gender that people are familiar with, even if we have physically the wrong gender. This, more than anything, is what makes people never misgender me when I present as a woman; people might be confused about ‘what I am’ (no wonder, I’m still confused too!) but at least they see a familiar appearance and behaviour, and treat me accordingly.

There is a concept from computer games (and which was also adopted by studies in aesthetics) known as the uncanny valley. As computer games became more and more photorealistic, thanks not only to advances in software (‘borrowed’ from CGI techniques used in the movie industry) and hardware able to run that software, but also in the way computer game software houses wish to ‘show off’ their products, we have reached a point where we can almost synthetically replicate the way humans look and behave in a computer game; our brain is tricked to believe that these are ‘real’ humans in a ‘real’ environment.

But… we’re not completely tricked. There are still some minor imperfections (and these have become less and les noticeable over the years) which show that a scene or setting in a computer game is synthetically generated, and not an actual movie with real humans in a real scenario. While we can do that with CGI in movies, home computers and consoles, as I write this in 2017, are still not fast enough and powerful enough to accomplish perfect photo realism in real time. We come ‘close enough’, and this is what the the discoverers of the ‘uncanny valley’ effect have shown: as games approach closer and closer the point where the brain cannot distinguish any longer between a real and a synthetic image, the tiny little details stand out much more – it is as if the brain is trying to ‘believe’ that the image is real but fails at the last moment to classify it as ‘real’ because of a tiny imperfection.

This is what happens to people who see me for the first time, or from afar: they notice that I look somehow like a woman, since I have sort of the ‘right’ proportions for one. But when I come closer or they give me a second look, they figure out that something is wrong with me, but they might not figure out exactly what it is – the brain is saying that something is wrong, but the conscious mind is confused and does not really know what is wrong, there is just a feeling of wrongness which is somehow off-putting. This feeling is what we call the ‘uncanny valley effect’.

For computer game developers, ‘hitting’ the uncanny valley is not a good thing: research shows that players do not identify well with game characters which fall into the uncanny valley – that nagging feeling becomes overwhelming after a while, and people may stop playing the game and not really know why. The solution for the software industry is either taking the next step, going further into photorealism, literally bridging over the uncanny valley and totally fooling the mind (which is what the CGI industry can already do for movies, but the game software developers still cannot). The other alternative is actually less intuitive: make the characters less realistic. Strangely enough, when the characters are not realistic enough, we tend to identify better with them. Of course we all know about that in the animation movie industry: characters there are merely caricatures, but we still react to them (think about our feelings towards each of the characters in The Simpsons – how do they differ from the feelings towards characters in a soap opera?). In the game industry, this lead designers wishing to push for more photorealism to tweak the characters somehow so that they are ‘unrealistic’ enough to avoid triggering the uncanny valley effect: that’s why anime characters or comic characters from the Marvel or DC universes are popular – their canon proportions are not the same as of a human being, and we humans notice that immediately, even if just at a subconscious level.

Now, for transgender people, the rules are slightly different. Ideally, we wish either to ‘cross the bridge’ and present ourselves exactly as an average person of the gender we identify with; or, as an alternative, we are simply ourselves, even if that means looking very bizarre and not ‘fitting in’. The latter scenario might be easier to accomplish (no surgery needed!) but it also places a pointing arrow over our head, immediately labelling us as ‘outside the established norm’.  Of course, for many transgender people, this is exactly what they want, so they’re fine with that option.

For those who aren’t, crossing the uncanny valley is (or may be) the only option. Note that this does not only apply to those people who use the ‘transgender’ label as it is understood today. Some female impersonators, for instance, delight in fooling the whole audience about their gender; others deliberately do such exaggerated makeup that their true gender is not even being concealed. With occasional crossdressers, many join groups which impose enough rules – basically how to behave as a woman in public, and what to dress according to the occasion and one’s age – and either you follow the rules or you’re out – the point being that such people, when in public spaces, might not look like women, but they behave according to the ‘average’ stereotype of how a natal woman would also behave in public. Sometimes the ‘illusion’ can even come as far as to trigger the uncanny valley effect: this is especially true in mixed groups (which are more common than people think!), with both natal women and MtF crossdressers who have relatively androgynous bodies. An unknowing observer might not even be able to figure out who is male or who is female – I have once been out with a group of friends during Halloween, and we had all sorts: two genderfluid persons, one of which of the oscillating kind and currently presenting as a woman; a MtF transgender friend currently in transition to live her life full-time as a woman; myself; and a natal woman. Being Halloween, everybody except me was dressed for the occasion, meaning that the clothes reflected the character each of them was playing: witch, zombie, demon… Well, when we were sitting down having a drink, the attendant was confused enough and decided to treat us all as males – including the natal woman, who, dressed as a sexy demon, was flaunting her natural breasts with cleavage that had to be real… but nevertheless she was addressed as a man, too, which is still a laughing matter between us (our friend has a great sense of humour, so she didn’t even bother to correct that attendant).

So, labels matter if you want to be treated as the gender you present. In other words: if your goal is ‘fitting in’, then there is a set of rules to follow; if your goal is simply ‘be whoever I am’, then all rules are off, and you can pretty much adopt whatever label you think that fits best to you.

Living with your ‘label’

If you ever bother to read posts or essays from hard-core feminists, or even from those abominable TERFs (who hate transgender people and are even more transphobic than the general population!), you will have noticed that recent discussions have been around ‘what is a woman’ and ‘who defines what a woman should be’. Of course, these hard-core feminists believe that only they can define what a woman is or isn’t; with some hilarious conclusions as to figuring out if a woman without an uterus (because it failed to develop for some reason) is still a woman or not. Because such arguments about biology are so fraught to fail – for example, the notion that women have XX sex chromosomes and men XY, a discovery made in 1905 and only started to be accepted in the 1920s, only to be totally debunked in 1959, a few years after the structure of DNA was discovered, and soon scientists gathered enough evidence that humans could have a much richer variety of combined sex chromosomes, or even have different cells with different pairing of the sex chromosomes – and nevertheless be legally called ‘male’ or ‘female’ depending on a lot of external factors, such as genitalia (eventually after some ‘corrective’ surgery was applied to ‘fix’ intersex individuals, for example, a practice still  common in many countries) and, of course, gender identity. Nevertheless, chromosomes defining sex is still taught at school, contributing to outdated arguments based on the science of a century ago…

Feminists are not so easily caught in a trap, so they prefer to define ‘womanness’ as an experience – one that only a woman who was raised as female from birth can have. Everything else, no matter if the person had any choice in the subject or not, is not a woman.

Society, however, is not so harsh, as the example of Lynn Conway shows so well: if you can ‘pass’ totally as a person of the gender you identify with, then nobody will ask about your past. It’s not as if only feminist camps are allowed to rubber-stamp every legal document after certifying that a person is a woman according to their definition.

I’ve often mentioned that in my country there is no legal recognition of ‘trans men’ or ‘trans women’; in fact, such designations are considered transphobic! The law only recognises men or women; you’re only ‘transgender’ during the period starting with your diagnosis and ending when the transition is complete (which does not need to include hormonal treatments or surgery!); afterwards, no matter how you look or behave, you’re legally a person of the opposite gender of the one assigned at birth. You can think yourself as being ‘trans something’, but from a legal perspective, you’re not ‘trans’ any more. This means, for instance, that your employer cannot make notes about your former gender, or even make a note that you identify as ‘transgender’, even if that’s a ‘label’ you wish to tag to yourself.

Why this strict rule? The legislator was made aware that most transgender people, after transition, do not want to cling to their pasts, but move ahead in their new role and identity. Thus, ‘transgender rights’ are only applicable if you ‘fit in’ the common conception of ‘transexual’ (as doctors define it). And the idea here is to try to give to those who ‘fit’ in that label – and later will ‘fit’ in their new gender role – the maximum protection under the law.

Most LGBT organisations are fine with this, simply because this group is seen as the only one requiring protection under the law, and special rights to get access to highly specialised health care.

But what about all other types of ‘transgender’ people?

Well, the way I see things changing is that all these other types are being pushed out of transgenderity. Instead, they get under the common label of ‘queer’, or, more technically-sounding, non-conforming gender role/presentation.

Originally, that classification was assigned only to those who refused the notion that gender is binary, and who identified with none of the genders, both, or with genders that are not part of the binary (such as it exists in some Eastern societies). These people consisted a problem, from the strictly medical point of view: while they did not want to ‘transition’, in the classic definition of the term, many seeked surgery or hormonal treatments to subtly change their bodies to conform better to their identity and make their presentation more easy. Doctors had lots of qualms about this, since they have this Hippocratic Oath which disallows them to perform surgery to destroy or remove an absolutely functional organ (in this case, the genitalia), with the end result being something which cosmetically might look like familiar genitalia, but functionally they would be something ‘different’.

Note that there is no question for doctors to discriminate between functional and non-functional genitalia. Many women, for instance, may have been born with some kind of issue that prevented full development of their vulva, and in such cases, doctors also create a neovagina with whatever tissue they can get access to, in a way which is similar (but not the same!) as the sex reassignment surgery done on MtF transexuals; and, conversely, there is an astonishing number of elderly gentlemen who, frustrated with their sex life and the lack of an erection that can give pleasure to themselves and their partners, resort to a complex arrangement of pumps and plumbing which can restore the male organ to its former glory – using a set of procedures also not very different from what can be offered to FtM transexuals today.

So it’s not a question of technology; it’s a question of ethics. Suppose you have been assigned female at birth, but do not identify neither as female nor male, but a mix of both – you wish to change your female genitalia to male ones (even if at today’s abilities, it requires several surgeries and probably the same kind of pumps and plumbing used in elderly males). What should a doctor do? Especially, of course, if that person’s female genitalia are perfectly normal and under natural circumstances she could easily bear children. Is it ‘morally right’ to make a ‘strange’ surgery, just to please that person, and create more ambiguity in her gender, thus rendering her life even more difficult than it already is?

But the point here, from a social rights perspective, is that a non-gender conforming person is entitled to the same kind of treatment that a ‘transgender’ person has. Nevertheless, in most countries, this is not the case: such requests are often denied.

So, as you can see, the reason why so many formerly transgender people are ‘pushed out’ of the ‘transgender’ label and into the ‘non-gender conforming’ one is because of discrimination: transgender people, especially those that accept a binary gender, are much more likely to have an easier life after transition, since they will simply ‘blend in’ with people of the same gender they identify with; whereas non-gender conforming people, after doing whatever surgery they need, will very likely be even less accepted socially.

But that’s their choice, right? Not the choice of the gatekeepers?

Well… it’s really complicated. I wish it were simpler, but it isn’t…

You see, the trouble here is that there are conflicts of interests here. And I’m not talking about political things. But rather about the role doctors play in our society, and how that messes up with our freedoms, namely, the freedom of choice. These are ethical conflicts – which one shall prevail?

Suppose that you have a job as a bank manager in a very conservative city. One day you wake up and suddenly think it would be a wonderful  idea to depilaste yourself completely – including shaving all your hair – and do a whole-body tattoo. In fact, the more you think about it, the more you’re convinced that this is truly an awesome idea, and you go out of your home, ready to go to the nearest tattoo artist and get the job done.

But as you walk down the street, you realise that perhaps there might be some downsides to the idea. In fact, you have read that some people can be allergic to tattoo ink – it’s rare, but it’s a possibility. And clearly you cannot scratch yourself all over the body if you develop an allergy. Somehow, it’s best to ask the advice of a professional – and so you decide to go to your good friend the dermatologist to ask him to make some skin tests.

Now, this dermatologist is not only a professional, but he has known you for a long time, and your relationship goes a little beyond the doctor/patient scenario; let’s assume that you had developed some nasty sunburns in the past, and, fearing cancer or something, your dermatologist has given you good advice (and a special cream!) which solved your problems. So you trust his advice, and, in turn, he is fond of you and goes beyond his duty to help you out.

When you explain what you have in mind, your friend frowns upon the idea. You see, he can really make a simple test – and, as it turns out, you’re not allergic to tattoo ink at all – but there is a problem. He knows that you both live in a conservative city, and the moment you walk in the bank with your full-body tattoo, it’s almost certain that you’ll be immediately fired. In fact, except perhaps for the tattoo lounge, your friend cannot imagine any other place where they would hire you.

So he has a dilemma. He can say that you’re not allergic to tattoo ink, and thus keep his oaths to tell patients the truth (especially good, old friends!), but, by doing so, he knows that you’ll lose your job, your security, and possibly your home, cars, etc. as the mortgage and credit card payments start to roll in and you won’t have a high-paying job to deal with all those bills. But he can also say that you are, in fact, allergic (when you’re not), and, that way, ensure that you don’t do anything foolish or dramatic which would ruin your life. As a friend, he would rather sleep much better that way; but as a doctor, he should not lie to his patients, especially one you’re fond of; worse than that, you might get disappointed with him after the allergy exams, ask for a second opinion from a fellow dermatologist who has no relationship with you, and two things will happen next: you will lose your trust in your dermatologist friend (because now you know he lied to you, even if you don’t know that it was in your best interest to do so!), and you’ll go ahead with the tattoos anyway, since you can get a third, fourth, fifth opinion, all of which will show that you’re not allergic to ink.

What should your friend do? Such ethical dilemmas are complicated to solve. Your friend is both a friend and a doctor; and you have the freedom to ruin your life if that’s your wish. He, as a doctor, has no legal power to prevent you from making a fool of yourself. He doesn’t even have a medical reason to do so. But as a friend he ought to prevent you from harming yourself. You see, doctors have this terrible Hippocratic oath, under which they not only should be honest and straightforward with their patients, but they shall also never harm them deliberately or consciously. And this is something that your friend has a problem with: there is no medical reason for the tattooing to harm you in any way, but there are strong social reasons for getting harmed due to prejudice against tattooed people – especially in a conservative bank in a conservative city.

Now, this is just a hypothetical scenario, and if I were the doctor, I would obviously start a conversation asking you if you really have thought about what you are going to do – and possibly offer to buy you a few drinks and, outside the office and as a friend, try to persuade you not to do something so foolish, and explain about the probable consequences. If you still wish to go ahead and tattoo yourself (and ruin your life after being unable to get a job any more), then, as a friend, I did the best I could. Ultimately the responsibility is yours; but at least I tried to persuade you with reason and logic to abandon your crazy idea – even if you’re fully entitled to do whatever you please, tattoos are not illegal – and if I failed, well… the responsibility is just yours. But there is some responsibility that the doctor also has to tell you when you’re going to harm yourself; the doctor cannot prevent you from doing so, he can only tell you that you’re going to be harmed.

The problem here is that the harm happens outside the medical context, and, being a form of social harm, a doctor has no legal right to interfere. Perhaps the doctors is not even allowed to do so – it’s not been so long ago, after all, when drunk people who harmed themselves in catastrophic ways didn’t get treatment at hospitals just because doctors knew very well that it would be a waste of time and resources – once that drunkard is out of the door, he’ll get drunk again, and return in a worse state. So is it still legitimate to attempt to treat him?

Of course we know the answer is ‘yes’. Doctors – especially at hospitals – spend quite a lot of time patching up people who are in downward spirals of self-harm from which they will never emerge; nevertheless, their duty as doctors is to try to cure them as best as possible, no matter what happens next. That is not the doctor’s concern. Sure, you can give those persons some advice, or even schedule an appointment with a therapist, or whatever is appropriate for that particular case… but that’s the limit of a doctor’s power to prevent someone from getting any treatment. Ultimately, the right to self-harm is also a freedom everybody enjoys.

Now, this is just an analogy to show you the potential issues that transgender people face – and the dilemmas that their doctors go through. If someone is not ‘transgender enough’, should they be allowed to transition – and ruining their lives in the process? On the other hand, will it be better for those people who are not ‘transgender enough’ to be condemned to a life of gender dysphoria, and eventual suicide – or allow them to at least try to get along with their lives, in the gender role they have chosen? What about those who do not have a gender role that ‘fits’ into mainstream, heteronormative, cisgender society? They will be discriminated no matter what – so perhaps allowing them access to surgery and hormones and a change of legal documentation cannot make matters worse than they are? Also, we’re talking about adults making informed choices. Why would a doctor ‘know’ what is best for someone who might not only suffer from gender dysphoria but also from discrimination?

Last but not least, who defines who is ‘transgender enough’? While transgenderity is certainly a spectrum, and gender dysphoria has several levels of intensity, the truth is that you either identify with the gender you have been assigned at birth, and do it all the time (and are therefore cisgender), or you’re not, and by definition you’re somewhere on the transgender spectrum. There are no people who are ‘more’ or ‘less’ transgender than others; you either are, or you aren’t. And while some cisgender people may question their gender identity once in a while, the difference is that transgender people question it all the time, or at least for very extended periods and recurringly.

There is no ‘authority’ who measures the ‘level of transgenderity’ although the tables from Dr. Benjamin did exactly that, and for precisely the reason I’ve pointed out: doctors wanted to make sure their patients had a great life after transition, and that meant having the required conditions for that – having a great body for the gender they identify with, being single and without kids, etc. While all these ‘requirements’ are seen today as a means of controlling appearance and behaviour by the doctors, we ought at least to make an effort to put ourselves in their shoes: some of these doctors were not horrible emotional manipulators, ready to decide over every aspect of one’s lives, but I can imagine that some were well-intended (even if for the wrong reasons, namely, non-medical ones) and really wanted their patients to live their lives as free from discrimination and ostracism as possible.

A recent video explainer from popular e-zine Vox tried to explain why White Suprematists can create a message that is not immediately rejected by a minimally intelligent person – not all White Supremacists are absolute morons (at least not in terms of IQ!), so how can they assimilate or even believe in the kind of nonsense spawned by their ideological leaders? One thing that makes that possible is the association between being different and being dangerous. This is, I think (and the Vox journalists certainly agree), the essence of the appeal of the White Supremacist message. And as I’ve said before, it’s something that is deeply buried in our genetic makeup and in our brains: fear those who are different from your tribe, because they are from another tribe, and therefore enemies. Difference becomes danger – and our brains are pre-wired to do so very easily. Once I realised that, it suddenly dawned on me why so many people who I consider reasonably intelligent – even having some ability for constructive criticism and analysing ideas on their own – are able to subscribe to the fear-inspiring techniques used by racists all over the world.

Obviously the message of fear who is different is not an exclusive of White Suprematists – it can be used, to the same effect, by any other group, irrespective of skin colour or ethnicity. After all, it’s the same argument made by radical Islamists as well. And the trouble is that we don’t even need to look at the extreme version of that motto – kill all those who are different, because they are dangerous – and which is more familiar to White Suprematists and radical Islamists and all sorts of psychos around the world; no, even the watered-down version used by conservatives – be wary of those who are different; stay away from them or the slightly stronger variant those who are different are dangerous so we should keep them away from us – are seen as a ‘moderate’ form of xenophobia which is almost politically correct among conservatives. In other words: we can accept those who come outside our community so long as they behave as members of our community, i.e. if they effectively discard their ‘difference’ and blend in. For me, as an European living in a country where it’s strictly forbidden to take down a person’s skin colour or perceived ethnicity, it is inconceivable to understand how in the US many African-Americans did not empathise with President Barack Obama because he was not seen as a ‘black person’, but rather as a ‘white person who happened to have dark skin’ – this is because President Obama blended so well in the white-dominated culture and society of the US that it was felt that he wasn’t really a ‘black person’. I found that absolutely ridiculous; but then again, I also found it ridiculous when some Americans commented that our country was so tolerant that we had a ‘black’ mayor of Lisbon (who then went on to become a ‘black’ Prime Minister) and I was ‘huh? But António Costa is not black‘. Well, technically, he’s ethnically Indian, from a region in India who belonged to the Portuguese for half a millennium, and still boasts of having some of the oldest Portuguese families around; but, really, after five centuries, they are even more culturally Portuguese than the mainland Portuguese. Oh, sure, he has a tanned skin, but so have millions of Portuguese after the summer vacation is over, the fact that his tan is permanent is more a question of envy than of racism. In other words: because Costa (and all his fellow Portuguese-born, ethnically-Indian citizens) has blended in so perfectly within our society – and his family has done that for centuries – it’s hard for anyone around here to think of him as being different. It’s not the skin colour that makes such a difference – it’s the cultural background and how it affects behaviour and speech. In other words: people like Costa ‘pass’ so well as mainstream Portuguese that most of us never even notice that his skin is permanently tanned in a lovely golden-brown colour that most of us would spend thousands of Euros in solariums to achieve.

At a company I work with, by sheer coincidence, one of the co-founders is actually close to Costa (yes, it’s really just a coincidence). It took me a whole decade to realise that he was Indian. The fact that he has blue eyes and a wonderful natural tan certainly doesn’t make him stand out in a crowd; as Bollywood fans know, the best-looking actors and actresses in India have soft-tanned skins and clear eyes, blue or green or sometimes even more exotic colours. They look much more European than Indian… and that’s absolutely no coincidence. We can’t say those things in this politically-correct world, but Europeans and Indians spring from the same root (even our languages have a common root, namely, Indo-European)… and our direct ancestors were called… Aryan.

Obviously, we don’t say these things out loud these days – we would just be feeding racism, xenophobia, and, worse than that, giving White Suprematists even some more fuel to add to their fire. My point here is just to show actually how ‘alien’ and artificial that notion of ‘difference’ is. My point here is that, while the extreme version of ‘different is dangerous’ calls for killing those who are different, at a much more moderate level, and one that is still politically acceptable in many circles, simply staying away from those who are different – or keeping those who are different away from us – is rather common.

Doctors in the 1960s and 1970s were quite aware of that, and this is one of the reasons why they picked out those transexuals who were as little different as possible from ‘ordinary people’ to allow them to transition, while ‘keeping away’ everybody else. That was also one of the major reasons for the great success among people who went through transition: because they ‘blended in’ so perfectly, and didn’t look ‘different’ at all, they were accepted as full members of the community, so long as their ’embarrassing past’ was never revealed.

While we can easily imagine that to be the case in less tolerant societies of earlier times, it’s also true for today’s more open-minded (Western) societies, which, almost without exception, consider difference – or the right to individuality – as an unalienable right of every citizen. Our societies, at least on paper, embrace diversity, by looking at was is common among us – we are all human beings – and impose, from above, the notion that ‘difference is natural’ (as opposed to being dangerous). Obviously this clashes with the ‘difference is dangerous’ meme imprinted in our minds. In other words, we must be educated to accept that it’s fine to be different; while, left alone, most people will fear difference, since it’s part of our evolutionary baggage.

Now, this is not an apology for White Suprematism!! Rather, it’s a warning about their techniques, and a further warning that many people despise White Suprematists and similar extreme groups, but nevertheless repeat their motto, ‘different is dangerous’, which even in a watered-down version continues to be a source of racism, xenophobia, and, of course, homo and transphobia. We ought to be alert to such signs and understand where their argument is coming from to simply say that we humans are much more than a bunch of genes conditioned by evolution: we are intelligent creatures, able to devise moral systems that are above and beyond our biological limitations: this is a counter-argument for both religious and non-religious people, at least for Christian faiths, which, in general, consider their own morality, allegedly inspired by God, to be much above basic human instincts; part of the Christian teachings directly imply that all humans are equal at the eyes of God, and that Christ’s message is universal, i.e. it applies to all humans, not just a few ‘elected’ ones (even though some Christian sects have a different message, this is a departure of what is recorded in the Bible as being the words of the Christ; similarly, some of the extreme Islamic views are also arbitrary interpretations of the Koran… but I digress!). Non-religious people, of course, are fiercely convinced that by reason and intellect alone, we ought to be driven to an ethical stance that maximises the benefit the whole of society, and this means that every human being participates in society (has duties) as well as being a recipient of those benefits (has rights) – something which can only be achieved if all are held equal under the Law (or else, some would have more benefits or rights than others, while some would have more duties than others, which means that not the entire society benefits, but just a few – thus, all must be held equal under the same set of laws).

The ‘right to individuality’ is by no means an obvious, much less a trivial matter. It is a sign of the current times, but it’s anchored in the Western view that each of us has the free will to become whatever we want – something that has been philosophically true for centuries, even if it only became enshrined both legally and socially in the West countries relatively recently. The Baby Boomers, for instance, were born in an age that inspired conformity to very specific roles in society (a return to a mythical Golden Age of the past) – against which people quickly started to rebel, and which culminated in the many civil rights rallies during the 1960s and the 1970s. In fact, the recent history of the Western civilization can often be seen in the way individualism confronts conformism; in the tension that exists between the return to a mythical Golden Age in the past (conservatism) and the drive to further progress towards a better society in the future (progression/social liberalism). Those forces have always been present, at least for several decades (even if not formally expressed as such), if not a couple of centuries – and they pretty much explain the dynamics of the Western civilization.

Those forces are antagonistic, but both drive our civilisation ahead. Ironically, the best example how both forces can be applied at the same time is seen among teenagers, at least from the X Generation onwards: they want both to belong to a group (which establishes the rules of behaviour, interaction, dress code, etc.) and be free to express their individuality, especially against their own parents (who always represent conservatism). Nothing can seem so ambiguous and paradoxal as the desire (even right!) to express one’s individuality by dressing and behaving as everybody else

So, to summarise: the ultimate right to decide about your identity relies upon yourself; no one else has the right – or even the ability – to determine that identity, and this is deeply rooted in the Western way of thinking. There is, however, an exception, and it’s grounded on this objection that so much harm can be done.

You see, another fundamental tenet of Western civilisation is the notion that you are responsible for your actions and behaviour – that’s the basis of our judicial systems. We could not have a legal system if it were otherwise. But even in the strictness of that conceptual model there is room for exceptions: for instance, if you are mentally ill in some form, society considers you to be unable to be responsible for your own acts. If you commit murder while ‘being insane’, you’ll escape the most severe and extreme penalties under the law, and will get assigned to a mental institution instead, where hopefully you can be treated until you fell well again – ‘feel yourself’ again.

Being mentally ill, therefore, is an ‘acceptable’ excuse for relieving one’s responsability. Because we have created social stigmas against mentally ill people, we’re conditioned to avoid, as much as possible, to ‘become crazy’ – this is how society makes sure that people do not plead insanity willy-nilly, just to avoid jail; and we have professionals who are trained to figure out who is insane and who isn’t. They will be brought in at a trial as expert witnesses to testify if someone is insane or not.

But this is also true outside the criminal courts. For instance, I get a grant to finish my PhD in a certain amount of years (or else, I will have to return all the money!). Having developed a clinical depression which prevents me to work, an exception was opened in my case: because I’m ‘mentally ill’, I’m temporarily relieved from my obligation of finishing my work in a specific amount of time; instead, I’m allowed to treat myself first, get cured, and then I can return to my work.

In other words: doctors, when evaluating a person’s mental stability, are allowed to override the normal rules of society, in the person’s best interests, since their mental condition may be clouding their judgement and therefore such a person would not be acting responsibly.

We find all the above quite obvious and logical, since we also know that such a system protects those who are really ill, and who will be a minority in any case; in other words, doctors will hardly have anything to say in most scenarios. It’s just when we are unable to perform our duties that the doctor’s orders can override our own ‘right to individuality’, expressed in the way we act and behave.

You can now understand the role of doctors as gatekeepers for transgender people: because most transgender people do not suffer only from gender dysphoria, but likely from other mental conditions as well – anxiety, depression, etc. – doctors can question that one’s behaviour and even identity might be clouded by one’s mental conditions; and that’s why they follow the WPATH guidelines and treat their transgender patients first for all other conditions they might have. Once all these are treated, if symptoms of gender dysphoria persist, then the doctor will give that person the green light to go ahead with their transition. If not… well, that person will be very happy to know that they weren’t really transgender and do not need transition, which would have been a nightmare to endure for someone who does not truly suffer from gender dysphoria!

Even the argument that a truly transgender person will be absolutely sure about their gender identity in spite of whatever other conditions they might have is not true: to give an extreme example, schizophrenic people will really hear voices. Such voices are real for them, and as clearly heard as if someone is physically near them and uttering those words. But of course we know that such voices are illusory; nevertheless, from the perspective of the schizophrenic person, they are unable to separate real from imaginary voices. Both sound and feel exactly the same way. It’s only thanks to the therapy work with a specialist (and some medication) that they might learn to distinguish what is real from what isn’t.

One might argue that one thing are voices, or other illusions of the senses, but identity is so deep in our core self that it will not be affected. And yet, we know of so many documented cases where people truly believe to be Superman and try to fly out of their window – with dramatic (and often deadly) consequences. Even in the case of survival, a person with an altered state of mind will create a plausible explanation for what happened which will be consistent with their identity: maybe someone had put a source of kryptonite nearby, thus preventing Superman’s powers. Maybe even those alleged doctors who try to treat Superman so kindly have their pockets full of kryptonite, to weaken him – how can you know what is reality?

I have met people in such states of mind, and they are really weird, because they might be highly intelligent and have a vast culture and knowledge; nevertheless, they will experience their environment in an illusory way, and it’s confusing for an external observer to recognise how such a person is unable to find the flaws in their logic, to notice that they are constantly coming up with the weirdest theories just to explain the divergence between reality and what they believe to be real. It’s a bit uncanny, because you can clearly see that they believe in their perceptions of reality with the same eagerness and degree of conviction as you believe in your own perceptions; it’s just because you’re outside that perceived reality that you can see how illogical it is; but the person trapped inside it has no such insight, and no reason to have it, since they totally accept their perception of reality – even when it has nothing to do with ours.

Now, I’m not saying that transgender people are schizophrenic!! We have to be very careful with correlations and extrapolations; only a tiny, insignificant amount of people who have a gender identity different from the one assigned at birth have a wrong perception of reality (and themselves!), and it’s really important never to forget that!

Nevertheless, because that number of people is not zero, we have allowed doctors to act as gatekeepers – and allow others, not ourselves, to define ‘what we are’, using methods that we didn’t have a saying in.

It matters little for a transgender person if who defines ‘transgenderity’ is a doctor, a philosopher, an activist, a lawmaker, or a White Suprematist. The transgender person knows what it means to be transgender: there is no need for an external validation of what a transgender person knows to be true.

The problem is that we cannot see inside people’s minds: all we can see is how they present themselves. And here comes the big problem: a gender presentation which is visibly inappropriate for what others perceive the gender to be falls into the realm of ‘different’. And different, as said, is dangerous. In other words: if we had mind-to-mind direct communication (don’t laugh, some scientists have achieved a very crude way of thought transmission – at a very basic level. But once the feasibility of a theory is shown, it can be improved upon, in what are more engineering problems than scientific ones), then we would not question a transgender person’s ‘true’ identity, because we could experience it ourselves. In other words, a MtF transgender person – a trans woman – would communicate telepathically in a way that she would be perceived as ‘fully woman’, and nobody would feel any ‘strangeness’ or ‘differentness’ in such a mind.

But because we don’t have telepathic powers (or telepathy devices), we have to experience how others present themselves to infer their identity. And since the brain is such a powerful pattern-matching device, we are very good at recognising faces, and uncannily experienced in distinguishing the tiniest detail in a face or a body that ‘feels wrong’.

Of course this does not apply only to transgender people! It is a common human trait, the ability to figure out who ‘belongs’ to the group, and who doesn’t. That’s why police agents infiltrated in a criminal group are always at the risk of ‘discovery’ – not necessarily because they will be recognised as police, but because they fail to present themselves as criminals. Naturally enough, such agents are trained to delude even the most knowledgeable of criminals; it’s a job that is not for everybody (not even for most agents) because it requires the ability to totally ‘pass’ as a member of a certain and very specific group. And this involves a lot of tiny details, from overall presentation to ways of speaking, even to ways of thinking, because even thinking ‘wrongly’ might subtly influence one’s behaviour and therefore lead to discovery.

Now, being transgender and interacting with fellow human beings falls into the same kind of pattern-matching our brains are so good at. You can be a trans woman and look perfect as a cisgender woman – but the slightest indication of something that feels ‘wrong’ (imagine something so simple as the way the wrist moves – because men and women do it ever so slightly differently), and the illusion is shattered.

This doesn’t mean that the only goal for transgender people is to ‘pass’. The story about passing has been evolving over the years: at the time of Dr. Benjamin, it was ridiculous to even consider to give hormone therapy and access to surgery to someone who didn’t pass 100% of the time (and most would already live as a person of the gender they identify with well before talking to Dr. Benjamin and his followers to get access to hormones and/or surgery). Time passed, yes, but the criteria for successfully going through transition certainly included being able to ‘pass’ – and the reason for that was simply to avoid being experienced as ‘different’ in any way. The more one could blend in, the more likely it would be to get a successful transition and a happy life thereafter.

Such a feeling was extended, in the 1980s, to MtF crossdressers as well, among those who did not identify as women but who routinely or regularly presented themselves as female in public. And for reasons of safety – among others – it was expected that such persons would blend in and ‘pass’ as best as possible; those who deliberately failed to ‘pass’ were scorned and laughed at. They were not seen as ‘taking it seriously’.

It is just in the past two decades or so that a different mentality came to predominate: the notion that ‘passing’ is just another constraint, artificially placed by gatekeeping doctors, to exclude trans people from transition (and treatment!) just on the basis of how they looked like. This is, from a civil rights perspective, a form of discrimination. Just because someone identifies as a trans woman doesn’t mean that they have to be candidates to catwalking on Fashion Week New York. People come in all shapes and sizes, and trans people are not different. And there are those who do not identify with either gender, or with both simultaneously, and their outwards presentation match their non-conforming gender identity. Are they going to be excluded simply because they do not look like ‘common people’?

On a blog of corsetry where I’m learning a few things (in order to understand the topic well enough to know what to get in the future), there were discussions and arguments brought by trans people who took offence to the way the author of the article said something like ‘[…] corsets made for those with male body proportions and wish to have female body proportions’. This awkward way of putting things was to avoid talking about ‘[…] those with male bodies wishing to look more feminine’, because some trans people said that they were women and their body was a woman’s body, even if it did not look like the body of an average woman. In other words: trans women have obviously a ‘female penis’, there is nothing ‘male’ about their bodies since they identify with a female gender identity, so everything in their body is, by definition, logically ‘female’. Trans women, after all, are not to blame that their body doesn’t look like the average female body, but, then again, so many women’s bodies fall beneath the average, so why should trans women be seen as ‘different’?

That point is well made, from the perspective of activism: today, it’s more than fine to be female and have a penis and male body proportions; one thing is identity (being female), the other is presentation (looking male). Those are connected, correlated, sure, but they’re not identical. A good, solid case can be made that a woman is a woman, no matter what she looks like, and it has nothing to do with the body one has. Not even with the kind of personality or behaviour they have!

This is common knowledge among all trans people: after all, trans people should be at the forefront of any civil rights battle to end discrimination against diversity. They also campaign for the abolition of stereotypical gender roles. It’s rather a cliché to see how earlier generations of trans women, for instance, would get married and all they wished was to lead the life of a submissive wife and companion, secluded at the home, eventually taking care of adopted children and her husband only – the image of the ‘perfect’ woman in the 1950s! Lynn Conway, transitioning in the late 1960s, refused the stereotype and proceeded in her chosen career as a computer expert – first in software (back then, men worked on hardware, all programmers were women), but later eventually returning to hardware and re-establishing her name in the computer industry. And, indeed, quite a lot of trans women I personally know have kept their jobs in industries more typically male than female; they kept their love for big cars or trucks, or guns, or typically male hobbies and tastes in sports, beer, and similar ‘male stereotypes’. They are not ‘lesser women’ because of that!

So the problem at this stage is partly medical (an issue that requires the intervention of doctors), partly politics (namely, identity politics). While doctors, and the mainstream at large, are relatively at ease with a very feminine-looking boy wanting to live their live as a woman, and having that desire since birth which can be validated by family and friends, and that, in turn, easily leads to a straightforward transition, accepted by all (well, by most), and one that very likely concludes with the trans woman being impossible to distinguish from a natal woman (except through an ecography…), everything else in the transgender spectrum is not that easy. Specifically, the risk of a failed transition is much higher. That, in turn, means that doctors willing to accept that transition to take a much higher risk as well. Such a person will be literally walking around with a huge arrow pointed at their heads saying ‘hey, I’m trans, and proud of it!’. They will have to have an iron will and determination to deal with constant transphobia – something which might not be that frequent among transgender people who come to the doctors in despair, crushed with their gender dysphoria and all other sorts of possible mental issues. It is therefore hard for a doctor to believe that this person sitting in front of them, a total wreck which is merely a shadow of a human being, may, after transition, suddenly become a person full of confidence and assurance, able to deal with the constant ‘pointing out’ that they are different and do not ‘fit’ in society. In other words: why should a person crushed by gender dysphoria not be crushed by constant transphobia as well? What makes gender dysphoria so different, that it cannot be tolerated, while transphobia is seen as being ‘comparatively easy’ to handle?

Well. I have no answer for that, mostly because I have never bothered to ask enough people what they thought about the issue – not even doctors. In general, transgender people talking about the issue just say that ‘during hormonal therapy all symptoms of depression disappeared’, something which a few of the doctors I consulted also agree with. The process of transition is, by itself, therapeutical. Both doctors and patients alike tend to agree, therefore, that coping with gender dysphoria is far, far worse than coping with transphobia on a daily base – especially because they can help with ‘coping wither transphobia’ (while gender dysphoria is another story!). I will need to take their word on that. I was asked once if I would be willing to change the current drug cocktail I take to deal with depression/anxiety for hormonal treatment, and of course I easily agreed with having HRT! Maybe I was too eager… in any case, the depression came under control (sort of) so doctors reasoned that gender dysphoria was not necessarily the most important influence on the depression. Oh well. My point here is that nobody wants to be depressed, and anything that fixes it and makes it go away, will be gladly accepted. There is a strong placebo effect attached to hormonal treatments (and this applies to both transgender people as well as, say, women in menopause, or afflicted with hormonal issues and their consequences). Then again, seeing one’s body become more and more aligned with one’s gender is certainly a huge boost in one’s mood – and, again, this also applies to cisgender women (at least, I know about some cases in my circle of friends and familiars where this was the case).

To resume and conclude: there are a lot of issues surrounding ‘labeling’ transgender people, and they have consequences. Some parts of the transgender spectrum are currently protected and defended by law, and they get all the treatments they need, and the full force of the law to deal with discriminatory actions (as well as medical help to cope with transphobia and discrimination – which is free in most welfare states, or at least very affordable). Other parts of the transgender spectrum are completely outside any jurisdiction – they simply aren’t seen as ‘transgender’ at all. This confusion comes from the appropriation of the word ‘transgender’ by the transexual community, mostly because there was a very rigorous step-by-step plan to ‘deal’ with transexuality – including things like sterilisation, having the ‘correct’ sexuality (heterosexuality after transitioning),  and a certain amount of mandatory surgeries. Many transgender people who genuinely suffer from extreme cases of gender dysphoria may disagree with such a ‘boilerplate’ solution – and therefore do not identify with what used to be called ‘transexuality’. So we got a new class of people, all of them suffering from gender dysphoria, not all of which, however, are subject to the same treatment to deal with their dysphoria. All get protection under the law, all get access to treatments, all get access to administrative changes regarding their documentation.

This still leaves a lot of people out. What about them? More to the point: they are the majority. And they get simply pushed out of the discussion; many are being ‘labeled’ as something other than transgender – for instance, gender non-conforming, a designation that may have clinical and sociological meaning, but not real legal meaning. But there are many more labels. The LGBTQI+ ‘meta-community’ does not always accepts those labels as being part of their community at all; definitely there are no activists behind them, either. And I’m not even talking about those who are self-labelled fetishists and enjoy themselves a lot (and most certainly have very clear ideas of their gender and sexuality and no doubts about either, even if their presentation may ultimately have sexual purposes only). I’m rather talking about all those who are not fetishists in the strict sense of the term, but are excluded from being called ‘transgender’ simply because they do not ‘fit’ into any category (or do fit in a category that nobody wants to link to ‘transgenderity’ at all).

So we need a new movement to deal with them And that shall be the topic of a future article…

Unfortunately, that created a problem over the years: how can you take a ‘fetishist’ seriously?

Here is my dilemma: I’ve started, long ago, when YouTube was still relatively new, to develop a channel there aimed for the smoking fetishist community. And why? Because they were, back then, very tolerant towards the transgender community. In other words: they couldn’t care less if I was transgender or not, so long as I was a smoking fetishist as well.

Smoking fetishism, perhaps differently from some kinds of fetishism, is what I call a ‘two-way fetishism’, in the sense that smoking fetishists are both interested in the fetishist activity and in watching other fetishist engaging in the activity. I know that this should be obvious, but it isn’t! For instance, a lot of people constantly watch shemale porn without no intention of becoming a shemale themselves! Indeed, there are a lot of so-called ‘voyeur’ fetishisms, where the fetishism itself is in the watching activity. In the shemale porn example, for instance, shemale porn actresses just have sex on camera because, well, they are either paid for it (if they’re pros) or because they enjoy it (if they’re amateurs). In the latter example, they might be exhibicionists, which is the perfect kind of fetishism that ‘fits’ like a glove with voyeurism — they are like two pieces of a puzzle, and work best when they fit together. The same, as you can imagine, applies to a lot of examples.

Whereas with smoking fetishim, most of the people who watch smoking fetishim videos are smoking fetishists themselves, or, at the very least, smokers. There are naturally exceptions, and I’ve met a few — non-smokers (but tolerant towards smoking) who enjoy watching smoking fetishist videos.

There is a huge industry of smoking fetishism porn videos, but smoking fetishism by itself does not need to be pornographic, although almost certainly it can be described as ‘erotic’ — for other smoking fetishists. For non-fetishists, of course, smoking is just plainly disgusting, and making out of smoking an art is pure nonsense at best, or a devil-inspired perversity which ought to get their perpetrators burn in Hell for all eternity…

There are also ‘erotic’ smoking fetishism videos available all over the Internet. They have, however, a problem for true smoking fetishists: these videos are filmed by major professional pornography studios, catering for their customers, and hiring gorgeous-looking actresses to do those smoking fetishist videos, according to the tastes of their customers. The problem here is that, generally speaking, with few exceptions, those actresses are not smoking fetishists themselves. A few are not really even ‘smokers’ in the sense of being people who enjoy smoking; they are just paid to smoke on video, and, while they’re not exactly gagging and coughing, it’s quite noticeable that they are not really enjoying to smoke — they just do it because they are paid to do so.

Now, we all know that pornographic movies, like (almost) everything else in the movie industry, are just pretension — the scenes are not depicting ‘real sex’, but just a form of fantasy, performed by actors. They are nevertheless exciting (or else they would not have an audience). But in some niche markets this is not enough: viewers demand more realism, and not merely ‘pretension’. We all know how good porn actresses are in faking orgasms, and many males (if not most of them) cannot tell the difference between a real orgasm and a fake one anyway, so, in the minds of the porn viewer, they are usually easily made to believe that the sex scenes are ‘real’. As for male orgasms on screen, well, they are much harder to ‘fake’, so porn movie directors just need to do additional takes until the actor gets an erection and ejaculates — or at least that’s what I assume they do, unless these days the porn industry uses much more sophisticated, CGI-based visual effects as well (it certainly is possible!).

With smoking fetishim, however, it’s very easy to see if an actress is just ‘pretending’ to enjoy smoking and is just being paid for looking sexy on a video with a cigarette in their hand; or if they are actual smoking fetishists and can convey the reality of the pleasure they have in smoking to their audience. True smoking fetishists are mostly interested in the smoking itself, not in how gorgeous the actress looks, even though, of course, the two combined is so much more erotic! This might sound strange for someone used to watch vanilla porn videos, but it has to be understood that fetishism, by definition, happens when the sexual erotism is diverted towards either an object or an action/behaviour which has nothing to do with sexual intercourse (although it might become part of it). Thus, feet fetishists get erotically excited by watching feet, and just the feet, the rest of the body (or what the person is doing while showing the feet) is completely irrelevant. High heels fetishists do not even need to see the foot, or the person; their erotic excitement is drawn towards the shoe as an object instead. Again, such fetishes are not rationally explainable to someone who simply does not have a fetish.

Indeed, smoking fetishism is very complicated to explain to those who are neither smokers (or, worse, anti-smokers) nor fetishists. I have explained before that there is an art of smoking, which, unfortunately, in these anti-smoker days we live in, is slowly disappearing — not totally so (because the dwindling number of smokers since the 1970s has stabilised, and, according to statistics, even gone up a bit, because even though the percentage of the population who smokes has been steadily going down, the world population is growing, and the net result is a slightly increase of the total amount of smokers out there — so, yes, Big Tobacco is still happily filling their coffers with gold and not in the risk of disappearing), but the number of people who see smoking as an art has certainly been much reduced.

And this is easily explainable due to the way how smoking is viewed by society. In the 1920s, way before any connection between smoking and decreasing health was established, smoking became a common sight among the fancy Bohemian parties, especially among women, who, until the turn of the 20th century, were disallowed to smoke (at least in public). Smoking was considered a ‘male’ pastime, for no particular reason except that males dominated society and therefore established the rules of what was supposed to be only enjoyable by males. There was a ritual attached to pipe smoking, dating from the 17th century at least, but even that ritual was a bit lost, as it implied mostly a need (in the sense of a sequence of steps that has to be performed in the right way to accomplish a result; just like, say, putting on some clothes) and not truly an art.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the concept of smoking as an art begins when women are starting to be ‘allowed’ to smoke in public, and this, of course, is reinforced by the emerging movie industry in the beginning of the 20th century. Women in the 1920s, indeed, turned smoking into something fashionable by starting to address smoking differently from men. It is to present-day society a bit baffling that smoking is a gendered activity, but it most certainly became one starting in the 1920s. Ironically, perhaps, as the global anti-smoking campaigns started in the 1970s — already half a century ago! — at about the same time of the great successes of the gender equality pushes by second-wave feminists, the way men and women smoke started to become much more similar. Not equal, but similar; and, nowadays, unlike what happened in, say, the 1950s, young girls will pick up smoking from their male friends and not from their mothers; smoking is, today, a borderline activity that happens outside established educational channels; and the consequence is that it begins to be done in secrecy, learned from others who also have picked the habit in secrecy as well, outside established social norms. In other words: women, these days, do not learn to smoke as a woman; they simply smoke as men smoke, because that is the only way they have seen people smoking.

As said, this is not entirely true, but it’s much more common to see women ‘smoking like men’ than before (meaning: half a century ago!), when smoking was clearly a gendered activity which had different norms and rituals for each gender role. And, of course, in the same way that women, from the 1920s onwards, have turned a lot of otherwise mundane activities into an art which inspires erotic undertones, smoking was not an exception.

In a world where fetishism is mostly a male activity (again, we cannot generalise, and there are certainly a lot of exceptions; for instance, many women have an uniform fetishism, i.e. being attracted to males in uniforms, such as uniforms from the armed forces or the police, etc.; women are as attracted to bondage and its paraphernalia as men are; and so forth), it is therefore not surprising that women, roughly in the past century, have turned so many mundane activities into mildly erotic acts. Consider how women put on gloves, or, better, how they put on their stockings; if you have watched porn videos where the actresses use such props, you can easily see how they have become sexualised! And while porn movies were certainly not so widespread in the past as today (mostly because having access to movies was not that easy), you can see how the glorious pin-ups in the 1940s and 1950s are so often depicted putting on their stockings and/or gloves, in deliberately erotic poses. In other words: while putting on underwear or even accessories were just seen as ‘utilitarian’ during the Victorian era (and in pre-Puritan times they had not thought about the issue at all), the roaring 1920s started to mildly sexualise, or at least eroticise, a lot of female actions and behaviour, which is not surprising, since this coincides with evolving notions about female sexuality and the role women play in society. Thus, while the bra was invented as a purely utilitarian piece of underwear by the end of the 19th century (when corsets were slowly being faded out, even if every once in a while they would make a comeback), we can see how the bra became strongly sexualised between, say, the 1940s and the 1960s, when the ‘bullet bra’ was specifically designed to enhance breast projection to an extent that we today would call ‘unnatural’; but voluptuous, curvy women were the image of feminine beauty in the 1940-1960 period, and that meant the bullet bra and a (partial) return to corsets (much more comfortable than the ones used in the Edwardian or the Victorian era) to accentuate the curviness of the female body. Today, as we have gone back to the notion of slimness as the ideal of feminine beauty (just as it was in the 1920s), the ‘bullet bra’ or the corset have dropped out of mainstream fashion — but both are still employed among niche markets where such heavy sexualised feminine items of underwear or shapewear have acquired fetishist overtones.

In other words: there has always been fetishism, and there always will be, but fetishism varies from culture to culture, and from time to time. Interestingly enough, from my limited perspective and understanding, what is considered fetishim in a specific time period seems to have been merely ‘erotic’ in the period immediately preceding it. To give two examples: in the 1940-1960 period, wearing bullet bras, perhaps a corset, and always using fake eyelashes was considered erotic and commonplace — it was expected that all women would wear that, and they knew that such a way of dressing/putting on makeup was considered attractive, even erotic, by all men. When feminists started to burn their bras in the late 1970s, and the fashion switched towards different designs in dress and overall attire, so that bullet bras and corsets did not fit any more in the feminine image of those days, women wearing bullet bras and corsets became a rarity, and images depicting such women quickly became fetishes for men still attracted to the ‘old’ image of female attractiveness. We moved on to things like the reintroduction of the push-up WonderBra in the early 1990s, when big breasts in skinny bodies became the new image of female beauty — and because such a combination is not very natural, unless one did breast augmentation, the alternative was the push-up bra to create the illusion of much bigger breasts. Today, at least in some social environments, having ‘too big’ breasts is seen as being ‘slutty’ and something that only the lower classes (or the porn actresses!) will deliberately ‘show off’ — of course, again, this varies from society to society, and from groups inside that society as well, but, generally speaking, we could say that porn actresses are mandatorily big-breasted and use whatever kind of bras that will enhance their cleavage even more because fetishism towards big-breasted women in skinny bodies — the image of female beauty in the 1990s — continues to be appreciated by a considerable number of men who are drawn to that image.

I do not want to be exhaustive in the list of changes in the feminine image — both in dressing but also in behaviour — but just attempt to explain that, before smoking as an habit became demonised, it was effectively used as an erotic tool by women, at least between the 1920s and the 1960s; smoking is a gendered activity, also starting from the 1920s, and there is much more to it than simply destroying your health by inhaling toxic, carcinogenic chemicals; even from a perspective of someone who enjoys smoking, they might not even be sensitive to the art of smoking as an aesthetic discipline, with its behaviour rules, and an intent that is designed to produce allure and eroticism — they might just see as something with an enjoyable, pleasurable taste, to which they are addicted, as they are addicted to coffee, chocolate, or even alcohol; there is not much to it.

And, objectively speaking, such people are right. Smoking in itself is supposed just to be a ‘taste experience’. However, we cannot simply ignore the historic context: smoking, when it was discovered by Portuguese and Spanish explorers in the 1500s, and brought to Europe, was contextually linked to ritualistic behaviour. Shamans, or medicine-men, would smoke in a religious context; we can still see the remains on that throughout the 19th century, when some tribes of Native Americans would smoke the ‘peace pipe’ to seal agreements to terminate a war. While the West mostly abolished such ritualistic behaviour associated to smoking, we nevertheless still keep a few remains of that — to this very day, smoking expensive cigars may still be part of, say, a wedding, or a very special occasion (like the signing of a big business contract), at least among those who are not radical anti-smokers. It’s not the issue of smoking cigars being a luxury that is truly important; since there are other luxuries (like drinking French champagne, for example) which are associated to very special occasions; it’s the actual act of smoking such cigars that is also important, and reminiscent of the way Native Americans also ‘sealed’ pacts or agreements by smoking a pipe together.

Such ancient memes linking smoking behaviour as a ritual to be performed in ‘special’ events have also been pegged to other situations and environments; the parties in the roaring 1920s were full of women freely allowed to smoke with their incredibly long cigarette holders made sometimes of precious substances, such as ivory, or tipped with encrusted gems and noble metals. Smoking, for almost half a century, was part of a glamorous lifestyle which turned the cigarette into a fashion accessory, and smoking paraphernalia (such as cigarette cases, lighters, or holders) became objects of jewellery.

Intellectuals, Bohemians, all sorts of artists, politicians, and the financial and aristocratic elite of the recent past were frequently (heavy!) smokers, in a world where up to 60% of all males did smoke habitually. What would be Einstein without his pipe or Churchill (or Fidel Castro!) without their huge Havana cigars? Until the fraud perpetuated by the tobacco companies was discovered in the late 1960s/early 1970s, and society finally got to learn the truth about tobacco products and their links to major diseases and forms of cancer, tobacco smoking was a habit that crossed all classes and (later) both genders, just like coffee, tea or alcohol. As such, being simultaneously a smoker and a free thinker was not only unusual, it was the norm.

But this is 2017. Things have changed.

At some point in the past years, my YouTube channel surpassed the million views. This would be surprising today, when only very rare videos become viral enough to reach such an astonishing number of views. But when I started that channel, there were very few videos for smoking fetishism; in fact, smoking fetishists tended to gather around our own online communities, in the form of text-only forums, with the sporadic link to a video download. With social media such as Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook, everything changed – people moved from their more obscure and feature-limited online social tools to the ‘mainstream’ social media, used by everybody else. In fact, the big advantage of those ‘mainstream’ social media are not only the extra features, but the notion that they cater to all tastes and all kinds of people.

However, there is a flip side to this, and the media is now constantly warning us about it: because what we put online stays online ‘forever’, people will be shadowed by their online presence, and judged by it. Nothing could show the dramatic effect of social media better than President Trump’s incessant twittering – once the message is ‘out there’, even if it gets deleted, someone will have made a copy, and come back to accuse us.

The ‘mainstream’ social media, because they have a business model based on profiling their users in order to sell that data to potential advertisers, have also got ridden of the concept of Internet anonymity. This had some profound consequences for those who were not so keen to publicly discuss their private life online with similar-minded people: such discussions now take place on different social media which do not care in the least about privacy issues, and force users to create profiles with their real data. Naturally enough, many don’t, and such profiles get deleted over and over again. It’s almost impossible to, say, openly and frankly discuss sex online among adults without getting banned by some company or another; I remember that when I first hosted this blog I had to ask the hosting provider if they were fine with having content which could be considered ‘erotic’ by some people; they answered that they were located in San Francisco, California, where everything is allowed; but of course this is not the case on many other places.

It’s clear that fetishism, as well as erotic content, must be part of the so-called ‘adult’ content. Unfortunately for the human population all around the world, it’s the US with its puritan, backwards, conservative rules which define what is supposed to be ‘adult content’ and what is not; in the minds of conservative, religious parents, sex is something kids are only allowed to be told about when they come of age, and, even then, in homeopathic doses. Needless to say that this is hardly the truth; teenagers, and even pre-teens, have always got access to so-called ‘adult content’ in secrecy, no matter what their parents did about it. There would always be a liberal parent allowing one friend to have some soft porn videos at home, or of having pin-ups showing off their gorgeous naked bodies on huge posters behind one’s beds. In any case, it’s not my place to discuss morality in the US and how puritan thought has shaped the way we use so-called ‘mainstream’ social media. The point here is that puritan thought still strongly shapes the attitude towards sex and eroticism; and that’s why it is more likely that a US President gets impeached because he may or may not have touched one intern in an inappropriate way, while other US Presidents can run amok creating turmoil and launching tens of millions of Americans into utter poverty, while abusing their power position, and nothing is done; so long as Trump keeps to having sex with his wife (and, ideally, not even with her…), he’ll be firmly in the Oval Office, no matter what he does.

But let’s get back to the whole point of this article.

Transgender issues, or gender issues in general (if we wish to include feminism, non-gender conformism, crossdressing, intersex issues, and so forth), are serious stuff. They are at the forefront of what might very well be the last battle for human rights — the remaining groups which still are ostracised by society, even among the most advanced, liberal, and open-minded societies in our planet. The battle is very slowly being won, but a lot of blood has been spilt in the long road to what we enjoy today. Naturally enough, those who have suffered or even given their lives so that the current generation of transgender people can enjoy a little freedom and some recognition by the law do take these issues very, very seriously. The fact that the transgender population is one of the smallest minorities among the Western world — when compared to, say, women, who are actually in the majority; or non-white people living in Europe and North America (and Australia); or even non-heterosexuals, who are at least 10% of the population — also means that there are few people to choose from to pick up the torch of freedom and bring light to these issues. It means that there are few transgender people who are thinkers, or philosophers, or academics in the field; or even doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists; not to mention being politically engaged and active, with a voice that can be heard. Think for a moment: how many transgender people do you know that are either news anchors or who are pundits or opinion-makers invited by mainstream TV to share their thoughts? How often did you see a transgender person on Stephen Colbert’s or Trevor Noah’s shows? Oh, sure enough, there are many transgender people politically engaged; some even get elected to office and, during their campaigns, they are able to make their voices heard. But such people are exceptions; the point is that they are very few.

As a consequence, if we wish those very few who fight and give their faces on behalf of the rest of us to have success with their endeavours (which are our own), then at the very least we should just humbly recognise their efforts and give them some moral (if not vocal!) support. But if we cannot even do that, well, then at the lowest end of the scale, what is expected is that we take them seriously, do not mock them, and, most especially, do not make their lives harder.

The LGBTIQ+ crowd faces a stigma which is very, very hard to shake off: they are, unfortunately, linked to sexual desire. This comes mostly from a perception, which is true to a degree in certain societies and environments, that male homosexuals have a lot more sex than male heterosexuals, especially those male heterosexuals who are firm believers in monogamy and already married — the kind that is conservative, puritan, and unfortunately hold the keys to law-making and opinion-making. They are also full of envy simply because, due to stupid self-imposed constraints, they force themselves into sexual frustration. Well… I’m of course adding my own explanation, but I have heard that argument over and over again, that even if it is not true, at least it is being repeated as a meme that is thought to be true. It does ring true: envy, after all, is a very powerful emotion, one that (unfortunately) leads whole countries to declare wars against others just because others have what they don’t.

But the LGBTIQ+ crowd is first and foremost as human as everybody else. Just pointing at and cherry-picking at their sexuality to stop respecting them and their opinions (and their fight for their rights!) is a very rude way of ignoring what they have to say, by simply claiming ‘it’s just about sex and therefore not serious’. John Oliver, precisely three years ago, interviewed on his show transgender Ugandan activist Pepe Julian Onziema, where, for me, the most shocking aspect of the interview was not knowing about the persecution that LGBT people face in Uganda because homosexuality (and also transexuality) became criminal offenses, punished by life sentences (the original bill mentioned the death penalty); but the way an interview in Uganda was conducted by the mainstream media where Pepe was asked ‘why are you gay?’ (subsequently reformulated as ‘why did you chose to become gay?’) and was faced with the ‘recruitment of youth to join the gay movement’, undermining the ‘core values’ of Ugandan society. It just happens that homosexuality is traditionally viewed with a certain indifference, if not outright tolerance, in most African societies; it is mostly due to Western anti-gay movements, infiltrated in Africa via certain ultra-conservative religious organisations, that a new concept – that of homophobia — was introduced in Africa! And it spread like wildfire: most African countries have now some form of anti-homosexuality laws (note: at least the Ugandan law was overturned by their Constitutional Court, because it was passed without a quorum, so the pressure on Ugandan LGBT people lifted a little bit), and, of course, it’s not hard to see how homosexuals are quickly blamed for the HIV epidemic, since ‘everyone knows how much sex they have’ (even though HIV in Africa spreads mostly among male heterosexuals who are culturally very promiscuous — but neglect basic protection, sometimes simply because they cannot afford it, or because it’s not easily available).

I’m just giving a few extreme examples, but it’s not fair to say that ‘the problem is only in Africa’. Of course not: from the US to Russia (say, Georgia), LGBT people are risking their lives when ‘coming out’, and even if the West has strong laws in place to fight homophobia and transphobia, that means little to a LGBT person who was beaten or shot to death. Sure, the perpetrators of such atrocities are judged and punished for their crimes, and sometimes the trial even appears on mainstream media, but for the victim, the knowledge that the judiciary system works, is of little use if they’re already dead. And this happens in the West, too, even, as said, in the most liberal countries (or US states); it’s just that most of those crimes of homophobia or transphobia are not given enough attention by the media. They might be all over the LGBT media, of course, but nobody but the LGBT crowd and their allies reads that. Once in a while, they get picked by the mainstream media; sometimes, however, that mainstream media simply gets it all wrong (as it happened in my own country eleven years ago), even though nowadays if they care to report similar news, it’s likely that they are a bit more informed…

So… yes, transphobia (and of course homophobia too) kills. People lose their lives even though the law is supposed to protect them. We can have good anti-transphobia laws, but enforcing them and educating society to at least understand that it’s not a question about hypersexuality, much less about a choice that someone makes — well, that is a challenge that is still ahead of us. I’m naturally an optimist and I can see that things are much, much better these days; it’s much more easier to ‘come out’ and transition, and much more tolerated, at least in many environments; but there is still a lot of ground to cover.

A while ago I’ve mentioned that I ‘came out’ to my best university friend — someone who is quite open-minded, being bisexual, polyamorous, and into swinging. By sheer chance, he had just met a trans woman at work (at the beginning, he had no idea she was trans, until she told him) who eventually became one of his girlfriends, so he was naturally a bit more informed about what trans people have to go through to get accepted. Nevertheless, one thing immediately caught my attention while he was talking about her, contrasting her to other girlfriends of his: that she was into very kinky stuff and, besides all the rest of her attractiveness as a person (being clever, witty, a good talker and listener, a good companion, and so forth), it was also clear that what she did in bed clearly outperformed all her other girlfriends, most of which were ‘plain vanilla’ and not interested in experimenting with ‘new stuff’.

Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong in a trans woman enjoying her sexuality like anyone else! The issue here is this immediate link that springs into people’s minds, even in the minds of those who are very open-minded and tolerant: transgenderity means (somehow) better sex (or at least more sex). In other words: trans people are kinky. They might not have transitioned because of sexual issues, but once they have transitioned, they’re quite cool as sexual partners!

While I had encountered this association at several levels, it is still shocking when it surfaces within the context of real people (and not merely abstractions or hypothetical cases). There are fetishists who have an intense desire of having sex with trans people, because they are viewed as being ‘special’ or somehow ‘better’ in bed. They become sexually attractive because they are trans. There is naturally the curiosity of ‘experimenting’, in the sense that trans people are a rarity, and there is this knowledge that they were ‘different persons’ (even from a purely sexual perspective) before transition, and now they are ‘something else’. Heterosexual males, for instance, may see trans women as a dream coming true: a person who is physically female in all regards, often making a strong effort to look pretty and attractive (unlike so many cisgender women who simply don’t care about that any more), but who is wrongly believed to have somehow a ‘male’ mind of some sort which drives their sexual desire, and, as a bonus, there will never be the risk of having an unwanted pregnancy with them. Now, taking this description out of context, we can see how sexist it actually is, while at the same time incredibly offensive towards trans women, who are seen as a new, special kind of ‘sex toy’, perfectly adapted to fulfill all desires and wishes of a heterosexual, cisgender male.

Indeed, and although I’m very well aware that anecdotal evidence does not make a case, I have personally met a few cisgender males who, in search of more sexual partners (without fearing the unwanted consequences of a possible pregnancy), turned first to other males, but, not entirely satisfied with that preference of sexual partner, found out about transgender people, who were much more aligned to their own preferences. In other words: such males, while eventually labelling themselves as bisexual or at least bi-curious, have a clear preference for a partner with a female body; but they are also aware that the number of available women with similar sexual enthusiasm might not be that accessible as they wished; on the other hand, due to a lot of social conditioning, males share certain mindsets – even if stereotypically so – especially regarding sex, a mindset which women may or may not agree with. Trans women are therefore seen as the ‘perfect’ choice, since they have also been socially conditioned to think as men for a large part of their lives, and even if they identify as women, that social conditioning left its traces – or at least that is what those men assume – but they have a physical body of a woman and are able to please men as a woman can please them.

I know that this is not only complex, but wrong in many aspects, and in any case politically incorrect. Trans women are, for all purposes, women, and that is especially true in terms of their mind. Now, one thing is to state the factual truth, which, in the case of trans women who went through a medical-assisted transition, was established by a team (or teams) of professional clinical sexologists. The other thing is to deal with perceptions of others, which will have nothing to do with the factual truth.

In other words: we, as community members, can claim as much as we wish that trans women are women in all aspects (except for the sad truth of having been born with a body which is not aligned with their gender identity). Such claims, of course, are part of scientific truth and have been established beyond a shadow of doubt, and this knowledge has been asserted a few decades ago. But beyond the realm of science and political activism, people have their own perceptions of the truth. It is still very hard to shake off the idea that trans people go through transition for sexual reasons; if you have a few minutes to watch the video below, at least from the 2m10s mark onwards, you will see how hard it is for transgender people to explain why they want to go through genital surgery, and making very clear that it is not because of sex:

Put in a different way: society, somehow, expects that ‘serious’ transgender people give up on their sexuality… or they will not be seen as ‘serious’. Of course we know that this is particularly true in more conservative environments (where people are against the existence of LGBTQI+ anyway!), but such a conservative stance ‘spills over’ to the rest of society.

I’m not speaking as a hypothetical case; I’m actually speaking from personal experience! Among the dozens of fans that faithfully watch my videos and/or the stream of pictures posted on Flickr, it’s just a very small handful who understands that there are other reasons besides sexual fetishism involved in crossdressing. When faced with that issue, they will be baffled and ask honestly: ‘If you are not into sex, why do you publish videos such as yours?’ And that question, of course, haunts me, and will continue to haunt me for as long as I keep a presence on YouTube and Flickr (and some other places as well).

It is painful for me to admit, but I cannot be publicly and openly a smoking fetishist, having joined their community decades ago (not formally, of course, there is no such thing as a formal association of world-wide smoking fetishists), while at the same time pretending that my crossdressing is not sexual in nature. Any form of fetishism is, by definition, sexual in nature. While most people who crossdress and ‘show themselves off’ on YouTube and/or other social media are interested in transvestic fetishism (and that’s also the kind of audience they attract), there are exceptions that might cater for a niche market, such as what I do (and yes, I’m very well aware of a handful of MtF crossdressers, sometimes even transgender people under transition, who are also smoking fetishists and publish their videos online for the same target audience that I do). Even though the act of publishing erotic or adult content to a specific audience does not mean that one is interested in engaging in sexual intercourse with the audience, that is what is automatically assumed by everybody else.

I’m naïve enough to admit that such a link was not immediately obvious for me in, say, 2005 or so, when my first videos and images were made public. Consider the porn video industry as an example. Just because someone is a director of porn movies, that doesn’t mean that they want to have sex with all the actresses. They might want that, but if they are all pros, this will simply not happen. At the same time, the audience knows that — or at least most of the audience! — the scenes depicted in a porn movie are fantasy. They are not real; in fact, in recent times, some of the more ‘unnatural’ sex scenes are not even performed with an actress at all, but rather with a silicone doll (acquired from SFX people such as RealDoll); but porn actresses also have (human) doubles as well; so it’s all pretty much fantasy coming from the movie industry.

We turn back to what I explained at the very beginning. Smoking fetishists naturally enjoy watching (porn) actresses pretending to smoke. However, they are frustrated if the ‘pretense’ is not convincing. Here we get an effect that is also present on porn movies, and which is the rise of the amateur videos.

Consumers of porn know that videos are just ‘pretense’. The actors and actresses may be good enough to perform very convincing sex scenes, and the degree of realism that they portray will have an impact in how big their audience is. Some, of course, are not worried about the ‘pretense’ — i.e. that the actor is not really having intercourse with a human actress, or that the actress is just pretending to have orgasms anyway — if the scenes are convincing enough. However, for some people, this is not enough — they expect an even higher degree of realism. And here is where amateurs can actually ‘outperform’ professional actors, in the sense that home movies have today enough quality (thanks to the development of affordable high-quality video cameras, such as the ones present in high-end mobile phones, for instance) to show satisfactory images. Amateurs doing their own porn videos may lack the studio quality of a professional production, but they show real people having real sex, and for a certain kind of audience, this is much more interesting than having actors and actresses in a studio (no matter how good the directing may be). While porn stars are hand-picked for their stereotypical looks, the truth is that there are far more good-looking people these days, plastic surgery is relatively accessible, and amateurs get access to better cameras, better editing tools, and reach an audience on the Internet which the porn industry cannot beat (since even the cheapest porn video has much higher costs than an amateur video posted on xTube or similar amateur porn websites).

There is a whole industry of amateur porn as well; websites compile the ‘best stuff’ out there and redistribute it to an eager audience for a fee. In many cases, amateurs who are able to attract an interesting audience will be able to make a living out of it — either through ads or by having agreements with online redistributors. In essence, such people cannot be called ‘amateurs’ any longer, and for at least a decade or so, many porn webcam chat sites have included ‘models’ who are professional porn stars doing some ‘amateur stuff’ on their webcams and earning an interesting income even when they are between movie productions. Some might even abandoned the professional porn movie industry in favour of doing ‘amateur stunts’ on the web; others use their web presence, doing ‘spontaneous’ online shows for free, to promote their own professionally-edited porn videos. And these days it’s not totally uncommon to have porn stars to be live on adult webcam chatrooms, interacting with their audience directly; last but not least, both amateurs and pros are more than willing to do private shows to an audience for a price, something that is very appealing to those who are voyeurs, or, not being voyeurs, rather prefer to watch their favourite actress to do whatever they ask her to do on camera, than to pay for a flesh-and-blood prostitute to do the same, with the difficulties that entails (namely, eventual laws forbidding prostitution; and having the required time and place to engage in such activities). ‘Digital porn’ is a huge market, and it’s always claimed that up to 20% of all traffic on the Internet is porn of some sort, although there are no real serious studies about that. Nevertheless it certainly is a big market, and one that never fails to have consumers.

Thus, the two industries — that of amateurs and professionals — have pretty much merged into one, at least to a certain degree, and this should not be that surprising. Outside the porn market, we have YouTube celebrities which, after reaching a certain status (and millions of followers), might get their own TV show on cable network. This has certainly happened and will continue to happen; the same is true for musicians who become famous netcelebrities and then attempt to make a career in ‘the real world’, sometimes using a platform such as The Voice or similar, popular TV contests to perform on TV for even larger audiences. I keep forgetting which show actually demands that contestants have a YouTube channel, which is evaluated by the show’s organisers before the contestant is even allowed to appear on an audition. Such things will become more and more commonplace.

The porn industry is far more advanced in that scenario (which is not surprising; they normally are one step ahead of the rest of the world; we cannot ever forget that the first social website, predating Facebook for a decade, was designed for adults to set up sexual encounters), and the two realities have blended. Porn distributors began their own websites to ship DVDs to potential customers; but soon it was obvious that the Internet is one of the best distribution mechanisms ever invented, and it became much easier to stream DVD-quality video through the Internet to eager customers than to deal with the logistics of actual manufacturing of the DVDs, having enough storage, and people to deal with the handling and shipping. Instead, after a movie is produced, it can immediately be released online; there is no need to actually burn DVDs any more. But the reverse side of the coin is that if professional distributors and professional porn movie studios can do this, so can amateurs. Eventually, an amateur that becomes successful in attracting a large audience gets invited to be part of the ‘big distributors’ portfolio or even to have their videos professionally edited by a movie studio; and, reversely, as said, porn stars start to get encouraged to do free online shows to their fans on webcam chatrooms, in order to promote their own videos; and, finally, webcam chatrooms, although they are in a different business model than distributors or movie producers, are nevertheless willing to pay people to perform on ‘premium’ channels, which help them to pay the costs of bandwidth and software —giving amateurs a potential regular stream of income, effectively turning them into professionals; reversely, professional sex workers are often willing to earn some extra money in their spare time by offering their own premium channels to their fans, showing themselves off in real-time on such webcam chatrooms. On top of that all, consumers become producers, and producers become consumers: people interested in watching porn through the Internet may also become interested in producing their own porn, as amateurs, for others to see.

And here is where things become confusing. Because the barrier of who is an amateur and who is a pro, or who is a consumer and who is a producer, have been shattered by the age of Internet video, common assumptions simply do not work any more. How can a viewer of a premium real-time video channel know that the person in front of the camera is really enjoying masturbating for an audience, or if she or he is just doing that as part of a show, a pretense, just as it is done in porn movies? Porn stars ‘pass’ as amateurs, in order to attract the crowd which is keen on amateur videos because it is ‘real’ (and done in real-time too); while amateurs with extraordinary skills become regularly paid and dedicate a chunk of their time in online ‘pretense’ as well, just to please their audience and guarantee their paycheck from the webcam chatroom owners at the end of the month. So, from the perspective of an outsider, what is real, what is not; who are the amateurs, who are the pros; and who is ‘just a consumer’ and who is ‘just a producer’?

Naturally, this dilemma has affected my own YouTube channel. On one hand, back in 2005 or so, it was much clearer who were the amateurs, and who were the pros; but professional porn studios started to have a problem with smoking fetishism. Smoking fetishism is more akin to an art such as, say, ice skating or ballroom dancing (really!): there is a certain amount of techniques that smoking fetishists are supposed to be able to perform — and prove that they can do it! — and ingeniously build them into a choreography that is erotic and interesting, captivating an audience. Smoking fetishism is therefore a performance, and actually a rather formalised one, even if it does not seem to be the case; and this is mostly because smoking itself also has its rituals (the way a cigarette is lighted up, how ashes are disposed of, how cigarettes are stored in cases, and so forth). Smoking fetishists, therefore, do not merely enjoy the act of smoking itself, but the whole ritualised, formalised approach to smoking with an erotic undertone as a specific intent (for those who appreciate it, of course). In this context, it’s not enough for an actress (or a good amateur!) to simply light up and blow some smoke into the camera; there is so much more to it; and the audience knows that and demands that. This is what makes it difficult for professional studios: there is just a limited amount of professional porn stars who are also smoking fetishists themselves and who are knowledgeable enough in the art of smoking to pull off convincing scenes that are acceptable for the audience; and while this is a small niche market, nevertheless there is far more demand than supply.

One might ask why this is the case (since it clearly is not the case with other kinds of erotic content!), and the answer is simply that the percentage of smokers is slowly dwindling. Connoisseurs of the art of smoking will watch delighted old movies from the 1940s and 1950s, when the directors would tell the actresses exactly what was demanded of them when they smoked on the silver screen; the art of smoking was well established and well known, and this is why those movies, even though they are meant to be PG, are exceptionally erotic for smoking fetishists: they reflect a time when women were aware of smoking as an art which could be performed in an enticing, erotic way, and when movie directors knew this very well, and knew exactly how to direct their actresses to produce those results (of course, it also helped that most of those actresses were actually real smokers as well, and thus familiar with the whole codification of the art of smoking).

When reviewing some professionally-shot contemporary smoking fetishist movies, it’s often evident for the audience that the movie director is aware of the tricks used by their predecessors in the 1940s/1950s in terms of camera positioning and lighting (cigarette smoke, for example, needs backlighting, or it will become almost invisible and thus uninteresting); however, they often have to work with models and actresses who are either not smokers, or causal smokers, or, even if they are regular smokers (which is rare these days), they are certainly not familiar with the full codification of the art of smoking — and thus their videos always lack realism and credibility, and are therefore very disappointing for potential viewers. Also, some porn movie directors misinterpret the point of smoking fetishism: it’s not a way to ‘show off’ the nice attributes of the models, but what true fetishists appreciate is the technique. If the woman is attractive or not, well, that is just a bonus, of course, but true fetishists will be enthralled by the technique, not the size of the breasts — they can watch gorgeous female bodies elsewhere. Obviously a combination of both will work best, but it’s not necessary; and the professional porn movie industry, lacking realistic and convincing smokers, try to compensate by offering good-looking actresses instead. Smoking fetishists feel that they are somehow cheated by that.

I obviously cannot generalise — like all fields of human nature, no two smoking fetishists are the same! — but I can speak for an average audience of smoking fetishists. There are not many, and the few that follow my YouTube channel, know exactly what they are interested in. They couldn’t care less if I am a crossdresser, transgender, gender non-conforming, or simply a guy who dresses up as a woman to make a few videos. Instead, they are just interested in the smoking. And while they are a very tolerant and open-minded group (namely, not caring about what ‘gender’ I identify with), they are also very demanding that the art of smoking is performed correctly according to the canon. I’m obviously aware that I’m far below the threshold of what would be considered a ‘good’ smoking fetishist — I’m ok with a holder, but not without one; my dangling (holding the holder or cigarette in the mouth by clenching the teeth on the mouthpiece) is not convincing; and I’m very bad at doing smoke rings. If the art of smoking were an Olympic discipline, I would just score around 70% or so — well below what would be necessary for joining the Games But — and that’s the important point — my audience knows that I enjoy smoking, that I’m a ‘real’ smoker and not merely an actress pretending to be one, and that I even do some of the techniques in public and not only on video — this is, by the way, how the art of smoking was actually meant to be used: in public, not just as a performance behind a camera.

Unfortunately, there is a catch: on public, open channels such as YouTube (and this is also true of many webcam chatrooms, of course) it’s hard to select your audience. In other words, it’s a free market: you put your videos out there expecting to attract some people who will like them; while, on the reverse side of the coin, people attracted by a specific kind of videos will try to find them through searches. Sometimes there is a match — which can be rare when we’re talking about very small communities! The problem here is that, on one hand, to keep that audience happy, I have no choice but to make my videos public, so that they can find them; on the other hand, because they are public, they will almost immediately be misunderstood by watchers who are not smoking fetishists.

And those — clearly the majority! — are mostly of two types. Some, of course, do not understand the purpose of ‘transgender smoking fetishism’ and will either insult me in the comments or simply skip the video and jump elsewhere. Others, however, come from webcam chatrooms, where they are used to get others to do ‘shows’ for them, and eventually even arrange a few encounters in ‘real life’. In other words, because I’m crossdressing, I’m automatically labeled as a ‘fetishist’ of some sort; and because the videos are public, it ‘means’ (for them) that I’m available, in the sense of being potentially interested in having sex with whomever writes on the comments. This is merely a reflection of what happens elsewhere, and people coming from environments where this is clearly the case — for instance, where escorts are available online as a ‘preview’ of what they can offer; or where women willing to have intercourse are actively looking for partners by ‘showing themselves off’ on webcam. Those visitors are by far the majority, or perhaps I should say were the majority, because thankfully most moved on to people who were aligned with what they had in mind.

The public in general, however, considers those that engage in any sort of erotic activity to be ‘lesser humans’ than the rest of the world, which is assumed that is ‘sexually inactive’, or, more precisely, which keeps ‘sexual things’ outside the public sphere. Naturally enough, this will depend on the context, as well as on the country and the specific society, but, in general, those who are open and public with their sexuality, or at least with what they consider erotic, are viewed with suspicion, disdain, or contempt. They are not taken seriously. And this offers a challenge, one that I had to reflect upon for several months.

Let me give you a very interesting example. One of my online acquaintances, which I have met over a decade ago, is one of the most formidably intelligent women I have met. She has a PhD in philosophy, teaches at some university in the US, and — online, via the social 3D virtual world of Second Life — she gives weekly conferences on a lot of deep philosophical subjects, which I tremendously enjoy, and of course I’m not the only one. Her conferences, lectures or debates are usually attended by an audience of several dozen people online, which is possibly more than what she gets ‘in real life’, most of which have been eager followers and fans of her for many, many years.

This woman, however, has an interesting background story. Besides her obvious intelligence, which is immediately noticed after just a few seconds of conversation, she was also a beauty queen in her university days. Now, I cannot really confirm or deny such claim, because I have just seen a few — very few! — of her pictures in her 30s, and while they are artistic photographies (and not porn shots!), it is clear for anyone that she had a gorgeous body and overall looks. But her artistic photos have a different intention than merely ‘showing off’ her body: instead, they are images about the beauty of the human body, where she poses in the nude as an example. The difference between ‘nude’ and ‘naked’ is a subtle one, and I have long ago learned the difference (my own language, Portuguese, just has one word for both), which may or not be correct — I’m just repeating what I was taught: when English speakers talk about ‘nude’, they are talking mostly about an artistic representation of the human body, where the focus is not in the lack of clothes per se, but rather in the harmonious, aesthetically pleasing ratios present in the human body (and which, to an extent, are replicated on all artistic creations, but that is a discussion for another place…); while someone is ‘naked’ when they drop off their clothes in the attempt to entice or excite viewers by showing off their uncovered bodies. Nakedness has sexual undertones, while nudeness has artistic ones.

Now, this particular PhD philosophy professor was scared of remaining in debt forever while going through university; she knew that even if she got a regular job flipping burgers and cleaning tables, she would not be able to pay her tuition fees, and she would have no choice but to get a loan from a bank — which she was reluctant to do (as I understand the story, she might not even qualify for such a loan). So what did she do? Well, she sold her body: she would earn far more that way, have plenty of spare time to do her studies (unlike what would happen with a full-time job), and, instead of being broke and having to repay a loan, she did actually make a good enough profit that secured her immediate years after university. She was already very uninhibited about her body and had no problem posing in the nude for art and photography students as a model; the step of starting to work as an escort and later as a prostitute was not too big for her to take. And, as easily as she slipped in that role when it was necessary, once she got her tenure and a secure job at a university, of course she could drop her activities as a sex worker (while still continuing to pose as a nude model for some artists and photographers).

Did her colleagues and teachers know about that? And if so, did they approve? I have no idea, and I feel it’s rude to ask her so — either she’s willing to talk about the subject, or not. It’s part of her personal, private life, and nobody has anything to do with it. I also have no idea where in the US this happens, and if it was in a state where prostitution is allowed or not (in my own country, for instance, she would have had absolutely no problem in doing so — she could even give her customers valid receipts, charge them VAT, pay taxes and the welfare fees, and enjoy an early retirement thanks to being labeled as a ‘fast burnout job’). But it’s only natural that she wouldn’t want to wildly advertise the way she paid her tuition fees during her student days. Not because she is somehow ashamed of it — nothing could be further from the truth! — but simply because it’s not socially acceptable for a professor at a university to have been a prostitute. In other words, having in your CV (or resumée) listed as former job ‘prostitute’ will not open you doors.

So, she very carefully kept her daily life separated from her past. To this very day, even though it’s very easy to see that she has a vast and thorough academic knowledge in the field of philosophy — which you immediately get by sitting through one of her philosophy lectures and debates done online in Second Life — I have no idea of her real name. The very few nude pictures she has on her profile are not good enough for Google images to track her down (and she knows that perfectly, or else she wouldn’t post them). But, of course, in the privacy of Second Life, she is quite open about her past (at least with people she has met and talked to for a long time) — no one there would be able to ‘leak’ details about her past life to her current employers, since nobody knows her real name, the institution she currently works from, or has any proof (like pictures or videos!) of her former activities as a prostitute.

By keeping her private past separate from her academic present, she is able to be taken very seriously in her job. And this is how it ought to be: there is no written rule that a prostitute cannot finish a PhD in philosophy and become a professor at a university (or vice-versa!), but, unfortunately, in the society we currently live in, the two situations are somehow viewed as incompatible — as if her sexuality has anything to do with her intelligence, education, and academic training.

I know this is a rather extreme case, of course. But it shows my point rather nicely. By insisting to keep some online videos and pictures which had the smoking fetishist community in mind, and which are merely a ‘fantasy’ and understood as such by my fellow smoking fetishist community members, unfortunately the ‘rest of the world’ doesn’t see it as such. In fact, even non-smokers find some of my videos strangely attractive to them; they can ‘forget’ the smoking bit which bothers them and focus instead on what they perceive to be an erotic undercurrent emanating from those videos. In effect, they just see me as a ‘soft porn’ amateur actress; and, as such, they put me in the same box as all other people engaged in porn (soft or otherwise). In other words, I’m not really taken seriously.

Now, one may argue that ‘being taken seriously’ is overrated (Buddhists certainly think that way!). But we strangely live in an age when conservatives are becoming more and more extreme, and even liberals are shaking on their foundations and wondering if we have not gone too far — whatever is meant by that, of course. In particular, in this age of social media, it’s a bad idea to mix one’s private life with the public one. Before the Internet, you could buy porn VHS tapes, subscribe to porn magazines, have your own BDSM dungeon in the cellar of your Beverly Hills mansion, entertain group sex parties, and still maintain the image of the perfect gentleman or lady in public — simply because it would be highly unlikely that anything of your private life would ‘leak out’. We didn’t even have smartphones, and mobile phones lacked trackability, so we would use landlines to get in touch with the members of the group sex parties — and since those were with consenting adults, the likelihood of anyone listening in to one’s telephone conversation would be next to zero. Also, all parties involved would be interested in securing their privacy as well; sex toys and porn magazines would be delivered plainly packaged, etc. And of course not everybody would have easy access to cameras; we would not make selfies of ourselves inside a BDSM dungeon, and, if we did, we would have to bring them to a friend’s developing lab, because we most certainly wouldn’t want a random guy working at the photo lab to see what we were about. All these precautions were natural, but it was also much easier to keep them off the public eye (unless, of course, anything illegal would happen; in that case, it would be certain that the police would step in!).

These days, however, ‘privacy’ is a forgotten word. Our own watches can take high resolution pictures easily — and without anyone really noticing — as well as whole movies. Home appliances built in China have Wi-Fi sniffers built in. Smart TVs are able to be used by hackers to view what’s going on in your living room — some have cameras which the manufacturer never told you about. Google, Apple, and all major smartphone manufacturers track you down via GPS, and they can pinpoint you with increasing precision (soon, new generations of smartphones will use Europe’s own Galileo global satellite-based navigation system, which surpasses the US non-military GPS system in precision — and of course smartphones will use both). We communicate via a plethora of technologies, of websites, of protocols — sometimes even not realising what we’re doing. Companies track down our browser usage — as well as what TV channels we watch on cable — and profile us to give us better ads. Drones with 4K video cameras hover by our windows — even on high-rise buildings! — and can see exactly what we’re doing, even by night, since they can easily use infrared cameras. Technology that once was in the hands of the military or the security forces is now available to the common person; in seconds, or at least minutes, we can grab a part of a picture, identify a face on it, and see on which social networks they are registered — thus easily figuring out their name, and possibly even their address. Stalkers live in paradise, as they can easily figure out where their victims are, and track them by their phones; and the same applies to burglars which need to know when someone has logged off from home and is travelling to work (hint: they can look at the check-in messages on Facebook!). Fortunately for us, crime prevention also uses the same tools, and they have professionals using them, so things didn’t totally get out of hand — at least from the perspective of criminality!

But nevertheless we lost this ability of separating our private from our public lives. Both are now open for anyone to see on the Internet. Of course, we can take precautions: we can have different profiles, different online persona, each with its own set of configurations, logins, passwords, names, and so forth; only more sophisticated computer users will be able to draw a connection between both. Some people are paranoid enough to change not only their passwords, but even their email addresses and social profiles, twice a year or so; sometimes this happens because they are blocked, of course, but there are people who are aware of their lack of privacy and therefore are always eager to change everything — making it even hard for their own real friends to track down!

While a little precaution is certainly more than advised, often we cannot plan what will happen in the future, and it might be too late to correct a serious mistake one has carelessly made in the past. 15 years ago or so, I had no intention to ever meet anyone in public, dressed like a woman; so I thought it would be more than ‘safe’ to register myself in all sorts of ‘borderline’ social sites out there. While it was fun, for a while, to see some of my YouTube videos reaching hundreds of thousands of views (!!!), now I regret how easy that allowed some people to capture those videos on their hard disks and upload them to porn sites (yes, that actually happened). I mean, this is the kind of thing that we all heard about; we know it does happen; so it should not be a surprise. In fact, a decade ago, I would actually be very happy if someone was redistributing my content! That would have been awesome!

But now…? Well, now I have made contacts, reached out to new friends and acquaintances, and tried to establish myself as a voice in my (tiny) community. This is incompatible with the kind of ‘fun’ videos (or pictures) I made over a decade ago. Not for me personally — I’m not ashamed of those videos and pics, I actually enjoyed doing them, and I know that there are plenty of friends out there who enjoyed watching them as all — but rather for the community as a whole. When transgender people are so adamantly defending that gender identity has nothing to do with ‘sexual deviation’ (although of course sexuality is an inherent part of every human being!), people raise a few eyebrows when they see the sort of content that transgender people actually post of themselves online. Sure, that is actually very unfair: cisgender people post far more erotic content (involving themselves!) than transgender people, simply because they outnumber us 30,000 to 1 — and therefore produce oodles of more content. But it’s always a question of perception. If a cisgender heterosexual male or female post images of themselves doing a sexy pose on Instagram, they’re cool, or sexy, or perhaps just labeled as attention-getters, but, in any case, it’s always socially acceptable behaviour (for the norms that we have in this decade!). Whilst when a transgender person does the same… well, then it’s just a ‘confirmation’ that, deep down, all transgenderism is about sex.

This is naturally a form of discrimination. In other words, cisgender people are allowed to have a perfectly normal and healthy sexuality, and even if they ‘show off’ on social media, this is not considered a major catastrophe. Even former presidents of the US can get a picture of themselves hugging their wives on the beach — it might raise a few smiles, a comment or two, but… even presidents have their sexuality, right? So we shrug it off — unless, of course, some ‘red lines’ are crossed. But transgender people are encircled by red lines. Whatever they do, even if they just do a nose job and post a picture of themselves showing how well it went… well, it’s just about sex. Everyone knows that transgender people are obsessed with sex, to the point of even wanting those warts removed from their noses…

Grumbling and complaining is not worth much; after all, we didn’t make those rules. We just have to adapt ourselves and try to ‘fit in’ as much as we can. Now, I’m not a rebel in the sense of believing that the best form of changing society and its (stupid) rules is by overthrowing the social order — although I know several transgender people who fit into that label perfectly. Rather, I think it’s better to work ‘within the system’ and slowly establish certain rights mostly by setting an example for others (even cisgender people!) to follow. Cisgender women, of course, know exactly what I’m talking about: they know that if they want respect and acceptance from their male peers at work, they have to work harder and better than all of them (and therefore earning the fame of being ruthless, emotionally detached, and distant and aloof…). Males respect the toughest, meanest, hardest women out there — barely so — even though they do not apply the same demands on themselves. Men can be lazy and stupid and still earn the respect and admiration of other men, but women have no such privilege. And the same applies to transgender people as well: we need to be perfect angels, without the slightest hint of even having a ‘sexuality’ — we must be pure, asexual, living in the ivory towers of the most sacrosanct celibacy — and only then we might get a few cisgender people to ‘believe’ that ‘being trans’ is not ‘a sexual thing’.

That way we can avoid stupid questions like ‘so, when did you start being trans?’ asked in the same tone as one cisgender person would ask another when they started attending group sex orgies. It’s not the same thing, but the mainstream population still thinks it is. In a way, and perhaps thanks to the efforts of the LGB crowd in the past decades, the cisgender heteronormative society is starting to accept that whatever happens in the privacy of your bedroom is the concern of nobody except you and your consenting partner(s). This is obviously not universally held, but there is a certain degree of more tolerance; and perhaps the way social sites have been mostly used for dating purposes — even if journalists, media pundits, computer experts, etc. vehemently claim the total opposite — has softened or mellowed the approach to sexuality. I don’t know, it’s just my perception — in a sense, the kind of comments I sometimes get (or got) on my videos and photos tended to show just that, i.e. that people are ‘fine’ that I get sexual pleasure from dressing as a woman. In other words, fetishism becomes acceptable, and people do not need to be so ‘ashamed’ of their fetishes and fantasies any longer. The question of ‘when did you become trans’ is not meant to be offensive, but rather an expression of curiosity, a certain degree of tolerance towards an ‘exotic fetish’ which may be incomprehensible for the common individual, but nevertheless they are more favourable to the whole concept of ‘transgenderity as a sexual fantasy’ and accept it more. While in Uganda people might resent ‘gay people recruiting others for their organisation’ (!!!), in the West, we start having less issues about that, because we’re slightly more open to sexuality.

So long, of course, that it remains outside the public arena. Electing a transgender person — a ‘sexual pervert’ — for office is still something which isvery confusing for many people. While homosexuals already get regularly elected to important offices — far, far below the actual percentage of non-heterosexuals in the overall population, but it’s a start — transgenderity is still too confusing for a general audience. Yes, it’s fine to have ‘strange tastes’, but ‘choosing to be transgender’ and chopping bits off your body and adding others is really ‘too radical’ for the mainstream population…

There is still a long, long way to go to make people understand that transgenderity has nothing to do with ‘sexual’ issues, but gender ones; and it’s equally hard to accept that transgender people, just like cisgender people, also have a healthy sexuality. But one thing has nothing to do with the other — and this is the hardest issue to explain to others. It’s far easier to get accepted for having a ‘strange and unusual fetish’ than to make people understand that transgender people have no ‘strange and unusual fetishes’ when they express their gender identity — although, of course, they may also have other ‘strange and unusual fetishes’, just like everybody else, because we are all humans, and we all have our sexual fantasies.

Even very open-minded people like my bisexual, polyamorous friend are slightly confused about the two issues (but to give him credit, he’s quite willing to learn more — most people simply make up their opinion and are impossible to convince otherwise). He does understand that there is a difference between ‘gender identity & presentation’ and ‘sexuality’. Nevertheless, he thinks that there is no coincidence that his transgender girlfriend is into very kinky stuff (as he so graphically puts it, without getting into details, of course — what he does with her is shrouded in their privacy!). In other words… he might accept that transgender people have, or had, gender issues; but he cannot deny that they’re awesome sexual partners, and that somehow the two things must be connected.

To be perfectly honest, I have often thought the same. While it’s quite clear that among the crossdresser and transgender communities there is an extraordinarily large amount of asexual individuals — or as close to asexual as possible, without any disrespect meant towards true asexual individuals! — there is also a much larger group that is into… ‘very kinky stuff’. In fact, I have seen some anti-transgender ‘studies’ (not peer-reviewed articles, of course) which deem to have established strong correlations between an above-average amount of hypersexuality, fetishism, and a high degree of sexual fantasies (with a lot of imagination!) among the crossdressing and transgender communities. While such ‘studies’ must always be questioned — some correlations are virtually worthless, such as the decrease of pirates linked to global warming  — what matters here is the perception by the general public that such a correlation actually exists. And it’s certainly true for many cases; such as it is true for many cases of cisgender heterosexual people, of course. Some humans simply are more inclined towards one extreme, others to the opposite extreme, but the average guy is somewhere in the middle — and the same holds true for transgender people as well, of course.

Nevertheless, it’s the perception that counts. And because of that, I have made a difficult decision.

Originally, I have posted on my website links to all my pictures and videos. The idea was to attract more visitors to them — and to my site as well — thanks to the many searches made by people on Google and other search engines. There was some sort of ‘cross-marketing’ going on, if you wish: some people might be searching for ‘serious’ discussions about transgender issues and find my blog, but also find some of my videos or pictures amusing; while others, who are fans of those silly videos and photos, might have found my blog ‘by mistake’ and therefore also take an interest in the kind of things I write about. I have, in fact, found a few scattered cases where this actually happened. But here’s the problem: they’re just few. In fact, very few — a handful of exceptions to the norm!

So it became increasingly obvious that linking both things together wasn’t a good idea, after all. I know it’s ‘too late’ to unlink them. Also, in recent months, the plugins I used to retrieve the pictures from Picasa and post them here started to fail — thanks to the deliberate changes that Google is making all the time, until they finally break everything they did, and nothing works any more as it should (if you ever wondered why Google never really overtook Facebook and other social media, in spite of offering the same technology, now you know: the main reason is that Google keeps breaking stuff, and that means that developers get tired of always having to keep up with the constant and deliberate changes introduced by Google… anyway, I digress). On top of all that, I have a huge backlog of material that needs to be processed — almost half a year, in fact — and, mostly because my depression is getting much better and I’m able to work more and have less time free for ‘other things’, and because I’m also doing far more pictures and far more videos because I dress as a woman so more often than before… I cannot keep up easily with all that! What a perfect excuse, therefore, to deliberately introduce a dramatic change on my website!

From now on, I will have the links for my videos and pictures on a protected area of my website. And yes, that means that you need to be a registered user in order to see those images and movies on the website – although they will continue to be freely available (for now) elsewhere on YouTube, Picasa, Google Photos, Flickr, OneDrive, etc. (each of these sites has different ways of access and permission levels). And I won’t simply let anyone get registered; I will only accept my old acquaintances (and fans!) that have been patiently following me online for the past decade and half (or so). Of course you can ‘become’ a new fan/acquaintance, and that means looking me up on the many social websites out there where I’m registered and chat a bit with me. That’s all that is needed

It’s possible that I might change my policies again in the future: I might, at some point in time, make all my images and movies completely inaccessible. Well, what I mean is that I will remove public access to them; but some people obviously have already made copies of them and uploaded them elsewhere (a friend of mine pointed out to one social site which has parts of one of my movies; and I’ve managed to track down that very same movie to another site…), so it’s not as if they will disappear ‘forever’ from the Internet: they will just be less visible. But I will nevertheless have proof of having created them in the first place and be able to track them down, one by one, and ask for their removal… even though I’m very well that this will take ages!

The point is just to make them harder to find; the smoking fetishist community, which is tiny anyway, knows very well where to find them, since they have been following me for quite a while. But those who do not understand the canons of smoking fetishism as an art form – one that involves a performance, a fantasy, which is just imaginary, not real – are always assuming that by publishing my images I’m showing my willingness to engage in sexual intercourse with anyone in the world. Over the years, this became wearing. It’s time to stop, or at least to start making some progress towards stopping that.

So, dear reader, if you have read to the end… welcome! You know that the changes will not affect you, and that you will continue to have these unthinkably long, endlessly boring essays to read — I won’t go anywhere, and I’ll see you again on the next article, where you’ll watch how deeply I’ll drag (no pun intended) you down the complexities of trans* taxonomy. Cheers and a kiss! 

If you have been following my blog from the very first post, you’ll know by now that, over the years, I have changed the technique of washing my wig, and all that depending on the excellent advice I get not only online, but also from the wonderful person who sells and conditions most of my wigs. And then, of course, I get to exchange ideas with fellow crossdressers and transgender people who have not managed to fully grow out their hair. We compare techniques, exchange tips and ideas, and in general try to figure out what the ‘best’ method is.

Over time, however, I came to realise that there are a lot of ‘myths’ about wig washing that simply aren’t true any more. They might have been true with earlier technologies of wig manufacturing; because wigs (especially human hair wigs!) can be very expensive, it means that hairdressers (and the community of wig users in general) tend to be conservative, that is, it’s best to advice to be extra careful than to risk ruining a good wig forever and getting an angry customer (or losing a friend!).

Anatomy of a wig

Over the years, I have owned several wigs made of synthetic hair (some of which of extremely high quality) and two wigs of human hair, one of which I have given away when it was some 15 years old, but still relatively well preserved. Human hair wigs last way longer, and that’s one of the many reasons why they are expensive. They are also much more fun to play with, because you can style them in any way you wish (synthetic wigs come with a ‘fixed’ cut, which has been established by the manufacturers, and the synthetic hairs keep the ‘memory’ of that cut), although, yes, it also means taking some more time to get them styled first (while synthetic wigs just need a brush and are ready to wear!). Washing them, however, is pretty similar, and, in fact, I have noticed that almost everyone out there who wrote a tutorial for washing wigs does not differentiate between human hair wigs and synthetic ones.

Synthetic wigs can have their hairs made of different materials and techniques, the most advanced and sophisticated being a Japanese invention, Kanekalon. It’s not a ‘new’ product, but rather something that the Kaneka corporation invented precisely 60 years ago and has been developing ever since. The current generation of Kanekalon synthetic hair fibres is ultra-light (as light as human hair) and heat-resistant; it’s so perfectly manufactured to resemble human hair that even experts (I mean hairdressers!) have a hard time figuring out the difference; the only good test is to set the fibres on fire, because plastic burns differently from human hair and smells differently too — but of course you’ll destroy the fibres that way!!

Kanekalon-based wigs can pretty much be styled like human hair wigs using heat; and, because they are heat-resistant, it also means that they can be washed like human hair wigs. But there are still a few differences to take into account! Also, a lot of brands claim to use ‘Japanese fibre’, giving the impression that they are using Kanekalon, when in reality they are using some cheap substitute ‘made in China’. Now, Kanekalon is not the only player in the market; there are a lot of high-quality synthetic hair fibres out there, some of which are close enough to ‘pass’ as Kanekalon fibres (or even human hair!). For a lay person they might really be undistinguishable. I do have an older wig which was sold as being ‘100% human hair’, but the price is definitely not right for a real human hair wig. When feeling those fibres and comparing it to the human hair wig I’ve got, the difference is so minimal that, with my eyes blindfolded, I might confuse both — that’s how good some synthetic fibres are these days! That’s why I have no qualms to recommend to new crossdressers to invest in a good, high-quality synthetic wig: nobody will know the difference, and they are much easier to maintain, because they keep the style even after washing and heavy brushing (although you can change the style with heat on Kanekalon wigs!).

Why use human hair wigs then, if the difference is imperceptible? Well, I have told this in the past, and I will repeat again: in general, human hair wigs, with proper maintenance, will last much, much longer. At the rhythm I wear them, a good quality synthetic wig will last me 6-12 months — after that, the ends will be so split, feeling like raw straw, that the wig is not useable again. A human hair wig, if properly maintained, can last a whole decade. That, however, really requires a lot of tricks, some of which I will reveal today.

Human hair wigs are also less irritating, at least to people who are susceptible to allergies; you will perspire less under a human hair wig than under one made of plastic, even if it’s a well-ventilated one (as is commonplace today among the better class of wigs). Loose, stray hairs will not irritate the skin as much — it’s just human hair, after all, even if it’s not your hair. And, of course, you can have way more fun in styling them, although I guess that you will be able to accomplish the same results with a Kanekalon wig — the main difference is that you might not need any heat to do some simple things with a human hair wig (I use rollers!), while even the best Kanekalon wig will need huge amounts of hair spray to be tweaked into the style you wish — or you will be an expert in manipulating all those heating tools to accomplish the same result.

So, yes, there are advantages and disadvantages for each type of wig.

Chemicals and why they matter

Now, the first lesson you might get when washing your wig for the first time is that you have to pay extra attention to what products you buy, because they might affect the wig (or even destroy it). Twenty years ago, when I first started to wash my wigs, I was told never to use any product with alcohol (that means no perfume) in it — the main reason being that alcohol will dry out the wig, and both synthetic and human hair wigs are already ultra-dry. But several chemicals might also interfere in the way the wig hairs have been manufactured, which meant being very careful with what one would buy — it often meant ordering from special shops, retailing to hair salons, selling products specifically for wigs and hair extensions. Such products are usually expensive, but the advantage is that they also come in large bottles.

While this is understandable for synthetic wigs, is there any need to be careful with human hair wigs as well? The answer is ‘yes’. Even though the raw material for a human hair wig is, indeed, human hair, only those with virgin human hair have ‘untreated’ hair. Virgin hair is often more expensive and comes in very few colour choices, except for European hair (which is used only by the top of the top of the luxury brands, since it’s insanely expensive) — this is because the most available kind of human hair comes from India and is therefore mostly black or at least a very deep and dark brown, and mostly straight or with a slight wave; some comes from China (Chinese hair is stronger, but also thicker, which can limit what you can do with it) or Vietnam (similar to Chinese hair but sometimes slightly cheaper), which is also black and completely straight; and finally, Brazil also exports plenty of human hair, which is often also very dark and very curly.

Thus, to get any other shade, virgin hair needs to be bleached first. This is a process that uses much more aggressive chemicals than what is used in salons for natural hair, since it is something that will be mass-produced in a large factory, without the fear of harming anyone. The bleaching process naturally also damages the hair much more than it would damage one’s natural hair, but since human hair wigs are not supposed to last forever, they know they can go extreme with that bleach.

Then a dye is applied to the hair. Again, this is a much stronger — and chemically way more powerful — kind of dye than what is commonly used at salons. It will not go away even with lots of washing: the older human hair wig I had, which had a copper red, remained with pretty much the same shade and colour after 15 years. My current wig has not changed its colour in the past two or so years even after the frequent washing (every other week or so), while dye from a hair salon usually fades after a few weeks, or at best after a few months.

Naturally enough, such aggressive treatment will weaken the hair, and that’s why it goes through a few more chemical processes to keep it in good condition for a long time. It’s also possible that some hair will go through special chemical ‘baths’ to make them more (or less) wavy, for instance. But due to all these manufacturing processes, the end result is not exactly natural hair, and that is one of the reasons why processed human hair seems to be so similar in texture and properties to high-quality Kanekalon fibre: both kinds have been through complex chemical processes until they are finally weaved into a wig. Both are the results of heavy-duty industrial manufacturing.

And here is where the first ‘myth’ is born: because processed human hair (the more usual type) has already undergone so many aggressive chemical treatments, washing it (and maintaining it in general) ought to be done very carefully in order not to destroy the whole hair.

This might have been a real issue decades ago, when industrial processes were quite different, but… I have found out that there has been some exaggeration in the ‘fragility’ of modern-generation human hair wigs. They are much stronger than what the sellers claim. Perhaps they are only shielding themselves to avoid lawsuits, I don’t know — with human hair wigs costing up to something like €5000 (!), it’s clear that manufacturers do not want their customers to spoil the wigs after the first washing and sue them!

So, how ‘careful’ should we be with a human hair wig? Well, careful enough: what you should keep in mind is that a human hair wig ought to be treated as having very dry and damaged hair which has undergone the equivalent of many bleachings and many dying operations. That means that it’s fragile, yes, and just grabbing the first bottle in the supermarket might not be the best choice.

Fortunately for us, real women also have dry hair, and they also bleach it repeatedly, and also dye it — often in low-quality salons who don’t know what they’re doing — and they get their own real, natural hair very damaged. And this has made a whole industry popping up into existence for dealing with so-called ‘dry and damaged’ hair — exactly what we need to take care of our human hair wig!

How low-quality synthetic wigs ought to be washed

First, a recap of the old method of washing wigs:

1. Fill a basin with cold water and dilute a handful of shampoo in it. Use a shampoo without perfume and without alcohol; ideally, a product designed for wigs and hair extensions; if not, use something for ‘dry and severely damaged’ hair.
2. Brush your wig carefully but vigorously, making sure that it does not have knots anywhere.
3. Very gently place the wig inside the water, making sure that it retains its shape even after being immersed in water — that is, if it’s a long wig, don’t separate the many strands, but try to keep them together.
4. Slosh it very gently around, still making sure that it maintains the overall shape — if it doesn’t, you’ll get a lot of tangles in the hair, and it will be a mess to untangle it (and very likely you’ll loose a few strands in the process).
5. Wait for 15-30 minutes. So, no rubbing, no vigorous scrubbing, like you would do to your own hair. No, the wig is supposed to be left in place and let it soak the water and shampoo.
6. Now rinse it by filling a basin with fresh, clean, cold water, and immersing the wig repeatedly into it. This will probably take a long time (more on that later).
7. Repeat step 1, but this time with conditioner. Again, select a conditioner for ‘dry and damaged hair’, without alcohol, etc.
8. Go through the remaining steps. You’ll notice that the conditioner takes way more effort to get out of the hair; you’ll need a lot of more clean water! And it’s very important that you get the excess product out of the wig, or it’ll look terrible after drying out.
9. You might wish to add a hair mask after the conditioner. Or replace the conditioner with the hair mask. Your choice! I usually do both, unless I’ve not got enough time, then I just do one of them. Note that the quantity will be pretty much the same in all cases, i.e. for long hair, about a handful of product. Hair mask works better if you rub it into the hair, however, but because this is supposed to be ‘dangerous’ to do, just let it get absorbed slowly.
10. Do not hair blow the wig; if you’re really in a hurry, you might have no other choice, but then use just cold air to dry it (yes, it will take eternities; but heat might damage the wig…). Instead, what you should do is to place the wig very gently — again, making sure that it’s still in the same shape! — on top of a towel, cover it with a second towel (or use a long one folded in two), and gently tap on the wig with the palms of your hands. Do not rub the wig, as you would do with your natural hair! The tapping is actually very efficient and will set loose a surprising amount of water (in fact, I have tried the same method with my natural hair, and, yes, it works even better than rubbing and scrubbing with the towel; the difference is that you ought to rub your scalp once in a while — it’s a kind of massage! — because it’s good for it; that’s why we learn as kids to vigorously rub our scalp and hair).
11. Comb the wig very carefully, starting with the ends and slowly working towards the roots, but be extra-careful at the top, so not to damage the wig cap. Use a wide-toothed comb, like in the picture; I personally prefer a wooden comb than a plastic one, because wood will not accumulate as much static electricity.
12. Put the wig on a stand (you have one of those, right?) and let it dry naturally. If it’s a very long wig with dense hair, it can take a few days…
13. After it dries, it’s highly likely that you’ll need to comb it again.

All right, if you look it up on the many sites on the Internet, you’ll see a few variations on the above method; the differences, however, will not be huge. For instance, some might suggest using warm water instead of cold one; not hot but mildly warm, because most shampoos and conditioners are designed to work at around 40-45ºC or so, which is the water temperature used by most people when taking a shower.

Also, there will be not much difference between the techniques used for synthetic wigs and for human hair wigs. The only exception is the so-called ‘microwave restoration’ method for human hair wigs: basically, you put a lot of hair mask on the wig, place the wig inside a plastic bag, and microwave it. Sounds crazy? Yes, but there is some science behind it: the mask (or eventually conditioner, it should work as well) will get heated and penetrate the hair fibres much better, while not damaging the wig in the process. Why? Well, it’s due to physics really. Microwave ovens essentially heat things up by getting water molecules to vibrate at much higher frequency (the higher it is, the ‘hotter’ it becomes). Because all our food is made of essentially water, this works well for heating food. But all hair products contain  a lot of water molecules as well, so it reacts quite well to microwaving; while natural hair, by contrast, doesn’t contain that much water (as said before, human hair wigs behave as ‘dry and damaged’ hair), so it will be much less affected by the microwave oven itself — which means it won’t be damaged in the process. In other words: you’re heating up the products used for hair treatment, which work better at around body temperature, while not heating up the wig hair itself and therefore not damaging it.

Skeptic? Take a look:

For the record, yes, I have tried this out on what was sold to me as a ‘human hair’ wig (I have no way of telling if it is or not), and it made an impressive difference — the hair was silky and shiny as never before, not even when it was brand new! There was just a catch: my microwave oven is not big enough for very long hair, so, unfortunately, there was a bit of hair that was ‘folded’ (I didn’t notice it when placing the plastic bag inside the microwave oven), and, because even the heated-up conditioner/hair mask will also heat the wig hair to a degree (just not as dramatic as, say, a curling device), it was enough to get a permanent kink on the wig, which was a shame, since it was otherwise wonderful.

The microwave technique ought only to be used with virgin hair, because one never knows what kind of treatment it went through to get the current colour; it’s plausible that water-based dyes have been used in the process, and, of course, these will be heated up by the microwave as well with unpredictable results: with luck, nothing happens; with bad luck, the dye might fade, or smudge, or somehow chemically react with the hair and damaging it permanently, I don’t know (and I don’t want to experiment!).

Vintage hairdressing: the benefits of rollers!

A much more peaceful form of ‘treatment’ is using hair rollers. These can be used both by synthetic wigs and human hair wigs, although, because synthetic wigs have ‘memory’, the effects on human hair wigs will be dramatic.

There is actually a lot that can be achieved with hair rollers. You might have noticed that they have different diameters. The larger ones are mostly used for creating volume; the smaller ones are used for creating waves and (possibly) fixing some split hairs.

If you only wish to add more volume, this is the easiest thing to do: just get separate strands as close to the top as possible, and roll them up, from the sides and behind, and that’s it. The wig should dry with the rollers applied, and it’s best if you can wait one day until you remove the rollers. They might give the wig a slight wave (it depends on the kind of human hair you’ve got), but the more visible aspect will be the illusion of more volume. Synthetic wigs will not benefit much from this technique.

You can also get slight waves or curls by using the smaller rollers. These are usually applied at the bottom layers of the wig, so that the curls are more visible that way. If you roll the strands in the front laterally or diagonally, you’ll achieve the same kind of curls as with an iron, with the difference that no heat is applied. They will not last long but they will look great (and natural!) while they last.

Nothing forbids you to use the smaller rollers all over the wig to get it wavy all over; it works to a degree. But if you wish more permanent curls — the kind that will last at least a whole evening going out dancing! — then the trick is to hair-spray them while they’re drying, and just removing the rollers when the hair is totally dry.

Again, using this technique on synthetic wigs will have not much of an effect, although if the fibre is good enough, the hair-spraying technique should work well.

Now, to fix split hairs, the trick is to use the smaller rollers just at the tip of all the strands. In other words, instead of rolling the strands up to the roots, you just roll them one turn or so. This works on both human hair wigs as well on synthetic ones, and you can repeat it as much as you wish, it won’t damage the hair — rather the contrary. Of course, again, we’re just creating an illusion that the hair is not split, by placing the ends ‘artificially’ together, letting them dry all close to each other with a gentle curl at the end. Sometimes that’s enough. On a very damaged synthetic wig, however, there will be not much hope for such extreme cases: the fibres are completely broken down, and they will not look better just by curling them with rollers.

On human hair wigs, however, there is still some hope left: using serums specially designed for split hairs. What they do I have no idea, but I’ve noticed that all of them include paraffin, or at least a paraffin derivative. Paraffin, of course, is a subproduct of petroleum, and not everybody will want something like that on their wigs (or natural hair!), but if you have no qualms about paraffin, then it might be just the product you want: it will coat the hair strands at the very tips with a thin layer of (invisible) wax, enough to ‘close’ the split end, and hold on to whatever moisture is inside the hair (which will be not much on a wig). It will also protect the hair against future splitting; this is particularly useful on relatively long hair (shoulder-length or longer), because it will be constantly rubbing against clothes and chairs and whatnot, and be subject to splitting much easier. Paraffin helps to protect the hair for longer periods.

The way I apply it to my human hair wig is simply by placing a little bit of the serum in my fingers, slip them through the last 10 cm of the strand or so, and rolling it up. This will give good results on human hair wigs; I have no idea what happens on synthetic ones because I haven’t tried it out!

I have also asked around about any side-effects from frequent usage of paraffin-based serums on human hair wigs, but it looks like not many people have written about those, or that I haven’t been thorough enough in my searches. The truth is that people use those on their natural hair, and have done so for years, and as far as I know, they haven’t had any problems; then again, natural hair grows, and you can always cut the split ends — an option you don’t have with a wig (unless you’re fine with shorter hair, of course!).

Sandra’s Ultimate Wig Washing Technique (Breaking All Rules!)

In the past few months, my wife and I really had to cut our costs to a bare minimum, and that meant saving money to get my regular wig maintenance by doing it myself at home. For the past months, I’ve noticed that the wig was needing more frequent washes, which is usually a bad sign (perspiring like crazy is also not necessarily good for the wig; alas, I cannot do much about that on hot days… and that means washing the wig more frequently, too). And it got more tangled as well — yet another bad sign, namely, that the ends were starting to split so dramatically that they would entangle themselves with the nearest strands, making a mess out of it.

I do own a detangling comb which works quite nicely, but there are limits to the miracles it can achieve. Sometimes you get such strong knots on the hair that the strands are simply ripped apart — there is nothing you can do about it. Yes, I use a few sprays to help to untangle hair, but… as said, there is a limit to what you can do.

A month ago or so, something terrible happened — something which I had only encountered a few times before in my life as a wig owner, and it meant either sending the wig straight to my specialist wig hairdresser, or, well, throwing the wig away. Basically, after carefully soaking the wig in cold water, and swirling it around very gently, suddenly almost all strands get tangled together — you basically get what I call a ‘soaked rat’: a huge mess of incredibly entangled hair, so much, in fact, that you have no wig any more — you just have a ball of tangled hair.

This happened perhaps half a minute after placing the wig into cold water. I did brush it before dropping it in the basin, just like I always do. I made sure that there were no visible tangles. But… for some mystic reasons… sometimes you get the ‘soaked rat’, no matter how careful you are.

The last time this happened to the very same wig I took over two hours to untangle it; I lost some hair strands in the process. But this was worse. Much worse. I had never seen a wig so dramatically tangled before!

Incredibly frustrated, I started the long, painful process to untangle strand by strand, as far as possible. I got some reasonable progress, until I stumbled upon four mega-knots, which would use up half of the wig’s hair or so. These seemed to be absolutely impossible to untangle, no matter what I tried. I was getting desperate. My wife wondered what was taking so long, and took pity on the ruined wig, or what I thought that was a ruined wig, and tried to help me out.

She quickly came to the same conclusion as I did: that some of the knots had to be ripped apart, there was really not much to be done about that. I was just hoping that enough strands would remain to make the wig still wearable. And fortunately that was the case. Sure, the wig lost some of its volume, but after a couple more hours, it was untangled — with lots of hair missing.

Well, the truth is that I had no other choice. I couldn’t even afford some professional maintenance, much less a new wig. So I had to be content with whatever I managed to salvage from the ‘soaken rat’.

For a few days, things worked out fine, the wig was still acceptable for wearing. Then I went through a few crossdressing sessions where I perspired like crazy. I tried to avoid washing by using the dry shampoo and the dry conditioner I had. This worked to an extent, but soon it became clear that something more dramatic was needed.

I’ve been using Schwarzkopf’s BC Repair Rescue Sealed Ends for quite a while (the prices around here are higher than on Amazon!), but that’s something you shouldn’t use too much, which soon became sort of a Catch-22: if I use it thoroughly (especially on rollers, as described before!) then it was clear that the hair would look ‘as new’. However, possibly because of the paraffin, or the way it interacts with the hair (I don’t know enough about hair products to tell), it also meant that the wig would need to be washed sooner — or I’d get a ‘wet look’, with thick, weighty hair strands (although healthy-looking ones!). I prefer that to a looser, lighter look where all the hair is split, of course, but I yearned to get the wig light and shiny again.

By sheer coincidence, because the Schwarzkopf serum/cream is slowly running out, I came across a much cheaper product I had never bought before: the Pantene Expert Collection Pro-V Hydra Intensify Extreme Hydration Serum (for some strange reason, I couldn’t find it on Pantene’s official website; perhaps it’s a product ending its lifetime…). Because it was so much cheaper, I didn’t give it a second thought. Sometimes it’s good to change products once in a while. So I gave it a try on the next time I wore the wig and… there was really a ‘wow’ moment. The results were insanely better than I got with the product from Schwarzkopf! And somehow the hairs also acquired a new glossy shine which they didn’t have before (more on that later!)

Still, there was no way to further way to delay washing the wig. So, with a sigh, I thought, oh well, either this will work, or it will be the last day of my human hair wig — and I would have to fall back to an old synthetic wig I’ve got stored for an emergency.

So what did I decide? To break all the rules. After all, what got the wig tangled in the first place was that immersion in cold water and the gentle sloshing around. Once it got tangled that way, I never managed to untangle it — not with the conditioner, not with the mask, not with the untangling sprays I’ve got.

Well, my mind worked the following way: this particular wig is undoubtedly made of human hair; it comes from a very respectful Italian brand specialising in wigs for women who underwent chemotherapy, and was sold by my wig hairdresser, who is also honest about the things she sells at their salon. It might not be made of the most expensive human hair out there (it’s not expensive enough for that), but I can assume that it’s made of the finest quality Indian Rémy hair. Sure, it was blanched and dyed, and probably got a few extra layers of chemicals as well; but, in essence, it’s nevertheless human hair and responds well to treatments designed for extremely dry, brittle, and damaged human hair.

So I should wash it like I wash natural hair.

Right? It just seems logical!

Well, maybe it’s not, but after carefully combing the wig to make sure it had no knots and tangles,I decided to wash it the ‘normal’ way. And this meant using the shower head set to a ‘normal’ temperature (around 42ºC or so), holding the wig in my hand and letting the water flow naturally, from the top of the wig to the ends. And to make sure the hair didn’t get tangled, I was constantly combing the wig with a wide-tooth comb.

Next came shampooing. As said, I use a shampoo for ‘dry and damaged’ hair. Here I was a bit more careful: starting from the top and slowly working a lather down to the roots, I didn’t scrub the hair vigorously, but merely let the shampoo flow naturally to cover the whole hair surface. Apparently you ought to do it on natural hair anyway. Again, I used the wide-tooth comb to make sure no strands got tangled. So far, so good: the hair seemed to be properly washed and shampooed, and I had zero tangles in it, so it was time to rinse it, and apply conditioner.

In the past, even when the wig was relatively new, and when I did wash it the ‘recommended’ way (i.e. just gently soaking it in cold water in a basin), I noticed that once the shampoo was off the hair, it started immediately to tangle, especially down at the split ends. But this didn’t happen this time. It remained tangle-free! Why? I can only speculate that the combination of using the shampoo at the water temperature it was meant to be used and the wide-tooth comb to make sure no nasty knots popped up, made a whole world of difference.

Next it was time for the conditioner. Unlike the shampoo, it’s not meant to be used on the roots, so it’s supposed to be applied only from half-way until the ends. I don’t know if that has something to do with the way the conditioner interacts with the delicate roots or the scalp itself. Wigs, however, don’t suffer from the same issue, so I tend to apply the conditioner almost to the top.

Modern-day conditioners act very quickly, a minute or so is usually enough to get it ‘activated’ (or whatever happens to conditioners while you wait that minute). When using cold water, however, things are different; again, conditioners are supposed to be ‘warmed up’ to body temperature or thereabouts. This is why some wig washing tutorials say that you should let the wig be soaked into water with dissolved conditioner for several minutes. This eventually works, but now I start suspecting that the conditioner will not get totally activated that way. I don’t know, it’s just the way I would chemically design hair products: for storage, they are usually stored at ‘room temperature’, i.e. something between 20 and 25ºC; for activation, even if you shower in cold water, at the very least the hair (even long hair) will be close to body temperature. What that means is that hair product manufacturers have a margin for storage versus activation — if I were a chemical engineer designing such a product, I would make it only get activated at around 30ºC or so, and put a label on the product to store it ‘outside direct sunlight’ or ‘not close to sources of heat’.

No such labels or warnings are on the products I use, so I can only speculate that this is the way they work. They can also be activated — ‘cured’, I believe that would be the word — just by contact with air, or any substance contained in hair (which would be harder to do, I guess, but not impossible). Whatever the actual chemical mechanism is, the truth is that most people do not wash their natural hair with cold water and let it soak the products by putting them in a basin. Instead, they put the products on their hair and let it stay there for a while.

Needless to say, I continued to use the comb over and over again, making sure that no strands got tangled, even though that is highly unlikely when applying conditioner (part of its action is to detangle hair, after all). Still, combing the hair also helps to distribute the product more evenly.

After that, it was time to rinse the wig again, using the comb once more, and apply the hair mask, which is pretty much applied just like a conditioner. In fact, some people tell me that it’s overkill to do both a conditioner and a hair mask, but that’s what I have been doing for years, so I stuck to my routine. Again, because the hair mask was applied on warm hair (i.e. warmed up to body temperature or so), I didn’t wait for as long as I usually do (sometimes even an hour!) – the mask is supposed to reach the peak of its chemical activity after a few minutes.

And then it was time to rinse once more. Conditioner and hair mask take a lot more water to remove properly, and it’s not so easy to figure out when all the product is removed, since it is supposed to leave the hair soft and shiny, with a smooth texture. I just basically ‘overdo’ the rinsing – my wig hairdresser tells me I use too much product anyway – but always, always made sure to properly comb the wig all the time. At the end of the whole process, I had a perfectly washed and cleaned wig with zero tangles, knots, or any such irregularities – exactly what I wanted!

It was time to place the wig inside a towel, covering it, and tapping it gently to release the excess water. And after that, you either let it dry, or you place your rollers (which is what I did!). It looked much better while wet, compared to what had happened last time I had washed it, and of course this time there were absolutely no tangling, but I was curious about how it would look like when dry…

Surprise, surprise: it never looked so good! Seriously! To give it the finishing touch, I added the Pantene serum and combed the wig with a super-extra-fine metal comb (it’s supposed to be a comb for my cats!), since that would make the strands visually very fine. And then I had one of those ‘wow’ moments: it had been months, or years, since the wig looked that great! It looked better than new – well, minus the issue of having lost so many hairs over the years, especially on the last wash, but… the ends didn’t seem split, the wig was glossy and shiny and super-light, like I had never seen it before!

It was so good that the volume and extra curl from the rollers even survived to a second day (usually, after my vigorous combing at the end of the day, the curls will disappear, even though the extra volume might hold out a few more days of wearing). In fact, I normally store the wig after spraying some dry shampoo on it (it will help to get rid of the dirt and sweat accumulated over the day), but this time it was not even necessary. The next time I used the wig it was still shiny, glossy, with a wonderfully silky and smooth texture, and still looking ‘as new’ without any split ends, nor the extra-dry and damaged look I always get at the hairs of the back (they are the ones more often in touch with abrasive surfaces, like the back of the car seats, and obviously the clothes as well). Seriously, this ‘treatment’ really made miracles, and I’m now very curious to see what happens next time I need to wash the wig! One thing is for certain: I will use lukewarm water from the shower head again, and make sure I keep constantly combing the wig as I apply water and the products…

Caveats

There is, of course, a catch with this technique: it works only on straight hair, or hair with a natural wave (which seems to be the case of my own wig). If you have styled your wig with curls or extreme waves, then the constant combing under water will very likely make it straight again. In that case, you might not have any other choice but keep the wig soaked inside the basin of water, and hope that it doesn’t tangle… even though you might try out using lukewarm water instead of cold water, to let the products get activated.

Also, I have no way to know if I was merely lucky and didn’t destroy my wig in the process; or if with repeated washing using this technique the wig will have a much shorter lifetime than by using the traditional method. And, obviously enough, I have no idea if the same technique will work on synthetic wigs, even those made of Kanekalon. All I can say is that normal shampoo will work perfectly on good-quality synthetic wigs (if you pick a shampoo for dry hair, that is), since that’s basically just to take the dirt away. Conditioners and hair masks… well, those are supposed to go deeper than the surface, to repair things beneath, inside the hair itself. If it works or not on synthetic fibre, I have no way to tell. Consider only that natural hair is, by definition, dead tissue (at least the visible part of it) — it doesn’t have any biochemical activity inside it anymore. So, in theory at least, it’s not much different from synthetic fibres — whatever products you put on your hair cannot rely on any biochemical activity inside the dead hair cells (unlike, say, skin products), but have to rely on its own chemical properties. On the other hand, natural hair is basically keratinised dead cells (as the cells at the follicle die, they are covered with keratin to stick together) — keratin being one of the many proteins made by our body; while Kanekalon is a sort of modified acrylic, that is… a form of plastic. Clearly, what will work on an organic protein will possibly not work on a plastic; the chemistry is way too different for that.

(Note to self: why don’t hair fibre manufacturers produce strands of synthetic hair made out of keratin? There are many industrial patents to extract keratin out of chicken feathers, for instance — that’s where most of the keratin for the cosmetic industry comes from. Surely there must be a way to produce fibres made of keratin using an industrial process; the resulting fibres should have similar chemical properties as natural hair, and, as a bonus, it should be much easier to apply extensions to natural hair: keratin, after all, bonds together to form hair filaments, so you could theoretically bond synthetic keratin hair to natural hair… oh well. Maybe I should buy a chemistry lab and file my own patent )

In conclusion: wigs made of human hair underwent many chemical treatments (except for virgin human hair), but they still retain a lot in common with natural hair. It is therefore not stupid to assume that the way we wash and maintain our natural hair also applies to human hair wigs. In particular, we ought to recreate the same environments in which we apply certain products to our hair; possibly they are meant to be gently warmed up to body temperature before becoming active. Soaking wigs in cold water with a dissolved product may be the only solution for cleaning low-grade synthetic wigs, but higher-end human hair wigs ought to respond better to washing and maintenance in exactly the same conditions as natural hair.

In fact, I wonder if my old crazy idea of taking a shower with the wig was so crazy after all. I did that a few times before I got scared by the idea of applying the least heat to a wig. But now I’m not so sure if washing them in the shower isn’t actually a good idea — perhaps to try out next time!

Unfortunately, back then, I really had very low confidence in my ability to face the public dressed as a woman. It’s also more likely, these days, to find more tolerant people around, although perhaps it wasn’t that bad in the mid-1990s; the truth is that I have no way to know. So, what I did, I limited myself to a closed room in a hotel, and the very occasional car drive in the darkest hours of the night. That was how much I ‘dared’ to do.

Back then, I already had a dream: to be able to master my appearance and self-confidence to go out with some of my crossdressing acquaintances. I had to wait almost two decades for that to happen.

Of course, these days, my life is completely different. And the biggest change in that regard was the sudden realisation that I really didn’t care if I really ‘looked like a woman’ – all I enjoy is going out dressing like I enjoy the most, and being treated according to the gender I present as, namely as a woman. I care little about ‘passing’, and, indeed, people’s reactions amuse me more than annoy me. Perhaps not ironically – but it came as a surprise to me! – the people I get in touch with (shop attendants, waiters, recepcionists, and so forth) never misgender me. In other words: they ‘play along’. I present as a woman, so they treat me as a woman; we both know I might not legally, nor genetically, nor even intellectually be a woman, but people really don’t deliberately ‘offend’ me, by treating me in a way that would be inconsistent with my gender presentation, even if sometimes it can become confusing, when I meet people who have seen me presenting as a male before.

Another of those ironies is that my extrovert façade (I leave it up to my doctors to figure out if it’s just a mask or something I truly am; I can only say that I mostly think and act as an extrovert in most situations, whatever my subconscious might believe about my ‘true nature’ – whatever that is) actually helps me quite a lot in those social interactions. I put people at ease. I make it simple for them to be comfortable with me. I’m friendly, smile a lot, joke to relieve tension, and have no problem in projecting an image of self-confidence which took me perhaps two decades to achieve, but which now comes naturally. And that usually is enough to ‘break the ice’ – and before I start explaining my current dreams, I will shortly go through a few examples!

Fingernails are just fingernails!

Last year, I remember that there was a short sequence of 2 or 3 days when I would be able to dress as a woman. Thus, to save time, I decided to get my fingernails professionally done. This is something quite cheap to do these days, and there are gazillions of options; but I had picked a specific salon belonging to a small network with which I was familiar with, and which have very reasonable prices for their quality. So I walked straight in and asked if they had any vacancies for that specific hour, explaining that I had not made any reservation. It was clear that the person who received me was a bit perplexed about what she ought to do or not. Besides, she was near the end of her shift; but her colleague was still having lunch, and she wasn’t sure if she would return sooner rather than later… and in the mean time, I was obviously a waiting customer!

So she decided to do the manicure herself. I noted that she was way more nervous than I was, probably because she didn’t want to sound offensive in any way, or of doing something wrong that would earn her a reprimand from her boss… so I put her completely at ease. After all, I just wanted something quite simple – I cannot do anything fancy like gel extensions because my wife would never tolerate that (and I’ll come to that later!) so it was a plain and simple job, just what I always get when I present as a male, with the sole difference of getting a coloured varnish instead of a transparent or watery white one.

I’m usually good at small talk, no matter with whom I talk, and I’m not humble enough to pretend that I’m not a charming person; I know I can be charming, and that I actually do it naturally, I don’t need any special effort for doing that. After a few minutes we were on the best of terms, she did a great job, and I thanked her profusely; she admitted never having done a nail job to ‘someone like me’ to which I replied that ‘fingernails are just fingernails’ or something with words to the effect.

It was a nice experience, of course, and one of the many where I wasn’t really treated ‘differently’, so to speak, even though there was an initial hesitation and it took a few minutes to break the ice.

Old face but new… body?!?

Another fun episode was when I recently went to the salon where I buy my hairpieces. Usually I go there dressed as a male; but the last two times, I went as a female. Now, the penultimate time was relatively peaceful since I came in relatively late, when the salon was almost going to close. But the last time was different.

I should explain that this particular shop is located in a building almost hundred years old, in one of the largest avenues of Lisbon, which was built shortly after we became a republic in the early 20th century. The salon is on the first floor. These old buildings tended to have some ultra-small shops at the ground level, squeezed between the stairs and the front… they used to be tobacco shops or host small repair services (like shoe repair for instance) — the kind of activity where you just need one person and not much storage or display space. With the hefty renovation being done all over the city, most of these tiny shops have gone, but this building still has one: it belongs to a 50-ish old Portuguese from African descent, and he is a dressmaker, or at least he does some work on his ancient sewing machine, which is set atop a tiny counter, behind which he sits most of the time, doing his work. Along the entrance hall some of his wares — mostly ethnic dresses of all shapes and colours — are on a display, and there is a full body mirror as well. I have never bought anything from him, but since I’ve known the salon for well over a decade, even if I don’t go there that often (mostly to get my wig professionally taken care of, for routine maintenance — and, of course, to buy new ones once in a while!), the dressmaker (or whatever he is!) knows me by now; he’s very friendly, and we always exchange some small talk for the brief time I literally walk ‘across his shop’ — so to speak! — to reach the stairs. Of course, we’re not soul buddies, nor even on first-name speaking terms… but if you have seen someone so many times over such long periods, we’re sort of ‘familiar faces’ to each other.

So, as Sandra, I naturally gave him a ‘good evening’ this last time. He is used to people addressing him, and probably knows my voice even without looking away from his sewing work, so he started addressing me back, but then noticed how I looked like that day, and, shocked or surprised, or even both, he sort of stopped mid-sentence. It was kind of amusing, to be honest, but I went straight up the stairs and got to talk to my favourite hairdresser (who — I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before — is a gorgeous blonde) for a while — she had no waiting customers, I hadn’t seen her in a while, and although obviously she had seen me wearing a wig lots of times, she hadn’t seen me fully dressed as a woman before (the other time I went there, I talked to her colleague instead). She was rather positively impressed with the way I looked (even though she had seen pictures of me before!).

And when I finally left her, I passed again by the dressmaker, and gave him another ‘good evening’, a short wish for a pleasant upcoming weekend, and so forth. This time, he started to reply, but swallowed the wrong way, and just coughed in embarrassment. Poor guy! Even though he very likely suspected for years that I went there for the wigs, he clearly didn’t imagine that I would, one day, walk in the building in broad daylight dressed as a woman. But… he nevertheless tried to be polite, as he usually is; the problem was that he was too shocked

It’s just for tobacco…

You have seen my pictures smoking, and you know that I almost always use a holder (the rare exception being some ‘special request’ from a fan…). There are good reasons for that, which I’m sure I have talked about before, but what you don’t know is what is inside the holder!

You’d be forgiven to believe that it was just a hollow cylinder. And, in fact, that’s how early cigarette holders were constructed — just a tube where the cigarette closely fits at one end. But nowadays holders have another additional usage: trapping the tar. ‘Tar’ is an abstract, non-scientific name for the gooey brown residue that remains from burning an organic product. It’s not just ashes! There are other remains, and, in fact, it’s the ‘tar’ that is made of the 7,000+ (toxic) chemicals which smokers inhale. It’s also what makes a smoker’s house be covered with an almost uniform coat of a sticky, brown substance — which we shrug off as ‘nicotine stains’, but the truth is that all of that is actually ‘tar’. Now, of course, smokers know that the ‘tar’ will accumulate inside one’s lungs, to the point that the self-regenerating ability of the lungs stop working, and then it means using a hacking cough to get rid of the mucus that covers and protects the lung interiors, until not even that is enough, at which time the smoker will probably die from emphysema, lung cancer, or some similar fatal (and painful) disease.

In theory at least, if there was a way of removing all the tar from tobacco smoke, then it’s nothing more than nicotine on water vapour (just like on e-cigarettes, in fact) with some aromatic molecules for taste. Unfortunately, currently there is no easy way to get rid of the tar, or at least of all the tar, and obviously there is no moral interest in researching and developing a ‘healthier’ solution (with a few exceptions: for instance, heating tobacco, as opposed to burning it, eliminates the tar because there is no combustion, and the tobacco leaves get gently roasted that way, which will keep the flavour — and the nicotine! — but leave no residue).

The first (and nearly almost last…) technology used to capture the tar is the paper/cotton filter known as the ‘cork’ — which is placed at one end of the cigarette and is traditionally painted in an absurd orange-y colour (‘corks’ used to be made of real cork, and I guess that the colour is a reminder of those ancient days). As every smoker knows, just puffing a few times on a cigarette will turn the filter inside brown or even black — this is tar being trapped, but, as we also well know, it’s by far not enough: most of the tar still gets through to the mouth and lungs.

Modern cigarette holders have an additional filter. They can be made of several materials. The simplest models just have a way to squeeze the smoke through a tiny hole — large enough for water vapour, nicotine molecules, and aromatic molecules to squeeze through, but small enough to capture a lot more tar. This works to a degree, but tends to spoil the taste. The filters are replaceable as they accumulate more and more tar until they stop working. They’re made of plastic, so they’re not very ecological, so the clever Chinese have devised a more sophisticated method using a ‘filter’ made of metal instead of plastic. The advantage? It can be easily cleaned with alcohol (which dissolves the tar almost instantly), unlike the plastic filters, which will never be completely clean that way (yes, the tar will also adhere to the plastic over time… so we smokers should really think about what the tar must do to our lungs!).

There are, however, alternatives. My own choice is using a filter made of silica gel — that same material which is used for absorbing humidity from the air and keep the insides of boxes dry. Silica gel crystals will also trap tar quite efficiently, until they become completely black and stop being useful — meaning that you have to replace the filter with a new one, generally after smoking a pack of cigarettes.

Now, depending on the brand, using these filters can quickly become very expensive — sometimes as expensive as the pack of cigarettes themselves! One might argue that one’s health is more important than the price, but if that were true, nobody would smoke in the first place. So, what do I do? I buy silica gel filters from a different brand, which are several orders of magnitude cheaper than the ones for my own holders. The problem, of course, is that each brand deliberately has its own filter sizes, and usually they are not compatible with each other — that way, holder brands often make far more money from the filters than from the holders themselves. It’s exactly the same thing that happens with ink jet printers: ink is cheap to produce, but it’s sold at exorbitant prices, and theoretically the most expensive liquid in the world. That’s how printer manufacturers can keep the cost of their printers down, earning their profits from ink. And I use the same principle for my holders: I just open up the cheaper filters and drop the content inside an empty filter correctly sized for my holder brands. Yes, it means that every day I have to ‘refill’ the filter with silica gel, but it just takes a few seconds, and, as said, I’m saving orders of magnitude of money. In theory at least I could even go cheaper and buy silica gel wholesale directly from a supplier; my problem is that I have no idea what kinds are ‘safe’ for usage (if ‘safe’ is the right word in this context). The silica gel crystals designed for cigarette holders may be produced differently, I have no idea; so I prefer to trust (again, for a certain value of the word ‘trust’ in this context…) to cigarette holder filter manufacturers to pick the ‘right’ kind of silica gel…

Anyway! That’s quite a lot of background, just to explain my story. As you can imagine, there are not many cigarette holder users, so there are relatively few tobacco shops which carry filters for the holders. There are also several different, competing holder brands, each with its own filter system. Most tobacco shops will carry, at most, one or perhaps two brands. Very few will bother to stock filters for all brands (even though well-packed silica gel filters can last a long time), and, over the past decades, I have been a good customer of those very few tobacco shops which have ‘my’ brand. When I moved to my current home, not quite two decades ago, it took me quite a while to find the only tobacco shop in the area which carries those filters, and, since then, I have almost exclusively bought them there.

Although the tobacco shop is tiny, I know the owner quite well; she does shifts with the rest of the staff (which I suspect to be members of her family…), so it’s not as if I always buy from her; it really depends on the day and the hour. But the other day I noticed that I had ran out of silica gel after I had dressed as a woman, and it was just plain stupid to take everything off, drive a dozen kilometres or so to that tobacco shop, buy the filters, drive back home, and start dressing up again… this would take me the whole day! So I decided to go there dressed as a woman.

Now, this shop, as said, is really not much more than a glorified kiosk inside a shopping mall — it’s really tiny, but crammed full with all sorts of tobacco accessories and the most exotic brands of tobacco I’ve ever seen. Besides tobacco, they also sell magazines, newspapers, and our equivalent of the national lottery and similar games — because, at most, they can have two people attending customers (and usually it’s just one), there is always a queue for that shop. Always. The queue may be as small as 3 to 4 people, or as large as 20 or so, but it always means waiting to be served — and most customers just want the lottery, but that takes some time to automatically validate, so it means waiting (larger shops, of course, will separate the ‘games section’ from the actual queue for tobacco products, but this kiosk is too small for that).

I noticed that this time, besides another staff member I didn’t know, the owner was there, too —and she immediately recognised me. She also made a clear look of disapproval. But, of course, she knows I’m a regular customer. So she practically did everything to make sure that I got served by the other staff member. But the queue was going slow — people were patiently waiting to play their lottery games — and it was not easy to predict who would serve who. At some point, she got some help from her husband, to speed up the queue; but the husband looked at me twice, and invented some plausible excuse to get away (I could hear her saying ‘but you cannot leave me now!’ before the husband grabbed his wallet and disappeared in the blink of an eye).

At this time, I found the whole scene utterly amusing, as the owner struggled to not serve me in any possible way; but, eventually, she had no way out. Before I could even ask her for anything, she said: ‘You’re here for your usual filters, right?’ That was when I had absolutely no doubt that she had recognised me

But really… I don’t bite, and transgenderity is not catching. I was not really going to ask for something extraordinary! In fact, I was just there for a pack of cigarettes and ‘my usual filters’, as she so well put it. The whole show of ‘not serving’ me was totally pointless. I might complain now, after the fact, that I was not particularly well treated; but because I know the owner of the shop for so long, I know that she must have had her politeness glands surgically extracted decades ago. She’s absolutely incapable of being nice to anyone (apparently not even to her own husband), so I was not treated worse than usual, or, in fact, worse than anyone else on that very same queue. It was just funny how she did try so hard to avoid me!

‘Friend’ is a genderless word (at least in English)

It’s one thing to pop up in front of someone you have never seen in your life (and possibly will never see again) and watch their reaction as they figure out that this tall, curvy ‘thing’ in front of them has most definitely not been born with a female body; I got amused by the funny looks I sometimes get on, say, public transportation, where you will actually ‘see’ thousands of people at the same time, but your eye will just catch the attention of one or two; needless to say, in spite of everything (my height, my ‘unusualness’…), I remain ‘invisible’ in the foreground most of the time. I have also developed a few tricks for that: while women will usually return looks, unless they are very shy (or brought up in a non-Western society), and those who don’t will be deemed ‘unusual’ — and therefore attract attention — there is a way out of it, which is to pretend to be aloof and above everybody else, and basically look towards the infinite and pretty much ignore direct looks. That means coming out as being a snob, of course, but all gorgeous women do that, because they are so used to be ‘checked out’ by anything male in the vicinity.

So I do pretty much the same. I don’t ‘look away’ (or down, which is even worse), because most women will walk with self-confidence and a smile, and not try to disappear from the scene (as I’ve heard that some crossdressers sometimes do when they panic). The trick is never to break your stride, look ahead towards infinity (or towards a shop window, if you’re near one!), and exude self-confidence; the more self-confidence you project, the less likely people will notice you. It’s strange, but every crossdressing manual mentions that; I’ve tried it as well, and I can only say that they were not lying! It’s those who are nervously looking the other way, or down, or fidgeting with their hair or something like that, who catch the attention of the public in general.

Obviously it depends a lot on how you dress, how tall you are, how feminine you look like. There is a lot that can be disguised with a little training, of course. But sometimes there is not much you can do. In my own country, where men are almost all over 1.70m tall, but women rarely reach that height (on average), it’s impossible not to ‘stand out’ if you’re 1.78m tall and wearing heels. That means that you will draw attention, even if you look exactly like any other woman, and dress according to your age, time of the day, and the place where you are.

The other thing, of course, is how you dress and present yourself for the first time (and even on subsequent ones) to people that you know well. I mean really well, like, say, your wife… or your best friend forever.

My own BFF currently lives in Switzerland, but he has also lived in the US for well over a decade, and made a successful career in his area. We became very close friends at the university; we don’t have similar personalities, but we sort of complement each other in many ways. I’m calm and moderate; he’s brilliant and has a temper (he has become far more mellow with age, though!). We both are extroverts under most circumstances, but we also don’t make friends easily – real friends, that is, not ‘acquaintances’, much less ‘Facebook friends’. We share several common interests; I have introduced him to the wonderful world of board games, and he is now a connoisseur way beyond my own interests; we both love science fiction, speculative fiction, philosophy, and reading books. So even after university and with the decrease of available time, we managed to keep in touch regularly, at least once per week, sometimes twice, over several years. Until this country really became too small for my friend; he quickly became overqualified to work here, and, of course, there was a limit to how much he could earn. So he packed his belongings, grabbed his wife (they married in a hurry after being together for several years, since a legal marriage would make their entrance in the US much easier – I was his ‘best man’ and also attempted to play the organ at his marriage with hilarious results. Long story…), and went to work for many compànies in the US – from top software developers to defense contractors, and he even worked for NASA and the military. One day, when we are too old to get sued, we might share with the public some of the fun moments of his experience dealing with the top IT companies and IT departments of top companies and organisations of the world. Some things, in retrospective, are so incredibly absurd that very likely nobody would believe us anyway…

Being workoholics, we started to see each other much less often — only on the rare occasions that he would spend some time with his parents, say during Christmas or so. He also tends to be busy visiting them, as well as all the other friends he has in Portugal, and that means that his available time is usually very short — and often during periods when everybody else is also very busy (say, with Christmas preparations or New Year celebrations). So there were a few years when we did not even manage to be together for a single day.

Seven months ago or so, I decided to reveal myself that I was transgender, even though I met him in my male clothes; his reply was to reveal himself as bisexual and polyamorous, so he couldn’t care less about what I was or what my choice of clothes would be Still, of course, one thing is to say that, the other is to experience that. Our friendship is now three decades old, and he has always seen me as a male and never thought of me in any other different way. Ironically, he didn’t even know that I smoked; he himself is asthmatic — not really a radical anti-smoker (his ex-wife used to smoke — not much, more like socially — but eventually gave it up because of his health), but rather not comfortable in closed places where smokers are, because the smoke irritates his respiratory system. And it is true that he can get serious lung-related issues because of his asthma (he did in the past, and very likely will be subject to them in the future as well).

Anyway… there was, of course, some anxiety in ‘dressing up’ for being with someone that knows me very well. As said, this is not a mere ‘acquaintance’. It’s not even ‘an old colleague from the university days’. We had been very close — really a ‘bromance’ if you wish — and inseparable for a few years. Even though we have not been even remotely close together often enough in the past 20 years or so, we still consider each other BFFs in spite of everything. Oh, it’s obvious that I have a handful of very good friends, some of which I have known for three decades as well — or people like my own wife, whom I’ve known for twenty years. I’m quite close to a handful of people, some of which might even be reading these lines, and they know who they are But… there is a difference. In a sense, we can both change — and we will! — and age and change our lifestyles and so forth, and have completely different life experiences (for instance, he’s quite a millionaire these days, owning stock options on blue chips from the times he worked for them… while, as I write these lines, I have exactly €239 in my bank — all the money I’ve got in the world! —  and still owe about €1200 in credit cards!). But there will always be a strange bond between us. Oh, nothing romantic, nor sexual; I’m really not attracted to men, and even if I were, my friend is not really an attractive person. He’s also not an easy person to deal with, because of his temper; but I’m used to people with bad temper (I am, after all, married to one) and that never bothered me in the least. He’s also very stubborn, obstinate, and completely sure of himself; when he is in a bad mood (which is not hard for him to get into, he gets easily annoyed by stupid people), he will pronounce his opinions ex cathedra and will never accept or admit that he is wrong in the tiniest detail. The truth is that he is clever enough not to be wrong almost all the time — in that particular aspect, he’s quite similar to my own wife (they get along together, by the way, but my wife is the first to admit that my friend is not exactly the easiest person to live with!).

Perhaps interestingly enough, though, like most of my close friends, who always are very complex persons (or else I would never really be friends to them: I can talk for hours with shallow people with one-track-minds and little education, but I cannot forge close, long-time friendships with such people), my friend, while having a clearly male mindset in practically all his endeavours and social interactions, he does have a soft side to him as well which is almost feminine. I say that as a huge compliment, of course! And I’m quite sure that the women who are in love with him (and vice-versa!) have touched that soft side of him. I mentioned our discussions about philosophy and future speculation; but he is also very humane in plenty of subjects, and he describes his relationships in terms of the emotional bonds he has, and how he feels towards so many things. I have no idea how much he’s aware that the way he expresses himself outside the workplace is not really part of the ‘typical male stereotype’. But you, reader, should not be surprised by now — all my male friends are like that, in one way or other, no matter how much they fit in the ‘male stereotype’ otherwise. Even my neo-nazi friend (yes, yes, I’ve mentioned him before, and no, he has not changed his mind in spite of current events…) has a very soft and feminine side to him, which I’m sure his own neo-nazi friends do not even have an inkling about.

And of course I’m also stereotyping with these ‘feminine sides’. It’s so unfair, I think, to claim that males are not supposed to express feelings, or emotions, or have an emotional undercurrent to describe aspects of their lives, and their relationships with others. I have dropped hints here and there that I suspect more and more that there is no real difference between how males and females think, in spite of the evidence to the contrary, both at a physical level, as well as at several, well-researched psychological levels. Many people have told me that they quite sure that scientific evidence shows that male and female brains simply work differently, because these brains are physically different, and those physical differences are today unquestionable. Anyway, I will not get back to that conjecture, you can read my earlier articles about it, and to make extraordinary claims, I must bring extraordinary proof (although I will one day talk about Alan Turing’s original ‘intelligence test’, not the one that he is known about, but what he really proposed back then), and this article is not the right one for that…

So… closing the long parenthesis on this side-issue… I was in front of my small closet and thinking what to dress. I mean, society does not prepare us to deal with such an event!

I had some help from the location where he suggested we meet — it was a fancy bar/restaurant/esplanade, and we would meet in the afternoon, for a light snack, in an unseasonably hot day. I first thought of simply picking something out of my casual apparel; but I’m a little self-conscious about my snow white legs (not being a beach fan, I haven’t tanned them yet… it’s May after all, and even though we have been having unreasonably high temperatures for so many days, the thought of wearing short skirts without stockings at this time of the year simply never crossed my mind), so I picked one of my longest dresses — one that is simple enough to be casual, but has some delightful details (like a pseudo-lace in the back that can be pulled to make the waist tighter) to make it seem to be fancier than it actually is (it was bought as a bargain!). And, well, as you can see from the pictures… it does show off my ‘girls’. My friend always loved big-breasted women!

As you’d expect, he did not recognise me when he arrived. To give him some credit, I didn’t see him coming in, either; I was busy posting silly comments on Facebook. But it was clear that he was… impressed, to say the least. The moment of awkwardness actually just lasted some nanoseconds; but I can tell you that he obviously looked at me in a way he never looked at me before. Which ought to be expected, after all! Being bisexual and polyamorous, he had no ‘objections’ to the way I looked — and he certainly repeated twice that ‘I looked great’ — and there was this tiny spark in his eyes now and then. He was amused, surprised, and delighted, and I could tell that just from his body language. In my mind, for some brief moments, there was also some amusement — here we were, two old-time friends, knowing each other for decades, and somehow I was now in a position that I could flirt with my best friend, which evoked a lot of contradictory emotions (in both of us). I mean, I know he was willing; two decades ago, while he was still happily married, he did offer to get me and my wife to ‘swing’ with them, and I was embarrassed at the time, and naturally refused because I’m not into swinging, but in a way I was honoured as well. I’m aware of the ‘swinger code’ among the serious crowd (not the ones who engage in careless swinging ) and understood reasonably well that what he was offering was something special for him and his wife, that he would not share with anyone casually found somewhere, but that they would only do with someone they knew well and fully appreciated in terms of close relationship… which they would naturally allow to become even more closer and intimate that way. Sadly for them, as said, I’m not into it (and neither is my wife… not to mention that she does not find either of them attractive, even if she were inclined to do some swinging — which she’s not), but I made sure that he understood that I wasn’t rejecting his offer out of politeness or so, but merely that I really was not into that. He obviously understood; the good thing about living on the edge of sexual relationships is that people are so much more understanding and do not require complex explanations for a refusal to participate! You either are ‘into it’ or not; there is not much more to know or talk about.

This time, however, there was a stranger undercurrent beneath our pleasant chat. We were not just friends talking for hours upon hours, as we have done so many times in our distant, common past. There was an element of ‘newness’ into it. Sure, people change as they age, and we humans are allegedly mentally equipped to deal with that; but usually people do not change their gender presentation when they get older and society has not prepared us to deal with that!

I remember that he was a bit sloppy with pronouns and names, and I told him that I really didn’t care — I’m not part of the activist crowd who gets furious (or depressed) if they get misgendered. We have known each other for so long that such things are irrelevant: I know perfectly well that he doesn’t mean to insult me in any way, or somehow ‘disapprove’ of what I’m doing. That’s absolutely not the case. It’s just that it’s not easy (even if you master a complex language like Portuguese where you can talk for hours without using gendered pronouns or even someone’s name in a conversation — it’s just a question of bending the grammar in a certain way!). It requires awareness, mindfulness, to do it correctly each time; and no harm is done. He did apologise several times, and I repeated each time that I couldn’t care less what he called me, but he insisted that it was ‘important’. And he also commented twice that ‘I looked great’. Besides that… we just enjoyed ourselves like in the good old times, pretty much at ease like we always did in the past, and we spent a lovely afternoon together. After the initial pleasant surprise, the way I looked or how I dressed was pretty much irrelevant.

From friend to… family

The other day I completely forgot that the doctors of the national health service were on strike. For the record, they did attempt to contact me to inform me of the new date, but I didn’t hear the message, and it was in vain that I tried to get my usual appointment with the psychiatrist.

So I had the rest of the day pretty much off… and decided to call my cousin again, to see if she had some time for us to meet. It happened that she was hurting from her back, and needed some ‘strong hands’ to help her with two sacks with 15kg of cat food. Now, I have already told you that I’m not really a strong person, definitely not for a male of my size, but obviously I could not refuse to help my favourite cousin.

She had seen me as Sandra twice before, so there was no surprise whatsoever (in fact, she has confirmed that she doesn’t notice the least difference between my male and female presentations, something that I agree with – these days, I really don’t make the least effort to ‘be’ different, it’s just the presentation that is different, not the person…). Things were different with the people I met with her. First, we had to talk to an elderly lady, who allegedly runs a wholesale shop for pet food, to whom my cousin introduced me as ‘her friend’ – and happily let me carry those bags of food up a stairway in my high heels.

We drove back to her place, and there we met some of her neighbours. I sort of half-greeted them, half-dragged the food bags out of my cousin’s car, so I missed most of the conversation; but I noticed that, this time, my cousin had introduced me as ‘her cousin’. This was a bit weird for me, to be honest, possibly because I’ve got quite a number of female direct cousins (uh, four, to be more precise… and three male ones, plus another two which are not legally my direct cousins but they are half-brothers of my direct cousins, so I tend to count them as my cousins as well, even if we do not share any genetic material… it’s complicated!), and, up to now, I hadn’t considered myself as ‘one of them’. Things surely get complicated in GenderWorld!

I was a bit curious about what my cousin had talked about with her neighbours, but it looks like they had not really discussed me at all (we trans people so often believe the whole world turns around our navel!), even though one of the neighbours told my cousin that I was very beautiful. That was a bit unexpected, like it always is for me, when people comment on my appearance – I’m much more used to the ‘dress shaming’ (does that exist?) I get from my wife.

Mischievousness is also part of my experience

While thinking back on what all these experiences have in common, I have to admit to a new side of my personality that I wasn’t aware of before: being mischievous! In other words, I enjoy seeing how people react to me, even if their reaction is not absolutely positive.

Surprise, shock, contempt, horror, amusement, or simply ignoring me? Every person reacts differently, and of course most people I come across when going out presenting as a woman will have different life experiences, different education, different knowledge and so forth, and that is why their reaction to me is never the same. It’s obvious that I feel most comfortable around people who treat me no differently in either my male or female presentations; this was certainly the case of my BFF and my cousin, and naturally it’s the case of my psychologists and psychiatrists, who are so used to so many kinds of people (and so many people with gender identity issues) that they don’t react differently (and yes, I’m paying attention to them as well!!). Then there is the case of the person that I need to interact with (say, a shopping attendant or cash register operator) and who is instructed in treating their customers as best as possible, no matter what their own opinions are. This, of course, is possibly a characteristic of my fellow Portuguese citizens: we’re simply too polite to raise issues, and this is true for all ages, so it truly must be a national feature. From the two elderly gentlemen in the pawn shop to the barely-legal-age supermarket cashier, all of them had the same exact reaction: smile, good day/afternoon, being concise and to the point in the questions, wishing me a great day. That’s it. It doesn’t hurt to be polite, and it works wonders: behind the barrier of politeness, you can pretty much ignore everything else. Sometimes I can understand what they are thinking from their body language and the glint in their eyes — usually, ‘surprise’, although amusement comes close, and contempt, if at all, is at the bottom of the list — but what they actually say to me is always with the utmost politeness. I simply believe that, these days, most people are aware of the existence of transgender people, there are just so few of us (who are clearly noticeable as being trans) that most people never come across them. When it happens for the first time, then they have to mentally check themselves. I’m not sure yet if the reason why I get so much politeness comes from presenting as a woman, or simply because I’m immediately noticed as being trans, and therefore they do an effort not to offend me, treating me like royalty, so that I cannot have any complaints. My ‘experiments’ are ongoing! It’s clear that the owner of commercial establishments usually treat me slightly differently than the employees, simply because an employee who has mistreated a customer can be fired (or at least been given a lecture!), while the owner, at worst, will have just lost one customer.

But if you walk around a big city — and Lisbon is so often crammed full of people of all sorts, including tourists, pretty much all over the place — or ride a bus or the subway or, well, any place really where tons of people are packed together, it’s impossible to ignore everyone. Obviously, our eyes are attracted to some things that catch our attention, and here I have no choice but to get a few looks simply because I’m way taller than the average woman in my country, and I have a large frame on top of that. Thanks to therapy, I’m now aware that not everybody looks at me with disgust; some of the people will be drawn to my size, sure, but they will possibly not figure out my physical gender at a first glance. And I understand now a little better why that happens: the prosthetics I use give me the sort of curves that a male cannot possibly have naturally, and that will confuse people. I’m well aware of how natural my wig looks, and, at worst, people might just think that I’ve dyed it to look more reddish, but dying one’s hair is something perfectly legitimate for a female to do anywhere in the world.

It’s just the second look I get that tends to dispel the illusion, or add to the confusion, or make people actually remain looking at me for far longer periods than one usually does when watching people on the streets or on public transportation. If the second look goes to my face, there are some features there that are not really feminine: I cannot disguise my crooked nose or the harsh line of my jaw and chin. I do have unusually full and fleshy lips for a male, and that will confuse people a lot; and although my eyes are deep-set just like all male eyes are, I know I have nice eyes with a slightly unusual colour (blue-green is not frequent in my country; these come from my German genes), and with some mascara, my lashes most definitely acquire a feminine look — and the eyebrows are, these days, thin enough to naturally look much more feminine than masculine. So… I place people inside the uncanny valley: there is a lot about my whole presentation that is clearly feminine, while other things are not, and that is often a source of confusion. At the end of the day, most people will settle on the tag ‘MtF transgender person’ and pretty much ignore me, or, well, treat me with the same respect that they treat anyone else. Some are shocked and horrified because, as a MtF transgender person, some of the things ought not to look like they look — for instance, most cisgender women are surprised at my cleavage, and even more surprised when they touch it and notice that it is human flesh (and not some makeup/SFX trick!), which should not be possible unless I went through hormones and surgery… which I didn’t, I just know all the tricks of the trade, and I’m happy to explain cisgender women what to do to pretty much achieve the same results, no matter what cup size they actually are.

But on the reverse side of the coin, I actually enjoy watching all these reactions to my female presentation. This was, for me, an interesting development. It started, to a degree, with my first webcamera chats, well over a decade ago, when I was curious to see what people thought. From the many things I already wrote about it, as well as my imperfect understanding of their reactions, I cannot really say that I had come to any conclusion. Some people knew perfectly well that I was ‘just a crossdresser’ or at most someone in the transgender spectrum, and they were liberal and open-minded enough to accept me as a human being. Most people had simply the desire to have ‘exotic’ sex with me, so of course they were naturally interested in doing their best to be polite and even nice to me. And there was certainly a group that was shocked and horrified and absolutely transphobic. Watching those reactions was interesting behind a webcam; but experiencing them ‘in the flesh’, in broad daylight, when you cannot hide behind makeup, it’s a bit different. For starters, it’s so much more intense. And there is also this notion that you cannot simply ‘turn the camera off’ if you (or anyone else!) are uncomfortable. You have to endure those reactions from others. If I’m on a long queue in the supermarket, and people are staring at me with disapproval, I cannot do anything but smile back — because I have no other choice but to remain in line and patiently wait for my turn. I cannot run away and hide! (even though I’m aware of some acquaintances who did exactly that, when it became intolerable)

It’s also interesting to notice that I’m not especially focused on the good reactions, although, of course, these are the ones that boost my self-confidence. I’m also amused by negative reactions (especially amusement!). When I’m aware that people are laughing at me, I smile mischievously as well — and I guess that sometimes they notice that, too. It doesn’t particularly bother me, in fact; I’m not exactly happy because some people ‘reject’ me, of course — that’s just dealing with transphobia, after all — but because, in a sense, I feel safe enough in public places during daylight hours, their negative reactions are, for me, amusing! I don’t know why that is the case. My best guess is that I lived a life presenting myself as a male who was totally invisible to the world; nobody would look at me twice, much less once. As a female, I do enjoy the attention — even if it is negative, there is some rewarding system kicking in at the brain level that gets me happy just for being noticed. And, as I said so often, if I get people laughing, that’s a positive thing — as a Buddhist, I’m supposed to be spreading happiness, after all! If they get shocked, or surprised, well, I hope to make them think twice, or at least understand that we trans people are real, we do exist, we’re not just something you read on magazines or on Discovery documentaries on TV or, well, on Caitlyn Jenner’s reality show about trans people. It is important to me that others see what a trans person is supposed to be like; I’m also aware that ‘being around’ and doing normal things like all other people is important to show that we trans people are not some kind of antisocial freaks, living in a fantasy world of our own, and doing obnoxious and utterly incomprehensible things for the rest of Humankind, like injecting ourselves with hormones or cutting off parts of our body, possibly related to sexual activity of some sort. No, we also have to breathe, to buy groceries (or cigarettes!), to pay our bills, to ride a bus, or even to do some research work at public libraries — mundane, un-sexy activities, that we citizens of the modern city need to do all the time, and trans people are no different from cis people, we have to do the same things as well.

There is a certain thrill in being provocative, in the good sense of the word, that is, I do not crossdress to shock people, but because I like to present myself that way; nevertheless, I’m aware that what I like to do and what others expect of me are, in this case, at opposite poles. At the end of the day, since I’m not behaving according to social expectations, that raises a reaction (positive, negative, or neutral/indifferent) — and inducing that reaction, for some reason, does give me some pleasure, some thrill, an adrenaline kick, I don’t know how to describe it, but it is fun in a certain way. It’s not pure masochism… after all, I rather prefer that people are positive or at least indifferent towards me. But even negative reactions are amusing to see. What goes on in my mind is that I’m breaking barriers in other people’s minds. It reminds me of the ongoing crisis at Chechnya, where its (Muslim) president claims to the world that there are no homosexuals (or bisexuals, or transexuals…) in Chechnya, simply because in his own mind no such people are supposed to exist inside a conservative, traditional, Muslim society. But we do exist, and that has nothing to do with the ‘society’ aspect. Society is only important in the amount of repression we get. In Portugal, I get, in the worst-case scenario, some smirks, a few laughs, and a handful of shocked expressions; in Chechnya, I would get a beating, be arrested, and possibly murdered in broad daylight. That’s the difference. Because I know I’m comparatively safe in my country, I can enjoy myself watching other people’s reactions, and even if those reactions are technically transphobia, I do not get verbally or physically abused by them. By contrast, elsewhere in the world, transphobia leads to aggression, arresting, and possibly a violent death — clearly it would be masochistic for me to go around and watch how people react in Chechnya! (Note: yes, we have Muslims too in Portugal; yes, I came across several Muslims, especially females, who clearly noticed that I was a trans person; yes, they were mostly mildly shocked but did not even dare to make a comment among themselves while I was in hearing range — it’s just that the way Portuguese people are tends to ‘contaminate’ the way other so-called ethnic and religious minorities behave in public. I’m sure there is a lesson somewhere in there, and I would guess that it includes food but that is a completely different discussion, probably not appropriate for a blog about trans issues)

There is a good reason to believe that my strange, mischievous attraction to induce reactions in people and watch them will become, at some point, ‘old news’, and boring to an extent. Why do I say that? Well, the other day I came across a gorgeous blonde, of supermodel class, who was briskly walking through the street. She was obviously drawing attention all around her — from leering males to jealous females. But I noticed that she ignored all of them, and did that so naturally, that it was quite clear that she was totally indifferent to everything going around her. In other words: I guess it’s great fun and a boost to one’s self-confidence if you do draw attention to yourself in a positive, flattering way. But if you have to live years or perhaps even decades as a blonde bombshell, this constant attention-gathering might quickly become boring or even annoying. It was clear from the whole body language of this person that she was not enjoying being the centre of attention, but there was nothing she could do (short of donning a burqa): she had to endure all that, all the time, all days of her life, until her beauty finally fades away and she can walk around anonymously like the majority of people. But she clearly mastered the art of ignoring everybody around her. I have to admit that she became my role model: when I’m sometimes among an unusually large group of people staring at me (it’s really unusual, but it has happened a few times), I use her methods to ignore them, while at the same time not show any real embarrassment, fear, or any other such emotion — I just show that I’m above their opinions about me, and confident enough to continue to do what I was doing without worrying too much about it. In fact, when I assume that arrogant and indifferent attitude (and corresponding body language), I tend to draw far less attention that way! That’s an interesting result, and I believe it comes from a certain expectation that people have regarding unusual, exotic, or extremely beautiful women — that they pretty much ignore us common mortals. This, in turn, raises a few more intriguing questions, but I’ll leave them for another day!

It suffices to say that, at this point, I do enjoy how people react to me, and one of the reasons for going out to so many different places and situations is, indeed, to deliberately provoke people’s reactions. But I’m aware that this ‘novelty’ will fade at some time!

Dream #1 — One week of Sandra

So, now at last we come to my dreams, or wish lists, or expectations, whatever you wish to call them! Such ‘dreams’ would be merely fantasy, say, a few years ago, because I had no idea if I could live full-time as a woman — even for just a short period. One thing is to be comfortable enough to go out for a party with other fellow crossdressers. The other thing is having to face neighbours and shop attendants; having to deal with issues like the car breaking down or having to complain at the bank because of something. I did not expect, a few years ago, to be able to do any of those things. But right now… well, I’m not only comfortable in doing all those things in public, I’m actually eager to do them!

What is currently my biggest issue? Well, it’s twofold — first, my wife can be tolerant up to a degree, and she certainly doesn’t allow me to be ‘full-time’. While she suspects that I’m going to the supermarket crossdressed once in a while, she hopes that I do that with a friend (or with my cousin) on a far-away place. She has no idea that I sometimes go to the very same supermarket where her mother shops (and we shop there often enough as well) — it all depends if I can find the things I want on other places. Anyway, the point here is that my wife sets her limits, and the main limit right now is that she wants to see as little of Sandra as possible. Ideally, she would like not to see Sandra at all.

However, there is good reason to believe that this might change in the not-so-distant future, as she completes her degree and becomes an university teacher full-time or at least part-time. Once in a while she will have no choice but to be away for a few days. Or a few weeks. Or… perhaps even more time than that! I cannot foresee what will happen, but I can certainly fantasise a few scenarios!

Unfortunately, the more likely scenario at this time is just the ‘short conference’ of two or at most three days. Under such circumstances, I would very likely do precisely what I do now, i.e. dress up every day, but do it full-time (the longest I can do right now is some 10-12 hours during Mondays and Thursdays, assuming I have no conflicting schedules). It would certainly also mean letting my fingernails grow a bit and have them painted for those 2-3 days (so far, I’ve just managed to do that once, and my wife grumbled so much that I had to remove the polish on the second day…), but nothing really more dramatic than that. In other words: it would not be a great difference from what I’m doing right now.

But let’s go for a different scenario: one where my wife would be away for a whole week. What would I do then?

It’s important to understand that one of my biggest issues is the time I ‘waste’ getting dressed and undressed. In fact, if I strictly limit myself to the time I need to do the makeup and to remove it, well, then it’s not really much time. I enjoy doing the makeup, after all, it’s great fun, it’s my only artistic expression besides writing, and it’s a relaxing activity if I’m not in a hurry to finish (which, unfortunately, is most always the case).

The problem is that I have to deal with all those things that cisgender girls — and transexual women after transition — do not need to worry with. First comes all the shapewear and attaching the breasts and so forth. This takes much longer to put on than it should. Then again, I certainly don’t take the four hours used in the video below — but my own results are not so great, of course:

My current shapewear, and that includes hip padding, corset, and breast forms, are not meant to be worn during the night — the hips are not really attached, they are just kept in place thanks to Spanx; the corset is not of the kind of quality that it can be used 24h/day (you need a professional-grade waist training corset for that); and while the Amoena breastforms I currently use are really well attached (in spite of their weight!!), thanks to the amazing German technology behind their adhesive, they are not strong enough so that you can sleep on top of them — meaning that they can burst. They were simply not designed to be used that way, they’re not a ‘sex toy’ but actual silicone prosthetics used for women who have undergone breast removal due to cancer, so they’re pretty convincing when worn under a bra, but they’re not meant to be used for, uh, ‘violent exercise’… and that includes sleeping over them.

What this means is that there is no other choice but to ‘waste’ all the time to slip into the shapewear first, and, before going to bed, remove everything, clean the breast forms (they need to be cleaned each time they’re worn) and the corset (which cannot be washed, but is just cleaned with a wipe), and pack everything in its respective places.

That takes time.

Of course, my own makeup is a bit complex. I become especially proud of myself when someone tells me that my makeup looks so natural that they actually believed I have done nothing more than put some lipstick on and a bit of mascara in the lashes. Wow! If only they knew! Of course, I love to experiment with makeup techniques, but I can say that it currently takes three distinct phases or processes to achieve the desired results — which is looking as if I have not put anything at all on the face! Rather the contrary, the amount of different products I used is so huge that I’m ashamed of admitting it publicly. And no, I’m not going to post a video of my makeup routine — ever!! Oh, not to mention shaving, which also takes its time, even though, thanks to the laser hair removal I did, I have far less areas that require shaving — but those that do have extremely thick and dark hair. I usually don’t shave every day, but perhaps just twice a week, unless, of course, I have several days in succession when I’m free to dress.

So… if I had just 2 or 3 days free to dress… I really would not do anything much more different than what I do now. I would just enjoy more time being dressed, but the routine would be pretty much the same as always.

What about if I had a whole week to be Sandra in full-time?

Well, a whole week allows for a few extra steps. For starters, I would immediately get some gel extensions — that would mean one issue less taking endless time. Even though I have accelerated the whole process of applying fake nails, it still takes too long — about 15 minutes if I wish to get them right — and it’s a waste to put them on, take them off in the evening, then put them on again next morning, etc. No, for a whole week, I would simply get them done permanently, and save that extra time every day. And on the last day, of course, I would get them removed.

And the same, of course, would go for the eyelashes. I have actually managed to do a combination of tricks — from regularly applying castor oil, to using better lash combs, and the appropriate mascara — to get pretty convincingly long natural lashes, but of course I love the extra length and volume I get from fake lashes. Applying those, however, is always tricky. If I get them right the first time, I can actually do it quite quickly — perhaps in 10-15 minutes. But often things don’t work out so well on the first time. Obviously, like everything else, practice makes perfect, and having good-quality lashes makes a huge difference as well. In my case, I dislike the utterly artificial look from some ‘extreme’ lashes which are popular among younger women for their special nights out; I prefer a natural look where I can blend my existing lashes with the fake ones, so that it becomes difficult (or hopefully even impossible!) to know where one starts and the other ends. But that also means spending time in applying them — and in removing them at the end, and meticulously cleaning the fake lashes so that they can be used over and over again, without fearing that they irritate the eyes due to bacteria accumulation, etc. So, unless I know in advance that I will have a lot of time, I will give up on the fake lashes and just be generous with the mascara on my natural lashes instead.

But it’s not the same thing. So, if I had a whole week free… I would get a semi-permanent lash extension done professionally. This is not unreasonably expensive, but you really need to go to a salon with specialists if you want a natural look. Getting a ‘fantasy’ look with impossibly long and curved lashes is something you can get everywhere, but to get it done so that they look absolutely natural is another story, and this really requires some experts to apply each lash (or lash group) individually, and knowing how to trim them so that their appearance remains natural and not exaggerated. Lash extensions tend to come out by themselves after a few weeks, sometimes even less, but of course, in my case, it would mean also removing them at the end of the week.

What could I do more to waste less time? Well, for starters, I would most certainly also get the eyebrows professionally trimmed and the unruly hairs waxed out — meaning no more wasting of time in using the tweezers every time I dress. Of course, waxing does not last forever, but it should last at least a week. As for the rest of my body hair… well, the biggest problem is still the facial hair. Once I start to get a bit more money, I really need to start electrolysis. Laser hair removal did what it could. On the rest of the body, for example, I can easily just shave every week, or sometimes just every other week, because I have so little hair now — especially on the legs, where I would say that practically all hair disappeared. The same, fortunately, is also true for the chest — almost everything has disappeared, and it’s just because I’m a bit obsessive that I still shave it every week, even if it’s not really needed. On the rest of the body, it depends. During the winter, I could easily skip the arms, the remaining hair there is also so little that it can be safely ignored. So… regarding most of the body hair, I can say that laser hair removal did a pretty much convincing job. It did make a difference on the face, too, and to be honest with the team doing the work on my face, the difference is actually huge, but… there is still, say, one third of the face which still has patches of thick hair. That would mean that I would still have to deal with shaving every day that week, something I’m not really keen to think about…

There is also the issue about the shapewear. What could I do to spend less time there? Well, I cannot forfeit the corset; unless I go through major surgery, I simply don’t have the right waist shape. The corset, however, is not what takes most of the time.

For the whole week, I would very likely opt for glued-on body prosthetics. The work in this area is getting better and better, and the best prosthetics come from artists who work most of the time in SFX for movies and TV series, but have a shop to do some work for the trans community while they’re between jobs. This means that the waiting time may be long (what I have seen so far is almost always custom made and hand painted) but the results are supposed to be very convincing. I have been dreaming about these kind of prosthetics for ages. The problem is that not only they are expensive (although thanks to increasing world-wide competition, prices have come down dramatically to more acceptable levels) but they are incredibly difficult to apply, and really take a long time to do so. The advantage? Not only you can achieve incredible details of realism, but the usage of medical-grade adhesive or even liquid silicone to attach those prosthetics means that they can be worn for several days. And yes, most of these are made to survive being crushed under your body when sleeping, and you can take a shower in them without them falling off. While I was mostly interested in breast forms, I have since then also found out that the industry has gone far beyond the ‘toy’ latex vaginas (I did buy one some 15 years ago, and it was simply horrible — a total waste of money! — and unfortunately lots and lots of suppliers still make them the same way they were done 15 or 20 years ago) and has very realistic ones, to the point that you can pee in them, masturbate in them, and, yes, get penetrated in them as well — and they will be hard to distinguish from the real thing. In fact, the subtle changes that I have seen in manufacturers is that they have focused more on the trans community (and you can see in the way they announce their products as ‘useful for reducing gender dysphoria’) and not only on the fetishists, which I can imagine to be their biggest customers — and they will be fine with a cheaper product which is not ultra-realistic but nevertheless allows them to enjoy some fun for a few hours.

Anyway, the point here is that I would very likely get some prosthetics attached for a whole week — breasts and hips for sure, possibly a vulva (even though most reviews show that peeing through them with a Texas catheter is not as easy as the manufacturers tend to claim…). That would allow for a huge reduction in time spent to get ready every day! And, of course, it would give me a whole new experience — feeling the weight of breasts 24h/7 for several days, for starters. Obviously, this would also mean that the first and last day would probably be wasted in applying everything and taking everything off, which I believe that will take a huge amount of time, but during the remaining days, I would most certainly enjoy much more ‘free’ time — since I would only have to worry about putting a corset on, doing the makeup, and getting the wig in place. Hmm. That would take me perhaps 45 minutes or so, which would be quite acceptable; and, of course, going to bed would also mean wiping the face off (10 minutes or so), taking the wig and the corset off (one minute at most!), giving the wig a quick brush for the next day, and slip into a nightie — way, way, way less time that I currently waste every day I dress!

Having my wife away a whole week would also mean not really worrying that much about packing everything in its right places; after all, I would be using those things every day. In practice, doing what I’ve described above, there is not really much to ‘pack’ or ‘unpack’ — I think that the only thing I’d need to have in a handy place would be my jewelry, and that’s pretty much it.

I’ve also thought hard about it, and I think that for two weeks, I would do the same routine, with the difference that the gel extensions would very likely require a bit of maintenance, and probably the lash extensions too. Also, it’s likely — or even advisable! — that I would need to remove the prosthetics and wash them thoroughly (as well as the skin underneath) before applying them again, for hygienic reasons, at least at the end of the first week. From all I’ve read, the manufacturers always say that their prosthetics can be worn for ‘several days’, but never for ‘several weeks’; I believe that this comes from their experience in the SFX world — actors usually put the prosthetics on, do their acting, then remove them again; but it’s conceivable that in some cases, during a very intensive shooting session, they might leave some prosthetics on for several days to save time, and the SFX artists know that their glue/adhesive/liquid silicone will hold that long, while not having any serious harmful effects. More than that is just speculation: it might hold and it might not!

Dream #2 — One month of Sandra (or even a bit more…)

One month of dressing as a woman every day? Oh wow. I can only drool at the idea! But, again, it’s not absolutely beyond the reality horizon: my wife has, for several occasions, told me that she might do some workshops or apprenticeships with architects and architecture teachers in Europe (or even the US!), which usually can take, say, 1-3 months. In fact, she does work for one architect who takes apprentices or students or how you wish to call them (they have finished their degrees, they’re just looking for some initial experience outside their home country), who come all over Europe and the Mediterranean, and who stay that amount of time in Lisbon — she even goes through their applications and selects for her boss those who look more promising. In about one year and a half or so, she would also be entitled to do the same abroad, and she has done a few good connections in the mean time, so I’m pretty sure that she would be able to do that. These apprenticeships are sponsored by the European Union, so they wouldn’t be a burden on us. That’s why this scenario is actually plausible and not as far-fetched as it might sound.

So, what would I do in the mean time? Well, of course, this would require some preparation — and the first thing to do is really getting off all the remaining facial hair with electrolysis. My only doubt right now is if I could manage to do that in time — because very likely I ought to be starting now. Electrolysis is a very slow and painful process, and it takes hours and hours to remove small areas — especially on the face, which has an incredible density of facial hair! But this would really be a must, I simply couldn’t bear to waste 20 minutes or so every day to shave my face over and over again, not to mention that I do have a sensitive (and oily!) skin which already complains a lot if I shave very closely two or three days in a row. I cannot imagine how my face would look like after a month!

As an explanation, I ought to say that I have spent most of my life using an electric shaver, which has mediocre results, but at least it doesn’t leave the face in a mess; because I care so little about my male appearance, that served me well for decades. It’s only in the past decade or so that I have stuck to twice-a-week shaving, just on those days when I dress — and let the skin rest (and the ugly hairs sprout out all over the face!) between those days. This has definitely been great for my skin, of course. But doing that every day?… No, thanks!

The other thing which I would almost certainly do as well is hair extensions. This is a very, very old dream, and one that has a lot of issues. First and foremost, of course, is that they are expensive. The service of applying them, at least in my country, is dirt cheap (we get such low salaries that everything that requires service is cheap ); the extensions themselves aren’t, and they often cannot be used over and over again, but merely for 4-8 weeks, depending on the quality, the way they have been bonded, etc. and so forth (although there are a few types that can be applied more than once). So… this is something that I could afford only for a little while, and make sure I’d experience to the fullest, thus one month would be the minimum time to be worth it!

Why use extensions? Well, my wife really dislikes to see me with long hair. Actually, there is something I truly don’t understand about her issue with ‘hair’. When I first met her, she had a wonderfully long, rich, wavy hair, full of volume and personality; over the years, of course, like all women in my country, her hair has become shorter and shorter. She is constantly telling me to get shorter wigs, and I did indeed buy shorter ones over the past decade, but there is a limit to how short I will go (the shortest wig I had, which was barely shoulder-length, I gave as a gift to a friend after only using it twice). On the other hand, she’s always praising a few millennials who go to her university and who are wearing their hair longer.

And, of course, her idol is Ian Astbury, lead singer of the alternative/psychedelic rock band The Cult, which we both love, and Ian had an amazing long hair in the early 1980s, when the current hair extension technology did not exist, and his hair was absolutely natural. So I can’t figure out why she hates my long hair wig so much (it never was as long as Ian’s in the first place!).

Whatever the mysterious reason might be, and no matter how much I love my current wig (and I think I have managed to ‘recover’ some of the damage done to it over the years — more on that on my next article!), there are some disadvantages of wigs. First and foremost, at least for me, is that they are hot. I already perspire way too much, and having something on top of my head which does not allow the scalp perspiration to evaporate is even worse. I guess that if I were less sensitive to the heat I would not complain so much, but, alas, I inherited my mother’s genes regarding low tolerance to heat, and it seems to get worse over the years (or perhaps the antidepressants and anxiolytics have made it worse, I don’t know).

Extensions are still hot, of course — it’s more hair, after all! — but at least there isn’t a ‘cap’ to cover the whole head. So this would allow me to enjoy the pleasure of luxuriously long hair without the advantage of slowly cooking my brain with the heat!

The second advantage, or at least I count it as such, is that I would be able to sleep with the extensions on — in other words, this means enjoying long hair 24h/7 — and that, in turn, would mean less time spent in putting on and adjusting the wig… at the expense of making life a bit more difficult in terms of washing and drying the vast mass of hair with extensions! And because I have oily skin and perspire so much, I tend to wash my hair every day — but the wig gets only washed every other week or so (especially after a day when I have perspired even more than usual!).

There is obviously a psychological thing about the extensions. Since I was 11 that I clearly remember how I always loved to have long hair. That’s the kind of desire that has been stifled for all my life. Now that my hair is receding and getting thinner at the top, it is highly unlikely that I could grow it longer, even if my wife allowed it; so the next best thing would be to use extensions. That way I could get the whole range of experiences of long hair without needing to grow it permanently; after a month, on the last day, I simply would get the extensions removed.

Now, this sounds much more simpler than it actually is. Even though modern hair extensions can be attached to short hair, the extension technician and hairdresser would need to work closely together to see what they could do with hair extensions to hide the receding hairline and the thinning at the top. This would probably require some consultation at a very highly regarded salon — the kind that gets certified to work with top hair extension brands such as Great Lengths. It will be tricky. It will also require several layers of differently-sized extensions (adding to the overall cost!). And to make it worse: unlike what happens with most female customers, where the hairdressers are able to cut the real hair before applying the extensions (and thus making sure it blends perfectly) and/or dye it to match the extensions, they would have no such freedom in my own case: after a month, when I would get the extensions removed, I would need to have my hair exactly as it was before, with the same stupid male cut, and so forth. That, I imagine, would really need a lot of hard work for the salon — in the sense that I would be giving them a tough challenge. I believe, from what I’ve read, that they can accomplish the ‘miracle’, but it won’t be easy, nor will it be cheap. Nevertheless, it’s what I would almost surely do.

In short: having my wife away for a month would allow me to experience the life as a woman as closely as possible without surgery, hormone replacement therapy, or any other dramatic changes, while at the same time allowing me to simplify my daily routine to get ready. After all, I would rise from bed already with long hair, no worries about facial hair, long eyelashes, no need to trim the eyebrows, gel nail extensions and glued-on breastforms, hip pads, and possibly even a silicone vulva. That represents close to two hours of work that I would ‘save’ to get ready — after taking the usual bath (which would possibly take a bit longer because of the long hair), I would only need to put the corset on, some makeup (which would be way easier and quicker to achieve), slip into a dress, and I would be ready for my daily routine — taking as little time as realistically possible. And at night, before going to bed, all I needed to take off is the corset and wipe the makeup away. I already have a long routine at night before going to bed — getting the makeup off my face (especially if I wouldn’t need to deal with getting rid of mascara and eyeliner!) would just take a few moments.

This would have some impact on my life. On one hand, it’s true that sadly I don’t need to worry about my parents any more, having lost my mother almost four years ago and my father a couple of weeks ago. That means no need to come up with complex excuses not to see them. I have already come out to my favourite cousin, and been with her several times presenting as a woman, so on that account there would be no problems. My brother would never  accept me, and even if, out of politeness, he would condescend to talk to my while presenting as a woman, he would never allow me close to my nephews — mortally afraid that they would freak out. They already freak out of so many things, even stupid ones, like, say, death (I mean, they are just a bit over 10 years old!… they have plenty of time until they need to worry about dying!). Explaining that ‘uncle’ is now ‘auntie’ (but will become ‘uncle’ again in a month or two) would be way, way over the top. The good news is that I don’t see my brother physically that often; I most probably would be able to avoid him easily for a whole month.

Things become more complicated on my wife’s side of the family. It’s conceivable, for instance, that my mother-in-law would insist that I have dinner with her on Saturdays, even if my wife is away; she really considers that dinner very important. That would mean coming out to her as well, something which my wife does not want me to do. And the same would apply to my sister-in-law, because it would be highly likely that she would be at those Saturday evening dinners as well. While their reaction is a bit unpredictable, I think that it’s more likely that they tolerate me than reject me; the worst case scenario is forbidding to enter their homes dressed as a woman, but otherwise continuing to be in talking terms with me. But of course it would make my wife mad as hell when she figures out that I had come out to her mother and sister, against her strict rules. My father-in-law would probably be a bit easier to avoid, at least for a couple of weeks, but if I come out to his ex-wife and daughter, then it’s almost sure that they would tell him. And I have no idea how he will react. He’s left-wing, he has been an active member of the Socialist Party and was even elected for office at the local council, and he’s a philosopher by training, so, considerably, he might have an open mind as well… but, as my wife is constantly reminding me, it’s easy to be tolerating and accepting and all that if you watch stories about trans people on TV, but it’s a completely different story if those stories happen to you, so I cannot predict any of their reactions. Still, I think it’s inevitable that I would have to tell them — I might be able to postpone any social events for a month or so, but if my wife would be away for 2-4 months, well.. that’s a completely different story… I would have no legitimate, polite way of refusing the social invitations of her family, even though I believe I could keep my own family at bay for that period.

It’s also conceivable that I would get a part-time job somewhere, depending on the amount of work I had at that time; I might also take one of those courses to learn to use a sewing machine. There would be a huge problem, of course, if I had actually started teaching at an university. In that case, I’m pretty sure that the whole ‘dream’ would be nothing more than a fantasy. On the other hand, if this scenario happens during my present time, when I’m supposed to be doing some work on the PhD as well as for a friend’s company — all of which are remotely done and do not require physical presence — then it would work out all right. Granted, I may take a job as an university teacher and immediately declare not to be cisgender, and explaining that at least part of the time I might have a different gender presentation. If this is revealed in advance before signing any contracts, I guess that the anti-discrimination laws would be on my side, so I would not be able to get kicked out just for dressing ‘differently’ than before. But, alas, I’m jus speculating at this point…

In terms of my ongoing relationship, this would actually not affect me much; after all, I would take everything off a few days before my wife arrived, and life would turn back to ‘normal’ (to my huge regret, of course!). There would not be any lasting ‘marks’ from my ‘full time experience’ — except perhaps a rash on the chest area where the breasts would have been attached, but my wife is used to see my body full of all sorts of marks and bruises and small wounds, all due to the complex shapewear I use. She obviously would know that I would be crossdressing as much as possible, and so nothing would surprise her. And, after that period, I would just continue to do my irregular crossdressing such as before… eagerly awaiting her next period of being away for several weeks!

Dream #3 — One year (or even two!) of Sandra

Let’s suppose the following scenario becomes true: one of the teachers of my wife, after seeing the quality of her work, has given her the idea that she should do her PhD in the US (or at least at a good university in Europe), as opposed to sticking faithfully to her alma mater in Lisbon. She was surprised to hear that, because she’s often humble enough not to understand how good her work is, and she had truthfully no idea that it might be good enough or worthy enough to do a PhD abroad.

Now, perhaps because of my own heritage, and the experience I have had with many people outside my country, I don’t hold any particular university in high esteem and almost religious reverence; I’m a child of the globalisation, and I’m strongly convinced that we are pretty much all interconnected in this shrunken world — by this I mean that one’s ideas can happen in any part of the world, and their impact can be felt world-wide. I have listened to a few interviews with the start-up owners of Far Fetch or Chic by Choice — two companies probably worth a billion dollars each, in the highly competitive fashion market, both of which are present worldwide, but, in reality, they have been founded by obscure Portuguese who came out of the blue with some good ideas, found an international investor, and started their business with an international audience in mind (Portugal, for both of them, is not even an ‘interesting’ market, and if they explore it at all, it’s just out of courtesy for the country that gave them a higher education and the open mind, skills and resources to start their business). Such stories are these days more and more common, and we have entrepreneurs from all around the world doing their job anywhere else in the world, and it’s not a ‘surprise’ any more. It’s just what happened, first thanks to global television, then to global Internet — for a surprisingly large part of the population, there are no real borders between countries any more, except, of course, in the minds of those who charge for taxes; the rest is pretty much a global, universal world of commerce, innovation, ideas, even flowing knowledge, that stick together and express themselves mostly in English, but which is not strictly tied to a specific country or city, except by sheer coincidence.

As such, well, I think that it’s highly likely that my wife could be admitted to an Ivy League university. I’m pretty sure that she has all the required abilities, skills, and intelligence to be admitted anywhere. As always, it’s just a question of having a way to pay for that; but it’s also not impossible to get a grant or a scholarship or something similar; against all odds, and to the bafflement of pretty much everyone in my close circle of friends, including my own PhD supervisors, I managed to get a scholarship to finish my own PhD, and that was only on my second application. My wife is far, far more intelligent than me, and she has a much longer list of activities and skills and whatnot than I had when I first applied for a scholarship, so I’m confident that she will have it even more easier than me.

The point is, this scenario is not as far-fetched as it seems. She may get a place in, say, Yale, where one of her teachers is doing a postdoc; her other teachers come from Harvard, the Sorbonne, or other similar universities making part of the shortlist of the most renowned universities in the world. She can easily get letters of recommendation from a dozen teachers at least for any of those universities. So… her chances of doing that, if she wishes to do so, are actually quite realistic.

In fact, the only reason for her not going abroad for her PhD would be me — in other words, I’m pretty sure that she would want either to drag me around (harder in the case of the US, because of the harsh immigration laws; much easier on any EU country, even in post-Brexit UK), or demand that I find a job at the same university but in my area, or else she would reject all proposals. Obviously I would try to persuade her to do what is best for her, regardless of me ‘staying back’ or coming over with her.

So, in my dreams, I manage to persuade her to go away for one or two years to do her PhD in Yale (the US is further away, and more expensive to travel to and fro, which is essential for my own devious plans!). What would I do in the mean time?

Well, I’m pretty sure that the answer to that is medically-assisted transition.

I mean, I could just do what I have described on Dream #2, and just prolong it for one or two years. But I’m pretty sure that after a few months I would simply give up pretending that this is what I want, i.e. sticking to prosthetics glued all over my body just to enjoy a very remote simulacrum of femininity, just to make my daily life a bit easier. No, if it would come to that, I would at the very least persuade my doctors to put me on hormones. Doing the actual gender confirmation surgery requires a slightly more complex procedure — namely, two separate evaluations of my gender dysphoria — but the other surgeries are not subject to that evaluation. In other words, there is nothing in the law that forbids a physical male to get boobs and facial feminisation surgery — the difference is that I would have to pay it out of my own pocket, instead of having the national health service do it for free.

But wait. Does that mean I’m transexual after all?

Well… to be very sincere, and this fluctuates according to my mood, I would say that the answer is ‘no’. I’ve been reading a few old articles, namely, Dr Vernon Coleman’s classic study of crossdressing, which was done over twenty years ago, but is still sufficiently close to us (even if the terminology may have changed in the mean time!) to be relevant. While Dr Coleman is quite polemic, and definitely an ‘outsider’ of the medical establishment (since he is so skeptic about medical research and its hidden purposes and backstage backstabbing…), carrying often his own bias and agenda to his research (even if he claims the opposite!), at least he is honest enough to publish his data, so you can draw your own conclusions. And mine is that the variety of crossdressing reasons is wide enough to overlap a lot of more common definitions of what ‘transgender’ and ‘transexual’ means. Coleman focuses on the external appearance of MtF crossdressers and tries to figure out what drives them to dressing that way, especially in those cases where there is no attempt at transitioning.

And his conclusions are a bit bizarre, at least from our perspective in 2017, but the truth is that similar research points to the same (or nearly the same) conclusions: there is at least a group of crossdressing men which do not quite fit into the overall picture, because they are neither sexually motivated (at least not as a primary purpose), nor do they want to be full-time women. Or, to be even more precise, they might dream of doing just that, but it remains a fantasy, and they stick to part-time crossdressing instead.

What has changed in these past twenty years? Well, such cases are seen as ‘borderline’, especially if it’s clear that they are suffering (because most do not suffer except from minor anxiety of being found out; some not even that!). In that case, they might either be transvestic fetishists (if the sexual drive to crossdress is there, even if it’s not consciously acknowledged) or MtF transexuals (if they would rather go full-time as women than spend the rest of their lives ‘stuck’ with a male body and a male gender role), but neither case is so crystal-clear. If the crossdresser is consciously aware of their sexual drive to crossdress, and suffers because of that (either out of shame or lack of opportunities), then doctors can treat them in one way; if the crossdresser is fully aware that they have always been women, just tried very hard to cope with their male body and gender, and ultimately failed, then they are transexuals and referred to transition. These are the textbook cases which are much easier to deal with.

But right in the middle there seems to be a surprising large number of male-bodied individuals who do not fit in either category, but are more a mix of both. They might get an erotic thrill out of presenting themselves as women in public, but, in general, they dress as women because they like it; the erotic thrill is secondary and not actively seeked. On the other extreme, we have MtF crossdressers who are quite willing to undergo surgical procedures and hormone treatments to change their bodies to become more feminine, even if they are aware that they might not ‘pass’ much better that way, or that there might be a risk of being found out after performing some of the more dramatic changes. They do not quite fully identify as females, but they are certainly aware of not being ‘typical males’, and often describe themselves as having a ‘female side’ which needs to be openly expressed. Now this latter description is much more common among the studies in the 1990s than today: we prefer to put such people under the label ‘genderfluid’ (which subsumes a lot of possibilities, from actual fluidness to oscillating gender, bi-genderity, and so forth) and sort of ‘forget’ about them, because most genderfluid individuals do not suffer from their gender identity. Others, however, do suffer; and they can become obsessive with achieving a more female body, even if they are aware that they need to restrain themselves not to do the ‘wrong’ thing; getting female breasts is almost always at the top of their preferences (and Dr Coleman also found that out) but it can go much further than that in some cases. So are these people gender dysphoric — or do they suffer from body dysmorphia? Or do they belong to a completely different category?

Consider the case of Caitlyn Jenner. It’s not clear if she considered herself a ‘woman’ when she started crossdressing. A lot of MtF transexuals, even late on-set ones, do never crossdress in their lives, because it doesn’t make sense for them; they will only pick up women’s clothing for the first time during their transition. Jenner then proceeded with becoming a regular at several CD groups, bars, restaurants, and similar places, and would go to those very often, when she had time for them. And at some point she started auto-medicating herself and administering hormones; while at the same time she did buy all sorts of shapewear to give herself a more feminine body and figure, and it was clear that she was unhappy with the way she looked.

But she held on for decades and decades. Until she landed in the 2010s, when things became, in a sense, more easier, as gender studies have progressed by leaps and bounds, and Jenner was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and given the green light to go ahead with her full transition. And, of course, we all have heard her personal story on how she struggled to behave like a man, even if she was just a woman inside; and now she continues to tell us that it’s so much easier for her to present as a woman than to present as a man.

How much of that narrative is ultimately true, and how much has been applied backwards to one’s memories?

The reason why I ask that is because I have the good fortune of having my wife to constantly criticise me and skeptically ask me about the way I feel about my gender identity; because she has a rather good memory, especially when she is sure that she will need to recall some events and their exact context in the future (often after several years have elapsed!), she is fond of telling me that I only started accepting myself as ‘transgender’ (as opposed to ‘merely a crossdresser’) when a) I read new studies made in this field of research; b) I hang out more with my friends, some of which have undergone transition, others are beginning it, others have intention of starting their transition once it’s more convenient to do so.

She argues therefore that what I hear today tends to affect retrospectively all my own fragmentary memories, and delude myself in believing that ‘I have always been a woman’ when this thought never really crossed my mind. As I reported on a previous article, I’m quite aware of some false memories, which I know perfectly well to be false (because I apply rational thought and logic to those memories, and it’s clear that they cannot be true, simply because at the age at which they allegedly happened I had no conscious thought of myself as an independent being); nevertheless, they are so strong and bright and vivid that I’m tricked in believing they’re true. It’s weird and complicated, but it happens to us all the time — like wrongly remembering that a friend has brought a green dress to a party, when in fact the dress was red, as all the pictures show. But inside our mind we still have the image of our friend in a green dress attending to that party; we know that this isn’t possible, and that the memory is fake, but nevertheless we still have that memory.

While I cannot be sure that the same happened to me regarding what I consider to be my gender dysphoria, I can at least question it. Maybe, if I could travel back in time to, say, 1999, when I momentarily believed that I could ‘pass’ in public (at least during the night!), and asked myself if I thought I was a crossdresser or a transexual person, I might give a different answer. I’m not sure, but I suspect it to be the case. I justify that with the lack of knowledge to which I had access to: from what I read in the mid-1990s, it certainly seemed the case that I was ‘just a crossdresser’. But then why was I so obsessed back then to have some reserve money for surgeries and even living out of the bank interest, so that I could survive even if I didn’t manage to get a job as a woman? I mean — a typical crossdresser would not worry at such things. I remember telling to myself that I was not sure of what I was, and in the case I was wrong about myself  (i.e. actually being transexual and not merely a crossdresser), then I ought to have a plan in place to be able to deal with that.

Regular crossdressers don’t think that way. They might plan to save money to buy more dresses or better wigs and breast forms, but they don’t think that they might suddenly ‘become transexual’ and therefore ought to start saving money for that!

In the same case that someone is transgender if they start questioning their own gender — because cisgender people will never have any doubts about their gender, and questioning it makes no sense whatsoever — I would also wonder if crossdressers who plan their future lives (even if these plans will never come true!) as women are ‘merely crossdressers’ or ‘something else’. And because the transgender community is so sensitive about the ‘body dismorphia’ label, the question is then what to say about a M2F crossdresser who is planning to start taking hormones and get surgical breast augmentation? Even if that wish does never leave the ‘planning stage’, what does that say about the person? What if the plans are merely postponed, not really abandoned? Jenner waited until she was in the mid-60s to do her transition. Has she been a ‘woman trapped in a man’s body’ all that time, or did that develop later, after Jenner got in touch with the trans community and learned about her options?

I was quite young when the first news about Brazil’s famous transexual, Roberta Close, came out. Our society was a mix of old-school conservatives still attached to the times of the dictatorship, and progressivists and reformists on the left who were enthusiastic about the freedoms we could now enjoy. Having the freedom to ‘choose’ one’s gender (not my words, but those that were used back in the 1980s) was a novel idea, and I was flabbergasted at how awesome Roberta Close looked like, and how she managed to become such a gorgeous supermodel after starting her life as a ‘normal’, healthy male baby. She transitioned relatively early; but in the wake of her fame, several people started to transition mostly because of Close’s success. Most of the media I had access to was tendentially on the political left, and the way they reported Close’ success story at the time was overwhelmingly positive. Roberta Close is actually just five years older than I am, and her story made a deep impact in my mind, namely, I had learned back then that men could ‘become’ women through medical science (in reality, Roberta Close was intersex, wrongly assigned male at birth, but she just explained that publicly in 2015). It was something that fascinated me, and became part of all my dreams, especially because I understood back then that even the strangest dreams could become true (or perhaps that dream was not so ‘strange’ after all!).

I know, I’m slipping away from contemporary transgender terminology, and please bear with me as I frame these things in context. You have to realise that transgender studies have had a tremendous (I hate that word!!) development in the past decade: we have really learned so much, that everything written back in the 1990s sounds terribly outdated and politically incorrect. But for those who, like me, learned a little bit about transgenderity in the 1980s and later on the mid-1990s, you have to understand that things were not figured out so easily as today. We were still struggling with the concept of ‘changing one’s body to match one’s gender identity’, because the concept of ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender presentation’ were still under development. Studies would still assume that the ‘natural state’ of Humanity was having a binary gender, but it was accepted that some people were outside that binarity, even though it was seen as something exceptional; it was just around 1990 that the role of the SRY gene was sufficiently understood (which determines if a mammal or marsupial develops as male) to show that just because someone has XY chromosomes, it doesn’t necessarily mean they will develop as males; and many other conditions (some of which produce intersex individuals), like CAIS, became better understood. In other words: the assumption that gender binarity is the ‘norm’ and everything else is some kind of genetic ‘defect’ was slowly been eroded by the end of the 20th century — so-called biological sex was only slowly becoming accepted as a continuum, requiring a lot of complex sequences of events to be ‘truly’ binary, and that when something in that sequence failed, people would not fit into the binary sexual stereotype; and, similarly, the notion that gender is developed separately from sexual characteristics in the body was only conceptually developed with some precision at that time (and today we are assuming that gender is also encoded genetically somehow, even though we still don’t know exactly how, although we have a few promising results).

That’s why the literature from the end of the 20th century seems to be so misleading: we still talked about ‘men becoming women’ back then. We conceptually identified individuals which had external male sexual characteristics, and who had been assigned male at birth, but who had a repressed female identity somewhere inside their minds, which could, for some unknown reason, be ‘triggered’ so that it would sort of ‘take over’ one’s identity. In some cases, this was seen as temporary, and under the conscious control of the person, who would usually be labeled as ‘crossdresser’; sometimes, this produced suffering, as the individual wanted their ‘female identity’ to ‘take over’ forever (like in the case of Roberta Close), but due to social constraints, this was deemed impossible, or at least very hard: such individuals were diagnosed with ‘gender identity disorder’ (what is today known as ‘gender dysphoria’). And finally there were clear-cut cases of people who strongly adhered to a binary gender/sex concept, they just had the wrong body for their gender, and these clear-cut cases were labeled as ‘transexual’ and it was expected that they would express themselves as such from a tender age (namely, around 3 years of age, when one’s identity is established).

It took a couple of decades to slowly evolve the model that we know today and understand to be more correct — that Humanity has a diverse spectrum of possible genders, sexes, and sexuality, and that depending on how hard they are coerced to adopt a specific combination which does not correspond to their own gender/sex/sexuality, the more they suffer; and that the only way to alleviate that suffering is to allow such people to express their gender or sexuality freely, and, if that requires an intervention on their bodies (including sexual characteristics) to make the expression of their gender identity more easy, then such interventions should be made as soon as possible.

But because the whole conceptual framework has changed so swiftly — from sexual perversion and/or mental illness just after WWII to an expression of human diversity in the 2010s — society in general has not kept up with the development; but even those who are part of the transgender community have some difficulty to be fully aware of the latest developments and how they have shaped and transformed the current understanding we have about gender, sex, and sexuality.

Why is this so important to me? Well, we all are shaped by what why read and hear — that’s the principle behind ‘education’, after all — and I’m aware I have spent a couple of decades or more learning about a swift-paced area of knowledge in constant mutation, until scientists sort of reached the current consensus, which, in turn, has provided feedback to the community, which also fed back into what researchers have figured out. While there is still some discrepancy between legislation, scientific knowledge, psychological approaches, and what the community thinks about themselves, we’re fast-forwarding to an overall consensus about gender identity, presentation, (biological) sex, and sexuality, with a comparatively solid model based on non-discriminative concepts such as diversity, variety, fluidity, a spectrum instead of fixed classifications, and several different approaches to deal with people suffering from non-conformity. All these are huge steps to what was believed in the days of our grandparents; and we have travelled a long road — at break-necking speed! — to reach the current understanding.

So, in the 1980s, cases like those of Roberta Close were described as a something which was not really a ‘lifestyle’, definitely not a mental disease or a paraphilia, but still something which was an ‘option’. In other words, it was thought that some people would make a decision to change their physical bodies to ease their suffering when presenting as the kind of person they wanted to be, and, because this would involve chopping off perfectly healthy bits of their bodies and adding a few new ones, it went way beyond ‘cosmetic surgery’ and was something completely different than body dysmorphia (which was already well-known and established as a mental disease). The difference between the 1980s and the 2010s is that today we know that our gender identity is inborn, no matter if it matches what society expects from us, even if we don’t know the exact mechanism of how it is encoded in our genes; while in the 1980s, it was thought that there were some sort of ‘anomalies’ in the brain which would get triggered by many possible causes (including environmental issues, traumatic episodes in earlier life, and so forth), but which medical science could not reverse with medication or therapy. Exactly how and when these ‘anomalies’ were triggered was unknown, but it seemed that it varied a lot from person to person — in clear-cut cases of so-called primary transexuals, it happened when the identity was formed (i.e. around 3 years of age or so), but this was clearly not the case for everybody — it could happen at any age, although, among males, it was very frequent to happen during so-called ‘crisis moments’ in our development, namely, during puberty or shortly after puberty, and then later at the age we usually associate with the so-called (and currently a debunked theory!) ‘middle-age crisis’. Because such moments in life are associated with hormonal changes, it could be more than a coincidence; but actual research (from as early as the 1950s!) showed that hormones could not induce (or diminish!) such ‘triggers’, so scientists were a bit more careful than that and tried to figure out other more likely explanations (which ultimately resulted into contemporary concepts like the ‘gender identity core’).

Thus, back then, cases like Roberta Close were ‘explained’ — at least in the media — that Roberta, at some point in her youth, possibly close to her puberty (when she started to dress as a girl against her parents’ wishes), started thinking that she would be living a much more richer and fuller life if she adopted a female gender presentation, and that was what ultimately made her to go through several surgeries (and long legal battles in conservative-thinking Brazil) until she managed to get everything she wanted in order to live her life as she wanted. There is, therefore, an implication of transexuality as a process, that is, that you somehow ‘start’ your life as being something and become something else after a (usually long and painful) process, which includes psychological therapy, surgery, hormones, and eventual legal battles — to finally become the ‘person you always wanted to be’.

This old way of thinking (and which is currently not correct!) certainly influences my own dreams, and especially Dream #2. Indeed, in my mind, I cannot honestly say that ‘I am female’ and that I have always been female since birth. What I can say is that I identify fully with the female gender presentation, and that I utterly reject the ‘male identity’ and its presentation and social role. Because I never ‘believed’ in binary gender — a ‘belief’ that has naturally been strengthened with current research in the field — I was unsure of what would describe me. A ‘crossdresser with a feminine essence’? Maybe. But I wanted more than just crossdress; I always wanted more: I wanted to have a female body, even if I really don’t know why.

When I go out in public, I usually get one of two reactions, depending on the persons that watch me. Those that know me in both the ‘male’ and ‘female’ mode tell me that I’m ‘exactly the same’ in both presentations, and this is precisely what I expected to happen, since I don’t do any effort in presenting myself differently (except, of course, for attire & apparel). I do not suddenly become a different person when dressed — something which actually does happen to many people (and is actually more frequent than most people would think!), but not to me.

But strangely enough, those who only know me in my female presentation, tend to say that I’m ‘very feminine’ down to gestures and small details. Now this truly baffles me, for several reasons. Of course I know a bit about different male and female postures, gaits, modes of walking, and so forth; and there are big differences between both. In that regard, I do make an effort (which is not easy given my large frame!) to look more naturally female when dressed as one. There is, however, a limit — I don’t have any exaggerated, effeminate gestures, like some gay drag queens tend to use. In my country, most women don’t make such gestures, although it’s true that a few immigrant Brazilians tend to use them more. It might be a cultural thing. Sure, there are a few differences, but less than you might imagine. It’s just that you don’t need them — we Portuguese, like all Mediterraneans, already talk with our hands as well (‘talking through your elbows’ is a common saying applying to those who talk really a lot!), so maybe that’s why women around here do not gesticulate in an excessively feminine manner.

My bafflement comes from the other side of the issue: if people tell me that I look and behave especially feminine, but I really don’t put that much effort in it, does that mean that my gesturing in male presentation is effeminate? The answer is ‘no’, it isn’t, not at all. It might not be stereotypically male, but nobody in the world ever told me that I’ve got ‘feminine’ gestures or body language in my male presentation!

This tends to reinforce the idea that our brains overcompensate with a few clues (because our brain evolved to do exactly that). In other words: my ‘normal’ gestures (which are almost gender neutral, if you wish) are perceived by others as ‘feminine’ just because I’m presenting as a woman, while people seeing me when presenting as a male will classify those gestures as ‘masculine’. Those who know me in both gender presentations just see the same gestures, so they say that I’m ‘exactly the same’ either way. In other words: the gender presentation (in terms of attire, makeup, wig, etc. — or lack thereof!) influences a lot what people think about us — no matter how often we repeat that looks aren’t anything. They are. They are way more important than we like to admit!

So let’s get back to my dream. If my wife went away for one or even two years to do her PhD, I would start working on transforming my physical body permanently to look much more feminine. The reasons for that are now better explained from the long context I gave above: I have no idea if I have a male or female gender identity core, but I truly don’t care at this point. What I love is to present myself as a woman. I identify with that kind of presentation much more; it makes me incredibly happy when I present myself as a woman, and it’s not just the looks, it’s how it affects the interactions with others. Granted, I admit that most of these interactions happen in a framework where people know that I’m not a ‘biological cisgender woman’ but they still treat me as one, out of respect.

Just loving to present myself as a woman, for as long as possible, doesn’t ‘make’ me transexual. I can just be ‘merely a crossdresser’, after all. The difference is that most MtF crossdressers will identify as male, even if they admit to having a ‘feminine essence’, but they do not wish to present themselves as women full-time. I do! I don’t really worry if doctors and such label me as ‘cisgender heterosexual male with a crossdressing desire’ — I’m fine with that, since for so many decades that’s how I thought about myself anyway. The difference, at this stage, is that I just want to be able to dress as a woman for as long as I can, and 24h/7 is pretty much my goal.

To do that more effectively, and stop losing so much time in getting ready, I really need to do some dramatic changes. While two years is not enough for my hair to fully grow, and that would mean relying on extensions — replacing them every two months or so! — I could work on the rest of the body to make it look more female without so much shapewear. I believe that some of my doctors would be willing to put me on hormones just to see if that has a positive effect on depression and anxiety (I would think so, but of course that’s something you have to try first!). I have repeatedly said that I do not worry about the sexual performance, and that I don’t have any particular attachment to my male genitalia, so I’m fine if the libido drops to absolutely zero (which it is already, in any case…) and the penis and testes get shrunk and withered (which is unlikely!). I’m totally fine to go through orchiectomy (to avoid being on anti-androgens for long periods of time) and I’m even ok with gender confirmation surgery, whatever that means in my case — in other words, I’d gladly exchange my male genitalia for female genitalia, if that’s what it takes to achieve a more feminine body.

This, however, is medically complicated (it requires a lot of procedures and tests, many of which I will very likely fail), so I’m also fine in being patient. By contrast, getting on hormones is more than easy, especially if I’m totally willing to do a ‘real-life test’ — I would start it today if it weren’t for my wife! So, give me hormones, as much as possible (given my pre-existing conditions, of course!).

It would also mean saving up to get a boob job, a tummy tuck, and some facial feminisation surgery, starting to get my crooked nose with a potato tip into a more desirable shape. I would probably also need some forehead bone shaving, since I have deep-set eyes; they are rather small for a woman, but I believe that they’re ok enough, so long as the forehead format is changed. So, yes, over those two years I would go through all those procedures, with or without the approval of my psychiatrists or psychologists, who might advise me to be more patient and only start those procedures after a two-year real-life test.

But honestly… I don’t care. Even if my wife returned after that year or two, and forbade me to continue to present myself as a woman full time, I would certainly do it a lot of time, and the more I look like a woman physically, the easier it will be to slip into my female presentation. I mean, I know some androgynous types who have grown their hair long to the point that the only difference between their male and female presentation is what clothes they wear and if they’re putting on lipstick or not; Andreja Pejić comes to mind, someone who was absolutely androgynous before her transition.

Now I’m definitely not androgynous (except on my lips!), but I’m pretty sure that I can shed some ‘maleness’ with hormones and surgery. Not enough to let me ‘pass’ as a woman, but certainly enough to make my ‘dressing up’ routine much, much easier. At the end of the day, I might just need to put on a corset, a sexier bra, some lipstick and mascara, and I’d be ready to go out as a woman — even if people would obviously notice that I hadn’t been born a woman. Given that my wife would never approve that, I might have to settle for keeping a feminine body underneath male clothing for the remaining of my life, and to forfeit growing the hair long and rely on wigs instead. Although some doctors tell me otherwise, I think that even all those treatments would not give me enough of a female body so that I couldn’t disguise, although it would mean thinking hard about the breast implants… there is a limit to how big I can get them to be able to conceal them under loose clothing, although famous gambler Brian Zembic was able to get 38C boobs for two decades and still wear loose shirts on top of them to hide them. I might be able to do the same if I settle for a much smaller size than the breast forms I use today (which are closer to 40E these days).

Would I really go through all that? Oh, for sure. One or two years is really a lot of time. And hormones and such take time to make a difference; I know a few people who are forfeiting their real life tests and only dress occasionally as female, and go normally every day to work in their male presentation, even though they have been a year or more on hormones. After all, Jenner, when she was still calling herself Bruce, did the same for a long time — then gave up on hormones to take care of her family for a while. And for the months before her public ‘coming out’, she was seen (and photographed) using very loose clothing that would hide her body’s true shape while it developed to the point that she was happy with it and made the big announcement. I would pretty much do the same, and over those two years, I would slowly come out to the majority of all my contacts — neighbours, friends, family, acquaintances. I’m already doing that anyway, just at a very leisurely rate, without any rushing, and picking the ‘right’ people first (those who have an open mind).

What if my wife’s reaction would be extremely negative? Well… it’s hard for me to say that, but after one or two years living mostly as a woman, it’s very unlikely that I would ‘go back’ easily. Thus, I would come to a point, similar to the one in 2004, when I would have to make a choice. The biggest difference between 2004 and, say, 2020 (when the 1-2 year absence would take place) is my wife’s financial sustaining. After getting a PhD, she will be able to get a job anywhere in the world; in 2004, by contrast, she was totally dependent on an external source of money to survive. In other words, it would be very cruel to abandon her to her fate at the worst possible moment in her life. But in 2020, things would be different. She would know that she would not need me any longer to provide her with food and a roof over her head. This would naturally weight a lot in my decision!

Realistic conclusions

We all should have our dreams, and goals in lives; but disappointment lurks at every corner. The higher and more unrealistic we set our goals, the less likely they will be achieved, and the higher the disappointment. While on one hand we should at least know what we’re going to do with our lives, it should not be done in such excruciating detail and wishful thinking that it will never work out as we wish. My wife and I have several female friends who are about our age and still looking for their Prince Charming; some with still a remote hope that he’ll come along eventually, others resigned to a life of spinsterhood, since they are quite unwilling to lower their expectations, and, as they age, they become more and more inflexible and unable to make concessions. That means leaving a life of solitude — at least in term of partnership — just because their expectations are set way too high.

In my own life, I have gone through such moments as well, so I pretty much know what it means to live with unrealistic expectations. My biggest issue is probably desiring short-term goals for simple moments of self-gratification, which, for other people, might not even be very special or easily achievable; but for me they are the climax of wishful thinking exactly because they will never become true. And that’s because everybody’s life is different: what is easy to some is impossible for others, and vice-versa. Aligning what is possible to me with what I wish requires a lot of effort, because it seems to incompatible; in that, of course, I’m exactly the same as everybody else!

But when looking back to those three main dreams, I can clearly see that the first one — living one or two weeks full-time as Sandra — is quite realistic and nothing extraordinary. It is highly likely that my wife, at some point in her academic career, will have to be away for a week or so. Therefore, this dream can become true relatively easily — it’s just a matter of being patient and wait. While up to now such a dream was just that, nothing more than a dream, there are good reasons for that: our crippling financial situation which prevents us from travelling (even for business purposes) and my wife’s ongoing studies which have not finished yet. As a consequence, wishing that she goes away for a week is, at this moment, absolutely unlikely and impossible. But things will change in, say, two years or so; and then, what seems impossible right now will become highly likely in the short term. More than that: it’s almost absolutely predictable that my wife will know that I’ll be dressing as a woman every day. I mean, I almost do it these days, depending, of course, on the amount of confusion and chaos there is on each week, with the difference, of course, that every evening I will need to undress and remove everything before going to bed. From that to going full-time as a woman for a week or two is really a tiny step, and one that just needs the right circumstances to be in place.

The second dream has two further difficulties. The first, of course, is that while I can realistically expect my wife to be away for 5 days for a conference, the expectation that she might be away for one to three months to do a workshop or course or something like that is much smaller, and naturally also has a much larger financial impact. It is not totally out of the question, however, because she has already been invited to do a one-month course last year; she just declined due to our financial issues, we simply couldn’t afford that. But that is about to change, and most definitely so in two years. The second problem is that what I plan to do (namely, extensions) is considerably expensive, and, right now, I have no way to pay for that. Again, things will change very soon; even the little money I might get from my father’s inheritance might be able to cover just barely those costs. So, again, while this scenario remains a dream, nothing more than wishful thinking, there are reasonable probabilities that it might become true in the future, again, at a similar time scale (say, 2 to 5 years). It’s just that it will be way more likely for my wife to be away for 5 days for a conference than one month or more for a small course. But neither will be impossible, they will just have different probabilities of happening.

The last dream is obviously a different story. It’s true that my wife’s teachers have suggested that she does her PhD (or eventually a postdoc) abroad, and they would help her out with recommendations and getting a scholarship. She was quite enthusiastic about the idea and even started to look for possible places to go (which surprised me, in a very positive way, because I thought she would have abandoned the idea as not being ‘realistic’). So, doing some higher education after her mastership abroad is truly part of my wife’s plans and her own dreams; and of course I’m the most enthusiastic supporter of those ideas. The trouble is that she will most definitely want to drag me along, and I might not have good enough arguments to say ‘no’, especially if I remain unemployed. On the reverse side of the coin, if I get some employment, and that means full-time work at, say, some university around here, there will be quite a lot of additional difficulties to deal with — namely, making sure in advance that wherever I end up doing my work accepts a transition, which might not even be successful (meaning that I might end up detransitioning when my wife returns!).

And obviously we are talking about a much costlier dream — since I’m talking about going through surgery, most of which (if not all!) I would have to pay out of my own pocket. There might be one procedure or the other that might be paid by my health insurance, but I cannot count on it alone to pay for everything. Some of those surgeries — namely, breast augmentation — might need to be reversed after my wife returns, and that, in turn, means also having enough money to do that procedure. In short, we’re talking about a lot of money, some of which would be perfectly ‘wasted’ if I didn’t continue my life presenting as a woman. I know that most people who talk about both their transition and de-transition rarely, if ever, talk about money issues; and that’s just because those who are more vocal on the Interwebs are usually financially solid enough to think about their mental and physical health first, and ignore whatever financial issues these things imply.

I cannot afford that way of thinking. For the past months, my wife and I have been living 20-25% under the poverty line established for my country (and since we have less than half the average salaries of the European Union, but the same cost of living, you can see that this is really not much to live with!). We can survive, sure, but thinking about costly medical procedures, even if they are covered by insurance, are completely out of the question. It’s true that transition surgeries are for free if you go through the procedure with the national health system, but it means long waiting periods, a lot of psychological evaluations (some of which I now know I will never ‘pass’), and a certain doubt about which procedures are covered and which are not. While technically (at least under a certain interpretation of the law!) we are supposed to be able to get for free all surgical procedures required to live as a person of the gender we identify with, in practice it’s hard to get more than a breast augmentation and the gender confirmation surgery (besides hormone replacement therapy, which is not free, but heavily subsidised). I’m aware that some people did manage to persuade the national health service to pay for other surgeries as well, but this is decided case by case. To make matters worse, our own expert in gender confirmation surgery is now in his early 70s, was forced to retire against his will, and badly replaced by some young butchers who have no clue about what they are doing; this surgeon is still working in the private sector and training new people in his techniques, but it means that at least some of the more important procedures are only managed by him. Of course, I could do the surgeries on a different country, and so many TG people go to Thailand for their own surgeries, but, to be honest, although they might be much cheaper (and better!) than those you can get in the US, they are astronomically more expensive than what I can get around here — especially if I take into account that I might get some procedures for free and might persuade my insurance company to cover at least part of the costs of some of the procedures. It’s more a question of how much I’m willing to wait.

So, the truth is that the first two dreams do not require a big change in terms of my life. Even with dream #2, assuming ‘one or two months away’, I might still be able to pull it off with minimal disturbance of my daily routine, whatever it might be at that time. It will require some planning, sure, but probably nothing dramatic. One of the beauties of being both depressed (even though in accelerated recovery mode!) and somehow transgender is that I can give a nice excuse for dressing as a woman — I can just let people know that I do have some ‘gender identity issues’ and I’m doing a very unusual therapy. In fact, if you have been reading my articles, you know that all doctors have encouraged me to dress as a woman while I work.

Pulling it off for a year or more might be much more complicated; and I don’t know how I would react if I had to ‘de-transition’ after that time. I mean, either I get insane after two or three weeks of spending three hours every day just to go out and buy groceries, and give up living as a woman, or, well, after one or two years — especially after HRT and some surgical procedures! — it will be way harder to go back to present myself as a male. I seriously suspect it’s pretty much the same thing as leaving your parents’ home and having to return after a couple of years because you’re broke and there is no other option left. After enjoying a few years in freedom, setting one’s own routine, disregarding all those troublesome ‘rules’ set by one’s loving parents… well, going back is not easy. Some people manage to do it, mostly when they are in despair. But it would never have been their first choice. I think that forcefully detransitioning — a bit what Jenner did some decades ago — must be incredibly hard, after having tasted Paradise for a few years.

Anyway… all this long article was just an exercise in wishful thinking. I still set myself some goals now and then. I admit to having increased 2000% my levels of pleasure and amusement when going out dressed as a woman, at any time of the day, going to any place. I admit that I was worried that, at some point, it would cease to have any fun — especially because, thanks to my ever-conflicting schedules, I have been forced to go out alone way more than before — but the reverse is actually true. Even when I go repeatedly to the same places (like certain malls and supermarkets), I’m always amazed and amused by my experiences there — even if, from a strict neutral perspective, they’re totally mundane and commonplace. But there is this switch of perception — experiencing the world as a woman, or at least not-as-a-man (in the sense that people know that I’m not a woman, but they don’t interact with me as if I were a man when I’m dressed as a woman), is much more fun than I ever thought it to be.

In a sense, a lot of my previous dreams from earlier years — interacting with more people in different places while dressed as a woman — have finally become true, and this gave a boost to my self-confidence, but also raised the level of pleasure, joy, and sense of wonder that I get from crossdressing. It was exciting to dress in secret at the beginning — so much to learn, so many new experiences! But that novelty quickly faded (even though I push myself to learn to do things differently over time), and was replaced, for a while, by maintaining a regular presence on the webcam chats. I realised back then that I needed to interact with others in order to enhance the joys of crossdressing, and it’s only recently that I learned that this might have to do with one aspect of a narcissistic personality, namely, the need to get assurance by others, to get some feedback from them (even negative one!) to truthfully believe that I’m in the right direction, whatever that direction actually might be. There is, however, a limit to how much you can interact through a tiny rectangle on your home computer; and unfortunately, 99% of the people you find there are only interested in sex anyway. I needed much more than that; I needed to interact with the real world, doing mundane and trivial things. And this is one of the dreams that already have become true.

The next stage, well, I see mostly as a refinement of the current one: as said, I can dress as a woman 5 out of 7 days every week, and spend several hours like that. I just don’t do it because it takes so much time for me to get ready to go out, and to undress when I return. It’s very frustrating to take three hours just to spend an hour having a coffee at an esplanade or so. This is what my current dreams are about: I want to reduce that to a reasonable amount of time; and even if I’m aware that I will always take a little more time to get ready as a woman, compared to what I need to do as a man, there are limits to how much extra effort I’m willing to do every day! One thing is to go to a special event — the kind that happens once per week, or twice per month — and I certainly enjoy a lot getting ready for that. But the other thing is to go out to buy a loaf of bread and some cheese — it’s stupid to take three hours just for that! Sometimes, though, I still do it, realising that it might be the only chance in that particular week to get dressed. But often I give up in disappointment, and that’s really frustrating for me…

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

— The Duck Test

You all know this classic example of inductive reasoning: based on a series of observed characteristics, we assume the most plausible explanation for them (the simplest theory that fits the facts), even if sometimes… we are wrong (for instance, a mallard looks, swims, and quacks like a duck but it is no duck — still, we would be right most of the time, and that’s the whole point.

MtF transexuals will obviously argue the same way: if it looks like a woman, walks like a woman, and talks like a woman, well, then it probably is a woman. Indeed, we would also be right most of the time, but… perhaps not always.

What, quoting Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists??

These days, science (both medical science and social science) agrees with a fundamental tenet of transgenderism: only the person herself or himself knows what their gender identity is. We can provide guidance in the sense of helping one’s self-discovery, but, ultimately, your gender identity is something only you can know, since we really cannot read minds…

While legally this might not be the case (few countries as such allow self-determining gender identity – my own country only started to allow that on April 6), doctors these days, at least in more liberal countries, will assess one’s gender identity based on what that person tells about themselves. And doctors will also use inductive reasoning: based on a lot of questions, they can, with reasonable accuracy, give a diagnostic of one’s gender identity. This is was ultimately they will report to allow that person to transition.

Now, Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists could not care less about scientific facts (do they remember you of someone?… all right, let’s skip US politics for now ). Although their logic is rather convoluted (and I’m being very nice in classifying their argumentation as ‘logical’), the end result is that TERFs assume that only TERFs are able to tell if someone is a woman or not: it’s a question of peer recognition. And TERFs, as you know, do not accept people assigned male at birth as ever being ‘women’. Instead, they see them as very dangerous incursions into their territory, namely, patriarchy agents ‘disguised’ as ‘women’ who are redefining what a ‘woman’ is supposed to be, and therefore perpetuating the patriarchy (as opposed to believing that most trans women, when they are feminists, are actually abandoning their privilege as members of the patriarchy, just because they do not identify with them in the least — and that’s something TERFs pretend not to see), by establishing the ‘rules’ of who should be considered a woman and who should not. In other words: TERFs do not recognise trans women the ‘right’ to call themselves ‘women’ at all, much less to ‘define’ what a ‘woman’ is supposed to be; that’s a privilege only TERFs have, and it’s non-negotiable. That summarises pretty much their argumentation.

Now, we can simply ignore TERFs (like we ignored certain tall people with strange hair and small hands… ok, ok, I promised not to go into US politics, so I won’t!), brush them off, label them as insane, and go on with our lives. After all, we know exactly what a ‘woman’ is supposed to be, right?

Strangely enough… the answer is not a loud ‘yes’. As a matter of fact, one of the many criteria for transexuality is to ‘consider oneself to have the feelings and emotions of a gender different from the one assigned at birth’. If a sexologist, therefore, asks a trans woman how she feels, she will tell him that she feels like a woman, has the emotions of a woman, and none of the stereotypical feelings/emotions/thoughts of a man. Affirming this is something that goes a long way towards the diagnosis.

TERFs, by contrast, ask ‘how do they know?’ In other words: a trans woman will have been born with a male body (or at least a body that is more male than female). That body will have produced male hormones (either only in the womb, if that person’s transgenderity is caught very early; or during puberty, if the person only seeks transition after adolescence), which will have changed the chemical composition of the body, and turned it into ‘male’ (giving them primary sexual characteristics in the womb, and secondary ones during puberty). While we cannot affirm how exactly the brain was affected (and in the case of trans people, the brain — and the mind emerging from that brain — does not seem to be affected whatsoever by the hormonal cocktail which changes the body), TERFs assume that, for all purposes, a trans woman cannot feel what a cisgender woman feels, because they don’t even have the right body to ‘feel’ things properly.

There is here a strong fallacy — TERFs who are less experienced in logic will argue that trans women do not have an uterus, and, as such, they cannot feel what a ‘real’ woman feels.

This, of course, is stupid; first of all, there are many women without an uterus. Either they have been born with a genetic defect which prevented their uterus to fully develop (but they have normal hormonal levels and therefore fully develop as females, and identify as such), or they might have been forced to remove the uterus due to disease or cancer. They are not ‘lesser’ women because of that. On the flip side of the coin, uterus transplants are now a reality, although they are still at the experimental stage; and, once they become a routine surgery, due to the difficulty of obtaining potential donors, it’s unlikely that they will be available to trans women ‘soon’. However, that’s hardly the point: the question is that all attempts to define ‘women’ based on whatever physical attributes one might choose will utterly fail, since eventually there will be some woman lacking characteristic X and still be called a woman; while there will be some male person with precisely that characteristic X and still be considered male.

But even when we move towards mental states, the situation is hardly simpler. We know now that males and females of the human species have exactly the same brain capabilities – and that includes intelligence and emotional intelligence as well. One way we can see stereotypes being so easily broken is by looking at how women complete their university studies in astrophysics, engineering, or any other degree requiring a lot of complex math – contradicting the stereotype that ‘women are not good at math’ – or they become world-famous architects, also contradicting the theory that women are not good at spatial reasoning; and remember that in these areas the number of new degrees comes from women, not men, something which is true across Europe and North America (but also on some countries where women were traditionally not allowed to study and who have recently given access to all high education degrees – here, they outnumber men as well). On the other hand, the top chefs in the world are mostly male, and so are most of the best fashion designers – saying that men are not good at cooking or sewing is simply stereotyping again.

When we start talking about emotions, and about how women are good at intuitive thinking, while men are more rational… well, if we are serious about doing a non-biased study, we will (not surprisingly) find out that both intuition and logic are equally used by men and women; giving an average group of men and/or women, there will be some who are more intuitive, some who are more rational, and this is not really something that either gender is ‘better’ at doing. Similarly, the issue about ’emotions’ or ‘feelings’ is also not shifted more towards women than men; it’s just that socially each is conditioned to express themselves differently. Anyone who has watched a football game knows how deeply and intensely run men’s emotions!

So the ‘deep thinkers’ among TERFs (yes, there are a few…) present a much more convoluted reasoning: to be a woman one has to have been raised as a girl since childbirth, going through puberty as a girl, and finally become a mother and a wife, or at least aspiring to put their uterus to good use. Essentially, therefore, being a woman is basically getting the whole female life experience. And this is something that late on-set MtF transexuals obviously cannot have had.

The problem for TERFs is that these days trans children are being identified as such at such an early stage that they will practically get the whole experience, at least since the moment they are conscious of their own selves – and ultimately that’s what counts! So I wonder how they argue these days (to be honest, I don’t really keep up with their ranting…). Still, it’s clear that TERFs do not agree that anyone is allowed to decide who is a woman and who is not — except for TERFs, of course. And on the reverse side we cannot even create a list of characteristics that ultimately decides who is a woman and who is not, at least if we work from a neutral point of view.

The issue is exactly that: we do not start from a ‘neutral’ point of view. Instead, we make our assertions based on social roles – constructs that serve as archetypes for each person to identify with. Thus, girls will have a predisposition to be with other girls and learn from them what it means to be a girl – in that particular society. This will show as specific mental traits (including how one’s personality is shaped) – say, women are ‘allowed’ to weep in public when they are angry or sad or disappointed, while men are only ‘allowed’ to do so when their soccer team loses. These are all acquired behaviours which will change from society to society, and from epoch to epoch; men in the 18th century wore makeup just as women did, and their clothes were as complex and colourful as the dresses women wore; furthermore, they had no restrictions to fully express all their range of emotions in public. It used to be women who were told not to express themselves publicly, to remain silent and submissive; the 18th century allowed both genders to fully express themselves; and from the 19th century onwards, both genders became much more controlled about the display of their emotions. So we will always need to take into account a specific social environment when talking about the gender role differences. They are not obvious, much less intrinsic or inborn; the only thing which is, indeed, defined at birth is the identification with a specific gender, and that does indeed mean that boys want to become men (following the archetypes and stereotypes that are current in their society) and girls want to become women.

And here is where the catch is: a semantics issue, where we confuse ‘being a woman’ in the biological sense and ‘being a woman’ in the social sense. We really need to be clear about what we’re talking about!

TERFs claim that trans women, no matter what they do to their bodies, will never ‘become women’ (according to whatever biological/behaviourist definition they might come up with). That’s only true in the strictly biological sense – but not in the sense that matters, that is, in one’s gender role.

Ok, so let’s delve deep into human biology…

It’s not unusual to question what exactly defines a ‘woman’ or a ‘man’ in our contemporary society: after all, philosophers (and feminists!) do it all the time. It used to be simple: you’d look at the genitals and say, this person is a man, this is a woman, this is something else (on those societies that allowed third genders) or an Abomination Unto the Lord and should be killed/maimed (as we did until very recently in the West). There was no question of allowing women with male genitalia or vice-versa, even if history — from Joan D’Arc to le Chevalier D’Éon — is full of exactly those examples. Still, we can at least agree that such varieties from the norm were unusual; they were (and still are!) considerably rare.

But ‘rarity’ is not something that can used as a pretext to ignore its existence. For instance: people are constantly confusing the ‘flu with the common cold. The common cold, as its name implies, is common: one in every five persons in the world will contract it at least once this winter. The ‘flu, by contrast, is relatively rare: only one in 1,500 or so people will be affected by the ‘flu. We still continue to confuse both, and believe that an extra-tough case of the common cold (‘rhinopharyngitis’, as doctors call it to make it sound more serious) is a ‘flu, when it’s absolutely nothing of the kind: the influenza virus (causing ‘flu) has nothing to do with the rhinovirus (causing cold). They are different kinds of viruses. It’s just that they cause similar symptoms, but a lot of diseases cause symptoms that (at least at the beginning) are very similar to the common cold. And to make things even more confusing, both the ‘flu and the common cold are often confused with a form of rhinitis (there are many!) which might not even be triggered by any microorganism at all, but just be an allergic reaction to the change of weather. And don’t forget hay fever — which happens by the end of summer — which is also an allergy which also shares symptoms with the common cold. In other words: except for someone with a little bit of observation powers (or a trained doctor!), all these diseases seem to be one and the same, although they’re not — they may be not even related at all, they just cause similar (but not the same) symptoms. And this leads to all kinds of silly superstitions — like, for instance, that the cold ’causes’ the ‘flu (it doesn’t; the cold usually affects negatively all microorganisms; it’s just that in the cold season our immune system may be weakened, and therefore we are more likely to contract diseases), while in truth the cold can only ’cause’ one form of rhinitis, at worst, and you must be prone to allergies in the first place. Similarly, someone with a rhinitis or hay fever cannot infect anyone, no matter how much they are sneezing, coughing, and leaving bits of snot around, because allergies cannot be ‘caught’; while you just need to be in the same room as someone with the ‘flu to catch it (they don’t need to cough or sneeze, just to exhale), because that’s how virulent the influenza virus is.

So, enough about sneezing and coughing! The analogy, I hope, is not lost upon you: when we talk about gender identity and gender expression, we tend to confuse a lot of issues, because there is a lot of misinformation, superstition, and plain old prejudice. Sometimes, as I nastily like to add, there is some jealousy — because of the superstitious belief that anyone outside the heteronormative binary gender has way more sex (and in incredibly more satisfying ways!) than those who stick with the God-given sexuality and gender, there is some resentment from the religious folks out there — they wished they could have much more interesting sex lives, but they aren’t allowed to have them, so, full of hate towards those who they believe to be sexually much more liberal, they lash against them. All right, so this is not an established scientific fact, but just something I came to realize over the decades — which baffled me at the beginning. It’s a superstition tracing back to the concept that there is only one ‘approved’ way to have sex, and that’s to procreate — anything else ought to be repressed. One would believe that such a backwards, superstitious idea would have been rooted out of our societies centuries ago, but no: it persists. Just like the superstitions around the ‘flu persist, in spite of decades of medical science telling us what each type of disease is, and how to distinguish their symptoms.

It’s also curious that, in the West at least, gender variance and sexual orientation have not been given much thought before the 19th century. It was assumed that it existed, but people simply didn’t talk much about it, they didn’t write about it, they didn’t draw complex theories about it. Men in the 18th century were simultaneously rascals and effeminate; ‘effeminacy’ was an affectation of the aristocracy (who could indulge in such pleasures as having lots of costly clothes and wearing makeup and wigs all day); this hardly had anything to do with gender stereotypes or sexuality stereotypes, but, eventually, by the time of the French revolution, things started to change, the concept of the ‘gentlemen’ was born (someone who was not a rascal and was guided by a much narrower moral compass), which in turn launched the West in an era of puritan thought, culminating perhaps with the Freudian notions that everything that was wrong with our minds was rooted in sexual issues. In retrospective, we could blame Freud for pretty much scientifically endorsing the notion that ‘sexual perversity’ is rampant in our societies and that all mental issues we have are somehow related to deviant sexual behaviour. Over a century later, we are still stuck to Victorian prejudice, both from a religious standpoint, but also a ‘scientific’ one, by pointing our finger at Freud.

Now, the mere fact that sexuality started to get studied and researched in a methodological fashion in Freud’s days is a good sign; even if Freud got lots of things so wrong, at least he encouraged generations of scientific thinkers to analyse gender and sexuality — formerly taboo areas of research! — more closely, and start to describe them scientifically. The 20th century helped things further, thanks to new advances like medical imageology (yay for X-Rays — you could observe how a human being worked from the inside without killing them first and dissecating them!), genetics (so that’s what determines how a human being will develop!), or very sophisticated medical drugs like synthetic hormones. Still, it was only around the 1950s that the first so-called sexologists were starting to seriously abandon their former prejudices, at the light of new discoveries which simply failed to fit into decade-old assumptions.

What we know now is unfortunately not yet mainstream knowledge; in other words, it hasn’t trickled down to the school’s classroom when students open up their biology books and study human anatomy. We are still stuck in explaining the differences between male and female bodies; it is assumed in the classroom that male humans behave as ‘men’ socially, while female humans behave as ‘women’. Literature, among other subjects, will focus on how males and females interact socially, and how this interaction changed over the centuries; similar comparisons might also be found in geography (showing how gender roles change across continents), history (where the change is seen across time), or even philosophy (where some attempts have been made to ‘explain’ why men have male gender roles and why women have female ones, and why some explanations inherited from the ancient philosophers may not make any sense today). However, this is still not enough: students only learn about the cisgender heteronormative view. Schools having sexual education in their curricula may talk about differing sexualities (because at least one in ten persons will not be heterosexual), but that’s the only thing which is given the thought of ‘variance’. Transgenderity might never be a word heard in school (it certainly wasn’t in my days; and even homosexuality was never mentioned by teachers, at least not during lectures in class). The idea that biological sex is different from sexual/romantic attractions which is not the same thing as gender identity and has nothing to do with gender expression is simply never taught in school. The main reason for that, I think, is that even progressive, liberal thinkers believe that teenagers are already so much confused about their own sexuality that it is pointless to explain things in full.

By doing so, however, we are still bound to the idea that biological conditions somehow influence everything at the same time — and while this is certainly the case for a majority of people (or at least that’s what those people will tell about themselves), we also know, from a scientific point of view, that things are not that easy.

An interesting concept which I have heard from scientists Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart is lies-to-children. This is basically telling a gross oversimplification of a very complex issue to children (or laypersons) that can be used as a teaching tool, but which is fundamentally wrong. I like the simple example of explaining people why the Earth orbits the Sun, so that they understand why it’s not the other way round, as we experience it when looking at the way the Sun moves across the sky. But ‘the Earth orbits the Sun’ is an oversimplification — in reality, both turn around a common point which is the equilibrium between the mutual gravitic attraction of Earth and Sun. Because this point is pretty much deep inside the core of the Sun, it makes little difference, for a layperson, to know about the difference. But it is thanks to this tiny difference that we have managed to figure out hundreds of extrasolar planets: because these also slightly influence the movement of their stars, making them wobble just a tiny bit in their paths, and we can measure that wobbling and figure out how many planets (and how big they are) are orbiting that particular star. In other words: if we took that oversimplification literally (‘no, I’m sure that’s what I have been taught at school!’), then we would never have found those amazing seven Earth-like extrasolar planets in a red star in our stellar neighbourhood.

Similarly, when children learn in school about the differences between the two genders of the homo sapiens species, they get presented a lie-to-children: a simplified theory that humans with XY chromosomes are male, while those with XX chromosomes are female, and we distinguish them through different embryonal development (different primary sexual attributes, e.g. a penis for the boys, a vulva for the girls) and different maturation through puberty (acquisition of secondary sexual attributes). This leads to the widespread belief that ‘men are men, women are women’ so commonly found among religious fundamentalists, conservatives, and other narrow-minded groups (including TERFs!) — because that’s what people get taught at school. It’s amazing the amount of comments you can find on the Internet coming from highly intelligent and educated adults who will stick to these definitions of the sexual differentiation among humans, who, even in spite of having the ability to educate themselves further on the subject, and having rejected many similar lies-to-children during their professional career, refuse to do so regarding how the human sexual development is anything as simple as what we get taught at school. What surprised me most is when doctors repeat these lies-to-children, fully believing them to be literally correct.

In practice, things are much, much more complex than that.

One of the best descriptions I have read about how (biological) sex is determined in humans (unfortunately I didn’t save the link, so you have to google for it yourself) is that our bodies are in a so-called sexual hormonal unstable equilibrium. It sounds scary, but this theory has great explanatory power, and is therefore worth considering as a good description of reality (as opposed as just a more sophisticated form of lies-to-children).

Basically, what happens when we’re first subject to sexual hormones, still in the womb and a long time before there is any resemblance to anything ‘human’ in our embryo, is that our genes encode instructions to produce both male and female hormones — this is, by the way, the reason why most people will always have both kinds of hormones. In a sense, the labeling of ‘male’ and ‘female’ at this stage is purely arbitrary: the body will develop proto-genitalia which are undifferentiated (in other words, no matter what chromosomes you might have, you will start your life with some genitalia which are technically neither male nor female). Don’t worry if this sounds queasy; at that stage, you will still have a tail, so having undifferentiated genitalia is really nothing extraordinary compared to all the other strange body appendages we go through as embryos. Also note that this knowledge is not recent; as far back as (at least) 1858, Gray’s Anatomy already had drawings of these stages of development — you can see for yourself how closely the male and female sexual organs look like during the embryonal stage. It should also not come as a surprise to you that both kinds of sexual organs mostly share the same tissue, they just followed different development paths. In other words, there is much less difference in terms of equivalent functionality (biologists call it homology) than many people still believe (ironically, during the Victorian Era, it was believed that women did not even feel sexual arousement just as men did, even though they knew very well how those homologous structures developed — that is, they ought to have a good understanding on how things worked, since they knew quite well how the sexual organs had developed, i.e. which parts ended up at each position).

Now, what current research shows is that the differentiation comes mostly from a delicate balance, or equilibrium, between the sexual hormones. To be more precise, biological males have one unstable equilibrium, where male sexual hormones (androgens) predominate, while biological females have a different unstable equilibrium where female sexual hormones (estrogens) predominate (and I’m oversimplifying again — there are a lot more hormones influencing the sexual development, but this can easily get very complicated, so bear with my ‘more advanced’ lies-to-children, while at the same time reminding yourself that this is just a part of the whole picture). This equilibrium is not ‘fixed’ for the human species, but is rather specific to each individual, and it is influenced by a lot of possible reasons — one of which, for instance, is the amount of androgen and estrogen receptors to which the hormones can bind to, and how well these receptors work.

In other words: to produce a ‘normal’ male human (‘normal’, as always in my articles, is a mathematical term simply pointing to a statistical majority), there has to be a certain amount of androgens that need to be synthesized by the body; such androgens must be, to a high degree, functional (i.e. the genes encoding the information for that sexual hormone cannot have been subject to a mutation which renders the resulting androgen non-functional — in this oversimplified explanation, ‘functional’ means ‘the ability to connect to androgen receptors’); and the body must have produced a high number of androgen receptors, to which androgen can connect, and, therefore, start to influence the sexual development of that individual into a specific direction. But at the same time the body must also keep the production of estrogens at a low level, as well as the number of estrogen receptors. Males do produce estrogen, and they do have estrogen receptors, because there are certain body functions which rely upon these sexual hormones — not all of which are related to ‘sex’ (even though, perhaps surprisingly, the increase of libido in males requires not only testosterone but also estrogen; just having testosterone is not enough!), namely, things like protecting the arteries to prevent cardiovascular disease (and this is one of the reasons why women are much less prone to die from heart attacks than men — they’re better protected, since they have more estrogen circulating in their blood stream), but also play a role in regulating the bone structure and even brain functions like verbal memory… so, yes, healthy males need estrogen as well, and this is why both males and females have both androgen and estrogen receptors. This point is crucial for the explanation later, so make sure you remember it!

Again, the lie-to-children that ‘women have female sexual hormones, men have male sexual hormones’ is nowhere close to reality. Both genders have (and must have!) both kinds of hormones. Or else… kaput. They die. Humans (and, in fact, most vertebrates and many insects) cannot survive without both kinds of sexual hormones, and both need to be present at a certain level — during all our lives. Indeed, one of the reasons of our decline in advanced age is that we simply don’t produce enough sexual hormones of either kind, and that means the body will slowly lose the ability to protect itself from many diseases. It would be nice to say that getting hormone therapy during all your life would prolong it indefinitely, but, again, things are way more complex than that, although it’s true that having hormone therapy at an advanced age can at least make some age-related diseases more tolerable. The only reason why we don’t do this routinely (although it’s becoming more and more popular to ‘treat’ menopause with hormone therapy) is mostly because the effects of such therapies have not been studied enough except on transexuals; and, secondarily, because of a certain morality that induces conservative doctors to believe that ‘sexual hormones’, i.e. hormones that are required during sex, should not be given to old people, since we still expect them not to have a sexual life any more — which is just a form of prejudice against old people, a kind of ‘ageism’, where we somehow expect ‘senior citizens’ to resign themselves to a life full of pain, diseases, and no more sex. But… I digress!

It’s worth mentioning what exactly those androgen and estrogen receptors are. Basically, they are very complex proteins, which will activate certain genes (which will produce, in turn, other proteins) when androgen or estrogen binds to them. They are different; there is one androgen receptor but at least two estrogen receptors, encoded by different genes. What happens exactly when androgen connects to an androgen receptor, or estrogen connects to one of the types of estrogen receptors? Now, a full description is waaaay beyond my own understanding, but I can give you another sophisticated lie-to-children. First, however, you must understand a little bit about how DNA works. And yes, this will be a gross oversimplification and incorrect in many aspects; after all, I’m not a genetics engineer, nor a molecular biologist, much less a doctor; so take it with a pinch of salt, and look it up at least on Wikipedia, if you’re really interested in the nitty-gritty details.

The common lie-to-children is that DNA is sort of a ‘blueprint’ which produces the proteins required for a human body (well, any living species, actually). So basically the idea you get at school is that you start reading DNA from the beginning to the end, and, hey presto! you get a human being. And you might also have an idea that during this process, some genes might have defects (mutations), and these will produce all sorts of terrible diseases.

A more thorough explanation will also say that the major reason for those mutations to produce those diseases is not necessarily because there is something ‘missing’ from the protein (because of a ‘wrong’ gene at a certain location). Unfortunately, things are so complex that proteins are not merely an assembly of aminoacids; they need to be ‘folded’ in a certain way, in other words, the 3D structure of the protein is crucial for its specific function. This is a long shot from learning, at school, basic chemistry (like oxidation and reduction processes), where you basically couldn’t care less how a molecule of H2O looked like in 3D.

When dealing with living beings, however, the structure is incredibly more fundamental, especially when we’re talking about mechanisms which will activate other mechanisms… let me try to explain it differently, and get back to what a hormone receptor actually does.

So, no, DNA is not like a computer programme which you start at the beginning and stop at the end. Rather, what happens is that an insane amount of highly complex molecules determine where you start to read and where you stop. These molecules, in turn, get ‘activated’ for different reasons, almost all of them triggered by a certain amount of chemicals present in the body. A typical example from a different scenario: your body cells require sugar (glucose) as a form of energy to do their work. When you eat carbohydrates, where the glucose comes from, your body needs to tell the cells to allow that glucose to be absorbed — as much as necessary, but not more than necessary. This is done by triggering the production of the hormone insulin in the pancreas: in other words, the concentration of sugar in the blood will trigger certain complex proteins to tell the insulin-producing cells to start reading the gene for producing insulin (I’ll skip the fascinating way how this actually works, I’d take the whole day to do that, but read it up, it’s really astonishing). Insulin, in turn, has a specific 3D structure which acts as a ‘key’ to insulin receptors on each cell; when the ‘key’ connects to the ‘lock’, the cell becomes porous to glucose (i.e. it allows glucose molecules to flow in). When ‘enough’ glucose enters the cells, insulin ‘shuts down’ the glucose gates, meaning that no more glucose is allowed to enter the cells. If there is still enough glucose around, however, the body needs to get rid of the excess — again, insulin (which is still around!) will this time tell the liver to store the extra glucose. As sugar levels in the blood drop, the special molecules in the pancreas insulin-producing cells stop being ‘active’, and that means they will also stop producing more insulin from reading the gene in the DNA that describes how insulin is assembled from aminoacids. The excess insulin will eventually be flushed out or reabsorbed/recycled (I’m unsure of exactly what happens to insulin, but its levels in the body will drop). When the cells require more energy, after using up all the glucose, they will trigger a very complex chain of chemical events that ultimately will trigger some higher mental functions in the brain letting you know that you’re hungry and are supposed to eat again.

You can see how things can go wrong even with such a simple mechanism. For example, the gene producing insulin may have a mutation, and now the body can only produce a insulin-like hormone which, however, has the wrong shape (because it has a different sequence of aminoacids, it will ‘fold’ differently) to act as a ‘key’. In other words: everything is in place, ready to get all this complex system working, but unfortunately, the key that fits into the lock that allows glucose to enter the cells is broken. This is a simplified explanation of type 1 diabetes — meaning that people with type 1 diabetes will require all their lives to get extra insulin, since their own body only produces defective insulin. Thankfully, because all the rest of the mechanism is in place, the extra shots of insulin will trigger everything in the correct order so that you can trigger all required mechanisms to keep both the sugar levels in the blood, the liver, all the cells — as well as the insulin levels required to maintain all of that.

Another possibility is that the ‘lock’ is ‘broken’. This happens, for instance, if you are repeatedly using the ‘key’ over and over again; eventually, the ‘locks’ start to break apart, and, at some point, the ‘key’ does not fit any more. In slightly more technical terms: the insulin receptors start to become less sensitive to insulin. In some cases, they can even become resistant to insulin (i.e. reject insulin completely and refuse to allow the insulin protein to ‘connect’ to it). This is pretty much a description of type 2 diabetes: due to a lifestyle including a wrong diet, those nasty insulin receptors work much worse than before, and there is nothing else that you can do but to ‘overload’ them with insulin, in the hope that at least some of them will react. And, yes, changing your lifestyle and diet will have an effect — those lazy receptors might start to work again as they should, or possibly the new cells that get produced as you change your lifestyle will have perfectly working receptors.

Confused? Overwhelmed? You well might be. And remember, the ‘insulin cycle’ is one of the simplest, and that’s mostly because there is a single gene for coding insulin, and the mechanism how the sugar blood levels are kept in check with more or less amounts of circulating insulin is rather well understood.

Now we can turn back to sexual hormones. The principles are the same — through release of certain chemicals, driven by sexual hormones attaching to specific receptors, and therefore pushing the protein-producing factories (the ribosomes in the cells) to synthesise certain proteins encoded in the DNA, a typical development is achieved — either in the direction of producing male sexual characteristics or female ones. But the complexity is several orders of magnitude higher than with the insulin-sugar balance — we are talking not only about several different sexual hormones, but receptors which activate a whole complex chain of events, triggering the production of more proteins, which in turn will activate more genes, and produce different proteins, which in turn will also affect the levels of sexual hormones in the body… and so on. You can start to appreciate the complexity just by twisting your mind around this description! And remember, I’m still oversimplifying — bringing it down to the level that I can understand (I’ve just got a smattering of chemistry in my curriculum, but I know almost nothing about complex molecular biology!). Reality is way, way more complex than this. You can also start to understand that things can easily go wrong, among this complexity. And that’s where it begins to become interesting…!

So… if both genders produce both kinds of sexual hormones, how does the body prevent both from affecting the sexual development? In other words: if we all have the potential to get sexual hormones attached to receptors, and these, in turn, will regulate what proteins will be produced (related to either male sexual development or female sexual development), how does the body ‘know’ which way to go?

Clearly this mechanism is still a lie-to-children: it just explains half the story. So, the body not only needs to get the cycle of sexual hormone production in balance, according to one’s gender, but it also needs to prevent the opposite cycle to function. In other words: a male body needs to produce inhibitors of the ‘female’ development cycle while at the same time promoting the ‘male’ development cycle. This needs to be in perfect equilibrium during all the development time, or else this won’t work!

You now should be properly amazed that this works at all, most of the time. Well, remember, Nature has been experimenting with this for millions of generations — sexual development came relatively early in the history of life; even most modern plants have it — and Nature tends to retain things that work well for a long, long time, until something better comes along. But if some mechanism tends to provide excellent results, then, no matter how complex it may be, or how ‘old’ (in the sense of having been developed millions of generations ago) it is, it remains in our collective DNA for really a long time. This is fortunate from the perspective of genetic engineers and molecular biologists: the ‘assembly stones’ that we humans have are shared with millions of species. There is just one DNA. While it technically could encode an infinite number of proteins, in reality, a finite amount has survived the rigours of evolution, and we all share a lot of things in common. And by ‘we’ I’m speaking of the entire spectrum of life on Earth — from bacteria through plants to animals to humans. Of course, younger species (i.e. humans, for instance…) tend to have inherited a lot of baggage from ancient species and still use it, but have made it more and more complex.

Humans, for instance, have a very complex DNA encoding. One would assume that we humans, being a relatively young species, and carrying a lot of baggage and adding whatever genes are required to make us human, we would therefore have the highest amount of genes in exceedingly long DNA strands. Actually, the reverse is true: it’s strange, but we have less genes than more primitive species (‘primitive’ here in the sense of ‘less complex organisms’ — some of those species might actually be ‘young’, e.g. bacteria that affect humans are as ‘young’ as humans, or even younger, but a single-cell organism like a bacteria is necessarily several orders of magnitude less complex than a whole human being…). This baffled everyone for a while, until researchers found out that we use DNA more efficiently — in other words, the same gene (or rather the same group of genes) can encode different proteins, depending on the environment. What this means is that we’re not humans just because we have human DNA; or, if you wish, if one places a strand of human DNA inside a mouse, for example, we wouldn’t get a human rodent as a result. The DNA is not enough — you need the whole environment, all those loops of chemicals creating all sorts of unstable equilibriums, which will fundamentally determine what genes will be activated, which ones will remain dormant, which ones will be combined with others to produce different proteins, or eventually the same protein with a different shape, which, in turn, will also affect the environment. Think of an automated traffic control system for a very large city: as traffic flows from one part of the city to the other — which will depend on the time of the day (e.g. rush hour or not) — all those traffic lights will need to go green or red to keep the traffic flowing, and that means they will have to be turned on and off at different rhythms. When a special event occurs — say, a soccer game at one part of the city — traffic will be completely different, and that needs rerouting, turning traffic lights on and off at other rhythms, which in turn will make traffic change, and that change will also be reflected on the way the traffic lights move from green to red and back. So you can see what is happening: the traffic lights shape the traffic, which, in turn, shape the way the traffic lights have to be turned on and off. Those two things are mutually influencing themselves.

Almost all living beings work like that as well — the chemicals in the environment dictate what proteins get produced from certain areas in the DNA, which, in turn, will also affect the environment, and, therefore, trigger other protein-building mechanisms from other areas of the DNA, and so forth. Keeping those cycles and loops in check so that there is an equilibrium is a tremendously complex task where gazillions of things can go wrong.

Let’s see a simple example. Suppose that you have been born with XY chromosomes. You would therefore expect that the body will attempt to produce androgen and enter the ‘male development’ cycle, while at the same time it will need to prevent that there is too much estrogen around to trigger the ‘female development’ cycle. This, in turn, requires all those receptors to be working well — in other words, the androgen receptors must bind to the androgen being produced, while the estrogen receptors must be mostly ‘turned off’ so that they cannot bind to estrogen (I said mostly because, as said, estrogen has other functions as well, besides sexual development).

But imagine that the gene that codes the androgen receptor is defective — in other words, it codes a protein that serves as androgen receptor, but, because maybe one or other aminoacids have been replaced due to a few wrong bases in the DNA, the resulting protein does not ‘fold’ correctly, and the result is an androgen receptor that is somehow ‘broken’ and fails to attach to androgen. Now we have a male organism producing lots of androgen (as well as some estrogen, of course) but all that androgen fails to trigger the male development cycle, because those androgen receptors are broken. The organism tries to compensate by producing more androgen receptors (as well as more androgen to connect to them), but it’s of no avail: all that extra androgen is sitting around, doing nothing. Worse than that: not only the androgen is useless to trigger the male development cycle… but because that cycle hasn’t been triggered… it means that the required chemicals that will ‘turn off’ the estrogen receptors have not been produced. In other words: there is a step in the ‘male development programme’ that is completely missing, the male development cycle has not started at all, and, therefore, the female development cycle cannot be blocked. What happens? Well, the estrogen will bind to the estrogen receptors, which are working as they should. More useless androgen is produced, but it does basically nothing; in the mean time, even the little estrogen that is produced starts triggering the female development cycle, because nothing is there to stop it. So the proteins that are being now produced are all related to the female development cycle: these, in turn, will trigger more and more areas of the DNA, where all required proteins for a female development are encoded, and the female development cycle starts in earnest.

But that’s not all. Remember, triggering one of those cycles means also blocking the other. So, even though this particular individual might have started with an androgen-estrogen ratio typically of a male individual, what happens now is that the female development cycle begins to block the male cycle. No matter how much androgen gets produced, now the female development cycle starts to inhibit its production — but since that androgen hadn’t any effect because it couldn’t bind to anything, and therefore could not affect the female development cycle, this now enters in full force — and its results are irreversible!

There is, however, a catch. Remember, this particular individual started with typical XY male chromosomes. Unfortunately for her, the bit that is missing on the Y chromosome has a lot of information related to developing the uterus, the ovaries, and much of what is necessary for the reproductive system to work. Thus, this individual will develop mostly as female, and, at birth, will have a fully functional vulva, and the doctors will say: ‘Congratulations, it’s a girl!’ because externally there is nothing that could give the doctors a clue.

And she will be a girl, because whatever influence the sexual hormones have on the brain (an area of much dispute, since the actual mechanism seems to be far more complex than what was thought — namely, that the brain structures for a male or a female are not directly associated to the sexual hormones, but to other molecules, also triggered by the female/male development cycle, which act directly on the brain cells, telling them to build specific proteins which will affect the way this individual thinks about their gender identity — the whole mechanism is still a mystery), this individual will be subject to whatever the female sexual hormones will do to her brain. Unsuspecting anything about their DNA, the child will clearly identify as female, recognise her body to be female, and because everybody else has not the slightest suspicion that she might be anything but female, will raise her as a girl — which is what she wants anyway.

There will be a few differences, though, but because human beings are so diverse, it’s hardly likely that anyone will notice them. Remember, this individual will not react to any androgen whatsoever. That means that her development will in fact be ultra-feminine — there will be no effects from androgen. And yes, at puberty this will mean big, round breasts, wonderful skin, no facial or body hair, but just luxurious hair on the scalp, and so forth… On the other hand, even if this person has no working androgen receptors, she still has parts of the ‘blueprint’ for a male; so, when things like the ‘growth’ cycle is triggered, because she has genes for a male growth, she will be usually taller than the average female in her area, with stronger bones, nicer legs… well, some have maliciously described them as ‘superwomen‘.

This is a condition known as complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS) — a not-so-unusual genetic disease (which affects something between 1 in 5,000 and 1 in 20,000 women, depending on the study) which has, in the past, been completely undiagnosed. Such people identify as female and have an external female body, with both primary and secondary female sexual characteristics — usually quite well developed, and often very attractively so. The only hint that something might be wrong will be at puberty when they fail to menstruate; and, of course, lacking an uterus, they will be infertile. In the past, however, because there are so many possible congenital diseases preventing women to carry children, CAIS was simply shrugged away as unimportant; people affected with CAIS usually lead normal, healthy lives; they can always marry and adopt children, of course. And because their infertility is usually just something they will tell to their husbands, nobody in the world will be able to suspect that there might be anything ‘wrong’ with them (in fact, their good looks, perfect skin, and statuesque body might just raise jealousy and envy from other women, and desire in most heterosexual males…).

With the advent of modern medical imageology, doctors could see that at least something was wrong with these women — i.e. they lacked an uterus, and their vagina, consequently, would just be a ‘pouch’ leading to nowhere. This at least allowed doctors, at puberty, to see that their uterus had totally failed to develop and tell them the bad news: that they would be unable to bear children. Because there are so many diseases affecting the reproductive system and rendering women infertile, once again, for decades, even with state-of-the-art technology, CAIS remained undiagnosed as such — people with CAIS would just be bundled together with hundreds of other potential diseases affecting uterus development.

It’s just with the advent of modern (and affordable) DNA sequencing that doctors saw that something was utterly wrong: persons with CAIS were genetically male. Now, this is important to underline, because, again, there are lots of genetic ‘defects’ or mutations, where either the X or the Y chromosome gets damaged, duplicated, cloned, whatever… and the result may be male, female or a mix (intersex). In those cases, die-hard fundamentalists could just have pity on the ‘poor women — yes, because they are genetically women, they just have bad genes’, and TERFs would still consider those people women, just unlucky women with bad genes.

But people with CAIS are another story. They are, for all genetic purposes, male. They are not ‘genetic women with mutations’ or ‘bad genes’. They are male from all possible definitions at the genetic level. Sure, they are males with one mutation at one particularly sensitive gene — the androgen receptor gene — but they are males nonetheless. In fact, there are dozens of different kinds of people clearly male (mentally and physically), identifying as male without any doubt, but who have their DNA in much worse condition than people suffering from CAIS, who might just have one bad gene and nothing else. Worse than that, many males with ‘bad genes’ might suffer from genes broken down due to new mutations, i.e. their condition is not inherited, but the DNA formed from the strands of their parents just mutated at some point and broke down (which is actually very rare; human DNA is not that prone to mutations; it’s just that, at 7 billion individuals, we are such a big species that statistically something has to go wrong once in a while — even with billion-to-one chances of something to go wrong means that seven individuals might have been the unlucky ones!).

CAIS is different: it’s often (70%) an inherited condition. The parents might not even know they are the carriers of a ‘bad gene’. The androgen receptor is in a gene contained in the X chromosome (yes, that sounds strange, but that’s how it works), and, because women have two X chromosomes, they will still have one ‘good’ AR gene on one of the chromosomes, while carrying the ‘bad’ gene on the other one. That means that female offspring will also have at least one good AR gene (from the father) and one bad one (from the mother); it’s a recessive condition. Even male offspring might be absolutely normal — they can get the ‘good’ X from the father or the ‘good’ X from the mother. It’s just when they get the ‘bad’ X from the mother that things go wrong.

The AR gene is one of those genes that is very easy to mutate: around 400 different mutations are currently known (which is an astonishingly large number!). Not all of them lead to a broken androgen receptor: many might just not work as well as they should (because they are ever so slightly differently ‘folded’ and therefore androgen doesn’t ‘stick’ to it as well as it should). And yes, you’ve guessed: a partially, but not totally broken AR will lead to all sorts of intersex conditions, from very mild forms (the person is physically and mentally male, but may fail to develop fully their secondary sexual characteristics, for instance) to more severe ones (the person might have ambiguous genitalia, and mentally identify as a female, for example).

CAIS is by no means the only condition leading to intersex individuals, or to produce women who are genetically male — there are a good handful of other complications and conditions — but it is one of the more interesting ones, especially for transgender people. People with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (and the more severe forms of AIS) are not male. They are, for all purposes — physical, mental, legal — female. They have always identified as female, and nobody has ever questioned them about their gender identity. Before genetic exams became widely available, people with CAIS would not even have a ‘diagnosis’ of their condition … they would just be unlucky, infertile women, like so many others who carry XX genes. But, unlike all other women, people with CAIS have, for all purposes, male DNA. It’s not just having XY chromosomes that makes DNA be ‘male’. It’s because they have a fully functional ‘male blueprint’ encoded in their genes. The trouble is that this ‘male blueprint’ cannot be ever activated (not even artificially so) because the androgen receptor is broken. The organism with a ‘broken’ AR has no choice but to do their best with whatever they can find inside their DNA, and that often means a very attractive, statuesque woman; but one could say that this is a ‘side-effect’ of having a defective AR, that is, most species (and most certainly humans) are positively biased toward being female as ‘default’, and ‘becoming male’ requires a special effort; if the organism fails to develop as male, it usually develops as female instead (but remember that we know from the multiple intersex conditions that things are not that easy!). In other words: from a geneticist’s point of view, a person with CAIS is a ‘broken male’ who has failed to develop as such, and it’s just by a biological coincidence that they developed as female instead.

From the society’s point of view (and, of course, from the perspective of the individual with CAIS), it’s the other way round: this person is legally, emotionally, mentally, and physically female. They just happen to have a very slight genetic defect (it’s just one gene, after all) which prevents them to bear children. But they are perfectly normal, healthy women otherwise. Well, perhaps they might even be especially attractive on top of everything, but that’s not relevant!

Of course, MtF transgender people such as myself are always fascinated with people with CAIS, for a very unfair reason: jealousy! After all, MtF transgender people have also been born with XY chromosomes and a ‘male blueprint’. They also identify as female. But because they have fully functional androgen receptors, their body unfortunately has developed as male instead — so they have to suffer from gender dysphoria, and undergo complex medical procedures and face the disapproval of the more conservative and fundamentalist members of society as they try to adapt their bodies to the gender they identify with. People with CAIS have no such problems. Granted, they will never bear children, but neither will MtF transgender people — they will have to rely on adoption if they wish to have families.

This jealousy, of course, is completely inappropriate and actually a form of discrimination; people with CAIS have, after all, a genetic disease — one that is incapacitating, in the sense that they will never be able to bear children. So it’s very unfair to be ‘jealous’ of them!

Nevertheless, from an activist’s point of view, CAIS proves the whole point — that genetics is totally irrelevant for gender identity. We can repeat lies-to-children saying that ‘XY chromosomes lead to men, XX chromosomes lead to women’, but that’s just an oversimplification. People with XY chromosomes and a broken AR will be women and nothing more than women, and they will be socially accepted as such, because their bodies and minds are fully female, and have never been anything but female. Genetics doesn’t play a role in either their identity or social role. And, on top of that, CAIS is not that rare, and this should also raise a few eyebrows.

If CAIS prevents an individual from reproducing themselves and pass their DNA along to the next generation, why haven’t they been weeded out by evolution?

We have to go one step back, and frame the whole question in a new context, that of evolution. After all, we’re not talking about a de novo mutation — that is, a new mutation that popped up unexpectedly for a specific individual, because that particular individual had one strand of DNA incorrectly copied. De novo mutations in humans (well, in most modern species, to be honest) are actually very, very rare. DNA, by itself, replicates correctly 99% of the time — but on advanced and complex species as homo sapiens, there are a lot of other mechanisms to get rid of the few errors that might pop up. For instance, we might have duplicate copies of the same genes, so that if one gene gets affected by a mutation and fails to produce the correct protein, the other one will still work. Or our organism may have means to identify a broken protein and ‘fix’ it so that it works again, even at the cost of producing less of those — that’s ok, because the body has means of ramping up production, due to the complex ways of sustaining an equilibrium. Or the organism might just have mutated copies of a gene in some cells but not in others (a condition known as genetic chimerism). I don’t know about all the possibilities of ‘fixing’ mutations, but I’m aware that there are really, really many of those, so that absolutely devastating mutations are incredibly rare. For example, there is also an equivalent estrogen insensitivity syndrome, which, as you might expect, will make an XX individual fail to develop fully as female. But because the estrogen receptor gene is located elsewhere, it cannot be inherited, since a XX individual with EIS is unable to reproduce themselves and pass the ‘bad’ gene along. So all mutations of the ER gene have to be de novo. And this is so rare, so rare, that currently there are just two reported cases of EIS in the whole world. That’s how resilient our DNA is against ‘bad’ mutations!

Still, because there are so many humans — after bacteria and ants, we’re at the top of the list of the species with the largest number of individuals — as said, even billion-to-one chances will happen once in a while. But it’s worth repeating that the problem with CAIS is that it is not that rare. In fact, the 1:20,000 ratio is based on reported conditions. Up until 1950, CAIS was not even known as such. Individuals with partial AIS — which is much rarer than CAIS — would show ambiguous genitalia, i.e. some form of intersexuality, and as a result they had been better studied: so the condition could be described, but the reasons for it were unknown. Remember, we just know how DNA looks like from 1955 onwards; it’s just by the 1970s that we started to understand how exactly AIS is triggered, and that it was actually quite common for people to suffer from complete AIS, but because their external appearance would be fully female, they would escape diagnosis completely.

For all practical purposes — and this naturally continues to be the case on less developed countries with limited access to highly advanced medical exams, such as DNA sequencing — a person with CAIS was just an infertile woman: the kind of auntie we all had in our families who never got married because she couldn’t give birth to her own children, and therefore was the kind, beloved aunt who helped her sisters to raise the kids. And here is the crucial evolutionary trait: because humans are a gregarious species with an extraordinarily complex society, we historically favour large families where kids are raised not only by the parents, but by the other members of the family as well — from uncles and aunts to grandparents and cousins. Evolutionarily speaking, this makes sense, because family members share genes (even if in a much lesser degree than a parent-offspring relationship), and protecting the genes of all members of the family means a higher degree of getting one’s own genes — albeit inherited through one’s siblings — to the next generation. This strategy, in fact, is typical of gregarious species, and gregarious species have therefore an evolutionary advantage over the others: they can raise children together and therefore increase the success rate of those children to survive, therefore carrying the genes of a pool of members towards the next generation. Such strategies have made gregarious species extremely efficient at surviving — just see the two examples I gave before, ants and humans, being among the species with the most number of members (of course, this is another oversimplification, as obviously several gregarious species might actually risk extinction due to dramatic changes of their habitats — think about lions and wolves, for instance).

What has been postulated is that these strange genetic and/or development conditions which emerge and are not so rare actually provide an evolutionary advantage as well. I’ve talked before about the current reasoning for the prevalence of homosexuality (and transexuality) in most species, especially on the gregarious ones which raise children together, is that such individuals, while not reproducing themselves directly, are able to aid their siblings (and other members of the family) to help them raise their children, instead of focusing on their own (because they don’t have any!). Therefore, an homosexual uncle helping to raise his brother’s children will enhance the rate of survival of their nephews — who also carry genetic material of the homosexual uncle, of course, just not as much as if the homosexual uncle had children of their own. Evolutionary biologists therefore argue that those members of society who do not have children themselves, but have no otherwise crippling conditions (a sign of ‘bad genes’!), can effectively raise the collective success rate of transmitting their collective pool of genes towards the next generation. In other words: small families, with just the parents and their children, have a much higher risk of not being able to bring up their children than large families, with grandmothers, unmarried aunts, homosexual uncles, transexual godmothers, and cousins with CAIS… which will have several available individuals to raise a group of children which will also pass part of their genetic material. While in the case of transexuality and homosexuality we still have no clue how exactly those ‘conditions’ are inherited (there seem to be no ‘transexual’ or ‘homosexual’ genes), with individuals with CAIS, it’s a different story: as said, the ‘bad’ AR gene is transmitted recessively via the maternal line. Many individuals with CAIS will even be able to lactate, and therefore serve as wet nurses, so there is evolutionary advantage of having them around to take care of the children when their genetic mother is not able to do so. This means that the ‘bad’ AR gene gets passed along — not directly, through one’s own children, but indirectly, through their nephews. And that makes the ‘bad’ AR gene be evolutionarily significant, which, in turn, explains why after hundreds of thousands of generations evolution has still not got rid of it — it serves an evolutionary purpose of raising the chances of survival of the species as a whole.

Tipping the balance: how easy it is!

What can we learn from this complex description of how people develop as male or female while inside the womb? What can we see that happens when things go wrong? What lessons are hidden behind these thousands of words?

First and foremost, every MtF transexual going through transition might wonder that actually it’s so easy to change their own bodies to become more feminine!

The lie-to-children is that if you remove androgens and add estrogens, your body will ‘naturally’ become more feminine. This sounds logical at the very basic, lie-to-children stage. But if you start to think a bit deeper than that, there surely must be something wrong with this reasoning, especially if we’re talking about an adult (i.e. post-puberty human) going through transition and doing hormone replacement therapy.

Remember, we have done most of our sexual development inside the womb — we get complete (even if not yet functional) genitalia, which are differentiated at the time of birth. While I’ve shown you some links about how so many parts of the human genitalia come from the same tissues, once they have been differentiated they are ‘fixed’, just like every other part of the body. You cannot change them by adding hormones: for instance, you can take the human growth hormone in your adult life to correct some conditions, but you will not grow taller or larger because of that! Why? Because the human growth hormone will act to make you ‘grow tall’ only at a specific period of time when the organism is developing according to a complex ‘blueprint’, which means that there is a special environment at a precise time in life where the human growth hormone is able to bind to the correct receptors which, in turn, will trigger genes that will add more cells and structures to the right places so that you ‘grow taller’. But once you have reached the end of your growth stage, the environment changes, those receptors will not bind any more to the human growth hormone, and thus they will not read those genes again. That stage of development is over; we have gone a few steps further in the ‘blueprint’, and there is no turning back. So, no, you cannot kickstart your growth process again by just adding the ‘right’ hormones, triggering the ‘right’ receptors, pushing the organism to start reading the ‘right’ genes again… it simply doesn’t work like that: once a specific stage is over, it is over, end of story. You can still administer human growth hormone to produce some effects — that’s why it’s used in certain therapies — and it will still bind to some other receptors (namely, it will increase production of all hormones), so there will be an ‘effect’. It just won’t be the effect of growing taller.

On the other hand… blocking androgen and administering estrogen no matter at what age will make your breasts grow. Well, of course how much they grow depends on your particular genetic makeup, but they will grow. And that’s not the only effect, of course — the skin gets softer; body fat gets distributed so that the coarse and angular shapes in the face will be replaced with softer and more rounded, feminine ones; hair on the scalp will become more luxurious, grow longer and healthier, and in some cases even bald men will regain hair growth; body fat will be channeled into the breasts and the hips and bottom; facial and body hair will become more sparse and much finer; muscle tone will disappear; the prostate gland will be reduced; etc. etc. etc. We all have read those descriptions millions of times; we all have heard transexuals describing it as ‘a second puberty’.

Actually, it’s even more than a ‘second puberty’: at puberty, what happens is that a mostly sexually undifferentiated individual (except for the genitalia and internal organs), under the effect of sexual hormones, will start to develop the secondary sexual characteristics appropriate to their gender, according to a ‘blueprint’. What happens with MtF HRT is that the previous ‘male blueprint’ gets cancelled (chemical castration), reversed, and a new blueprint, the ‘female blueprint’, is activated. And this happens in spite of age or degree of development of those secondary sexual characteristics!

You might now be wondering how this is possible! After all, I have started to describe how the ‘growth blueprint’ stops after a while, and no matter what hormones you take, you won’t start growing again. So why is the secondary sexual characteristics ‘blueprint’ still operational — in the sense that you can switch it off and on, even at an adult age — but other ‘blueprints’ are not? What makes this particular blueprint so different from others?

Remember what I told you about the unstable equilibrium that ‘defines’ what sexual characteristics blueprint is picked? Well, there is some logic for that. As you so well know, human beings have a certain ‘fertility age’, which in women begins with their menstruation and stops with menopause. Men are a bit luckier in the sense that their penises still work for quite some time, and that sperm production drops dramatically after ‘peak age’ (somewhere around 27 years) but since men produce gazillions of sperm cells, this drop of production will take a long, long time to have some effect. Nevertheless, it’s obviously not a coincidence that men’s peak sexual performance is at roughly the same time as women’s fertility stage.

Why doesn’t the female fertility stage last longer, i.e. like men, remain active until the end of life? This, again, is where evolution steps in. Bearing children places very tough demands on the mother; a lot of energy and resources have to be funneled towards gestating a new life in the womb, and, after birth, there is a lot of ‘used material’ that has to be replenished so that the womb can carry a new child again. This means further expenses of resources; not to mention the resources also needed for lactation to feed the newborn child. Because mortality rates for the human species was staggeringly high, it meant having the ability to bear, say, a dozen children, in the hope that at least two survived, possibly three (which would allow a population growth over the generations). So evolution had to find an equilibrium again — how many children ought a woman to be able to bear in order to at least sustain the population levels, given a certain (very high) mortality rate, while at the same time not depleting the resources of the female body until the mother dies from exhaustion way too soon to be useful for the society (namely, raising the children to adulthood)?

It is not a coincidence, therefore, that the period required for humans to reach sexual maturity is roughly the time that women are fertile, plus a margin; this means that, in theory, prehistoric human beings, who had a life expectancy of 40 years, would start to carry children by around 15, and continue to have, say, a dozen of them in the next dozen of years, while possibly raising some of the first children to adulthood. That would mean that mothers would at least have to live 30 years, with 15 years of fertility, assuming that the first children would survive. In practice, there is a bit of leeway — if out of a dozen children, the first eleven would die, and only the last one survived, then the mother would be 27 years old, be able to raise her last child to adulthood, and be 42 years old — about the age that humans would die from natural causes. During the raising of most of the children, especially the last ones, she should not be bearing any more children, but save her strength just for taking care of the living ones. To save resources, therefore, the organism ‘shuts down’ the ‘fertility’ blueprint. But there is more! Once she’s infertile again, she should show external signs of infertility, to make males aware that they should pick a different partner and leave her in peace. This is what the ‘menopause’ blueprint does: not only it shuts down the reproductive system, but it also affects the secondary sexual characteristics, making the woman ‘less sexually attractive’ to potential partners (the same, of course, also happens to a certain degree to males: as they age, and become less efficient in producing sperm, they will also lose muscle tone, become balder, their skin will wrinkle, etc. and so forth — also to give an outwards sign that they are not ‘healthy’ in terms of reproduction any more, but become ‘unattractive’ through the shutting down of the secondary male sexual characteristics ‘blueprint’). I don’t mean this as a form of disrespect, I’m just referring to the biological aspects of menopause; obviously the changes will be different from person to person.

And yes, I know all this sounds horrible — dehumanizing people, describing them as mere machines that are turned on and off according to the whims of Nature and evolutionary biology. Again, let me repeat once more, I’m definitely not using any judgement here, much less trying to discriminate and/or insult people who are aging (after all, I’m almost half a century old myself — not exactly a youngling any more…). My whole point is to explain why the secondary sexual characteristics ‘blueprint’ needs to be switched on and off: it signals to the rest of the species when a person is in their fertile stage or in their infertile stage. And we need that in order to be able to pick the ‘right’ partners so that we can reproduce when both members of the couple are at their peak of their reproductive abilities, which raises the probability of success in terms of passing along their best genes to the next generation. It’s tough, but that’s what it means in terms of evolution.

Nowadays, of course, we have thrown evolution out of the window by not only artificially enhancing our average lifespan to more than twice its natural span, but also by artificially enhancing the success rate of children surviving after birth. Thanks to modern medicine, the actual rate of child deaths is infinitesimally small, compared to prehistoric (and pre-civilization!) levels, where possibly 50-80% of all children would never reach maturity. Today, in the European Union, an average of 99.6% of all births will at least reach 5 years of age.

The implications are staggering. This actually means that women can start their fertility stage much later, and that is seen by young couples marrying (and having children) much later in life than their parents and grandparents. In other words, it’s not unusual for young adults to enter their first marriage around 25-30 years of age — which would be close to the end of their natural lifespan in prehistoric times!

Ironically, these days, women start to menstruate earlier than before! But they delay their marriage for much, much longer; i.e. they might start menstruation at 9-11, and become sexually mature by 13, but they will only think of marriage after 25… contrast that to prehistoric women, who would probably only start menstruation by 15 and immediately become sexually mature, get a partner, and get pregnant.

This is an anomaly which comes from the fact that the menstruation cycle also has a ‘blueprint’ which says that it ought to start when the woman has reached a certain level where she is able to expend resources that will go towards the growth of new life inside her womb, as opposed to use up all those resources for her own growth, maturation, and survival. Because humans are so much better fed these days (and not only on developed countries: this is a trend that happens all over the world, even the poorest people in the poorest countries are much better fed than a hundred years ago, not to mention ten thousand years ago…), this means they have plenty of extra resources available much sooner in their lifetimes, and that’s what triggers their ‘fertility blueprint’ so much earlier. It’s another legacy of evolution. It’s no coincidence that sexual hormones are produced in the body using up cholesterol — yes, that same cholesterol that clogs up our arteries because of excessive fat intake. Since we have so many fatty products easily available, we have plenty of cholesterol, which in turn signals the body that it can safely start converting it to sexual hormones much sooner, and which, therefore, will trigger the fertility stage much sooner as well. And yes, this also explains a bit why more people are strangely more attractive these days than a few generations ago — attractiveness, as in ‘suitability as a partner’, is not only linked to good genes, but somehow also to being healthy and having a regular diet, as opposed to living near the starvation level. So, with more food available, we become prettier. I know it sounds stupid. But that’s how it is! It’s complex, and we’re artificially fiddling with evolution by tricking our organism in soooo many different ways…

All right, so we can see from this that what we usually call ‘secondary sexual characteristics’ is basically the external appearance which signals that a human being is in their fertility stage. Because of this careful balance between how many resources a woman has to spend to survive, and how many she can afford to spend to generate new life, the fertility stage doesn’t last ‘forever’, neither is it started ‘too soon’ (when the body has not reached a critical mass where it can actually store all those extra resources needed for childbearing). Evolution has figured out the ‘best’ timings for all of that; but through evolution, it has also developed a system to signal ‘sexual attractiveness’ only during the fertility stage. This is more visible in women than in men because men, even with a reduced level of sperm production, are nevertheless able to produce it for a much longer time — because producing sperm expends very few resources! See, it all makes sense if you think that way…

It’s also the reason why very, very old men and women will strangely look much more alike. Of course, we will artificially enhance the differences using clothes, makeup, hairstyle, and so forth; but the truth is that humans, decades after their fertility stage has been ‘shut down’, will simply have no further use for their secondary sexual characteristics, and these will be ‘turned off’ — or, rather, there will be no further incentive to produce whatever is required to maintain them. So things will literally ‘shrivel and die’ — both in males as well as females — and they will resemble each other much more, again, just like in their first years of life. Obviously the primary sexual characteristics, which have been produced before birth, will still be in place; and things like bone structure and skeleton will still show the different development paths taken during puberty.

Transexuals, therefore, benefit from this unique advantage of the ‘blueprint’ for their secondary sexual characteristics: it can be turned on and off, by creating the appropriate chemical environment inside their bodies. In the case of MtF transexuals, what is effectively happening is that the ‘male reproductive/fertile stage’ is ‘shut down’ (through chemical castration with anti-androgens, and, later, either an orchiectomy or a full gender affirmation surgery), and the ‘female reproductive/fertile stage’ is ‘turned on’. This ‘turning on’ of the female stage will really be like a ‘second puberty’ in the chemical, biological sense of the word, that is, the body will really tip the unstable equilibrium of those sexual hormones so that it starts entering the ‘female stage’ and actively block the ‘male stage’. Interestingly enough, this works dramatically well, at any age, and it just requires an increased output of female sexual hormones — which are artificially taken through pills, patches or injections, simulating the extra hormones produced by a woman’s ovaries during her fertile stage. As long as this new equilibrium is (artificially) maintained, that MtF transexual will effectively have all ‘female reproductive/fertile stage blueprints’ turned on, and yes, that means that she will acquire all secondary sexual characteristics and attributes that a cisgender woman with healthy genes will have acquired during her naturally-produced puberty.

From a strictly biological and chemical point of view, therefore, we can say that the changes brought by HRT have turned that person into a ‘biological female’ — more specifically, a ‘biological female in her reproductive/fertile stage’ (where biological refers to her biochemistry in this context). I know this is anathema in many circles (namely, among TERFs) but that’s what it means, if we’re looking only at the biology. In other words, it’s irrelevant if that person has XY chromosomes or not — just like it is irrelevant for people with CAIS. As we have seen, people with CAIS will naturally block androgen from connecting to androgen receptors and therefore engage the ‘female’ blueprints during all their natural lives. Transexuals will do exactly the same thing — with the difference that the blocking of the androgen receptors occurs artificially. It’s also unfair to say, ‘oh, sure, but if you give up your pills/patches/injections, you will continue to be male just as before’ — because we’re talking about technological modes of triggering the ‘female blueprint’. In 2030, we might simply be able to get a retrovirus to break down the androgen receptors, and eat some kind of bacteria that starts producing female hormones inside our bodies — so we won’t need any more pills or patches or injections. By 2050 or 2060, we might not even need that, we might be able to change our DNA so that it automatically enters the ‘female’ stage without the need of supplementing the chemical balance with externally taken hormones — in other words, tell the body to start producing female hormones on its own, and stop producing male ones. Remember, people assigned male at birth also produce female hormones, since these are also needed, they just don’t produce enough, since most of it is only produced on fatty tissue (yes, the more obese you are, the more female hormones in your body…). We might be able to genetically engineer things so that way more female hormones are produced, either elsewhere, or just make the estrogen receptors more sensitive… whatever. We’re talking about future technology here: anything is possible. So, blaming one’s ‘artificial femaleness’ on pills/patches/injections is just being narrow-minded — this is just the state-of-the-art today, who knows what we will come up with in the future?

TERFs and fundamentalists can still argue that MtF transexuals will ‘trigger’ their ‘female blueprint’ artificially, no matter what method they employ, while ‘real woman’ (their definition of real woman, at least) will do so naturally. Again, this is a very, very weak argument. We all enhance artificially our lifespans. Does that mean that anyone older than 40 is not human any more? Women start menstruating artificially  much sooner than we humans were evolutionarily conditioned to do. Does that mean that female adolescents are not human any more — nor even women, just because their first menstruation artificially started much sooner than it should? What about artificially getting people to survive during childbirth? Anyone born via a C-section, or, worse, through in vitro fertilisation — are they not human any more?

The argument of ‘artificiality’ is simply not valid any more. We artificially dress in warm clothes so that we can survive during a cold winter, instead of dying out; we artificially heat up our homes for the same reason, and that goes back to the discovery of fire, the first ‘artificial’ form of using energy for heating up our homes (and for cooking — another ‘artificial’ and much more effective way of eating and consuming nutrients). We artificially wear figure-hugging clothes, walk on heels, and put on makeup to artificially look more ‘attractive’. We artificially build machines to make our work simpler or to allow us to move further distances that would be impossible to achieve simply by walking. We create artificial drugs to fight diseases that would otherwise kill us. And of course the list of everything that we have developed to ‘artificially’ enhance our lives in so many ways is so incredibly long that we should not even call ourselves homo sapiens any more, but a completely different species…

So, let’s stop pretending. Triggering one’s ‘secondary sexual characteristics blueprint’ using special-purpose drugs is as ‘artificial’ as taking a drug to lower fever when we catch the common cold. We can’t simply say that one thing is ‘unnatural’ or ‘fake’, while the other is ‘natural’. It’s not natural to lower your fever when you’re ill; fever is the natural way for our organism to fight disease. Of course it’s much more uncomfortable to deal with the side-effects of a fever. But in the same way that we feel pity and compassion towards someone who is ill and give them medicine to lower their fever, we should be consistent and feel the same compassion towards those who are ‘curing’ themselves by triggering the onset of their female secondary sexual characteristics.

Now, this is not an article about evolutionary biology, much less an essay about CAIS, even though it feels like one after these thousands of words There is a point to be made here, and one that is fundamental for transgender activism: what exactly is a woman?

Forget genetics, forget biology: focus on the gender role!

The whole point, in fact, is to show how TERFs (and fundamentalists!) are completely wrong about ‘what makes a woman’. Lacking an uterus is not a sign for excluding a woman from being a woman — there are (unfortunately) tons of reasons why women have no uterus, or have to get their uterus removed. A woman without an uterus is not a ‘lesser woman’, a ‘subwoman’, much less ‘a male passing as a woman to subvert the feminist movement’. It’s just a poor woman who was unlucky with her health, or with her genes, and had to have their uterus removed (or it failed to develop). Just because they are unable to bear children doesn’t make them ‘lesser woman’; they are not to be scorned or despised, but they ought to be objects of compassion. In fact, even TERFs and fundamentalists will show pity towards those women, while, at the same time, continuing to insist that women without uterus are not really women…

Going deeper, and apparently ‘more scientifically’, so many TERFs and fundamentalists, or even conservatives with a mind more open than the average, will ultimately point out at the DNA and repeat the lie-to-children that XY means male and XX means female — while at the same time fully recognising the ‘right’ of people with CAIS to ‘be’ women. The argument that trans women are ‘artificial’, and therefore not ‘real’ women, while women with CAIS are ‘naturally’ women even if they have 100% male DNA… well, it simply doesn’t stick. You cannot argue both ways and get away with it (unless you’re a certain president of a certain country…).

And of course they cannot even argue that trans women are not ‘biological females’. From the perspective of what goes on inside their organisms, they are triggering the natural, biological blueprints for their secondary female sexual characteristics. This is undeniable; you can make detailed analysis of what’s going on at the chemical level and clearly figure out that, yes, this is exactly what’s happening inside their bodies. On the other hand, TERFs and fundamentalists would have to exclude women after their menopause from the classification of ‘women’, because their chemistry is not the one of a ‘natural’ woman any more — their ‘female characteristics system’ has been shut down.

We have to clear all that from the table, and start working from basic assumptions again. We cannot root the arguments about ‘womanness’ based on biology, chemistry, genetics, embryonal development, and so forth; we know today that what ‘makes’ a man or a woman is incredibly more complex than the simple lies-to-children we get taught at school. We have no choice but to go beyond that, in a world where there are so many ‘natural cisgender woman’ with such different genetic, biological, and chemical makeups — all of which socially accepted as women during all their lives — while somehow arguing that trans women are not ‘women’ at all, even if they have a ‘female chemistry’, a female mind, and a body which exhibits at least some secondary female sexual characteristics — something that allegedly only ‘natural women’ are supposed to have!

Instead, we have to move the discussion elsewhere, and it’s clear that the only way to define someone as a ‘woman’ is by watching how closely that person identifies with the female gender identity.

Now, as we will shortly see, this has a trillion of problems of their own, but at least it has a huge advantage over the physical/biological model: it unifies the whole gender since it will be the same definition for all women, no matter what their biological makeup (or how they physically look like) is.

Sounds simple? No, not in the least!

If we fail at enumerating the physical differences between men and women, because we can show how easily our lies-to-children can trick us into false beliefs, and if we can show how we can turn a man’s chemistry into a woman’s (and back again) by simply tipping the fine biochemical balance inside a person, then how are we supposed to tell the difference about mental states? Remember, as I told you before, we cannot simply list so-called ‘typical male traits’ and ‘typical female traits’, because many of those are simply social conditioning. Just remind yourself that in the early days of computing, women were programmers (‘software’) because they weren’t to be trusted with hardware; then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, programming became a man’s job; and these days, it’s becoming a woman’s job again, simply because there are far more women graduating these days. We cannot say that ‘abstract reasoning and logical thinking’ (two important factors for programming computers) are ‘male’ traits, because at some point in our so very recent past, we gave those tasks to women to perform. The movie Hidden Figures shows how the whole US space programme in the 1960s would have been impossible without those female mathematicians who did all the ‘abstract reasoning and logical thinking’ in rocket science.

Now, we know that there is a considerable number of biological differences between male and female brains, but the more these so-called ‘differences’ are deeply researched, the less differences there seem to be. Even though one thing is using imagiology techniques to ‘see’ the differences (and conclude that there are far less differences than it was thought) and another thing is trying to relate those differences to actual behaviour. In other words: just because the brain structure might be differently constructed, it does not mean that the behaviour must be different (after all, on average, women’s brains are smaller than men’s brains, but they are more ‘convoluted’, which gives them more surface area — brain size is not everything, or whales and elephants would be far more intelligent than humans; brain surface, however, seems to be more important than mass, weight or volume, which explains why mammals with relatively tiny brains, like rodents, or even birds, are able to exhibit surprisingly complex behaviour and even learn a range of new behaviours).

It’s technically hard to argue either way. We know from IQ tests and school tests that women acquire knowledge in all areas, on average, as well as men. We also know that nowadays women are getting higher education degrees on areas which were ‘traditionally’ male, and at a faster and higher rate than men; in fact, if the trend continues, in another generation there will be hardly any men with a higher education in the Western world. We will live in a strange society where all professional jobs requiring higher education will be performed by women, while men will become lorry drivers or pizza deliverers, but those men who will get an education will study enough to become electricians, plumbers and carpenters, possibly even becoming nurses or firefighters, but probably not much more than that. And perhaps in another three or four generations it will all be thrown upside down again. The conclusion? We cannot really rely upon a pre-established (and prejudiced!) idea of what men and women are able to do with their brains, because history is constantly proving us wrong.

We also must seriously separate what are innate abilities and what are socially conditioned behaviours. We tend to confuse both. In conservative societies (such as my country was during roughly half a century, from 1926 to 1974), men tend to see women as weak, stupid, unable to learn anything complex, but needing protection; and as such ideas are passed on to little girls during their early years, and reinforced by teachers and textbooks on school, women start to believe such nonsense. Under authoritarian regimes — almost always lead by men! — women are not even allowed to become freethinkers or somehow question those prevailing sexist ideas; even intelligent women will subdue their abilities and conform to society’s rules — and become ‘good motherly citizens’ due to peer pressure. We can see this still happening in so many countries in the world (mostly those where Islam is the main religion, but not only those); and even older generations living in our current, contemporary, Western societies will still truly ‘believe’ that the innate abilities, or the lack thereof (in the case of women), drives socially conditioned behaviours. To give an example of such a backwards mentality: women stay at home to raise the children because they are unable to get a higher education and a high-paying job, thus their husband needs to provide for her (and for the family as a whole).

Now, of course we live in societies where this is not the case any more (and hasn’t been so for a few generations); but people have been living for so long under such conservative societies that it’s hard to get rid of all those prejudices, passed along from our great-great-great-grandparents to their offspring. Indeed, we would have to have 250-year-olds still living with us to remember a time where even men questioned the lack of abilities of women, and when women, even though they were not intellectual and social peers of men, they would at least be granted much more leeway — at least among the Enlightened aristocracy of the 1700s (peasants, of course, would be too dumb to understand anything — both men and women!). So the main reason for still having a gender wage gap or similar rubbish comes mostly from a long heritage of generation upon generation repeating certain memes, namely, that women have not the same mental abilities as men.

Curiously enough, there is a small hidden gem in Charles Darwin’s writings. Darwin, like every other gentlemen of his age and time, was strongly prejudiced against women in general (of course, as a gentleman, he would treat them with utter respect and protect them with his life, if needed, but he would not grant them the idea that they might be his intellectual peers — that would have been outrageous in his time!), and we know that well. Nevertheless, he was also one of the deepest thinkers of the 19th century, and good scientists have this knack of constantly questioning everything. At some point in one of his books (The Descent Of Man, And Selection In Relation To Sex) there is

a curious and somewhat obscure passage on page 329 where he seems to imply that women could become like men in their mental facilities if they were provided with suitable opportunities and training (from the Princeton University Press edition in 1981)

The passage in question is:

It must be borne in mind that the tendency in characters acquired at a late period of life by either sex, to be transmitted to the same sex at the same age, and of characters acquired at an early age to be transmitted to both sexes, are rules which, though general, do not always hold good. If they always held good, we might conclude (but I am here wandering beyond my proper bounds) that the inherited effects of the early education of boys and girls would be transmitted equally to both sexes; so that the present inequality between the sexes in mental power could not be effaced by a similar course of early training; nor can it have been caused by their dissimilar early training. In order that woman should reach the same standard as man, she ought, when nearly adult, to be trained to energy and perseverance, and to have her reason and imagination exercised to the highest point; and then she would probably transmit these qualities chiefly to her adult daughters. The whole body of women, however, could not be thus raised, unless during many generations the women who excelled in the above robust virtues were married, and produced offspring in larger numbers than other women.

While to understand the precise context of this affirmation requires reading a good part of Darwin’s book, it’s nevertheless interesting that he, even with his prejudice against women, considers that it is theoretically possible for women to become men’s intellectual peers if only they got the proper training and education (like men), and, on subsequent generations, parents did the same to their children, and so forth, especially if such children would have a selection advantage (that is, if a woman with education would be able to bear more children, and those would be more healthy than the children of an uneducated woman). Ultimately — thinks Darwin — we might reach a point where women and men would show the same intellectual prowess.

Now, Darwin was almost right in his prediction, since after six generations or so we are most certainly seeing women outpacing men in intellectual endeavours — mostly because nowadays they are getting a higher education than men. He also correctly predicted a good reason for children of women with an education surviving better: because their mothers are able to treat them effectively (calling doctors and giving them the appropriate medicine), their children will be able to survive much better than an uneducated woman who tries to heal their children with superstition instead of science.

However, Darwin was not right in everything. He got it wrong that educated women would need to have more offspring than uneducated women; in fact, educated women have far less offspring than uneducated ones — but the offspring they have will almost always survive (as said before: in the European Union, 99.6% will survive until at least the age of five). It’s not the absolute number of offspring that is important, but how many of those actually survive; and the trend is seen worldwide, in all countries, irrespectively of their societies: the higher the education of women, the less children they have, and the more likely those children will survive. Having less, but healthier children is also an evolutionary advantage: the mother will be not so ‘drained’ of resources (as explained earlier on this article!) and will therefore be able to take much better care of their children — and have time to educate them as well, not only of making sure they survive. This trend is universal.

Darwin was also not right in explaining that the ‘mental ability’ of humans comes from natural selection — or at least it’s not done in the way he explains. In fact, it’s the prejudice of his time (much of which has trickled down to conservatives and religious fundamentalists even today) that constricts and limits the innate mental abilities of women, confining them to certain tasks, roles and behaviours due to their gender. Even highly intelligent women are supposed to be meek, submissive, forfeit a higher education, and commit themselves to household tasks. Some of them did all that and still wrote wonderful masterpieces of literature, or, like Lady Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter and the world’s first computer programmer, who published several advanced mathematical research papers during her lifetime (they are so complex that I cannot understand a single line of them). I’m sure that Lady Lovelace was also a wonderful mother (of three children) at the same time, complying to the stereotype of the perfect Victorian lady, no matter what her actual scientific achievements were.

Ada Lovelace, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Somerville… they might be seen by people of the Victorian era as ‘exceptions to prove the rule’, while considering that, on average, women were quite dumb, well below a man’s intelligence. But even Darwin points out the difference between ‘education’ and ‘intelligence’. In other words: great women of the past, who excelled in their fields (literature or science), had the good fortune of not only having been blessed with above-average intelligence, but they had access to what we would today call a ‘higher education’ as well. Victorians would most certainly shun at running surveys about potential women of all social classes with high intelligence who might have had an education and therefore released that latent potential and be acclaimed thinkers of their time. But there were no such ‘social experiments’ — unfortunately, it was only in the late 20th century that women and men shared the same access to higher education and, as a consequence, their ‘intelligence’ levels are indistinguishable.

But ‘intelligence’ is just one mental aspect; what about so many others? What about empathy, or intuition, or the ability to express emotions, and so forth?

Because there is a limit to how much I can cram into a single article (no… really! There is!), I will not go through each aspect of human emotion — especially because each decade they get all redefined again anyway, as new researchers and philosophers come up with novel views about what is an emotion, what is a feeling, what is a thought, what is a memory, and how they are interrelated, and so forth. Needless to say, if you start from different assumptions, you will come up with different models. And which one would be ‘correct’? None, and all; that’s the beauty of science — you can always come up with new ideas.

So I’m going to cheat. I’m going back to Buddhism again, and borrowing its ideas. By this time, you might be hopelessly bored about my frequent references to Buddhism. I know; bear with me for a moment longer! The advantage of Buddhism is that ‘Buddhism’ is a name given by Westerners to what is merely a collection of teachings on a lot of topics, but which appears to the eyes of Westerners to be ‘religious’. And one of the myriad of topics covered by Buddhism is  a deep and profound research on how the mind works — using the mind itself as a tool to explore itself. In fact, the ability for the (human) mind to self-observe itself and auto-analyse itself is one of the key teachings of Buddhism; it’s not a philosophical ‘thought experiment’ — in the sense of establishing conjectures on how the mind might work and then argue it ad nauseam et eternum — but it’s an empirical guide to how to accomplish that. In other words: the way Buddhism analyses the mind is like driving a car, as opposed to reading a book on how a car works. You go deep into your mind and look at what you find there. Sure, there are guidelines to how to accomplish that (several dozens of thousands of them), because each person is different and some techniques are different exactly to cover a wide variety of people.

So what does Buddhism tells us about the mind and its mental states? Unlike Westerners, who tend to divide the many different aspects of mental states in different little boxes, and try to argue why they are different — e.g. ‘pain’ is tied to some neurological triggers which in turn induce chemical changes which the brain interprets simultaneously as the ‘experience of pain’; while thinking about an abstract concept like ‘justice’ or ‘democracy’ has little or no bearing to what the body feels — Buddhism comes from the other side and simply claims that everything we experience is done by the brain; no brain (or being unconscious, either to trauma or drugs) means no mind. Easy-peasy. Collectively, everything that the brain does and which the mind is aware of are called movements of the mind (that’s perhaps the more popular translation). For the practical purposes of Buddhist teachings, it matters little if these ‘movements’ are related to feelings, emotions, thoughts, complex higher mental cogitation, or simply day-dreaming: at the core, each of these ‘different’ mental aspects are all tied together by a common denominator, and that is simply that they happen ‘inside’ the mind (‘inside’ is my own word; don’t take it literally) — in the sense that you cannot have a ‘dream’ outside the mind (even though, if you’re psychotic, you might believe that something is ‘out there’ which doesn’t really exist — except inside your deluded mind). So, mental aspects and the mind itself are closely connected, and they are ‘such stuff as dreams are made on‘, as Shakespeare so well put.

To understand how Buddhists reason about mental aspects — and you should be forewarned, I’m not a Buddhist teacher and most definitely not an expert, just a lousy student of Buddhism, but I had wonderful teachers! — it’s important to take a look at the ultimate goal of Buddhist training: basically (and using my own words) the purpose is to be able to be aware of all ‘movements of the mind’ without allowing them to affect us.

This is a mouthful, so we need a few practical examples. The easiest to show is perhaps anger. We all know the effects of being angry and irate: we ‘see red’ in front of us, we verbally assault others, we become violent, and we become so driven by this super-strong emotion that we do things that we wouldn’t do in a more rational state. In fact, it’s not surprising that we often regret what we did in a moment of anger; but people who get so used to be angry all the time will probably never regret anything (think about a certain well-known President of a certain well-known Western country). Anger is overwhelming: we cannot control ourselves with lucid, rational thoughts; it is also powerful, since strangely enough we even seem to be stronger, bolder, and less sensitive to pain while under a burst of fury (hint: it’s called an adrenaline rush); we literally tremble with fury (that ought to be a tell-tale sign of all that adrenaline in our system…). And the consequences of being angry is to do irrational things.

So what’s the point of anger? Some biologists believe it’s an innate mechanism to deal with threats that require us to fight — because anger triggers so many chemicals that make us faster, stronger, immune to pain, and so forth. However, it also has several bad side-effects, the first of which is turning off the ability to learn (and that’s why we so often forget the real reason of an argument). Long-term, a person who is too angry too often will suffer from pushing the organism to enter this ‘threat mode’ all the time — that means potential cardiovascular problems ahead on the road, and possibly an inability to learn and focus on one’s job in the short term. Not to mention that it also means people avoiding you because you’re always angry — and that, in turn, might mean being lonely, which can also lead to being more angry, and so forth.

Buddhists don’t see any purpose in anger. Although Buddhists have no problem with evolution (it actually makes a lot of sense for them and there are ancient writings suggesting some evolutionary mechanisms, although they don’t come close to the clarity of Darwin’s writings), and can perfectly understand why animals need to be angry now and then to fight threats, we humans are supposed to be above that; in other words, we have complex brains and advanced minds which should give us alternative ways of solving conflicts. Anger, for a Buddhist, is the kind of emotion that is perfectly useless — it neither benefits the person who gets angry, much less those who are the victims of that anger. Nevertheless, one thing is to recognise the futility of being angry; the other thing is to understand (and fully admit) that, as humans, we have a need to have emotions, strong or weak, and that these emotions actually allow us to relate with each other — because we experience similar emotions, we can actually be more understanding and tolerant towards others. If I’m sad because I lost a parent, I can understand much better why other people are sad when they lose their own parents; and of course this happens to anger, and to all other emotions.

So, Buddhist training regarding anger is mostly to learn to observe it without allowing anger to interfere in our actions. This is pretty much ‘breaking the habit’ in the sense that we can learn to overcome an innate emotion which occurs in specific situations (namely, conflicts with others) — not by overriding it (and becoming vegetables without emotions) but by fully experiencing it without allowing it to ‘force’ us to conditioned behaviour. And this is what Buddhism is all about: getting rid of conditioned behaviour. According to Buddhism, the source of all our troubles comes exactly from conditioned behaviour, be it innate (i.e. acquired through our genetic heritage and embryological development), be it acquired (by imitation or through formal or informal education). All conditioned behaviour will ultimately lead to trouble, an euphemism for what Buddhists call dukkha, usually translated as ‘pain’, ‘suffering’, or ‘insatisfaction’.

It might seem impossible to become angry without being conditioned to violence (either verbally, in written — think of Internet trolls! — or even physically); in fact, it may even seem that ‘anger without violence’ is not ‘anger’ at all — it would feel like a different kind of emotion! Well, it isn’t — but you really have to do some training in order to be able to experience anger without being conditioned in your actions and reactions. It’s not easy — but it’s actually the easiest emotion to recognise, and, therefore, to be able to merely observe without feeling the urge to do something (in a conditioned way) by it.

Now you understand why Buddhist monks and teachers like the Dalai Lama never seem angry and are always laughing or at least in good spirits. It’s not that they don’t get angry. Of course they do; they’re human like all of us. The difference is that when they’re angry they aren’t compelled by the urge to become violent. They can do something else instead; sometimes, something completely unexpected; other times, they might just remain silent, observing the anger rising in them, reaching a peak, and then slowly fading again. Because this emotion is tightly linked to a lot of biochemical activity, it takes a few seconds — which is an insanely long time for a trained Buddhist practitioner to watch and observe! There are far, far more difficult emotions to deal with — envy or jealousy, for instance. Eventually, a good practitioner will be able to deal with all of them, by learning all sorts of tips and tricks; and because ultimately the emotion is nothing more than a ‘movement of the mind’ — in spite of having lots of measurable physiological effects! — they will always be able to learn to observe those, instead of being conditioned by them.

Buddhists go even deeper: it’s not just emotions and feelings that constrain our actions, it’s even the whole mental building we carry with us and which exists only in our minds. Things like ‘prejudice’, ‘racism’, ‘xenophobia’, and everything negative we might wish to list; but also those positive things like ‘relationships’, ‘friendship’, even ‘love’ — all these can be tied to a multitude of emotional states, triggered when we experience something which exposes those emotions. Again, Buddhists don’t simply put away all those experiences; they become friends and lovers just like everybody else; and they will have prejudice and racism against others (often induced through social conditioning — for instance, even though it’s quite clear on the Buddhist texts that both males and females can be ordained monks, several Buddhist countries refuse to ordain females, much less allow them to become teachers, just because of social prejudice against women). The major difference is the degree of attachment or aversion they have towards those complex mental constructs — they will be much less influenced by them in terms of conditioning.

But don’t think for a second that Buddhists remain impassible, never betraying their true emotions, and isolated from the rest of the world; the whole point of Buddhist training is to allow people to deal better with the world they live in (and the people inhabiting their society), not to escape from it. So, a Buddhist mother, watching her son cross the street without looking at an incoming bus, will yell at the top of her lungs, full of that adrenaline caused by anger, pain, and fear, just to get the child to notice the bus and avoid it. However, this was not a conditioned response to her feelings; instead, she just very quickly went through the whole range of possible actions, and picked the one that was more pragmatic and functional in that particular context. From the perspective of an outsider, however, it looked just like a very angry or frightened mum yelling at her child; but she was neither. Or, rather, she experienced all those emotions very intensely, but she didn’t react according to them — but to what was more functional in that moment.

You might think that it’s impossible to be so cool and rational in mere fractions of a second, while at the same time having all those ‘anger/fear’ chemicals coursing through your veins. Well, all I can say is that it isn’t, and actually, it’s far more easier to do that than you might think (I was very surprised the first time I managed to do so!). Just think about what accomplished musicians can do: in fractions of seconds, far faster than the eye can follow, they are able to manipulate their instruments to create amazingly complex music. Athletes, in fractions of seconds, are able to perform amazing feats of gymnastics, ice skating, or jumping into pools; not to mention martial arts practitioners, who are able to precisely know where they are going to be hit, and deflect an incoming attack faster than the audience can even see it coming. Racing car drivers are able to drive at insane speeds with reflexes that are superhuman, since we know how much time, on average, a normal human needs to press the pedal to break. All these people have trained a lot — often more than eight hours per day, months after months after years, to be able to accomplish those feats, which seem ‘impossible’ to us. Nevertheless, they do it every day. And the only secret is training, training, training.

Buddhist practitioners do the same with their minds. And that allows them to observe precisely what is going on inside their minds, and, according to what is more functional and practical, establish a course of action. If you wish, the goal of Buddhism — what people might call Awakening — is pretty much that: living in a functional and pragmatic way where nothing can condition your actions, not even your mind. That’s pretty much the definition of a Buddha according to some schools; it’s not something ‘supernatural’ or ‘superhuman’ — or, at least, it’s as superhuman as an Olympic-grade athlete performing something ‘impossible’, or a musician able to play something that requires the fingers to move several times faster than the speed at which we can see things. Our minds are amazing in the way we can train them!

Now… I haven’t completely lost my thread here! One of the things that Buddhists actually find out when they’re training their minds — the actual term for it is becoming familiar with one’s mind, which in the West we call ‘meditation’, but that’s actually not quite what Buddhists are doing, at least not in the sense that most Westerners meditate — is that there is no difference in quality between all those emotions, feelings, and mental constructs. Ultimately, no matter what the physiological aspects of those mental states, the awareness of such states happens always in the mind, not someplace else. And we have proof of that: you can do surgery under anesthesia and you won’t feel any pain. It’s not that the biochemical messengers that transmit pain are not working. They are; it’s just that your mind isn’t there to register any pain! So, Buddhists feel pain like anyone else; and, sure, you can perform surgery on a Buddhist by giving them anesthesia; however, a very advanced practitioner will be able to observe what’s going on even during anesthesia. I know that this is very hard to believe, but it’s possible — because under anesthesia you’re still alive, there is still brain activity, and therefore — according to Buddhism — there is still a very, very deep and subtle level at which your mind is still operating, even though those coarser layers of the mind (those that will feel pain, for instance) might be completely shut off. But I digress; my point is not to ‘show off’ what Buddhists can do with their minds; in many cases it seems at the very least amazing, sometimes even impossible, but it’s actually just a matter of training. The point, in fact, is to show that, according to Buddhist thought, the fundamental quality of all experiences we have is the same, because it all happens in the mind. It doesn’t happen ‘anywhere else’; in other words, we just have a mind (at least while we have a working brain in a working body), there is simply no place else for mental states to happen.

And sure, all those ‘movements of the mind’ can appear differently, because they are triggered by different conditions. Some are purely mental states — say, doing a math problem in your mind. Most others are somehow related to bodily functions, which can be more or less annoying, more or less compelling, more or less constrained and conditioned. Sitting on a chair, for instance, is an experience that doesn’t require much mental activity, but if you sit long enough on a chair, no matter how comfortable it is, you will need to change position — for whatever reason, either the muscles on your bottom are tired, or you’re getting itchy, or impatient, whatever. In those cases, again, biochemical signals are sent to the brain for you to move position, and you, accordingly, in a conditioned way, will react to those signals. But ultimately the chemicals by themselves matter little; how the brain ‘lights up’ in response to them is irrelevant; what matters is that somehow all this translates into ‘uncomfortableness’ inside your mind, and there is where the decision is made to move your position on the chair. You can make the longest possible list you can imagine with all sensations and feelings that your body can transmit to the brain — and, in fact, lots of people have done that over the ages  — but what all of them will have in common is that they are perceived in the mind.

I can give you also some contrary examples. For instance, we don’t get itches inside the heart, although it pumps blood once per second. We don’t get annoyed by blood rushing through the arteries. Unless something is seriously wrong, we will not feel the pancreas or the liver secreting their fluids to aid digestion; unless you have stones in your kidneys, you don’t feel the kidneys purifying the blood and pushing the toxins towards the bladder. A working organism has no need to make the brain aware of all these functions, and so there are no chemicals traversing the bloodstream, no electric charges across nerve endings, to signal the brain about the regular working of the body. It’s only when something goes wrong that we get those signals — and once we get them, we feel… pain. Or indigestion (which, of course, is a form of pain). Even if we can, in some cases, precisely point to where we feel pain, the truth is that we can only feel it if our brain is working: if we are unconscious, we don’t feel anything. Our bladder might be filling up during the night while we sleep in peace, but it’s just when the bladder is full that it triggers the complex biochemical mechanism which makes us wake up and go to the bathroom to relieve ourselves. Under normal circumstances, in order to be able to walk, we need to be awake — during sleep, the muscles actually are fed a sort of natural anesthesia, locking them down, to prevent involuntary movements — that’s why we won’t fall out of bed. And if you happen to have fallen out of bed once or twice, well, then that’s just because, like everything else in our organism, nothing works a 100%, nothing is 100% on or 100% off.

So, everything happens in the mind… or, more precisely, everything we experience is made aware in the mind. Even though all those experiences might be very different — and that is easily explained by the different chemicals involved in triggering certain mental states or others, or by different neural pathways that are ‘lighted up’ when we think of something — ultimately all of them require a mind that is aware of them, and, conversely, it is the mind (and only the mind) that is aware of all those mental states. That’s why for Buddhists all you need to really worry about is the mind; and that’s why they spend endless time training the mind. If you can change your perceptions — or, better, see through them — then you can pretty much accomplish anything, even stop suffering or insatisfaction, and lead a much better life, relating to others in a much more functional way.

Now, conditioned behaviour — innate or acquired — is also, from the perspective of Buddhism, a ‘movement of the mind’, in the sense that something (either DNA/embryological development) or someone (imitation, education…) ‘created’ that conditioned behaviour. Again, I’m using lies-to-children here — this is a simple analogy (which is ultimately false) just to get the argument along, since it’s neither a true description of modern science, nor of ancient Buddhist teachings.

But you can think of something conditioned — like putting your hand away if it comes too close to fire — in the following way: somehow, our organism has created a network of neurons and a system of biochemical release that will trigger the movement of the hand once the sensors on the skin reach a temperature threshold. It’s not important how complex that mechanism is; we know that all healthy human beings will exhibit it, it’s innate, we don’t need to learn it, so that means that it is either somehow encoded in the DNA, or it manifests itself through embryological development. In either case, the pain from the heat is still perceived in the mind; even if we ‘mindlessly’ react by taking the hand away (in the sense that we don’t need to consciously think about moving the hand), this conditioned reaction, or reflex, still registers in the brain (and therefore is made aware to the mind), even if ‘too late’ for the mind to interfere — which is as it should be, because we are supposed to keep hands away from fire!

But we all know that we can do stupid stuff like not remove the hand away, i.e. deliberately feel the pain and get yourself burned — we can all remember similar examples of sheer stupidity. What is happening here? Even though there is an innate, pre-programmed, automatic reflex to deal with an injury caused by excessive heat, our mind can nevertheless override the innate programming (and get burned). Now this seems to be a contradiction in terms: is this a reflex, after all, or is it not? Since we can override it, it seems that it is not innate; on the other hand, it’s true that unless we override the reflex, ‘our nature’ is to avoid putting our hands on fire, even if we’re not paying attention; and we don’t need to ‘learn’ that, we have acquired this ability at birth.

Let’s take another stupid example, one that is very dear to me: smoking. Anyone who has at least tasted a cigarette once knows what happens: our gagging reflex is immediately triggered by the presence of smoke (that’s particles in suspension on water vapour, by the way), and we cough like crazy. After all, if we didn’t cough — and stay away from inhaling smoke! — we would die when we saw our first forest fire, because we wouldn’t know what to do about it. Evolutionarily speaking, we are the descendants of those humans and animals who learned to avoid forest fires because the smoke would make us cough, so we would run away to where we could breathe clean air. The gagging reflex is innate, born with us, as it is with most animals who live on dry earth.

But smokers deliberately override the gagging reflex. They force themselves to inhale the smoke or at least keep it inside their mouths — and derive pleasure from absorbing the extra nicotine and the smell and taste which is pleasant for them — which they should not be able to do, since ‘tasting smoke’ is supposed to mean death (and that’s why we have the gagging reflex). And, in fact, smokers will eventually die from some form of cancer — because they are overriding a natural reflex which exists to preserve our health. I could go into further detail into this, explaining that the gagging reflex is not totally overridden, because even heavy smokers will be able to distinguish between ‘tobacco smoke’ and ‘forest fire smoke’, and trigger the reflex in the latter but not in the former; but let’s stick to a simpler lie-to-children here. The whole point is just to show how we humans, by sheer willpower, can override so-called ‘innate behaviour’, or reflexes, and sometimes with surprising ease, even if we put our health (or even our lives) at risk.

If we can even override our inborn reflexes, it’s obvious that it should be even easier to override those that we have acquired. Strangely enough, and I’m not going to philosophise on that, sometimes it seems that the acquired behaviour is even harder to override, even when it is non-functional, or even nonsensical. A typical example is jaywalking — we do it all the time even if it is forbidden, and it’s forbidden for a good reason, because we’re putting our lives, and that of other people, at risk. We nevertheless ‘override’ that social conditioning very easily, not even thinking twice. The other classical example is riding in an elevator: it’s socially awkward to present your back to the door — instead, everybody will face towards the door, or at least present themselves sideways to it, but never turn their backs to the door. There are no ‘rules’ for this, it’s not even something your parents will tell you, but it’s one acquired social rule by imitation that runs very deep in our brains — to the point that we do that automatically, by reflex, without thinking twice. And — to give an example so dear to the transgender community — for most cisgender heterosexual individuals, entering the ‘wrong’ bathroom for their gender is not only mentally awkward, but it may even give people psychosomatic symptoms (dizziness, a sense of fear or even panic, a weakness in the stomach, and who knows what else). That, again, is an acquired behaviour which goes so deep as to produce physical symptoms. And I’m sure you can add a lot of similar examples where acquired behaviour is so deeply ingrained in us that we cannot even function normally without it, and considering abandoning that behaviour — going against our conditioning — is deemed insane, and, as a consequence, impossible.

Now where am I going with this? It’s simple. From a Buddhist perspective, of course, all this ‘acquired’ or ‘conditioned’ behaviour is just that, something acquired, not even innate. While Buddhists certainly recognise that there are aspects of our body and mind that we cannot change (this explains the theory that every sentient being is technically able to attain the same state of awakening as the historical Buddha; the problem is that animals, for instance, lacking a human form and its consequences — such as the ability to use language — cannot learn about Buddhist techniques, and, therefore, it’s much harder — but technically not impossible! — for them to experience the nature of their minds), they also teach how so much behaviour that we take for granted is actually acquired and conditioned, and, therefore, ‘not innate’, meaning that we can override it easily enough with the proper training. In a sense, therefore, what we call ‘Buddhist meditation’ — becoming familiar with one’s mind and how it works — is a deconstructive process where we get rid of all those layers of conditioned behaviour and thought, until we reach the point where we can directly experience the nature of our own minds, free from all the conditioning. If it sounds crazy and impossible, you just have to remember that we spent all our lives acquiring those conditionings, learning to become self-conditioned if you wish, and all that is ‘artificial’ in the sense that it wasn’t part of our mind when we were born. So, if it’s something we somehow ‘added’ to our mind, we can ‘remove’ it. A typical example: yes, you can turn your back to the elevator’s doors, and the world won’t end, and fire is not going to come from the skies to destroy you. You might feel awkward and people will look at you with shock in their expressions — but you can override that conditioning. I’m not saying that it’s easy; I’m just saying it’s possible, with adequate training.

So, all behaviour (and even thoughts) related to gender roles are just conditioned. There is no reason for ‘boys wearing blue, girls wearing pink’ — in the sense that such a ‘reason’ is somehow embedded into our DNA or embryological development (the truth is that coloured clothing for children became popular after WWII when people started to have surplus money to spend in such stravaganza — children’s clothes used to be simply bleached white, no matter what their gender). In fact, all that is ’embedded’ there is the ability to recognise your own gender and the gender of others, and, at about 3 years of age, manifesting the desire to ‘belong’ to the group that you identify as the same gender as you. This is something that is truly part of us — as said, it’s a requirement for reproduction — but everything else (from clothes to proper behaviour adequate to your gender) is not. (Keep this in mind, because it’s important, and I will return to it later on.) Philosophers, and later pedopsychologists, attempted to describe certain traits that would give raise to specific predispositions in humans to acquire gender-specific behaviour: for example, women are naturally inclined towards protecting their children, and therefore, when they are very young, they have a propension towards role-playing the ‘mother role’, and this explains why little girls like dolls, especially those that look like small babies. This is a ‘training’ for their later role in life.

But of course this is nonsense. Today, more than ever, ‘little girls’ might replace their dolls with computer games (just as boys do!) and find ‘role-playing the mother role’ incredibly boring. Not all girls will be like that; but many will — and that shows that such ‘propension’ cannot really be part of our DNA. While it’s true that ‘dolls’ have existed for uncountable generations among almost all sorts of populations in the globe, it’s nevertheless also true that not all girls like to play with them, and they develop into socially perfectly conditioned mothers later on. In other words: there is no logical reason for girls to play with dolls, except that it’s a required social conditioning in our society. And because other girls play with dolls, and we humans as a gregarious species want always to be ‘part of a group’, then a human being who identifies as a girl (an innate, inborn desire that is conditioned by DNA and embryological development) will ‘do what other girls do’, and learns by imitation. If ‘to be a girl’ means ‘playing with dolls’, then girls will want to play with dolls. If, in this era of mobile phones and social media, ‘to be a girl’ means chatting on SnapChat, then that’s what girls will do. Clearly, we don’t have gender-specific DNA to give us the propension to use mobile phones! (Such absurd examples can show us how weak are those arguments which claim that boys or girls have a ‘natural predisposition’ towards certain specific behaviours)

I have recently read a fascinating book about the Japanese geisha written by Liza Dalby, an American anthropologist and her experiences in Japan. In it, Dalby describes the role of the geisha in Japanese society, filling a gap between conditioned behaviour: women, traditionally, are raised to become good mothers, who ought to be silent and submissive in front of their husbands. Shyness, therefore, is encouraged in little girls; and while they may get an education, traditionally they aren’t even supposed to converse with their husbands.

Now naturally this poses a social problem. Men in Japan, like everywhere else in the world, enjoy female company with whom they can have delightful conversation, in the middle of a party, where there is plenty of food, music, and dance or other performances. It would be unthinkable to demand from Japanese wives to participate (or even to organise) such events. Therefore, Japan society ‘created’ the role of the geisha: a female ‘companion’, skilled and versed in several topics — including the arts, namely, singing, playing the shamisen, dancing, and so forth — but, more important, with the ability to freely converse about pretty much everything with a man. Because a wife cannot fulfill that role (due to social conditioning), geisha had to be ‘invented’. And here is the interesting bit: how do geisha get trained? While certainly there have always been ‘rebel girls’ — who refused the strict conditioning of women in Japanese society — and although several geisha have been ‘born in the community’, so to speak (they are daughters of geisha or workers of teahouses in the geisha districts), there are always a few who come from other environments. Their biggest obstacle? Breaking their conditioning as shy, quiet, submissive girls. They might even be very accomplished dancers, singers, or performers in classical geisha arts, but if they cannot override their ‘traditional Japanese woman’ conditioning, they’re worthless as geisha.

Now, as Westerners, we might find this either amusing, confusing, or very sad; and of course, modern Japanese do not ‘condition’ their daughters so hard as before (Dalby’s book is about her experience in the mid-1970s). Nevertheless, on average, Japanese men are still very fond of shy and submissive wives; these will have an easier life if they stick to the traditional conditioning. And that’s one (of several) reasons why there are still geisha in Japan, and why the tradition simply doesn’t ‘die out’ — there will always be wealthy male individuals whose wives will stick to a traditional role presentation as a Japanese wife, and these individuals will have to rely on the society-approved companionship that a geisha is able to provide. So it’s not just about ‘preserving the traditions of Japan’: geisha exist because they fulfill a role in Japanese society, one that relies upon breaking social conditioning and adopting a role that is not appropriate for traditional women in Japan.

I’m no anthropologist, but it would be interesting to study Japanese geisha from the perspective of gender identity. Because there is such a stark, dramatic difference in the way geisha and (future) wives are brought up, each having different social roles, which clash and conflict in so many ways, one might even consider that there are two different social gender roles for cisgender women in Japan. In other words, if we list the characteristics of what a geisha and what a housewife are supposed to have, we will see that they are completely disconnected and opposed to each other in several details. And while geisha wear feminine attire and makeup, both are actually formalised and have rituals to wear and use — in other words, what a geisha wears is never what a housewife would wear, even though, in the past, geisha were actually trendsetters in feminine fashion, being always a step ahead of what was common in society. While this changed with the generalised appropriation of Western clothing in Japanese society since the early 20th century, the truth is that even today, for special occasions, when women dress up in a traditional way, their dress code will be different from the geisha’s — even if perhaps, from the perspective of a Westerner, they will look much alike; and the way geisha talk with their male patrons would not be seen as different from any other woman in the West and therefore we Westerners wouldn’t understand the social role they present. No wonder, therefore, that traditional Japanese used to be very, very confused about Western women, who seem to be able to ‘fuse’ the two roles of the geisha and the housewife in the same person; something which in traditional Japan would not make any sense.

Geisha, sometimes, have the wish to marry later in their lives. In a sense, when that happens, they will become ‘genderfluid’, if we use a Western term; they will be able to present both the role of geisha and of housewife to their husbands, although it might be far more likely that they would adopt the housewife role forever and abandon the geisha role, except perhaps for the most intimate moments with their husbands. In other words, from the perspective of a geisha seeking marriage, it would feel to her as if she was ‘changing social gender roles’. While of course I have never asked this to a geisha — and haven’t read as yet anything about the subject — I would imagine that such ‘change’ would be perceived at a similar level than someone transitioning between two gender roles in Western society. But to be honest, I seriously doubt that I would get a good answer from any existing, living geisha today, since of course Japanese society is so much more exposed to the Western world and Western thought, which is pervasive throughout all of their society; I therefore believe that the experience of abandoning the geisha role and adopting the housewife role would be more like ‘switching jobs’ in completely different areas. Nevertheless, I bring up this example, using the traditional Japanese context, to show a few important things:

• ‘being female’ (or male) is mostly conditioned, and social conditioning of women in traditional Japan (to give an example) is totally different from what happens in the West;
• there are several possible ways of ‘being female’, even in traditional Japan, who ‘invented’ different social roles for different kinds of women, filling niches in Japanese society;
• usually, people who have been assigned (or have chosen) a specific gender role in Japan will not easily switch to the other; thus, it’s very hard for girls having been brought up to become housewives to break their conditioning in order to become geisha; while geisha, who traditionally rarely marry, if they nevertheless do so, must abandon their geisha role and adopt a different social role with different attributes, characteristics, behaviour, and even dress code.

Now, we may obviously argue that what applies to Japan and Japanese society does not apply to the West, where there is but ‘one’ female social role (and ‘one’ male social role). The example of Japan’s society, however, shows how clearly social roles are merely social conditioning and nothing else; and how a society can become more complex when individuals who are biologically of the same sex (in terms of their primary and secondary sexual attributes) can actually fulfill radically different social roles.

Kabuki players in Japan, for instance, are also ‘allowed’ to cross the gender barrier when performing; and, because since the mid-1650s, there are only male Kabuki players, a few of them are especially trained from an early age to play female roles (they are usually picked from individuals with an androgynous look). Again, we can see that even in societies where gender roles are much more strictly defined, with precise attributes and characteristics specific to each gender role, such societies nevertheless are able to produce individuals who are socially accepted as belonging to neither ‘main’ gender role, but having a gender role of their own, or, in exceptional circumstances, be allowed to ‘cross’ gender roles at will, with social approval (even today, Kabuki performers are viewed by the Japanese society at large as superstars, at the same level as, say, rock/pop singers, movie actors, or sports athletes — including, of course, sumo wrestlers!).

Again, it’s tempting to draw a comparison with female impersonators in the West, who are also in the entertainment business (as are geisha and Kabuki players), and who are socially accepted, to a degree, as they perform their ‘art’ in front of a public audience. But there is a major difference. No matter what the female impersonators actually think about themselves, for the audience, this is a job being performed by a male artist; it’s fiction, a fantasy, an artistic performance, and nothing else. Sure, prejudice and transphobia might label the performer as being gay, trans, or anything like that, but the general audience just expects that performer to get rid of the wig and makeup and lead a normal life in the role appropriate to their assigned gender, that is, a male role. And, in fact, many female impersonators do exactly that. There is just a suspension of disbelief combined with a ‘suspension of gender norms’ on stage, during a show; once the show is over, ‘reality’ is back, and the female impersonator becomes just a normal guy again (the fact that many of them are actually gay, bisexual, or even trans, is absolutely irrelevant for the argument — as said, what matters here is what society thinks about them, not what they think about themselves).

Not so in traditional Japan. Geisha and Kabuki players really play a social role in Japanese society, a role which they perform all the time, just like the two ‘main’ classic gender roles. A Kabuki player who only plays female characters will be expected to learn everything that a woman is supposed to know in Japanese society — and it’s not unusual, in fact, for male Kabuki players and geisha to jointly attend shamisen classes (since Kabuki players might be called to play the role of a geisha in a convincing manner). Male Kabuki players playing female roles will often dress and behave as women all the time (or at least as much as possible), even if they do not identify as female, because that is what is expected of them. They are still viewed as ‘male’ — just like geisha are viewed as ‘female’ — but they are a special kind of male, one that is allowed to publicly dress and behave like a woman (similarly, geisha, even though they dress in a feminine way, are expected to behave and talk like geisha, even in their leisure time — which is the opposite of how a traditional female is supposed to behave). Now please don’t take this too literally: I’ve never been in Japan, I’m no expert in Japanese culture or society, if anyone in Japan is reading this they’re probably laughing out loud, but my point here is just to present yet another lie-to-children, a gross oversimplification of some aspects of Japanese culture — which is seen to be so formal and strict — where the issue of non-conforming gender roles was suitably addressed.

Perhaps better than ‘non-conforming gender roles’ a better way to look at the whole issue is to really start getting rid of our sociocultural prejudices about what a gender role is expected to be — and use all sorts of pseudo-scientific, religious, moral, or semi-logical arguments to ‘prove’ why this is so — and open our minds a little more. Just look at how people over the centuries have addressed gender roles: there has been change all the time!

Anyway, this was just a small digression, but the main point remains: male and female minds pretty much work the same way – while there are certain innate activities which are, indeed, different (like the so-called ‘motherly instinct’ which is much stronger on females than males – which of course doesn’t mean that males cannot have it: it’s just that, statistically, far more women will have it and at a stronger level of intensity than men), in general, most of what goes on inside the mind is precisely the same, even if technically some areas of the brain might ‘light up’ differently (since women’s brains are smaller and more convoluted than men’s, it’s not surprising to find some differences).

Nevertheless, it’s hard to address those ‘differences’ outside the context of acquired social behaviour. In other words: if we use RMI scans to investigate what goes on inside the brains of little boys and girls (say, before the age of three, when they acquire a sense of identity), then the differences are negligible. As we progress towards puberty, adolescence, young adulthood and maturity, those differences will be more and more significant, which is hardly surprising: as people acquire more knowledge and complexify their own sense of identity, they will imitate or be taught the ‘adequate’ behaviour for their gender role (and later for their overall role in society) – such acquisition of knowledge will ultimately transform the way a brain works. And, again, this is not surprising: we know very well that the brain of an Olympic athlete or of a professional orchestra player work quite differently from the ‘average’ brain, and that should be exactly what we are supposed to expect from a ‘specialist’ brain coming from someone regularly training themselves for endless hours a day.

Even when researchers analysed the brain waves from meditators they found amazing differences between people who meditate occasionally but regularly, those who spend a large amount of time meditating (like Catholic nuns or Buddhist monks), and people who had never meditated in their lives. The results are just astonishing for a particular school of Tibetan Buddhism (I won’t discuss here why this was the case, but it has a very plausible explanation) – for all the other groups which were subjected to these tests it was very easy to distinguish who meditates, regularly or very intensely, and those who never meditated in their lives. Also not surprising was a further experiment where a group of people who never meditated in their lives started taking meditation classes and, for the purpose of the experiment, did half an hour or so of silent meditation every day. After just a fortnight, there were significant changes shown in their brain scans: their brains had changed and now more closely resembled the brains of regular meditators. This experiment was done several times, with different groups, with people being tested after many months of regular daily meditation, and so forth. It was quite clear that we can train our brains to work differently, and that difference will register in those brain scans. Also, with the exception mentioned above, there was little difference between the actual meditation techniques that were employed; all would pretty much achieve similar results, sometimes quicker, sometimes slower, sometimes more intensely, and so forth. Many of those tests also included a scan made along a certain period of time, and, again, there were differences here: newbie meditators would not be able to register a ‘meditation pattern’ for long periods of time, while meditators with years of training would be able to enter and leave the meditation pattern at will, and sustain it for very extended periods. I could go on, but it’s best if you just google for the references if you’re interested; the point here, anyway, is not to talk about the merits of meditating (there are certainly many!) but rather to show that simple mental training will change the way the brain works – even if the person does not ‘feel’ any real difference. But those brain scanners are not so easily fooled!

So when I read about brain tests that were made with people with non-conforming sexuality and/or gender identity, where the researchers are so eager to ‘prove’ that transgender people have brain structures more closely resembling the gender they identify with, instead of the gender assigned at birth, I take all of those conclusions with a pinch of salt. I don’t mean to claim that those test are ‘fake’ – oh no, by the contrary, they are very well made, and in some cases, different labs have repeated the same tests and reached the same conclusion. The problem here is confusing cause and effect. Trans-friendly researchers will claim that because the brains of transgender people are different from those with the same gender assigned at birth, then such people will experience gender dysphoria.

Now I don’t think that’s totally true: I believe that they are confusing cause and effect. It’s because those people are transgender that their brains have changed to resemble more the brain patterns of those genders they identify with. Such an explanation is much more plausible because we already know that we can change the brain with training. There might  be some structures in the brain which actually label or tag that brain as ‘more female’ or ‘more male’, but we still don’t have enough information: we must follow a transgender individual from birth to mature adulthood, scanning them all the time, to see what is going on inside their brains. Unfortunately for the researchers, transgender people are relatively rare and they will only manifest the first symptoms of gender dysphoria after a few years at best (and several decades at worst). To have a meaningful, statistically valid group of, say, a thousand individuals, it might mean scanning the brains of three million  baby brains – and do that for several years until at least they start showing signs of gender dysphoria, and see how their evolution was. There is simply no funding for doing such a massive, large-scale research project!

Instead, researchers work with individuals who already say that they are transgender. They fail to capture the history of their brain changes: they just get a snapshot of the state the brain already is, and can conclude that there is indeed a difference in the way it works, compared to another person assigned the same gender at birth, but not suffering from gender dysphoria. This is not very interesting, because we lack the whole set of causes and conditions that ultimately lead to a ‘transgender brain’. Researchers have just studied the ‘finished product’ and tried to extract meaningful information from it.

Thus, I offer the following conjecture: what researchers are seeing is the result of a brain that has been affected — changed its inner workings, if you will — by transgenderity. As we have seen on the previous ‘chapter’ of this insanely long article, there are biochemical changes that will easily ‘tip’ the balance towards either the male or the female spectrum; and these, in turn, will make the person become more ‘male’ or ‘female’ (in the sense that this will be the gender identity they assume) — or both or none — and it’s that kind of sensation and/or feeling that, in turn, will change the brain to show the images that we can see today.

The main reason, therefore, why such brain scans still report ambiguous results regarding non-conforming sexuality and/or gender identity is not because such scans are ‘wrong’ or ‘incomplete’ (or because not enough scans have been made), but rather because they show snapshots of brain activity at a certain moment in time, failing to capture the history (or, if you prefer, the sequence of causes and conditions) that lead to that particular moment when the brain was scanned. This is mainly to argue that we cannot simply look at how a specific brain ‘lights up’ to different stimuli and say, ‘aha, you have reacted like a male ought to react to that, so, I’m sorry to say, but you’re not a trans woman, just a male with some delusions’. It’s actually rather scary to imagine that in the near future doctors might demand a brain scan to make sure that a certain person is transgender or not!

Well, nobody has — yet — argued that way. Nevertheless I have seen some arguments brought forward saying that transgender persons have brains that are not that close to the ‘typical’ brain of the gender they identify with, but, well, somehow in-between, at the edge of the margin of error for the gender they have been assigned at birth. This should not be surprising at all: we use our brain plasticity to the best of our advantage, and this is shown by how men and women have essentially different biological brains (based on average size/weight and level of convolution) but nevertheless can think in the same way. And we also have lots of examples where brains should not be able to allow certain people to think and act the way they do (because certain areas have lesions/tumours, in specific points where we know that, in an ‘average human’, will ‘light up’ in a certain way when reacting to specific stimuli) but they nevertheless allow such people to lead normal lives, unaware of the ‘different’ brains they have. These are, of course, edge cases, extreme scenarios, and not the ‘average’; still, they do exist, and they exist in a sufficient number to baffle neuroscientists.

Using my own conjecture, I would propose instead that things are quite a bit more complicated than that. I would not rule out that there are certain structures in the brain which, during embryologic development, might be related to a sense of gender identity, and those structures (usually these are marker molecules, not exactly neuronal structures) influence the way the brain thinks about its own gender identity (I’ll address this in much more detail below). What happens next is much harder to predict: while it seems clear that the ‘average’ male and female brains tend to develop according a certain predetermined way — and that’s why, on average, neuroscientists may guess the individual’s gender identity by scanning their brains — such a development is not 100% accurate, but probably just around 90%. Therefore, outside the established ‘average’ male/female brain, we will encounter all sorts of alternative configurations; these show much less what gender identity someone identifies with, but rather what they have made out of their plastic brains with whatever they got. In other words: a perfectly ‘male brain’, according to average parameters, can ‘feel’ to be ‘female’ in spite of what is shown on the scans; and there is no contradiction here, it’s just that this particular individual is making the most of what they have inside their brains, and, having started life with the ‘wrong’ configuration, there are limits to how quickly and profoundly they may be able to change their own brains under the action of constant training. Or perhaps we might also claim that those changes happen at a level where our neurological imagery is still not sophisticated enough to detect. But we’re getting there!

My point here is that it’s not very likely that we might isolate ‘male thinking’ from ‘female thinking’ inside a human brain. Instead, there is just human thinking, assuming we can figure out how exactly the ‘thinking’ is correlated to a signal distribution inside the brain (we’re getting there; we have decoded the neural code for the optic nerve, a work that has begun twenty years ago in simple organisms and progressively working towards the human eye). What happens next is that due to social conditioning, men and women will ‘think differently’ — they will use parts of their brains differently — in the same way that, say, a musician, an athlete, or a PhD ‘thinks differently’ than the average human being because they have trained themselves in very specialised activities for hours upon hours, changing the brain so that it works differently for that particular activity.

As you can see, my conjecture welds together behaviourism and embryological development. The main reason for my thinking is that there are not that many gene differences between men and women, and the little we know about such differences are restricted to what genes are carried in the X and Y chromosomes. If men and women had completely different brains, then we would very likely see much more genetic material differing between the two biological genders. As such, as we could see in the previous ‘chapter’, the ‘difference’ is mostly in the way the biochemical balance of sexual hormones is maintained. In other words, as far as we know, we don’t have a ‘genetic blueprint’ for ‘penis, testicles, muscles, male brain’ encoded in the Y chromosome, while the X chromosome has a blueprint for ‘ovaries, uterus, vagina, vulva, breasts, female brain’. It could not be so simple as that, especially because men also carry a X chromosome, so that would mean that men would also have the ‘female blueprint’ inside their genoma. Instead, what is much more plausible is that we have blueprints for a whole human being, regardless of gender, and it’s just the subtle chemical unstable equilibriums between sexual hormones that will ‘decide’ which blueprint gets activated — but, as discussed before, we can relatively easily tip the balance artificially.

The brain, being possibly the most ‘advanced’ organ in our body (this is naturally a lie-to-children: all our organs are at the same level of ‘advancement’, since that’s how evolution works; the difference is that some organs did not require much adaptation for the human species and therefore look similar to other organisms; while the brain is definitely different in quality from other species, since it has so much more to do), is unlikely encoded by a relatively short sequence of genes (in the sexual chromosomes). Rather, all the building blocks for the brain must be scattered along all our DNA. Their assemblage will be mostly the same for men and women, taking only into account a smaller cranial volume, on average, on women; very likely the ‘brain construction blueprint’ will know how many neurons it has to produce, and, if the cranial volume is not enough, the brain matter convolutes more in order to accommodate for the extra neurons, something which also does not need to be ‘encoded’ specifically for a sexual difference. After all, smaller humans are not dumber or smarter than taller ones; their brains simply adapt to the available space, within the acceptable size variations for the human species (which, as argued, is not that big a difference, it just looks like that for a layperson).

So what my conjecture claims is that we are not born with a ‘gendered brain’. Instead, we are born with a human brain. What happens is that certain markers in the brain — very likely tied to the way the brain, at a later stage of development, will necessarily have to immediately recognise the difference in biological gender — will provide a propension, or a potential, for a specific brain to develop according to a more ‘male’ or a more ‘female’ outlook. But such changes are not exactly ‘inborn’ — most of it, I claim, will come from constant training and social reinforcement from one’s parents, teachers, and peers, which will ultimately develop certain patterns of thinking that a specific society will recognise and identify with ‘male thinking’ and ‘female thinking’.

There are limits, however, to how far we can go with this. The notion that social gender behaviour is purely conditioned has been debunked several times. We know now, with absolute certainty, that we cannot condition someone to ‘be’ a gender they do not identify with. And this can only be explained if certain brain patterns cannot form, even in the presence of constant social conditioning. For me, this explanation just points out to the crucial inborn ability to recognise gender; we have to have it encoded in our genes, or our species would not have survived. Indeed, I’ve looked for studies on this area, and as far as I could understand, we haven’t yet found an adult human being that is unable to figure out their own gender, or, put in better words, that has the gender-recognition mechanism broken. We have several examples of people failing to recognise faces, and, therefore, unable to attribute a specific gender to such persons; nevertheless, they have no doubts about their own gender. A corollary of my conjecture, therefore, is that a human being with a broken gender-recognition unit in the brain will never develop, i.e. they will either be reabsorbed in the womb or be dead at birth: the gender-recognition unit, as so many other vital things in our organism, is a fundamental component of our human hereditary, and we cannot work without it.

Thus, once that gender-recognition unit is fully active — which will happen at least around three years of age in healthy human beings, when their identity starts to form — there is no way for the brain to get conditioned to think about itself as a different gender than the one it has originally recognised. We have so many examples showing that kids at three years of age utterly reject the gender they have been assigned at birth that it’s clear that not only that gender-recognition unit must be fully active and operational (the individual recognises its own gender and that of others), but that once it has determined its own gender, there is no amount of ‘conditioning’ that will change it, and this mechanism will also not be affected by hormones and/or any other biochemical form of ‘tipping the balance’. In other words, we can affect how the body develops according to a specific gender — at least regarding the external, secondary sexual characteristics — but this will not affect the brain, or, at least, it will not affect the gender-recognition unit (and we also know it won’t affect the sexuality unit, either).

But I claim that besides this gender-recognition unit, which is vital for the human species to reproduce and therefore cannot be tampered with, all the rest that happens at the brain level is very likely the product of conditioning — including (and most importantly so!) self-conditioning. In other words, once an individual has their gender-recognition unit active and operational, it labels itself as one of the possible genders (not only the binary ones, of course), and is compelled to join the group of such individuals who have been recognised as their own gender. Once this very simple and primitive mechanism is at work, whatever happens next will be a product of socialisation — we start to get ‘trained’ as a member of one of the possible genders, and we will yearn for that training. You can think of this as a mechanism similar to the one that makes us hungry, thirsty, or in need of going to the toilet — while the details will vary among individuals, and what we eat or when we eat (or even how we eat) is a matter of social conditioning, the raw ‘need’ to be hungry/thirsty/etc. which is essential for us to exist and continue living cannot be ‘unconditioned’. In other words: we can fast, of course, and we can even force ourselves to kill ourselves due to the lack of eating/drinking, but we cannot change the way our brain works when it gets signals from the rest of the body that it needs to eat or drink. While we can ignore such signals (until we die of hunger or thirst), we cannot change the way such signals are interpreted as ‘hunger’ or ‘thirst’, because such interpretation is vital to our survival as an individual in a species.

I believe that the gender-recognition mechanism is similar. We can be taught to ‘behave’ according to a gender that we do not identify with, and this teaching will also change the way the brain works. However, if that is attempted, we will know that something is seriously wrong. Like a person who is always hungry but nevertheless is prevented from eating (for various reasons!) might have their brain patterns subtly changed, they will still feel bad — we can call it suffering if you wish — because they are not eating when the brain is told by the body that it must eat. A similar thing happens regarding the gender-recognition unit, the gender the brain labels itself with, and the social conditioning we get. If there is a discrepancy between what the brain recognises as its own gender and the social conditioning we get, we ‘feel’ that something is profoundly wrong. The degree to which we feel that varies, of course, and we all know that gender dysphoria, if ignored for too long, will lead to depression, anxiety, even suicide — as the individual cannot tolerate further ‘wrong’ social conditioning.

But the ‘wrongness’ of this feeling becomes worse over time. Why? It’s simple: as time progresses, an individual with gender dysphoria is learning more and more about the gender role that they’re supposed to assume in society. And the more they learn, the less that role makes sense according to the gender they identify with. As they progress towards puberty, it becomes clear to them that their body will not develop according to their gender identity, and at that point, anxiety will most definitely step in — individuals with extreme cases of gender dysphoria will of course enter in panic as they realize that there is something utterly wrong with the way their bodies are developing, and the more their bodies develop in a certain direction, the clearer it becomes that it’s a body congruent with the gender they have been assigned at birth, in other words, rather the utter opposite of the gender role they identify with.

Now I cannot truly explain what goes on in the mind of individuals with extreme cases of gender dysphoria. In my particular case, what happened, in a very convoluted way, was that my brain registers my own face and overall looks as being ‘monstrous’, horrible, disfigured. I know now that this is not the case, but as I’ve written before, that is something actually very recent and came to me as both a surprise and a shock. I still see myself in the mirror as obnoxious; my female looks are slightly better than my male ones, but not that much, to be honest. I understand now that this was a ‘coping mechanism’ which was mostly subconscious. In other words, at some point, my brain figured out, during puberty, that the body was developing ‘wrongly’. I don’t really have a conscience of that, and to make matters worse, I was always romantically (and later sexually) attracted to females — which is what a ‘normal’ cisgender heterosexual male is supposed to do. But ‘something’ was wrong and I couldn’t understand my own dreams, where I was female; at that time, of course, I had absolutely no idea about transexuality, even though homosexuality figured somewhere in my very vague knowledge about human sexuality… and I was terrified that I would somehow be forced to ‘become gay’, which was absolutely horrendous for me, and impossible even to imagine — except with utter disgust. So I reasoned that the whole issue of not being successful in establishing romantic relationships during my teens was first because I was very shy — which I overcame — and second because I was physically repulsive to women. Interestingly enough, though, once I started to truly believe in that, I actually lost all anxiety and stress during my teens; I knew that I could do something about my shyness (it was a personality trait that I could work with; and it was mostly about being afraid of saying the wrong things to the wrong person, especially if those persons were female), but there was nothing I could do about my looks, so I resigned myself to that perception about myself. Even today, it’s very confusing and strange that my own wife is not only romantically attracted to me, but also physically — I always shrugged that off simply because love is supposed to turn you blind, etc. and so forth. But ultimately it was just that very unusual coping mechanism — believing that I’m hideous — that left deep scars in my mind.

I also think that this is mostly what differentiates the several levels of gender dysphoria. At the extreme levels, of course, there is no possible ‘coping mechanism’ except for immediate transition, the sooner the better, and ideally and optimally before puberty kicks in; if that option is not available, suicide is the result — and this is why the suicide rate is so high among transgender people. The less severe levels of gender dysphoria, however, have been attenuated by some form of coping mechanism, or trauma, or even abnormal personality traits. One of the most popular coping mechanisms, of course, is crossdressing, and that usually happens at a very early date. Other people will figure out their own coping mechanisms. Sometimes they are not obvious at all, like my own, and might remain dormant for a long time — and this, in turn, will ‘blow up’ sooner or later (usually later) at an overwhelming intensity, and the urge to transition can happen at any age, but possibly decades after puberty. This would ‘explain’ the so-called late onset transexuals — often due to a concatenation of circumstances, which just happen later in time, the urge to transition will be triggered. This is not much different from childhood trauma, which has been suppressed through a coping mechanism, but which at some point, the coping mechanism does not work any more (for whatever reason), and then the full consequences of the trauma are experienced.

I’m not saying that gender dysphoria is the same as trauma; it is not! Gender dysphoria clearly comes from an abnormal encoding of certain precursor chains of chemical reactions, and that happens during embryonal development at some point. Certainly the experience of understanding that people around a transgender person are forcing them to assume a gender role they do not identify with can become traumatic (unless a coping mechanism is found very early); and in a sense, that trauma can be alleviated by therapy. However, this will not affect the dysphoria in the least.

So, what makes a woman a woman?

Although I have not backed my conjectures with a lot of factual data, you can get a lot of it from merely googling around. And in that way you may be persuaded about a few concepts:

• that biology/genetics/embryology most certainly determine a lot of factors that will make a body develop as male or female, but such ‘determination’ is by no means black-or-white, but allows for a lot of variation and diversity in-between;
• that sexual hormones do not ‘define’ gender (since both genders have both kinds) but certainly help to develop primary sexual characteristics during embryonic development, and secondary ones at puberty – while at the same time reverting such effects at an age where the person is not fertile any longer;
• that these hormones, and the whole biochemistry around them, are delicately balanced in an unstable equilibrium, which can easily be ‘tipped’ either way; this allows us not only to alleviate the symptoms of menopause in women, but block and delay puberty, or switch secondary sexual characteristics in what is, to almost all effects, a ‘second puberty’;
• that the human brain, while physically it may appear to have a few differences between the two genders, does work fundamentally in the same way (in spite of claims to the contrary);
• that there are no thoughts, emotions, feelings, etc. which are innately ‘male’ or ‘female’ (except perhaps for the motherly instinct, but even that might be questionable, as some women don’t have it, and some men appear to feel something very close to it), but rather that it’s the society that labels such thoughts, emotions, feelings and so forth as ‘typically male’ or ‘typically female’;
• likewise, there are no ‘modes of thinking’ (in the sense of higher cognitive functions) that are ‘typically male’ or ‘typically female’, and nothing shows that so clearly as the number of female doctors, scientists, lawyers, accountants, and so forth, who leave university with a degree — formerly thought as ‘typically male jobs’ for which women ‘had no talent/skill’ — in a far greater number than men, who tend not to finish their studies; against all claims to the contrary, women can outperform men in all mental fields, just because they’re motivated to do so (while men, these days, tend to be much more lazy…);
• that we most certainly can define ‘social roles’ around gender, forcefully impose them, and, in that way, artificially separate the two genders more (as such social roles also imply appearance, presentation, way of speaking, emotions publicly shown, and so forth), but many societies — especially those that historically have been stricter! — added further possible ‘gender roles’ for those who did not conform with the stereotypically ‘male’ and ‘female’ ones, and that such ‘innovations’ were actually accomplished centuries or millennia ago;
• nevertheless, that ultimately there is a strong reason for having (at least) two gender roles, and those are linked to biological reproduction: therefore, we all have an innate mechanism to identify and classify our own ‘gender’ and that of other people, so that we know to which ‘gender group’ we belong — this mechanism must be innate and hereditary, or else we wouldn’t have reproduced enough to survive — although what exactly implies ‘belonging’ to a ‘gender group’ is socially established as an artificial construct, which varies according to the epoch and location.

Taking all the above into account, I will now formulate a second conjecture, one which I’m aware that will make more than a few heads shake in denial:

‘Being a woman’ is not more, nor less, than the identification with a specific gender role, which can be strongly correlated to biology, embryological development, a physical appearance, and so forth, but does not necessarily have to be.

Note my peculiar way of writing ‘identification with a specific gender role’, as opposed to ‘having a specific gender identity’. This is deliberate, because the notion of ‘gender identity’ is, in itself, also a hypothesis (or conjecture), not rooted in empirical evidence (i.e. as in figuring out which areas of the brain ‘produce’ the gender identity) but rather accepted as the simplest possible explanation with the highest explanatory power (this is pretty much what scientists mean when they apply Occam’s Razor). There are other possible explanations, but either they do not account for all observed behaviour, or they are far more complex but explain basically the same thing. It’s also important to acknowledge that the concept of ‘gender identity’, or, more precisely, the idea that there is a ‘gender identity core‘ somewhere inside the mind/brain (because we also assume there is an ‘identity core’ in the mind/brain, even if we have no idea how it works), is something that most scientists researching this area and the community will agree upon — i.e., doctors, neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, social science researchers and activists, all of them accept the ‘gender identity core’ conjecture. But in science that doesn’t mean that this conjecture cannot be questioned (even though activists will wince when they hear that!), nor replaced by something with even better explanatory power while at the same time being simpler — that’s the work of future generations of researchers, of course. Last but not least, the ‘gender identity core’ conjecture can be falsifiable (and that’s why it’s a scientific, not an ideological proposal) because all that is needed is for neurologists to find out that, after dissecting the brain, and figuring out how exactly it all works together, they notice that, after all, there is no place for a ‘gender identity core’, and so the conjecture must ultimately be rejected. Now, of course, we do not have the technology to do that, and won’t have it in many generations; that’s why the ‘gender identity core’ proposal is merely a conjecture and not a theory — we lack the means to either validate or falsify the proposal. In science, this is not something terrible: it just means that we must either develop more advanced technology to test the hypothesis (and then the conjecture might become a theory), or, through logic and rational thinking, we might be able to falsify the conjecture, or address some of its shortcomings, or come up with a novel concept which completely abolishes the need of such a conjecture. But while that doesn’t happen, scientists, activists, and the community at large accept the conjecture as ‘truth’. It’s a temporary truth, if you wish, but it’s nevertheless a scientific truth.

Don’t think that there aren’t people currently trying to falsify the ‘gender identity core’ theory! In the past, it was postulated that ‘gender identity’ is an epiphenomenon emerging from conditioned training according to one of the binary genders; so it was postulated that we haven’t a ‘gender identity’ at birth, but learn it from our parents and peers. This theory was dramatically debunked, several times and in different places, unfortunately with very damaging results for the people involved in the ‘experiment’ (at least two cases I’m aware of resulted in suicide). So we know that several other proposals to explain ‘gender’ have been shown to be incorrect, and that strengthens the acceptance of the ‘gender identity core’ conjecture, because, so far, there are no known ‘experiments’ (which can also be thought experiments, mind you) which have falsified the assumptions.

So what is the difference from the ‘gender identity core’ conjecture and my own? Well, the ‘gender identity core’ is based on the notion that ‘something’ encoded in our genes or in the embryological development ‘produces’ this ‘gender identity core’, which, as its name implies, is part of the ‘identity core’. In other words, and as I’ve explained in previous articles, there is this notion of the autobiographical self which somehow ‘gives’ us our identity. It does that using several ‘tools’ in the brain, and one of them produces the ‘gender identity’ we talk about. We can therefore say that the ‘gender identity’ is something innate, something we are born with.

The ‘gender identity core’ conjecture also has an advantage: it explains easily why we are just ‘aware’ of gender at about 3 years of age or so, because that’s also the age when we finally ‘acquire’ our own identity (and, therefore, the gender identity as well). In other words, it takes for a human being about three years for those innate structures in the brain to develop until they reach a stage of maturity that ‘produces’ identity and gender identity; this is actually well supported by the theory that the brain is born with a certain amount of neuronal connections, but during the first months and years of life, it creates new connections at a fantastic rate, something which will not happen in later stages of life. At some point, if you wish, these connections reach a ‘critical mass’: we become sentient as an individual.

(As a side note, this is also the reason why science fiction writers, or Transhumanists following Ray Kurzweil’s theories, believe that a sufficiently complex computer will eventually develop sentience as well — the theory is about reaching that critical point in the level of complexity which a human brain reaches at a certain stage in their lives.)

I prefer to see things as slightly different, and I will also explain why. I prefer to speak of having a ‘gender recognition/identification mechanism’ which will ‘attach’ our embrionary ‘identity’ to ‘gender identity’, but that mechanism, in the case of ‘gender identity’, requires sensorial stimuli (mostly visual, in the case of non-blind people), pattern recognition, group/category identification, and, last but not least, education (in the sense of acquisition of knowledge through tutoring or imitation).

Sounds complex? Yes, it is, and that’s why this article is not a scientific article, because it actually proposes more complex conjectures to explain what is described by a much simpler mechanism, i.e. the ‘gender identity core’ conjecture. But I have a good reason for proposing it, as you will see.

First, let’s see what is involved in my own conjecture. And secondly, I’ll try to explain how the current conjecture can be ‘perverted’ by TERFs (yes, we started with them and we finish with them) and their allies, the right-wing religious fanatics.

So, in my own conjecture, there is no such thing as an inborn gender identity core, just as there is no inborn identity core. ‘WHAT?’ — some of you might be yelling, especially when you know that the theory of gender-as-learned-behaviour has been so thoroughly debunked and rebuked and ultimately abandoned. Well, I think that things are a bit more complex in terms of explanation, but actually more simple in terms of biological structures. You see, the more I read Damasio’s (and others’) theory of the ‘autobiographical self’, the more I get convinced that there is no such thing that ‘creates’ the self, so to speak, out of the existing brain structures. Instead, self (or identity) is what our higher-level cognitive abilities call what is going on at a lower level. And what is at the lower lever? Why, the mechanism which registers your memories and links it to your body position in 3D. That mechanism is certainly inborn, inherited, transmitted by genes and embryological development, and, more to the point, neurologists like Damasio can pinpoint exactly where on the brain this mechanism is — in the sense that if that specific area gets damaged, we lose the ability to recollect memories with our body in them, and either they appear to us as memories coming from another person (they are not ‘ours’ because our own body is not in them), or, worse, we completely lose our sense of identity and just have what feel like fake memories swimming in our brains, but which we cannot link together as making part of the stream of consciousness to which we call ‘self’.

Neurologists like Damasio are a bit more cautious; they prefer to assume that there is an ‘identity core’, or a higher-level self, which is built from the lower-level structures, and is linked to them, but somehow independent — such a theory can be partially validated by showing that if the lower-level structures are damaged, the person loses some aspects of their identity, so that would mean that the lower-level structures can affect the higher-level ‘identity’ structures. Such a reasoning would be much more collectively accepted by those who work in neuroscience, since it follows the more accepted models of how the brain works.

I, by contrast, am free from the chains binding neurologists to their theories (i.e. formulate something too radical, and you can kiss bye-bye to your funding!). Instead of postulating an area of the brain where the ‘self’ is located (note that even neurologists accept that there might not be one specific area, but rather that the ‘self’ is distributed across the brain, possibly even as a whole, so that talking about the exact spot of where the self is becomes an absurdity — it’s the whole brain), I postulate instead that the notion of ‘self’ is merely a description of an assembly of lower-level brain structures, of which we are not aware, but which produce (epiphenomenically) what we describe as a ‘self’. If those structures are missing, or damaged, or not working well, then our description of the ‘self’ is only partial, vague and confusing, or totally missing. So it’s not as if the self does not ‘exist’ in the physical sense of the word; it’s more as if the ‘self’ is merely the aggregation of a lot of different and complex mechanisms in the brain, which we describe with a single word in an attempt to convey what we experience.

Perhaps the following analogy might be useful: we can talk of a ‘nation’ or ‘country’, by pointing to a map, see where the borders are, and considering that the human beings inside those borders are, in fact, the population of a nation, and give the nation its identity. But such borders are completely arbitrary. Aliens from outer space visiting Earth would only see people, wandering around the world. What essential attribute of those humans they observe include a ‘national identity core’? Where exactly is that located? Such questions do not even make sense unless you accept that borders ‘exist’ — not in the physical sense, but rather in an abstract convention, made by other humans, possibly decades or centuries before, establishing an artificial separation of humans according to their location, and declaring that the humans on this side of the border have one ‘national identity’, while the humans on the other side will have a different one. Aliens would be baffled — after all, on both sides of the artificial border, humans are just humans, with more or less characteristics, but they share so many of those characteristics that, for the aliens, they cannot understand why some humans have a different national identity. And then those same humans will explain: ‘look, when we’re small, we learn different languages; we have different holidays, and for some of them, we dress in different clothes to dance different dances; we admire different painters and musicians, we read different authors; we pray to different gods. All this contributes to form the national identity.’

And the aliens would insist: ‘all those superficial differences come from just arbitrarily drawing lines on a map?’

You would probably be tempted to say, ‘yes!’ But that’s not how we humans work. Instead, we have to explain to the aliens how we have been evolutionarily selected to be what we are today. We would have to explain that we are a gregarious species: that means we cannot live in isolation but have a lot of inborn mechanisms to naturally come together and feel more comfortable if we are together than alone. This, in turn, requires having inborn mechanisms to figure out who are the members of our clan or tribe, and who is outside our close circle of friends. We are pretty good at figuring that out, but, nevertheless, we enhance the differences by artificially creating ‘cultural artifacts’ that make each group different from the other — language, singing, but also apparel, the way we move, the way we arrange our hair. Such visual differences enhance, on one hand, the bond that draws group members together; they provide a ‘common identification’, while still leaving space for individual expression; but, on the other hand, it also provides a mechanism to separate one clan from a different clan. Ultimately, such bondage and differentiation lead to larger and larger collections of people, larger and larger units of space where such people came together, and we developed those artificial borders to artificially enhance our sense of ‘belonging’ to a group, but not to another. This ‘group’, of course, now comprises millions of individuals in the same ‘nation’. But we have even advanced towards concepts above the level of nation — i.e. ‘European’ or ‘Western’ — and perhaps one day we will consider the whole planet our own ‘clan’, but we’re not there yet.

So… do we have an inborn national identity or not? Of course not, and the aliens would understand that. The national identity is an artificial concept, a convention, which ties abstract notions (which we commonly can describe as ‘cultural’) to a specific group, making it distinct from others (who, in turn, will have developed their own conventions, there own culture). Nevertheless, all the mechanisms which allow us to pursue a ‘national identity’ are part of our genetic heritage, and they have been defined through evolution: being a gregarious species, we are naturally drawn together, and that means being able to recognise who is part of ‘our’ group, and who is not (an ‘enemy’). Such characteristics are innate, that is, even in the absence of external artificial attributes (clothing, hairdos, language…), we might be still pretty good at figuring out who is ‘one of ours’ and who is not (that’s why actors and spies — both being very good at ‘passing’ for someone who is not part of a group but successfully pretends to be so — are relatively rare; similarly, that’s why we are rather good at detecting who is lying; accomplished liars are, in fact, a small minority).

This example illustrates rather well how elements from what is innate and what is acquired mix and blend well together, and the result is something we call ‘identity’. In the case of ‘national identity’, of course, nobody has ever postulated the existence of a ‘national identity core’, i.e. something with which we are born which, at a certain stage in life, makes us identify with being American or Portuguese. We know that ‘culture’ is something acquired (through education and imitation). But we must also recognise that we have a predisposition towards ‘acquiring’ that national identity. Of course, 100.000 years ago, we would have talked about ‘clan identity’ or ‘tribal identity’, but it’s the same thing: an abstract, high-level concept, and nothing more than that, which is nevertheless rooted in the basic necessity of a gregarious species: we need to be part of a group, to be able to protect ourselves better as a community against the aggression of other groups. And therefore we have the tools, the mechanisms in the brain, which make us come together, and help us to identify who is part of our group, and who is not. These are innate, and necessary, in the evolutionary sense, or we would not be a gregarious species — we wouldn’t have a way (or even a necessity!) to figure out how to ‘come together’.

While at a very high cognitive level we might talk of abstract concepts such as ‘group identification’ (something that all teens will go through), we can also recognise that, at much lower levels, we have several tools and mechanisms which aid the existence of those high-level concepts. They are closely tied to each other. And, again, we can observe that certain brain structures must play a part in this. The typical example is the sociopath: certain brain areas that deal with ‘gregariousness’ are defective, damaged, or otherwise inoperational, and therefore the sociopath cannot ‘bond’ successfully, even not understanding, at a higher cognitive level, why he has to ‘belong’ to any group whatsoever. We have lots of mental diseases where we know that the ‘gregariousness’ is missing or broken; schizophrenia certainly shows that happening (lack of empathy towards others) but there are more cases. And in some of them we even know that chemical substances can either promote/enhance ‘gregariousness’, while others can avert it. So while we cannot affect ‘national identity’ directly with drugs and/or therapy, or even brain surgery, we can affect the low-level mechanisms, which we innately have, and on top of which the concept of ‘national identity’ emerges. Therefore, in a sense — and only in that sense! — we can say that ‘national identity’ is something that most humans will possess, at some higher or lesser degree, and that our offspring will also ‘inherit’ the predisposition of having a ‘national identity’, so somehow we can even claim that ‘national identity’ is inherited — not directly, in the sense that we have genes saying that we are American or Portuguese, but indirectly, because we have genes which will develop our need for belonging to a group (and avoid other groups) as well as the mechanisms which allow us to recognise who is part of a group and who is not. Those lower-level mechanisms are inherited; it’s on top of them that ‘national identity’ is acquired as a behaviour. And this is much easier to show, since we all know that we can switch ‘national identities’ (and, in fact, refuse to have one, or have several at the same time), because all it needs is to acquire the appropriate cultural behaviours and identify with them.

That was the easy part! Now let’s get back to gender identity. As I have shown before, the mechanisms that make us recognise gender based on pattern matching — subtle hints in physical attributes (and in the case of secondary sexual characteristics, those hints are anything but subtle!) which our brains can process almost immediately and tag a label to them — are obviously innate, and it should have been quite obvious to the behaviourists in the 1960s that we humans need to reproduce ourselves, and that means knowing for sure how to couple together to generate offspring. Nature has even been kind to us, and almost all animals have secondary sex attributes (even if in some cases they are not visually perceptible), to help us to identify each physical gender better and quicker. Because generating offspring among humans just requires two working biological sexes, our brains must be adapted to easily differentiate between one and the other. So all of this must be present in the brain structures when we’re born; after all, even insects are good enough at separating between those who share the same gender/sex (‘opponents’ in the game of love) and those who don’t (potential mates) — so such a mechanism must be not only innate, but it must be very simple indeed!

We cannot even argue that the ‘biological-sex-identification-mechanism’ is incredibly sophisticated for us humans, compared to other species, because both sexes actually resemble each other very much, so we need better pattern-matching mechanisms than, say, peacocks or chicken or even lions, where it’s really very easy to distinguish between both sexes. But this is not the case for all animals: as I like to mention always, cats have almost no (visual) distinction between the sexes, and they certainly have no trouble reproducing! So the actual complexity of this identification mechanism must be very low indeed: with just a few hints, in general, we can guess correctly in, say, 99% of the cases.

As humans, of course, we enhance that chance, because we define gender roles — cultural artefacts that attribute a lot of behaviours to each of the genders (and that includes appearance, obviously). So what that means is that we do not rely only on the secondary sexual attributes, because in some cases they might not be ‘enough’ to visually separate the two biological genders. For instance, two very skinny teenagers of different genders, who have had little fat intake in their nutrition, who do not exercise much, and who dress alike with the same hairstyle, might be easily confused; but if you dress the ‘woman’ in a dress, and the ‘man’ in a three-piece suit, then they will be immediately recognisable as to which gender they belong.

I’m just restating the obvious, all right? The assumption here is that the pattern-matching mechanism which labels each of the genders is, indeed, inborn, innate, somehow inherited genetically. We might not know exactly where on the brain this area is, but we know of some cases where people look at faces and cannot tell if they are people they know — or even what gender they are — due to some damage on a specific area of the brain. Some of those people, however, can often rely on other ‘hints’ to address people correctly and not misgender them; in other words, they can learn to go beyond the secondary sexual attributes and look, say, at clothes or hairstyles, and guess correctly the gender of the person, even if they know that, intuitively, their brains do not ‘know’ which gender is which. Such are extreme cases, where the pattern-matching ability for faces is somehow broken; such people are rare, of course, so we can safely assume that most people will guess correctly at one’s gender when looking at a face.

As we crossdressers so well know, we can cheat, meaning that we can create the illusion of a specific gender by using all sorts of tricks (from shapewear to makeup), and then we can somehow ‘override’ the natural pattern-matching mechanism; in other words, that mechanism will give the wrong answer somehow, because, through what is merely acquired behaviour (in this case, the way someone dresses or puts makeup on) in a specific cultural environment, the brain gets ‘fooled’ by matching patterns at a high cognitive level (the level of abstract cultural concepts). Now all this would deserve whole books on the subject (namely, showing how humans are able to ‘override’ natural impulses and replace them by cultural ones), but I’ll spare you another 10,000 words on the subject; the whole point, after all, is to show two things — that the pattern-matching mechanism we have that ‘recognises’ a specific gender is inborn, but that each gender is culturally enhanced with behaviour/appearance and, through that, we can actually fool the pattern-matching mechanism, which works 99% of the time, but does not guess correctly all the time (99% is an invented number, of course; it just has to be sufficiently high to allow the human species to reproduce, while at the same time we know it’s not infallible, because we can fool it).

So far, so good; nobody, I think, will dispute this argument. Now my conjecture is working at the level of the inborn pattern-matching mechanism which tells our brain what gender some person belongs to — including ourselves. What we call ‘gender identity’ is, according to my conjecture, merely an abstract description of the result of this mechanism: when it is first applied to ourselves (and rendered fully functional, which happens around 3 years of age), it will trigger one of two possible results, i.e. that we belong either to the ‘male’ group or the ‘female’ one. And, as we know, one in 10.000 human beings (or so) will get this resultwrong.

It seems like a huge step — from something so simple as tagging a face ‘male’ or ‘female’ to the immense complexities of ‘gender identity’? Well, to be honest, that’s what I think. The underlying mechanism must be something really simple, since, as said, even insects have it — and they certainly have way simpler brains than ours! Because the mechanism is so simple, it also means that when it ‘tags’ something as male or female, it creates a very strong attachment to that identity. Of course this is just speculation, but my conjecture is that, the simpler the mechanism (and we can look through all living organisms and see what mechanisms we share with the simplest of those organisms), the stronger it will be — that is why we give so much importance to, say, pain, or hunger/thirst, or passion/desire, etc. So-called ‘basic instincts’, most of which are innate and inborn, and without which we couldn’t function as living beings, must — according, again, to my conjecture — have very strong associations, bonds, emotions, whatever. In other words, the more abstract a concept is, the less rooted it will be in innate mechanisms, and the ‘less stronger’ it will be. People will care much more about the next sex partner than about voting for the next president; after all, without sex, there will be no reproduction; while having the wrong politician sitting behind their desk will not matter that much to the continuing survival of the human species (well, unless that politician has the codes for launching a nuclear war… but I digress!).

There might be a relationship between the pattern-matching mechanisms which make our species gregarious by attracting ‘people from the same group’ together, and the pattern-matching mechanism which identifies genders. However, it’s clear that the gender-recognition mechanism is much older and more important, evolutionarily speaking, because the vast majority of species is not gregarious and they have survived until today. So it’s possible that ‘gregariousness’ might be an adaptation of the gender-recognition mechanism, but I will leave that discussion for biologists; I think that all those mechanisms might be rooted in something even more primitive, or that the most primitive mechanism is precisely the gender-recognition mechanism, and all others are variations of it. I don’t know, I’m just wildly guessing.

In any case, because the gender-recognition mechanism is essential for reproduction, and therefore for ensuring the survival of our species, it must be at the top of the list in importance for all mechanisms inside the brain — i.e. at the same level of those mechanisms that make us hungry, thirsty, avoid extreme cold and heat, and so forth, or, in essence, everything which affects our ability to survive. One might even argue that, from the perspective of our genes, the gender-recognition mechanism is the most important mechanism inside our brain — because if we starve after we have sex, our genes won’t care; but they will care if we are too weak to even have sex and reproduce ourselves, so we will have a lot of mechanisms to ensure our survival at least until we are able to reproduce ourselves. Again, I will not discuss this further, I’ll leave it to the biologists! In any case, it’s easy to see that during our first months of life, we clearly will be much more interested in getting fed than in developing identity or worrying about sex…

But wait, I hear you yell. The ‘gender identity core’ is not merely an ‘identification mechanism’; their proponents, after all, also assume that a person identifying with a specific gender will also think like that gender — and this, in fact, is also at the root of gender dysphoria, when someone has a body differently gendered than their brain, who thinks like a person of a different gender. My conjecture relegates everything to the gender-recognition mechanism. What about the rest? What about what really constitutes a woman — her way of thinking? The ‘gender identity core’ conjecture, obviously, assumes that ‘all that which makes a woman’ is somehow embedded inside that ‘core’.

Well… as before, I will have to cheat once more, and turn another leaf in my Buddhism book. One important concept of Buddhism is known as ‘habitual tendencies’, and hopefully my own teachers, if they ever read this, don’t get shocked at the way I explain them. The reasoning behind Buddhist teachings is that when we tend to think according to a certain, specific way, we sort of leave some ‘grooves’ in the mind/brain structure, and then it will become increasingly harder to ‘leave’ those ‘grooves’ (i.e. thinking out of the box, or in an open minded way), because they have become so deep — and so familiar — that we will have no other (apparent) choice than to continue to follow the same reasoning, over and over again. This is, for instance, why allegedly elder people are much more stubborn than younger ones — their ‘grooves’ run much deeper. By contrast, someone who is constantly in touch with new ideas and new ways of thinking will develop relatively shallow grooves, and, as a consequence, be able to be much more open-minded — a typical example might be a teacher, growing old but learning all the time, and being surrounded by succeeding generations of youth with their own views of the world. Buddhists tend to push the analogy to the point of describing the mind of an awakened being, one who is free from every constraint, like drawing pictures with a stick on water: as soon as we trace a line, it immediately fades, and the waters will be calm and placid again. While an untrained human being is like carving on ice: the grooves will remain there for a long, long time. The water/ice analogy points to the mind: it’s the same substance, there is no difference between the mind of an awakened being and an unawakened one, the only difference is that the former’s mind is fluid like water, while the latter is solid (i.e. thick-minded!) and cold like ice.

‘Habitual tendencies’ is pretty much the way Buddhists explain behaviour. While they also assume that some things are innate — for instance, being a human being instead of, say, a cat, will constrain us due to our form to do some things, while cats are constrained differently; we may be able to learn language, but cats are able to run faster and jump on their prey on dark nights — most of behaviour, according to Buddhists, is acquired, and by constantly repeating the same behaviour, it will leave deep-lasting grooves in one’s mind. While this analogy is mostly used to explain unwanted behaviour which harms us and others (like, say, getting irate when someone offends us), it is also true for so-called ‘good’ behaviour, in the sense that we also learn it so that it becomes a ‘habitual tendency’. In fact, learning Buddhist techniques to avoid being constrained must pass through a first phase where we abandon certain habitual tendencies and adopt new ones — the Buddhist training! — until we reach a point where we can also leave the Buddhist training behind: at that moment, our mind is free from all habitual tendencies, and, as a consequence, we have a free will unhindered by any sort of constraints and obstacles. In other words, this is what Buddhists call an awakened mind: one that is free from constraints.

Constraints are often self-imposed (we adopt certain behaviours of our own ‘free will’) but many of them will come from education and imitation within a certain cultural context. In other words: it’s not that we have been born human beings, which necessarily constrains our way of thinking (we think as humans, not as cats); we are also born within a context where other human beings with their own behaviour will necessarily influence us. And this starts from an early age: our own parents, according to their own education and the cultural context they live in, will start forming our ‘habitual tendencies’ very soon in our lives, leaving what they hope to be deep grooves for those behaviours they deem to be ‘important’ or ‘appropriate’. From the tendency to study and do our own homework punctually, to the way we eat or speak or dress, all these tendencies come at a very tender age. None of them are ‘innate’, even though Buddhists will admit that we might be more predisposed towards some than towards others; for instance, some people might have a predisposition to love to read, while others will prefer to do outdoor sports. I will skip the Buddhist explanation of why some of us prefer to read while others prefer outdoor sports, because it’s not really relevant to the discussion here; the main issue here is understanding that Buddhists are certainly behaviourists when explaining habitual tendencies, but they are also aware that our nature is not behaviourist, and that we can overcome habitual tendencies even with just a little training. In other words, habitual tendencies are not ‘us’, in the sense that these compulsions or urges we feel because we are deep inside a certain groove are not innate or even ‘natural’ (in the sense that we have been ‘born’ with them), but they are things ‘outside’ the self, if I can explain it that way: they are some sort of outer layer, like in a onion, which we can safely discard while not really losing our ‘identity’.

Perhaps I can explain this better with an example. Suppose that someone lives in a household where the father, frustrated with his job and overall outcome in life, is often in a bad mood, and has spontaneous outbursts of anger, when he’s prone to hit the mother. The child sees this, and because the mother does nothing to check the father’s anger (let’s assume that for a moment), the child assumes that this is ‘expected behaviour’. So he also ‘learns’ to hit others when feeling frustrated, and because he learns this in his very early childhood, that behaviour is deeply set in his mind. Later, as an adult, he gets in trouble with the law because of the way he hit someone too hard, and they had to be treated in a hospital. He claims that he cannot do anything to control his anger and frustration, that he usually is a very peaceful person (he might even be telling the truth), but, occasionally, when he ‘sees red’ with anger, he will lash out to the nearest person, and cannot do much about it, it’s ‘part of him’ or ‘what he is’.

The clever judge, besides punishing him with the cost of the hospital fees of the victim, and condemning him to some civic duty, also forces him to do some therapy. And with the help of a good therapist, he learns that, after all, this ‘anger’ he feels which ‘forces’ him to hit others is not part of him at all. It’s something he acquired in childhood, but it’s something he can overcome or ‘opt out’. And once he manages that, he can safely discard that aspect of himself. Now he has to consider a moral dilemma: did he lie to the judge when he said that the anger was ‘part of him’? But the truth is that now that he doesn’t feel the urge to hit others so strongly he actually feels ‘more himself’. In a sense, he has recognised that his hitting others when angry was just an imitated behaviour from his father; in reality, before he saw his father doing exactly that, he did not hit others when angry. Therapy allowed him to ‘rediscover himself’ before he was so severely influenced by his father’s behaviour.

Is he the same person? Or just discarding one behaviour does not make him all that different? In fact, how much of his personality — his identity, his self — is innate, and how much is acquired behaviour? And maybe his own father wasn’t really a bad person, he only imitated others who would lash out when angry?

Such questions, of course, delight philosophers and therapists (well, and of course Buddhists too), because the dividing line between what is innate and what is acquired is never that easy to establish — and we got it wrong so many times in the past, why should we assume that the current answer in this early 21st century is the correct one, the final and ultimate truth?

Buddhists, having been thinking of exactly these questions for the past 25 centuries, have come to a few conclusions. One of them is that we pile up behaviour on top of behaviour, habitual tendency on top of habitual tendency, and somehow point at all that and say: ‘this is me, this is what I am’. A Buddhist teacher, hearing that, might ask in return: ‘Well, and who is this person who is saying “this is me, this is what I am”?’ — hopefully baffling the student in thinking how much of his identity is just behaviour; and how much of that behaviour is innate, and how much is (voluntarily) acquired. Another conclusion that Buddhists reached is that thinking about these things — by closely watching our own minds to see what the mind is doing all the time — will ultimately lead us to realise that all the things that we label as being part of the ‘self’ are just abstract concepts, which ultimately are not innate (if they are an abstract concept, then it took a human being to label it — it was not something we were ‘born’ with, but something we learned the name of at some point). The last question to ask, therefore, is: once every habitual tendency is ‘removed’, once every behaviour is stepped aside, what exactly is the ‘self’?

Again, I will not bore you with the answer, you can grab any book about Buddhism written by a qualified teacher, and you’ll get a much better answer than mine. The whole point, in fact, is not to somehow claim that Buddhism has all the answers to all issues related to the mind and the self and the problem of identity, but that we can borrow some of its ideas and see how well they actually apply to what we already know about how the brain — and the mind — works.

And there we can see some similarities, even if we use a different language. The reason why behaviourism had so much success, and has not been totally abandoned (just adapted), was that it actually had great explanatory powers with a simple theory: basically, that we are born practically with a ‘blank’ brain, and that all we have is conditioned behaviour of some sort (either acquired on our own, or forced upon us). If that’s the case, then therapists only need to reverse certain behaviours, or find ‘antidotes’ to some behaviours, in order to change the way a person thinks — which can propitiate a cure.

In fact, many mental issues can actually be solved that way. Behaviourism also tends to give a person an open mind: it sees the world and its inhabitants not as a dogmatic ‘blueprint’ which has to be followed for some reason (i.e. in a Freudian style of someone who had a traumatic sexual experience in childhood will have necessarily to suffer in a certain way from that, in the present), but rather as a progress, a sequence of events always fluidly in motion, which result in enhancing some behaviours and refraining others, according to one’s perceptions of what is better for ourselves and for others. Misbehaviour — in the sense of acting against one’s best interests or against others — can therefore be corrected; new behaviours can be learned, acquired; old behaviours which are not functional nor beneficial can be discarded. Of course, this is the theory; in practice, as behaviourists have learned, some things cannot be changed.

And perhaps not surprisingly (at least not for a Buddhist!), we cannot change those things that are more closely connected to ensuring the survival of the human species: our sexuality, the way we relate to our bodies, our basic needs (food, shelter, rest, nearness to other human beings…), and our role in society. Again, not surprisingly, all of these are, indeed, tightly connected to certain behaviours which, at the lack of a better word, we would have to consider ‘innate’ (again, I’m refraining from giving you a Buddhist explanation, and opting for one which is more consistent with Western science) and somehow transmitted during reproduction. While the remaining behaviours, especially all those which are essentially social and cultural, are acquired.

So we will always have certain predisposition towards some behaviours, namely, all those mentioned above (and perhaps a few more!), related to survival of the species, both individually and as a whole. This means that we not only need to achieve the means of physical survival (i.e. getting enough food to eat, a place to rest, a partner to mate with) but, because we are a gregarious species, we also need some innate mechanisms to deal with ‘society’. In other words, the ‘need’ to be part of a group, and to tie our identity to a group, is also driven by biology, not only by acquired behaviour.

And here is where my conjecture fits in. To recap: there is no question that we need the innate gender-recognition mechanism to ensure reproduction and the survival of the species. And that means we first have to apply that mechanism to ourselves. Then we will know to which ‘gender group’ we belong, and what is the opposite gender group, with which we will reproduce together (even if at 3 years of age we might not necessarily think exactly along these lines…). Such a mechanism is indispensable, and, therefore, it cannot be left merely to ‘education’ or ‘imitation’. In the same way that we automatically know how to pee when our bladder is full, we also know who is a boy and who is a girl (later on, of course, we will learn that it’s not socially adequate to pee everywhere, but just in specific places — that is acquired behaviour, overriding our innate impulses to pee for the sake of positive social interaction). At the very basic level, we can say that this is ‘instinctive behaviour’, in the sense of being innate and not acquired. And I might even go further and claim that figuring out one’s own gender identity is one of the first puzzle pieces that we fit into what ultimately will be our ‘identity’, our ‘sense of self’ (the first piece, very likely, is understanding the role of our mother and father, and how we relate to them — so we will recognise ourselves as ‘children’ first, and ‘boy or girl’ next). As human beings, of course, we will also have an innate ability to start labeling and categorising things (something which also will only happen as we start to grasp the concept of ‘language’ for expressing ourselves as an independent, self-aware personality), and, again, the first thing we usually label is our own mother, or at least our parents, and then ourselves.

What happens at the very moment when, for the first time, our gender-recognition mechanism becomes functional? We will tag ourselves as one of the genders — we might not even be aware of how many there might be. And once that happens, we will want to ‘belong’ to the group of people of the same gender. We will quickly learn that one of the parents is of the same gender, while the other is not. Among our siblings, the same will happen. Our first experiences will immediately show us that, in general, there are only two possible genders, two possible groups to fit in, and we fit either into one or the other, and that is established irrevocably at the moment our gender-recognition mechanism ‘activates’ at the first time. And then we will feel the urge to join the group of people of the same gender, and, by imitation, do what they do; and at first we will shun the group of people of the other gender, but, of course, this relationship with the other gender will change as we grow…

This is the point where my conjecture stops claiming ‘innateness’. From this point onwards — but notice how crucial this point is! — everything becomes ‘acquired behaviour’, starting with the names we give to each gender, and culminating in the complex social roles that are ‘expected’ from us. So girls don’t innately ‘like’ to play with dolls; they do so because all their peers ‘like’ to play with dolls, and because they want to be accepted by the group (and that urge to be part of a group is innate behaviour!), they will learn what to ‘like’ and what to ‘dislike’. Of course, they play with dolls, because their mothers (who also have played with dolls) gave them dolls to play with. Here starts the whole social conditioning process; and of course this will change from society to society, from epoch to epoch, and even from family to family. If all boys in a family are given dolls to play with, then for them, belonging to the ‘boy club’ means ‘playing with dolls’, and that’s what they will do, and they will naturally have fun playing with dolls (although it will certainly involve trying to remove their heads, throwing them as far as possible, or hitting other objects with the dolls…) — until, in kindergarten, they suddenly realise that the other boys play with other things!

At around three years of age, the world may be much simpler, but it’s also a time when all those neural connections are furiously been made. It also means that what happens at that time will etch very, very deep grooves in our minds. Because we self-attribute a gender to ourselves at such an early age, we will have a very deep ‘sense of gender’ since our first memories. In fact, as said before, we don’t have any memories of ourselves before that age, simply because the required mechanisms for having self-identification are not yet fully in place. And ‘identity’ and ‘gender identity’ happen at about the same time — therefore, our ‘sense of self’ will be very closely, and strongly, related to our ‘sense of gender’.

Transexuals, of course, will correctly identify other people’s gender, but they will see their own bodies mismatching the gender they identify with. This hints at that mechanism not being merely visual; much more has to be involved in it. I believe that when we achieve what we could describe as self-awareness we also acquire the ability to look at our own thoughts, and this would explain that the gender-recognition mechanism would also look at the pattern of thoughts and recognise them as belonging to a gender different from the rest of the body, which is perceived visually; but I’m aware that such conjecture would ultimately mean that there would not exist examples of transexuality among animals, and we know that is not quite the case; on the other hand, we might speculate that there are some patterns of thought that are very primitive and exist at a very low level, therefore we pick up these patterns very early in our age, and they are not really ‘conscious thoughts’ in the sense of high-level cognitive abilities, but rather ‘movements of the mind’ at a very basic level, roughly at the level of emotions such as pain and hunger and the need to pee.

This would hint again at a ‘gender identity core’ that produces such low-level patterns in the mind, which would pretty much render my own conjecture absurd; I therefore prefer to consider that the gender-recognition mechanism is more complex than mere visual pattern matching. In fact, the discovery that one’s body does not match one’s gender is a consequence of the visual pattern matching; but that usually happens later in life, mostly because the awareness of the physical difference in genders is not totally present at that time, although it certainly is a few years later, i.e. with 5 or 6; and transexuals start getting horrified that their own bodies will develop ‘wrongly’ when they start to understand, perhaps somewhere between 8-11, that they will soon be subject to puberty which will transform their bodies into ‘adults’ of the wrong gender. So I would rather think that the gender-recognition mechanism, at around 3, is good enough to distinguish ‘boys’ from ‘girls’ in others, but probably not in our own bodies; this is based on some reports where transexuals are absolutely sure about their own gender and about other people’s gender, and are terribly confused why their own parents cannot figure out what their gender is, and are forcing them to ‘join the wrong gender club’, against their will, and for some reason they cannot possibly understand. Their rejection of being ‘assigned’ the wrong gender, the wrong clothes, even the wrong name,  and so forth, may at that stage be simply very confusing because they still see themselves as physically belonging to the gender they identify with, and thus cannot understand why others see them differently. It’s just at some much later stage that they realise there are physical differences between ‘boys’ and ‘girls’, it’s not just about what toys to play with, what clothes to wear, or what hairstyle to have; and transexuals will slowly understand that there has been a huge mistake with their own bodies, which somehow has failed to develop as the gender they identify with — and that things might even become worse (they will) once they hit puberty.

Now this is the extreme case, and the one that is perhaps better studied and known, because it also happens to be the case where it’s most easy to deal with the problem — i.e. going through transition as early as possible — and where the success rate is highest. But any good theory about the gendered brain must also be able to explain late on-set transexuals, and other kinds of transgender individuals, who are gender non-conforming in certain ways, but not necessarily in the same way as early on-set transexuals.

My reasoning is inspired by Felix Conrad’s suggestion, which I have already talked about, the ‘Drunken Irish Minion Hypothesis‘. A brief recap: Felix suggests that we are born with a switch which defines our gender and our sexual orientation (to whom we are attracted to). Usually, most of the time (i.e. about 90% of the cases), we are ‘wired’ for cisgender heterosexuality. Sometimes, however, the switch for sexual orientation is reversed by mistake (homosexuality) or broken (bisexuality or even pansexuality). Sometimes it’s the gender switch which has been reversed (transexuality) or is broken (non-conforming gender expression). But sometimes it’s even worse: the ‘Drunken Irish Minion’ responsible for that wiring is so drunk that he not only reverses the gender switch, but connects the sexuality switch so that it points to one’s own reversed gender: the result is someone, say, in a male body, who identifies as a female, and, worse, is sexually attracted to their own body image as female (what Blanchard would call autogynephilia, although the reasoning behind it is completely different than Felix Conrad’s). This explains how such people tend to live ‘normal’ lives, ‘passing’ as cisgender heterosexual males, because, as they are attracted by all things female, they will try to get female partners (and often have offspring — thus perpetuating the tendency for future ‘Drunken Irish Minions’ playing havoc with one’s genes defining gender and sexuality…); ultimately, of course, such people will become very confused at some stage in life and realise that perhaps their best choice is also transitioning, since they do identify as female, after all, they just have the wrong body and a completely ‘alien’ sexuality (these would be late on-set transexuals), although they might still have no problem whatsoever as to be romantically attracted to females, therefore potentially maintaining long-lasting relationships.

Felix Conrad, using that explanation, clearly also follows the assumption of the existence of a ‘gender core’ and a ‘sexuality core’ — it’s just that the genetical, biological, chemical, embryological, etc. conditions for their manifestation may not always fall into cisgender heterosexuality, but rather a disturbance of the fine balance between all those ‘cores’ may produce a vast variety of sexual orientations and gender diversity.

An alternative explanation would therefore be that the gender-recognition mechanism somehow is ‘broken’ at self-identification; this will mean that the person, at a very early stage, might not really be sure about their own gender, and generally ‘go along’ with what others assign to them. They might rebel against that once or twice, or even fall into depression (especially during adolescence) once in a while, because somehow, unlike their peers, they are not sure about their gender, and that often also means a conflict in their sexuality. They might identify with the gender assigned at birth but prefer the gender role of the other gender; or they might not even identify with that gender at all, just ‘go along’ because it’s expected from them, or it has been inculcated into their minds so strongly that they ought to behave as a different gender, that they have no choice but to obey. Think of those grooves in the mind again. But also think of what behaviourists have learned: you cannot condition gender. Ultimately, therefore, such people will have three options: transition; suicide; or suffering from severe mental issues, from depression through anxiety through compulsive behaviour, which is a way of their brains to tell them that something is seriously wrong with the way they behave, compared to how they ought to behave, according to the gender they identify with.

I need therefore to develop an explanation on how the gender-recognition mechanism can be ‘broken’, especially if I have been stressing to much the importance of that mechanism in successful reproduction which ensures the survival of the species. And here I have no option but to fall back to the best model we currently have on the way the brain works, at the biochemical and bioelectrical level: neural networks.

One of the fields of artificial intelligence studies precisely models of neural networks, simulating them in computers, and looking at what they can accomplish. We have no way of knowing if the models are actually modelling ‘reality’; we only know a few basic aspects of how neurons actually work, but we can only speculate that the way they store information is similar to how simulated neural networks work.

Basically, what we know is that neurons ‘fire’ packets of information (an electrical impulse) once the inputs they get (other electrical impulses) reach a certain threshold. This threshold, of course, varies from neuron to neuron; and neuroscientists assume that the thresholds, as well as the way the neurons are interconnected, are part of our learning process.

On simulations, we have basically a ‘digital’ neuron, which also ‘fires’ a packet of information (possibly just one bit — 1 saying that the neuron is firing, 0 otherwise) when a certain threshold is reached. Those thresholds may be set by the programmer, or the neural network might ‘train’ itself to adjust the values. Neural networks work with fuzzy logic — a type of logic where we have the values of ‘true’, ‘false’, and ‘maybe’, the latter being expressed in a percentage — a specific bit of information may be 70% true and 30% false, for example. Simulated neurons, therefore, can accommodate uncertain or incomplete information. They are especially good for being trained in pattern recognition, because sometimes figuring out key elements of a face in a picture depends on a lot of factors, namely, how the face is being currently lighted, if it is facing straight towards the viewer or at an angle, and so forth. By ‘training’ a neural network with subtle variations of how the same face looks like, it can establish neural connections with ‘maybe’ values, which establish limits in the recognition: for instance, if the distance between two eyes is slightly off what was measured from a mugshot perfectly centred on the nose, that can mean that the face is just slightly twisted, so it will still be accepted as the same person; but if the distance is a bit more (or less) than a certain threshold, and if the eye colour cannot be only accounted for the change in brightness, etc…. then possibly it’s someone else. We have a very solid understanding on how these things work in simulated neural networks, and a vast body of accumulated scientific results, besides a mountain of data from giants like Google or Apple, who routinely train neural networks to profile us — and we know how good they are at doing that.

Does the brain work in the same way? Honestly, nobody really knows. Simulated, digital neural networks most definitely exhibit a lot of functionality which we would expect to find inside a brain. The simulated neural networks can certainly ‘learn’, i.e. acquire knowledge, and that knowledge can be incomplete and be still useful for making decisions — characteristics that we know that our brain actually has, so there must be some similarity between reality and simulation. However, many neuroscientists (and many AI experts as well!) have pointed out that a human brain may have a much more complex way of acquiring information, since it’s not unlikely that the same neuron participates in several different functions at the same time. In other words, using a simulated neural network, if I wish to train two completely different things — say, recognising faces and fingerprints — then I need two networks, one for each. Even though the face-recognising neural network may be trained to recognise different faces (not easy to programme, but it’s feasible, at least from a conceptual point of view), it’s hard to imagine how that neural network now manages to recognise fingerprints as well, which have totally different key measurements! Nevertheless, this is what some neuroscientists believe that organic neurons are able to do — perhaps at a level of complexity that we cannot even dream, where each neuron is not merely a simple true/false/maybe cell, a small component in the overall picture, but rather that each neuron participates in millions of simultaneous ‘organic computations’ — being part of several millions of neural networks in the AI sense of the word — and therefore each neuron is much more like a supercomputing node than merely a simple cell. If that’s the case, of course, the brain would be several orders of magnitude much more complex than most optimists have thought it to be, who believed that artificial self-awareness was just a few years away, thanks to the ability of modern supercomputers to model billions of nodes in a neural network. But we might need, after all, billions and billions of supercomputers, all connected in the same network, to ‘simulate’ a human brain with self-awareness. Really, nobody knows; we can only speculate.

In any case, we know a little bit about how the neurons ‘fire’. We also know that the process is electrochemical, that is, the information carried along the neuron — some of which can be one metre long! — travels at the speed of light through electricity, but the connections made between neurons are chemical: the sudden electrical pulse will release some chemicals which, in turn, will activate a new pulse on the next neuron, and so forth. The ‘threshold’ is basically the amount of pulses (or the intensity of the pulse) necessary to release enough chemicals so that the next neuron is fired. We know how to tweak those neurons, both by increasing the conductivity of the neuron itself (i.e. making the electric pulse either travel faster or with more intensity), as well as making more chemicals be released, or inhibiting them totally (which happens during anesthesia, for example). In other words: because biochemical processes are analogue, and allow for so much variation, we also know that things can be way more complex than simulated digital neurons tend to imply; and we also know that things can go wrong.

So let’s assume for now that, through an unknown method, the information to develop an embrionary gender-recognition mechanism is triggered, and neuron after neuron is attached to each other according to a specific ‘blueprint’, so that, once finished, this neural network will be able to recognise gendered humans. We have to assume that such a blueprint exists, of course, and the reality is that we have no known mechanism which could ‘encode’ such information: that’s one of the biggest mysteries of the human brain, namely, how exactly it can start with pre-existing structures. They certainly are not ‘coded’ in the DNA — the DNA just produces proteins, which can be aggregated into cells, but that’s pretty much it. Rather, scientists think that the process is pretty much embryologically driven. In other words: when a human foetus starts to develop, because it is a human foetus, the cells that differentiate themselves to become future neurons are assembled in just that way, because the whole embryological environment pushes them to be assembled that way and not another… and ultimately, when the child is born, all neurons are in the ‘right’ place for the pre-existing structures to start working. This is a bit mind-boggling because it implies a lot of circular thinking: if it’s a human foetus, then it has to develop in a certain way and in no other; because it is developing inside a human womb, than the right conditions are created in the environment, so that the foetus can develop as a human foetus. There is nothing ‘magic’ in this, except in the incredible complexity: things have to start from a certain environment; as the foetus grows, it also changes the environment — and the mother, in turn, will react to those changes and also feed chemicals to the mix which will, in turn, push the development through a certain path, and no other. This precisely orchestrated balance of environment and foetus development has been ‘rehearsed’ by Nature gazillions of times; we humans have retained the precise combination which allows human foetus to develop as they should (if they don’t, well, they are usually discarded — a natural abortion — or reabsorbed).

But, again, we’re talking about biochemistry — not digital computers. There is some leeway, some margin for error. Sometimes, an extra neuron is developed, or goes into the wrong position. It will not matter much, if the end result is a viable, thinking human being; and a few cells off course is not significant. Obviously, if the wrong cells are all over the place, then the whole development will stop; but sometimes a few wrong things pop in, and they may or may not have consequences later. Again, there is a fine balance here: for the mother, as said before, bearing a child requires an incredible amount of effort, energy consumption, and time. There is a limit to how many children one mother can bear; and that means that the whole process must be efficient and reach a satisfactory finish (a viable human being that is able to reproduce themselves at a later stage). If the whole embryological process goes awry from the start, well, then there is not much to do than to abort (literally!) and try again later. But if just some odd cells here and there are not in the right place… well, then it might not make a lot of difference, and it’s better to deliver a slightly-less-than-perfect human being, so long as it can survive and reproduce, than expecting for perfection, aborting each time when it’s not perfect, and exhausting the mother in the process, so that she cannot bear more children afterwards.

Nature has it all balanced out. And, as we so well know, 90% of all human beings who are born are cisgender and heterosexual, all ready to reproduce themselves happily into another generation.

It’s conceivable, therefore, that during the embryological development some neurons from the gender-recognition mechanism are not in the right place to fire when they should; or they might not be correctly connected; or they might not have enough chemicals to trigger the next neuron… whatever might be the case, it might be just a tiny ‘defect’ that usually will not matter much (the brain is so plastic that it can easily reroute neurons at a later stage). Or it might make a difference, and not be able, at a later stage, to correctly identify the gender of the owner. And then we get a transgender person.

So Felix Conrad’s ‘switches’ and minions operating those switches are translated into very complex neuronal structures, which develop according to a precise plan with some leeway — because fine-tuning biochemical environments is not as precise as digital computers are — and which, in 90% of the cases, work out fine to produce a cisgender heterosexual human being. Sometimes, however, the gender-recognition mechanism does not work correctly,

Since we have no idea on how the gender-recognition mechanism actually works (or where it is!), we cannot say how it doesn’t work ‘correctly’. What interestingly seems to be the case is that it will always have the ability to correctly recognise the gender of others. In other words: I have not come across any statistics showing how many people cannot recognise the gender of others, but I think that the actual number of those people must be infinitesimally small (it’s just because there are so many humans on this planet that even billion-to-one chances are possible… for about seven human beings on average!). By contrast, recognising one’s own gender wrongly happens at least once in every 30.000 humans, or even 1 in 10.000 (depends on the studies); sexuality is even worse, with 10% of non-heterosexual humans out there. It’s clear that this mechanism, therefore, is prone to error, and it’s also clear that people are born with a ‘defective’ gender-recognition mechanism, it’s not something that gets ‘broken’ at a later stage, or that can be ‘changed’ somehow through training.

My own conjecture coincides with the ‘gender identity core’ conjecture in that point: both assume that, whatever has happened, it happened during embryological development; and whatever mechanisms or structures embody the actual concept, once they are ‘broken’, they cannot be ‘fixed’ by any means whatsoever. They’re fixed into place; they are innate, and therefore that points to something that happens before birth. Just like we cannot take medicine or do some training to develop an extra eye or finger, we cannot do anything about the way our gender-recognition mechanism works. In other words: for a transexual person, it will always recognise itself as a member of a gender different from the rest of the body. On most transgender people, this ‘recognition’ will not be conclusive. Remember the bit of fuzzy logic I spoke about? So the neural network, if that’s what it is, will answer ‘male’/’female’ with 100% certainty on cisgender individual. For early on-set transexuals, it will give the opposite answer that it should. For transgender people… it will be a ‘maybe’. In some cases, the answer will be different according to the time of the day: that would be a gender-fluid individual. In other cases, it will sometimes answer ‘male’ with 100% certainty, sometimes ‘female’ with 100%. This individual will be bi-gender, or gender oscillating. And sometimes, of course, it will come out with, say, 50% male and 50% female. Or 0% of each. Or any other possible combination. For instance, in my case, it answers 0% male but perhaps just 10 or 20% female, so that makes me wonder what exactly I should do about myself!

Advantages of pushing away from the ‘gender identity core’ conjecture

New ideas in science are supposed to either explain something better or solve problems that previous ideas could not solve. The gender-recognition mechanism that I propose may complicate a lot of things, but because it goes one step deeper than the ‘gender identity core’ conjecture, I believe it has more explanatory power. To be more precise, I can now answer the original question by formulating my conjecture in a slightly different way:

A woman is a woman when her gender-recognition mechanism recognises herself as a woman.

Pretty much circular, isn’t it? But it actually shows the whole point of my proposed mechanism. When transgender women try to argue with TERFs or other similar fanatics, saying that ‘they are as much of a woman as them’, they will always get at least one irrefutable argument back: no matter how early they might have transitioned, they have started their lives having the experience of living as a different gender. The older they transition, the more they have the gender role experience of a man. They can say that they ‘feel to be a woman inside’ but the simple truth is that they cannot know; before transition, they can only imagine what a woman ‘feels inside’. They can even express what they ‘feel inside’ in a way that mirrors so completely what a woman’s social role ought to be, that, from the perspective of an outsider (say, a doctor diagnosing gender dysphoria), there is no difference whatsoever between them and a cisgender woman who has been raised as a woman since birth. Nevertheless, TERFs will still insist that the experience of being a woman is different from what a transgender woman experiences, and their only valid argument is based on the life history of the transgender woman — and it’s true that there will be a pre-transition phase when she experienced the world as a man (against her own will), and the post-transition phase, when her experience is that of a woman. This argument seems to be irrefutable, even with the ‘gender identity core’ conjecture, because TERFs might even accept that a trans woman has a ‘female gender identity core’ (at least to a degree — but gender identity comes in degrees anyway), but will nevertheless insist that a real woman needs to have both a female gender identity core and a life experience, from birth, as a woman. That’s how they define a woman, and, clearly, this allows them to exclude trans women — but accept a woman with CAIS as a ‘real woman’ (even though, genetically, she isn’t one).

By the same token, the argument that TERFs make that even HRT and surgery will not ‘turn’ someone into a real woman, but just cripple a male to externally appear as one, is based on the same premises. Here, of course, the transgender community is on much more firmer ground: MtF transgender people do not go through HRT/surgery to change their gender, but rather they change their body to conform a little better to one’s self-image of a woman, and to be also socially more conforming with the image that others have of a woman. So in this regard, TERFs are completely wrong. Trans women do not become women after HRT/surgery. They have always been women; hormones and surgery are totally irrelevant for that. And, in fact, that’s what many countries (including my own) are now accepting for changing one’s name and gender marker on the ID cards — surgery and hormones are not necessary for the legal transition, except, of course, in more backwards-thinking and conservative countries. In other words: the body doesn’t matter, what matters is what one feels inside.

But here is where the problem lies. How can someone, before transition, claim to ‘be a woman’ or ‘feel like a woman inside’, if that’s not what their experience is? (no matter when they transition). All they can say, of course, is that they reject the male gender role, as said before; but since gender is not binary, rejecting the male gender role does not mean that the person is automatically female, as I’ve argued before; they are just ‘non-male’, that’s all. And this is exactly where TERFs can place a wedge in the argumentation.

I therefore suggest a different way of classifying someone as a ‘woman’. Clearly, the TERFs’ main argument is a temporal one, i.e., that there is a period of time in the life of a transgender woman when she was not in the female gender role, and this, ultimately, will ‘decide’ what she is. It’s obvious that the traumatic years leading to transition will have a huge effect in the person’s mind, but that’s not what the TERFs mean: what they are saying is that ‘real women’ start their experience in the female gender role at birth.

So, we have to push things back even more and thus my suggestion: the gender-recognition mechanism is something innate, and that’s what ‘tells’ the person what gender she is. That, in turn, will trigger a lot of other neural circuits which will make the person identify with a specific gender; and this, in turn, will allow the person to be subject to external stimuli, learning, and imitation, of the behaviour expected of a certain gender role.

Now I will argue something a bit more controversial. I believe that the gender-recognition mechanism does not produce a result that can lie arbitrarily someplace along the vast spectrum of transgenderity. I think it’s much more simpler than that, because, biologically, for reproduction, we only need the gender-recognition mechanism to identify two genders. And I argue that based on evolution — we do not need an innate, inborn mechanism to recognise more than two genders, because, ultimately, as we complexify our society, we can add more gender roles to the society if we wish to do so (something I alluded at when talking about Japanese society), but all human societies recognise at least two very distinct gender roles, and those two, incidentally, will be tied to reproduction. I’m not an anthropologist, but I would nevertheless claim that the Japanese, in general, are not even aware that their traditional society allowed more than two gender roles; they have two main gender roles, ‘housewife’ (biologically female) and ‘household owner’ (biologically male). ‘Geisha’ (biologically female) and ‘Kabuki player’ (since the mid-1600s, biologically male) are just additional roles, which are recognised for those who do not conform to the ‘main’ roles. We can see similar examples in other societies as well. In general, therefore, there is a distinction between the two ‘main’ genders which are directly tied to reproduction, and the other — additional or auxiliary — gender roles which might exist, and even be crucial for the survival of the group/tribe/clan (like the shamans, for example) as a cultural entity, but who are not directly connected to reproduction (except accidentally, of course).

Thus, the gender-recognition mechanism is a simple neural network which will work in the following way: when estimating one’s gender, or someone’s gender, it will result in ‘highly probably male’, ‘highly probably female’, ‘both’, or ‘none’. I assume that the latter two cases will only exist in the self-gender-recognition mechanism of transgender people, and it’s also important to notice that so-called ‘classic’ transexuals will also get a binary result — just the opposite one that is intended (maybe they have a neuron in that neural network wired backwards?… who knows?). And now I’m even going to be more controversial: I seriously suspect that the gender-recognition mechanism can only give two results: ‘probably male’ and ‘probably female’. That’s enough, after all, to allow a species to reproduce sexually — they don’t need more than that.

This gender-recognition mechanism, unlike Felix Conrad’s on/off switches, does not require a very special configuration. It is, after all, just a neural network, which has been pre-trained to produce one of two possible outputs (‘probably male’ or ‘probably female’) based on a certain amount of inputs — patterns it tries to match. Now, we can only speculate about what those inputs might be, but speculation goes actually a long way in this case. Clearly, it needs to evaluate mental states as well as physical traits — because we know that ‘classic’ transexuals have absolutely no doubts about their gender, regardless on how they actually look like. So in their case, the gender-recognition mechanism has evaluated mental traits only, and achieved a satisfactory result.

This is not really surprising. While the gender-recognition mechanism is important to distinguish between potential sexual partners and potential competitors, this is just necessary after puberty. At the age when children acquire their sense of identity, their physical bodies are too much alike to have the gender-recognition mechanism rely upon an evaluation of their own bodies. And here is exactly where things become interesting.

I’ve addressed at the start of this long essay the issue of inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning does not give us certainties, just probabilities. The more observed phenomena, the higher our probability of deriving the right conclusion. We use inductive reasoning a lot, because it is so powerful at reaching conclusions when we just have partial data; and the more data we have, the more accurate our conclusion will be. I have no doubt that the gender-recognition mechanism, like pretty much everything which uses pattern-matching in our brains, must use inductive reasoning — because that also happens to be one of the easiest way to train a simulated neural network in a computer, so we would expect that the same ought to happen with our brains as well.

What this means is that, at some point in our earliest childhood, the gender-recognition mechanism starts to work. It will be fuzzy at the very beginning, but it will try to figure out what gender we belong to. The gender-recognition mechanism, at a much later stage, will use visual input as well to make decisions faster, and with more data, more accurate. As humans, we also help children out visually, by dressing differently — mommy does not wear the same things (or the same colours) than daddy, so mommy must be a different gender than daddy. Am I more like daddy, or more like mommy?

But clearly, at that age, we don’t need visuals to figure out people’s genders — or our own. Clearly we still ‘get’ results. On the other hand, our mental processes and states are still very fuzzy. We still don’t know exactly what we ‘feel’; our identity is still being built, it’s not 100% operational yet, so it’s ridiculous to talk about ‘feeling like a boy’ or ‘feeling like a girl’ at this stage. So the only explanation is that the gender-recognition mechanism comes already pre-programmed with a lot of assumptions, and the first assumption, of course, is that people can belong to different genders, and that we belong to one of them (at least). The second assumption is that we can figure out if we belong to mommy’s gender, or to daddy’s gender. Because we have learned to distinguish between both, something is triggered in the gender-recognition mechanism which will tell us the difference between both ‘groups’, and we know exactly to which one we belong. I don’t really know what is triggered, or what rules the gender-recognition mechanism already has pre-programmed. But what I can speculate about is that the gender-recognition mechanism uses inductive reasoning, and, at our earliest childhood, it will have very little to work with. So it will assign one gender to ourselves — ‘probably male’ or ‘probably female’ — based on very little data, and that means that the probability will be very low indeed. How do we ‘get it right’ over 99% of the time? Well, because we also get encouraged by our parents to ‘learn the difference’, and here is where visuals start to become more important.

With time, the gender-recognition mechanism becomes more and more complex, incorporating more and more rules, and, at some stage, it is even able to deal with secondary sexual characteristics (women have boobs, men don’t), but also with much more complex and abstract mental constructs. One fascinating characteristic of human beings — and very likely of most hominid primates, and possibly of several other species as well — is the ability to try to imagine what others are thinking. In other words, we can simulate in our minds how we believe that others think. This is crucial for us as a gregarious species, because that’s how we learn about other’s emotions, how we learn empathy — because we can understand how others feel, by imagining how they must feel — and ultimately compassion and altruistic behaviour (because other gregarious species tend to do the same, biologists speculate that they have this ability too, even if not developed to the same degree as us humans).

Now this ability is important for the current issue, because clearly the gender-recognition mechanism will also use that ability to do the following reasoning: ‘I believe I know how mommy thinks; I can see that I think in the same way; so I must be of the same gender as mommy’. So my argument that the gender-recognition mechanism also acts upon mental states is because of this ability: we don’t merely ‘feel’ to be a certain gender, but we can watch and observe persons of that gender we identify with, project in our minds how we believe they think and feel, and compare it to our own thoughts and feelings. If there is a match, then the probability that we have guessed our own gender correctly increases.

In other words: when we are very little children, gender recognition is not crucial for reproduction yet, because we’re still years away from puberty. But the gender-recognition mechanism must start its training, that is, it needs to acquire more and more rules, so that it can predict gender more and more accurately. When we’re very young, it matters little if we ‘guess’ wrong, because parents will help us out. Even a clearly transgender child who has guessed her own gender with a low probability, when finding out at first that others do not recognise her as being part of that gender, might not immediately throw a tantrum all the time. We’re still playing with very low probabilities here. The child might be aware that ‘something’ is wrong, and see herself to be pushed to play with kids of the ‘wrong’ gender, but the details are still fuzzy.

As a few years pass, however, the gender-recognition mechanism becomes much better. It even starts evaluating much more complex abstract representations of what others think. So, through observation, and inductive reasoning, a MtF transgender child can simulate how girls think in her own brain, and identify with girls; while at the same time, she simulates in her brain how boys think, and utterly rejects it. At the beginning, such thought processes will be very simple and limited to obvious things like preferred colours, dresses, or what kinds of games are more fun. But it quickly will start to become more and more clear to which gender that child belongs; this just means that, at some point, the probabilities given by the gender-recognition mechanism start to become very high, and this happens during the very first years, since the brain’s neural connections are growing at an exponential rate at this time. Not surprisingly, it’s around 3-6 years of age that most transgender children are sure that they belong to a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth: they have, by then, accumulated enough knowledge, enough data about the world they interact with, that the inductive reasoning processes of the gender-recognition mechanism are giving pretty good results. And this will only improve with time. If left unchecked, it will come to a point where puberty hits, and this will completely crush the transgender person with intense dysphoria, since the last bits added to the gender-recognition mechanism — secondary sexual characteristics, and what to do with them… — are now giving such high probabilities in identifying one’s own gender, which is the opposite of the direction of development of one’s own body, that all the brain is signaling that something is terribly wrong.

This is the edge case, of course; other transgender people in the spectrum will just have their own gender-recognition mechanism giving out less probable results. Sometimes, they will give low probabilities for either male or female; some other times, it will give high probabilities for both; and, of course, sometimes the result will be ‘probably male’ and on different days (or hours, or weeks, or years) it may come out as ‘probably female’. And for many MtF transgender people who do not transition, but try to cope with their dysphoria, they will very possibly get a result of ‘0% male’ but just ‘40% female’ — high, but not high enough to make that person feel gender dysphoria at a very intense and acute level.

So… here is my point: this gender-recognition mechanism is (obviously) exactly the same for transgender and cisgender persons. There is not one mechanism for cis people, and another for trans people; or a ‘working’ mechanism and a ‘broken’ mechanism. In both cis and trans people, the mechanism works in exactly the same way. Of course, because people are ‘trained’ differently, each person will get different results. Normally, most people will accurately ‘guess’ their own gender correctly, and, over time, reinforce that ‘guess’ over and over again, so that it becomes a ‘certainty’. This is, if you wish, the ‘expected biological result’ — that most people in the species are good at guessing genders, especially their own gender.

Some, however, will guess differently, i.e. outside the ‘expected biological result’ — and that’s just because inductive reasoning doesn’t work with certainties but probabilities. This is crucial for transgender activists: religious fanatics, extreme conservatives, TERFs, etc. cannot say with certainty that there are only two genders. All they can say is that most people have a very high probability of belonging to just one of two possible genders. Anything more than that is not only philosophically (or ideologically…) false, but it’s also false in the biological term: we’re not equipped with a gender-recognition mechanism that works with certainties, because almost none of the brain structures that we know of work that way. We’re very strongly conditioned to use inductive, not deductive, reasoning. In fact, the reason why those extremists will claim that there are only two genders is because of inductive reasoning: they start with themselves, and see that they belong to one gender. Then they look around themselves, and see that everybody apparently belongs to one of only two possible genders. Thus — goes the inductive reasoning — everybody must belong to one of two genders. Well, as said, inductive reasoning only works with probabilities: what our logical circuits in our brain are saying is that most people belong mostly to just one of at least two possible, and different, genders. And we can say that this is true for, say, 99% of the cases. We cannot extrapolate to the whole of the human species, simply because that’s not the way inductive reasoning works!

According to my conjecture, therefore, there is really not a ‘broken’ system for transgender people, and one that is ‘fully functional’ in cisgender people, unlike what I have said before (remember lies-to-children? Yep, that was another one). There is just one system which is perfectly functional in both cis and trans people. The difference here is just in the threshold: there is a set limit along the neural network of the gender-recognition mechanism, possibly near the end of the long tree of neurons, where the network will say ‘yep, it’s a boy’ or ‘yep, it’s a girl’ — and because we are talking about probabilities for each neuron to fire or not, that ‘result’ is expressed in a percentage of certainty. In most cisgender people, such percentage is very high when evaluating one own’s gender, and that will give the strong conviction that cis people have of belonging to the gender assigned at birth; in transgender people, the opposite is true, i.e. the percentage of certainty is low, and therefore such people will question their identity; in transexuals, the neural network will actually give the opposite result, thus creating the strong (unshakeable) conviction that they have the wrong body for the gender they identify with. The degree of conviction, of course, is dependent on the percentage of certainty, but we know from extensive research on transexuals that their conviction about their own gender is as high as in cisgender people. Among the vast spectrum of transgender people, however, the percentage of certainty may be low, or high for both possibilities, and so forth.

We should also take into account two things:

1. This mechanism can vary or fluctuate slightly in the results it gives, at least it certainly works that way for gender-fluid people of all types; this will also explain why certain transgender people start merely with crossdressing but still believe to be the gender assigned at birth, but, with further input, they start disbelieving that, and become slowly convinced that their gender identity is different from the one assigned at birth. This fluctuation, or change of the configuration of the neural network, happens in some cases but not in others; there might be many factors at play here, but also consider how some people are open minded (always eager to learn new things and question their own current knowledge) while others are not (their mentality and convictions are unshakeable, even in the presence of facts that clearly contradict their concepts and opinions): clearly we have an amount of flexibility in those neural networks, and some are more ‘frozen in place’ than others.
2. Also, this mechanism is inborn, that is, we do not ‘learn’ to recognise gender, nobody needs to ‘teach’ us, but that’s something that comes with the package, like knowing how to suck at our mother’s tit, walk, or acquire language. The neural network is already in place at birth: we just need to fill it with data (and note that this is not just passive, sensorial observation; but it can also be physical sensations — like in walking — or mental states — like in learning at school or with parents), so that the neural network is correctly ‘trained’ and can produce inductive conclusions in face of new data. Parents, teachers, etc. will only reinforce the already-existing mechanism, by providing new ‘rules’ to identify the two different genders, through pointing out their different gender roles and presentation.

If we assume all that — which is reasonable for simulated, digital neural networks, but may not be the case for organic neural networks, we cannot know, just speculate, and compare the similarities between the simulation and the organic reality of the brain — then we can come to some extremely interesting conclusions.

First and foremost, of course, we can completely debunk any theories that

• transgenderity and transexuality are diseases. The gender-recognition mechanism is perfectly functional both in cis and trans people. There is no disease, or malfunction, or broken functionality, or missing functionality — nothing. It is just a question on how the neural network supporting the gender-recognition mechanism has been trained: and because neural networks work with probabilities, not exact numbers, it’s plausible that somehow this gender-recognition mechanism gives different results than expected;
• ‘becoming trans’ is a fad, or something we convince ourselves that we are, mostly due to the influence of the mainstream media and social media, or even due to some persuading by doctors. The gender-recognition just works as it does, and if the result is ‘transgender’ or even ‘transexual’, this is something that is set pretty much at birth, and nobody can change by sheer willpower how this mechanism works; thus, one cannot ‘become’ transgender, one already is one;
• because the underlying mechanisms are unknown, doctors might misdiagnose when applying their own bias and establish transgenderity where it doesn’t exist. Here we must be careful: usually, people only talk to doctors about their gender identity issues when they have gender identity issues, period. Now we know that some psychological conditions also trigger a disruption (or at least the questioning!) of one’s gender identity, but in my mind what is clear is that these other conditions can affect the self-gender-recognition mechanism, but such conditions are not permanent. It’s exactly the same mechanism that happens when we consume alcohol above a certain threshold: we know that alcohol will change the way the brain works (as I’ve thoroughly explained on a previous article), and that change is real and measurable through imaging devices. Nevertheless, once the alcohol leaves the organism, the brain reverts to its original state. The same happens with those conditions that might affect the gender-recognition mechanism. What doctors have to be careful about is to recognise those conditions first, and only if everything else is discarded, if symptoms of gender dysphoria persist, only then a positive diagnosis can be made. Such are the standards of care set by the WPATH, but, of course, sometimes doctors ignore them and commit mistakes (they are human, after all…);
• gender dysphoria, while a real issue, can be controlled or moderated, much in the same way that hypersexual conditions can be controlled thanks to medication (usually hormone treatments) and therapy; or that it can be seen as a similar condition to, say, depression, which some claim not to be ‘curable’ but certainly the patient can learn how to cope with it. Now this is a common argument coming sometimes from well-intended people, but gender dysphoria is really quite different than other mental issues (or it would have been bundled with them). We can trace some mental conditions like depression, anxiety (and ultimately even hypersexuality) to the release of certain chemicals in the organism, or the absence of such chemicals. While such conditions may only respond partially to medication (which attempts to regulate the release/absorption of such chemicals), usually therapy is necessary for learning coping mechanisms. But the cause is normally known, and it’s often biochemical in nature. Whereas gender dysphoria belongs to a class of issues where the structure of the brain does not fall within the parameters of so-called ‘normality’, and, as a consequence, there is no way to change the structure to a ‘normal’ way (we simply don’t have the technology yet). Now I’m aware that some incredibly sophisticated forms of brain surgery can, today, ‘cure’ people from their propensity for criminality, for example; therefore, it’s not completely unreasonable to believe that, in the future, neurosurgeons might be able to tweak the neurons of the gender-recognition mechanism so that it gives different results from those that were recorded at birth. However, we don’t have the technology for that yet, and that’s why the standard ‘treatment’ of gender dysphoria is to change the body to better fit the gender, simply because we don’t know how to change the brain that way, but we’re quite good at doing all kinds of gender confirmation surgeries;
• gender dysphoria has levels, or degrees, and it’s conceivable that its severity can be reduced to a ‘tolerable’ level. This argument is essentially a variant of the above, just expressed differently. We know that, indeed, the degree of gender dysphoria can vary during one’s life. It’s not a coincidence why so many males, when reaching what used to be called the ‘middle-age crisis’, suddenly cannot bear to live any more in their assigned gender and seek transition: their dysphoria has reached unbearable levels, mostly triggered by many other factors (i.e. insatisfaction with one’s current situation in life, which prompts depression and anxiety, which just intensifies the symptoms of gender dysphoria, etc.). Now, it should be obvious that the gender-recognition mechanism is not static: as I’ve described its presumable functioning, it gives very fuzzy and unclear results at the age of identity formation, and gets better and better in a very short period of time. So it must change. Now the degree of change is another story! For instance, we have a very strong sensation of being a ‘human being’. But when we were very young we would not really think much about it; later in our lives (but not that late!) we can figure out that animals, for instance, even pets, can be very cute and do lots of things, but the quality of what humans do is different, and we identify with ‘being human’ more and more. So the species-recognition mechanism (and possibly so many more!) may work with a high degree of fuzziness before our identity fully forms, but become, by stages, more and more refined, more and more adept at identifying human beings from other species based on relatively little data (i.e. at a certain age, no child will ‘confuse’ animals with humans…). Nevertheless, we cannot ‘stop being human’ (although there are people that claim that, their condition is a bit different: they claim to belong to a different species but nevertheless do all that humans do, like talking, walking on two feet, cognitive reasoning beyond the ability of the animal they identify with, and so forth; so, in those cases, the species-recognition mechanism is intact – and the person does develop as a human! – but the conclusion of that mechanism is wrong). Likewise, the same happens with one’s gender-recognition mechanism. For cis people it will clearly always give the same result with the same degree or intensity of certainty, and the result will match the assigned gender. For most transexual people, the degree of certainty is exactly the same but it is the opposite of the gender assigned at birth; finally, among the vast transgender spectrum, the degree of certainty varies, and it can vary for different reasons, and at different times (so that gender-fluid people will get different results from hour to hour, for example). The problem is that we have no idea how to affect the level of certainty produced by the gender-recognition mechanism. In fact, we can go further, and claim with some accuracy that scientists have tried all possible approaches (many of which are illegal today!) to affect the gender-recognition mechanism, and all attempts failed; in other words, affecting that change lies beyond the ability of current medical science, so it’s worthless to try any known mechanism, because we have conclusively proven that none of them work (and we have been very creative in the past!);
• finally, and this is what this whole article is about: all human beings feel the results of the gender-recognition mechanism in the same way. It does not matter if one’s cis or trans: the gender-recognition mechanism is there, and it is a part of our brain functions like any other mechanism, and we experience it in the same way. The difference is that trans people may feel gender dysphoria, because the result of the gender-recognition mechanism is in contrast with the way that person is treated socially (and, on top of that, their body might have developed wrongly according to the gender they identify with). But not all trans people have gender dysphoria. Many, in fact, don’t – and they are nevertheless transgender. In other words, ‘suffering’ because of the results of one’s self-gender recognition mechanisms is not a prerequisite for being transgender!

But I digress. The point I wanted to debunk is the assertion that trans women, having a different experience in life than cisgender women, are not ‘real’ women, since there was a period in their lives when they didn’t have the ‘female experience’, as they were coerced to live as men until they managed to transition.

Now the flaw in this argument is in claiming that ‘all real women have the same experience’. They clearly have not. A woman born with CAIS will never have the same experience as a woman without CAIS, because her genes do not allow it; she is nevertheless a woman. A Catholic nun will never experience maternity, or possibly not even sex (nor even masturbation!), but she’s not a ‘lesser’ woman because of that – her experience of life, however, will be crucially different from most women in society.

But we don’t need to look at extreme cases! In fact, every human being has a different life experience. We may share some events in that life experience: the majority of us, for instance, will have experienced having sucked at one’s mother breasts, or gone through similar pains in learning how to walk, even if we don’t remember any of that; but there are human beings who did not go through the experience of ‘walking’ (due to genetic disease or accident), for instance – and they will not only be human beings, but, if they are cisgender females, they will be as ‘real women’ as TERFs – even though they lack a crucial element in their ‘life experience’.

Obviously, some TERFs will have had boyfriends and sex, others might have had either but not both, others still may be lesbian and never had a boyfriend. Some will have had their first period at a very early age, others just experienced it first in their late teens. Some will have caught measles when they were very young; others, having been vaccinated, never went through that experience. Some will have never worn dresses or high heels and thus never experienced the difference that such apparel makes; some will never have seen snow, while others have never experienced a heat wave. Some will have tattoos and piercing; some will never had a cigarette or went to a rave party on the beach. And of course I could go on, and on, and on, listing example after example – even if I restricted myself to examples of events in an ‘average’ life experience of a woman – and obviously we would clearly see that not all women have had the same experience as women. In fact, the more we appreciate the diversity of the human species, the less likely it is that two women have shared exactly the same life experience – even if they are twins!

TERFs therefore cannot claim that ‘life experience makes the woman’, because that is not true for any two women; the more ‘life events’ we list for the ‘average woman’, the more we realise that there might not even be a single woman on Earth that had all those experiences, even though they might have shared several of them. Similarly, it’s not a question of genetics, or of biology, or if having some organs or lacking others; cisgender women can also suffer from all sorts of medical conditions (or accidents!) and therefore will not have gone through the same experiences as others. Even ‘motherhood’ is just a choice these days, and it’s a choice that any ‘real’ woman is allowed to make, and that doesn’t turn her into a ‘lesser’ woman – while a trans woman is allowed to adopt a baby and get the whole motherhood experience (except for the tiny detail of actually delivering the baby).

So they cannot argue about behaviour, past or present; and we have already established that they cannot argue about the biology. In either case, the stricter the definition, the more likely it will be that many cisgender women are also excluded from the category of ‘real women’!

What do cis and trans women have in common? Well, both will share at least one event, and that event is the one that ‘makes’ them a woman: and that is the moment their gender-recognition mechanism will finally become fully functional, start to analyse themselves, and conclude that they belong to the ‘female’ gender. This experience will be exactly the same for cis and trans women and it will happen at about the same time.

What others will do about this self-recognition as ‘a woman’, however, is another story: in the case of cis women, they will be raised as girls and become adult women; in the case of trans women, that depends a lot on the parents, but it’s very likely that they will not be raised as girls. But that is not the trans woman’s choice. At 3 years of age, they do not have the physical means of forcing their parents to raise her as a girl; they can attempt to persuade them with reasoning, but it’s obvious that they will have a huge disadvantage in that regard!

Arguing, therefore, that a trans woman is a ‘lesser’ form of woman, one that is ‘not real’, when what actually happens is coercion against her own will is the same thing as arguing that girls who were submitted to genital mutilation are ‘not real woman’, because their parents have mutilated them against their will (in almost all cases…), preventing them to have the same kind of life experiences than other girls of the same age, but living in different societies. Why, then, do TERFs actively promote the end of genital mutilation and take pity on the poor girls deprived of the integrity of their bodies, when exactly the same happens with transgender girls?

Failing to see the exact parallels is being blind! One might, of course, argue religiously, which does not require logic; or even ideologically, which most often doesn’t require any logic, either. But if human beings wish to engage in a rational argument they must conclude that ‘being a woman’ is the result of the gender-recognition mechanism applied to oneself and nothing else, and that this experience is exactly the same for all women, cis or trans. All other experiences, as well as the biological setup, might be different after that self-recognition as a woman – but that will be true for any two women, regardless if they are cis or trans, since each will have a completely different life experience, even though they share similar life events. But that’s the case of transgender women, too! In fact, if the argument is just one of ‘similarity’, then trans women, in their early childhood, will very likely have put on their first ‘adult dress’ (or heels, or makeup) at about the same age as cisgender girls do; the difference, of course, is that in one case such behaviour is encouraged, while in the other it’s discouraged (often with violence, both verbal and physical). But, again, these are circumstances beyond the transgender person’s abilities to control!

I conclude, therefore, that we need to better define what makes a person ‘be’ a certain gender. The gender identity core conjecture, while more than sufficient for doctors, the community, and even legislators, is not enough for fundamentalists, transphobes, religious people, and, of course, TERFs. For them, this ‘core’ may even exist, but what makes one person think that they ‘belong’ to a gender is far from clear. The argument from biology can be easily debunked, even though too many people disbelieve science in order to give clear, universal arguments, that can be accepted by everyone. But the argument that deals with mental states is much harder to accept and easier to reject, because we effectively do not know how the brain really works. Nevertheless, we have some idea of how some features of the brain may work: it’s not ‘wild guessing’ any more. In particular, we can say, in many cases, how the brain does not work, or how it’s cannot work. And obviously we can also apply both deductive and inductive logic to figure out if some ‘theory’ holds or not. The gender identity core conjecture, on the other hand, is based on two main assumptions: that such a ‘core’ exists and that it cannot be changed (it is inborn). Clever transphobes, of course, will try to argue logically against either of those assumptions.

I most definitely believe that the argument of ‘life experience’, based or not on biological issues, does not hold as sufficient ‘proof’ to define who is a woman and who is not. While it’s obviously true that cis and trans women will have different life experiences, the same is also true for two different cis women. Even if the ‘life experience’ of two cis women share a lot of common events, the same can be said of the life experience of trans and cis women. It’s not even a question of narrowing down the list of valid experiences that ‘make a woman’: when such a list is drawn, then it will exclude millions of cis women from the classification of ‘real woman’.

Ultimately, therefore, there is not an ‘ultimate test’ to figure out who is a woman or not; we can only rely on the gender-recognition mechanism to figure that out, and such a mechanism is inherent and innate in every woman, cis or trans, and works in precisely the same way.

Please note that this article, for questions of simplicity in writing, only mentioned one type of transgenderity; the same arguments can be made for any other type, of course. It’s just that MtF transgender people have whole feminist organisations actively fighting against them, using their own convoluted ‘logic’, which, however, attracts many followers, even outside the TERF camp. Otherwise, the argumentation around the gender-recognition mechanism conjecture holds true for pretty much any gender (or no gender at all).