Sometimes I have thoughts that are neither worthy, nor capable of being turned into thousands upon thousands of words. This particular thought has been bothering me for a while.
In the theology of trans activism, we are effectively told that people were born in the wrong body, or that they were ‘men’ and ‘women’ their entire lives, internally, despite their opposite-sexed bodies, or actually, their presentation is ‘man’ or ‘woman’ and that’s way more important than the fact they’re pitching more tents than Beavis and Butthead, or whatever new religious origin story that’s been come up with that invalidates the old ones and makes them transphobic.
Okay, if we go with that, then lets just assume that’s the case, that these people have internally been men or women their whole lives. The vast majority of people are straight.
So, ergo, it must be that the majority (we’re talking 90%+) of these wrong-bodied individuals would also be ‘straight’ - that being ‘men’ or ‘women’ they would be heterosexual individuals. To any outside observer, however, these ‘wrong-bodied’ individuals would be homosexual.
Through transition they can be their real ‘man’ or ‘woman’ selves and be the straight men/women they should be and wait a minute that’s incredibly homophobic.
However, it also follows that only a small minority of these ‘wrong bodied’ individuals would be ‘gay or lesbian’, or to outwards appearances, heterosexual.
Instead, if we take a quick look at this Cambridge study describing referrals to England’s Tavistock gender identity clinic, we get a very different picture. Around 45% of boys are same-sex attracted, and around another 40% are bisexual. Nearly 70% of girls are same-sex attracted and a further 20% are bisexual.
This does contrast with other studies - this 2012 New Zealand survey (with a small sample size of under 150) of school students found that 41% of transgender students described themselves as ‘same-sex attracted’, while 54.6% of them described themselves as ‘opposite-sex attracted’. What these students meant by that is left as an exercise to the reader.
This sounds weirdly disproportionate. If, say, these people were really born in the wrong body, we would expect the vast majority of these people looking for transition to be outwardly presenting as gay or lesbian, homosexually inclined but believing they’re in the wrong body.
Sound confusing? Try typing all of that out, I’m getting a migraine.
However, looking at it this way neatly debunks the wrong body theory. Firstly, it would appear that following a ‘wrong body’ line of thinking means that homosexuals are heterosexuals in the wrong body - this is an old homophobic trope, dating back to when Radclyffe Hall was calling herself an ‘invert’, and it’s the basis of the transition-or-die regime oppressing homosexuals in Iran. Secondly, it means that we need to start looking for other explanations. Why would so many trans women, for example, call themselves lesbians? Autogynephilia, a sexual fetish for an internal female self, provides a neatly laid out explanation for this.
When you start thinking about these issues, the whole theology starts to fall apart.
Makes sense to me, but I'm not sure logic is gonna work with the activist class.
I am not woke, just attempting to be intellectually honest. I do agree a lot of this is convoluted and we're not able to examine it honestly without threats of being called whatever-phobic. However, you're assuming the rate of incidence of homosexuality (by identity) would be the same in trans-identifying folks as it is in the rest of the population, which isn't a safe assumption with all the other confounding psychosocialbiological factors at play.