Modernity is in part characterised by the drastic break from a mimetic to a poetic approach to reality. Meaning is not so much discovered in the world as created by us. The language of politics reflects this shift at the most fundamental level. Progressives tend to do better out of it. According to the trans activist script, for example, gender is not a given essence found in nature, but a manmade construct ‘assigned’ at birth.
If such signs cause distress, who but a bigot could protest their being changed to satisfy human desires? After all, if they reflect no basic essences, signs are just corrigible reflections of the social structures and cultural categories that condition our naming of things. This has roots in medieval nominalism, but in the modern age it has helped to birth an ethos of expressive individualism—an understanding of man and his place in the cosmos which accords priority to the infinite potential, the adventurous feats of self-making, believed to set the human mind apart from its material encasing.
We likely have René Descartes to thank for this dualistic account of total reality. Its origins cannot be separated from the vigorous early strides of the modern scientific project in the 17th century. In-dwelling purposes gradually came to be removed from our picture of the natural world, leaving it to be examined as a mere system of mechanical processes. For those unwilling to embrace brute materialism, as Thomas Hobbes did, mental or spiritual substances had to be pushed into an altogether different realm. Mind-body dualism was Descartes’s attempt at a solution to the difficulty of having to explain mental contents in terms of the physical phenomena with which his new mathematical science, modelled on the precision of geometry, was concerned. Mind for Descartes was irreducible to nature. Instead, it should be understood as inhabiting nature, in Gilbert Ryle’s evocative image, like a “ghost in the machine.”
Quite apart from this ghostly appendage, the main event was the machinery itself. Descartes wrote to his friend Isaac Beeckman in 1619 about the monumental promise of reconceiving nature as a mechanistic inventory answerable to mathematical analysis. The result, he said, will be
a completely new science, which would provide a general solution to all possible equations involving any sort of quantity, whether continuous or discrete, according to its nature. … Almost nothing in geometry will remain to be discovered.
Modern science, then, is a testament to our power. At the same time, however, its metaphysical underpinnings and philosophical implications seem to imprison us in a clockwork universe, a cosmos governed by inflexible laws, an arena in which the human freedom equally emblematic of modernity struggles to find a home. Metaphysical dualism, by positing a spiritual realm independent of bodily processes, was Descartes’s bid to salvage man’s claim to autonomy. This guarantees his status as an agent who, far from having to relinquish his liberty, in fact stands to become the master and possessor of nature through the trailblazing success of the scientific enterprise.
Descartes thus carved reality into the res extensa and the res cogitans—the realm of body that yields to the methods of science and the realm of mind in which freedom reigns supreme. Trans ideology is parasitic on a crude version of this mind-body dualism. After all, the mission is to mutilate and transform embodied human persons who register anguish in their given bodies, thus liberating their ‘true’ selves from alienation. This makes transgenderism much more like a gnostic theology of salvation, a kind of earthly messianism, than a technical discipline indebted to the physical sciences.
In his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875), John Henry Newman described conscience, the natural law written onto the hearts of all men, as “the aboriginal vicar of Christ” in the soul. Trans ideology replaces this with something like an aboriginal self, a willing intellectual substance as unconstrained by physical nature as Newman’s aboriginal vicar, in its dealings with a contingent world, is free to pursue the good independently of the corrupting influences of culture.
Indeed, the res extensa—in this case, quite literally the realm of physical bodies—is precisely what must be sacrificed to the glorification of this all-important aboriginal self, said to dwell in the res cogitans. When trans activists say ‘trust the science,’ then, they really mean: ‘trust the technology that enables us to fulfil our eccentric metaphysical view of the human person.’ While it would cause them deep embarrassment to admit it, they have co-opted the lustre of science as a successful, quintessentially modern enterprise for second-rate theological purposes. To brand their view of gender unscientific might be good politics, but it does not cut at the root of their worldview. Science for them is a tool, not a master. Better to reign in the res cogitans than serve in the res extensa.
We are not so much part of the physical world as an immaterial perspective on it: thinking substances free to fashion nature after our own ends. Once this Cartesian picture is granted, expressive individualism becomes difficult to avoid.
In defence of Descartes, who presumably would not want to be blamed for strange chaps invading female spaces, he did argue that nature and man jointly depend on a benevolent, all-powerful God who would not mislead us. Only this can guarantee our fitting intellectual relationship to nature, even if mind and the matter it comprehends are distinct substances, and enable us to conduct a mathematical physics well-adjusted to its natural object.
Trans ideology ruptures this uncanny—Ryle and other critics would want to say unexplained—interaction between Descartes’s two realms. If anything, it smuggles Descartes’s evil demon back into the picture—except that this devil, unlike the hypothetical trickster of the Meditations (1641), does not deceive us with sensory impressions of a physical world that is not really there, but instead creates the physical world as a prison in which to detain otherwise fluid, disembodied selves. In effect, this malevolent creator simply forces certain persons to inhabit their own skins as strangers. What for Descartes was a happy marriage officiated by God becomes, on the account presupposed by trans metaphysics, a cruel and ungainly arranged one. The only solution to the injustice is divorce via metamorphosis.
Still, a free-floating fluidity is the logical consequence of expressive individualism. Homosexuality and lesbianism now seem not only old hat, but thoroughgoingly conservative, even reactionary. After all, both depend for their coherence on the ‘gender binary’ that we are duty-bound to ditch at all costs. As the philosopher Carl Trueman puts it, “if gender is a construct, so are all those categories based on it.” If identity is founded on nothing more than psychological conviction, as expressive individualism dictates, then boundless fluidity and a self-assured repudiation of all imprisoning essences must follow.
Crossdressers have existed for much of human history. Traditionally, it has been more of an escapist fantasy, at times even an erotic fetish, than a politically reinforced ontological claim about the nature and potential of the human person. But allied to a triumphant narrative of technological optimism, and helped along by the stunning accomplishments of science in the last four centuries, what once motivated a negligible minority to adopt a playful mask is now sold—including to vulnerable young minds—as the promise of engineering a salvific, gloriously embodied resurrection.
Following the release of the Cass review in Britain, this metaphysics now finds itself in very low water. My guess is that in twenty years’ time, trans ideology will be like the Iraq War: no one will admit they were ever in favour of it, particularly as the lawsuits pile up (there is already a growing community of detransitioners) and all the LGBT groups see it fit to move on to some other newfangled crusade.
For the moment, they are still fighting this one. Mermaids, a trans lobbying outfit, has expressed concern at the way in which “hateful” actors have weaponized the Cass report “to place what feel like ‘limits’ on gender expression, further pathologising and medicalising their [ostensibly trans children’s] identities.” Stonewall called into question the rigour of the methodology and by extension the quality of the evidence.
The modus operandi of these agitators should be obvious by now. The activists have gone from displaying a vicious, dogmatic triumphalism, leaning into their gnostic theology while hunting down its critics, to ‘well, let’s be mindful not get carried away here.’ It tells us everything we should need to know that scepticism kicks in as soon as we have some sober research before us, rather than just emotionally incontinent hunches.
The people who call for kindness are not wrong to do so, but they too often betray this virtue with their specific recommendations. Far from being compassionate, indulgence is simply neglect under another name.
