A transsexual male weighs in from the influencer world

Thomas McBee, a transsexual (my blog, my language, McBee) male weighs in from the NYT opinion pages.

He has a number of words for the gender critical radical feminists, self-identifying as a former "queer feminist."

He also rejects the "born in the wrong body" phrase as dehumanizing. From what I've talked about the fraughtness of human reproductive fetal biology development, and how sexual identity fraughtness (male/female) parallels that of sexual relationship identity fraughtness (gay/straight), I'd say it's probably less than fully accurate as well as dehumanizing. I think that's part of his take, too.

That portion of his column I thought was pretty good. His own take, that it's "wrong," at least if people understand that in a moral sense, or, that's my understanding of his angle, is certainly correct. At the same time, when "we," or certainly when I, want some descriptive language, what do we use besides "fraughtness"? Because, it's not "normal." No, I'm not going to put that in scare quotes. It's not normal. But, at the same time, I'm not going to use a word that's the opposite of normal that could be seen as pejorative.

In terms of evolutionary biology, fetal development of an individual fetus that eliminates its reproductive ability as an adult is not normal. That's true above all for a physical limitation, but along the lines of my repeated discussion in the past about psychological constraints on "free will," which I do put in scare quotes because, in traditional terms, neither it nor "determinism" exist, it's also true for psychological constraints on reproduction as an adult.

He rejects claims that there's a "trans activist movement" to recruit people, though. That said, he ignores more and more states letting kids as young as 13 get on puberty blockers. He ignores more and more doctors ignoring the Mayo Clinic and not requiring counseling at the same time as these blockers are administered. And, he ignores activists pushing for other states to have similar rules and other activism.

I did Tweet him, and while I wasn't rude, and while I didn't use the word "transsexual," I DID use "sex-dysphoric" rather than "gender-dysphoric." Period. My Twitter, my language.