Civil liberties that rest on science are fragile

The gay liberation movement that started in the 60s and the subsequent legal recognition of the rights of minority sexual orientations largely (but not entirely) hinged on the assertion that sexual orientation is not a choice, but innate.

Now, this seems to be true for most people, but it’s clear that this was chosen as the narrative not for reasons of science, but for reasons of rhetoric – if true, denying gay people their rights would be denying them any hope of ever finding love. That rhetoric worked pretty well on social conservatives.

But such a narrative is fragile. Had their opponents managed to prove that sexual orientation could be changed (for example, by inventing a new form of psychosurgery¹), the whole thing would come crashing down. And the true reasons for gay liberation have nothing to do with science, but liberty – it’s fundamentally not the purview of the state what consenting people get up to.

But that’s all ancient history now. Let’s talk about the fight for trans rights.

So, for a transgender person (like me, hi), the subjective experience of gender and/or desired physical sex characteristics differs from the sex assigned at birth. Typically this results a form of psychological distress called “gender dysphoria”.

Now, from a medical perspective you probably want to do something about gender dysphoria. First (as is standard practice), you could affirm the trans person’s sex/gender: This entails medical intervention and/or social transition to make factors external to the psyche congruent with the psyche. Alternatively, you could flip that on it’s head and attempt to convert the person, to modify the psyche itself to make it congruent with the external factors.

The rhetoric of many trans rights activists, in striking parallels with the gay liberation movement, advocates for gender-affirming care on grounds of science: the medical literature shows it to be by far the most effective at reducing dysphoria. This is true, but again, resting it on science is fragile, and the primary reason for gender-affirming care over conversion isn’t scientific at all, it’s philosophical.

Here’s a hypothetical that really gets to the crux of it. Say you had a magic button that, if pressed, would turn me, a trans woman, into a cis man by painlessly modifying my brain. What would I do?

Well, first I would spend no small amount of money hiring a bomb disposal team. Then, I would instruct the team to carefully dismantle the button. Then, I would throw each piece into a different ocean. Hopefully that would be enough to stop anyone ever pressing it against my will.

In other words, the reason that gender affirmation is the only valid route is not (just) because the science says so, but because (most) trans people don’t want to be turned cis, and any attempt to do so, no matter how well-intentioned or successful, would be psychological violence – worse even than physical violence; it would necessarily destroy the subject to build someone else.