I am transphobic

I am transphobic. That's a good thing.

Context

Important starting places for my transphobia that my argument here assumes you share:

• I have a foundation of love for all people. I want transgender people to be as happy as possible.
• I have a commitment to the truth. I think that while lying to ourselves might make us happier in the moment, in the long term truth is always the best way.
• I have an openness to being wrong about what is true. I take other opinions and perspectives seriously by default and assume good faith.

Things that aren't part of my argument but might influence me unintentionally:

• I find body modifications of all kind to be aesthetically displeasing, even piercings, died hair, and tatoos. The more extreme the body modification the more I dislike it. This is not a rationally supported belief, just something I notice about my aesthetic preferences/reactions. I think this aversion comes from a fundamental respect for the inherent beauty of natural things.
• I am a man with many feminine qualities, and I have experienced some discomfort and shame from people telling me that I am not masculine enough.
• I am a man, and I have experienced people telling me that I am bad for having that identity and not deserving of the same love or empathy as other identities.

My reasoning

There are many aspects of the recent changes in mainstream philosophy of gender which I disagree with, but in the context of the messiness of human culture I don't really care about most of it. When it comes to pronouns, man/woman labels, etc, it's really two frameworks, neither of which have any validity beyond what we give them by believing them, and if everyone else wants so very badly to change the definition of woman to include people who are born male and undergo some kind of social or medical transition, so be it. Well, I guess. I think there might be some negative consequences to this change, but in comparison to other things it doesn't seem to matter very much.

What really makes me afraid of the trangender belief systems and bring me to embrace the 'transphobic' label is the surgery and hormones bit. This is acknowledged by everyone to have negative consequences, with varying degrees of risk depending on the specifics. People who support surgery and hormones as treatment for trans people have a justification for these negative consequences, simply that as with any other medical intervention, 'gender affirming care' is performed with informed consent and a cost/benefit analysis which yields the conclusion that for the patient, things will turn out better in the long run if the medical intervention proceeds¹.

My objection is simply that the cost benefit analysis is usually not accurately calculated by anyone involved.

In order to make this assessment, the decision making group (which is usually the patient and the doctor) must understand fully the risks and negative consequences associated with the treatment. At this point, while many of the surgeries and hormone therapies are new and somewhat experimental (see the leaked WPATH documents for direct proof of just how much the leading professionals in the field don't understand). It's still possible to explain to a patient fully that there is a lot we don't know and have everyone fully understand the risk involved, and while to me it seems that in reality doctors do not acknowledge or communicate to patients the full extent of the risk, let's assume for the simplicity of the argument that they do².

So in the cost/benefit analysis, we are left with the trickiest part of the whole business: the benefit. In order to understand the benefit, we need to imagine what would happen if there were no medical intervention, and what good things the intervention would bring about. Since we cannot know the future, we have to look at people who have already had similar treatments and combine it with knowledge of the specific patient in order to make our best guess.

If the issue which is being presented is gender dysphoria, specifically a deep discomfort with ones own body such that one desires it to be medically altered, then presumably there is a cause of this discomfort. It's a difficult task to discover the cause, as human psychology is infamously difficult to understand, but there must be some reason or reasons why one person has gender dysphoria and others do not. The acknowledgement that such a reason exists does not stigmatize gender dysphoria; there are reasons why people differ in skin color, but those reasons do not lead to judgements about certain skin colors.

Currently, however, we have absolutely no understanding of what causes gender dysphoria. People have, with varying levels of outrage in response, suggested genetic factors, chemical environmental factors, cultural factors, and every other type of factor that is known or imagined to affect human psychology. But there is no serious scientific inquiry into the cause, let alone supported hypothesis or consensus.

This means that we don't know what the options are for helping people with gender dysphoria. In the case of an incongruity between mind and body, the resolution can come from a change in mind or a change in body. There are no reasons why a change in mind should not be an effective approach to help people with gender dysphoria.

If there is a way to resolve gender dysphoria without medical interventions, then the calculation of the benefit which medical interventions bring about is significantly different, as the pain which causes the desire for change is resolved either way.

It is my belief that treatments which attempt to resolve gender dysphoria so as to make the patient feel good about the body which they were born, should they exist, are likely to create a greater feeling of satisfaction in patients and have significantly less costs. The horrible thing is that there is no active effort to discover these treatments.

So my fear results from the fact that many people are suffering from gender dysphoria and are not being presented with the best possible care; instead, research into discovering the best possible care is being blocked. Many of the people who currently face gender dysphoria are young people, my friends and peers. Perhaps someday my own children will experience gender dysphoria. On all of their behalf, I am deeply sad and afraid that they will not be cared for as they should, and will face a great deal of suffering as a result.

So yeah. I'm transphobic.