Being in a relationship with a “trans woman,” under the currently popular ideology, means telling an extraordinary number of lies. The most obvious of these is “you are a woman.” I’ll get to some of the others in a moment.
The transgender person thinks this particular lie is true and doesn’t know that his friends are telling him a story. The transgender person’s friends think this is a polite lie for the sake of kindness or a purely semantic concession and don’t know that the transgender person genuinely believes otherwise (such a level of delusion seems unlikely to many). The fact that neither side knows what the other is thinking is one of the hazards of choosing to lie.
I think a case can be made for never lying in any arena of lie. It’s a goal I work toward every day. Starting from a place of sound ethics and bravery can make it possible to tell the truth in a compassionate way. Sure, you can tell your friend that you like her ugly haircut and probably never suffer any consequences. Or you can say nothing, which is my recommendation in this situation. Or you can learn to say, if directly asked, something honest: “It’s awfully short, isn’t it? I have to say I preferred it when you wore it a little longer. But if you like it, that’s all that matters. That’s a popular style now. A lot of people like it!”
But let’s put aside the question of whether one can live without lying, ever, and focus on the question of lying to a transgender person.
Is it really kind?
A detransitioned female I’ve met, who sometimes writes under the name Maria Catt, says it isn’t. I’m paraphrasing her post (which seems to be available only at intervals), but she says there’s “no respect” in simply acquiescing to your friends’ demands instead of treating them like capable adults who can handle the truth.
The post was private for a while, but now it’s public again, so I can access her actual words. She calls such behavior a “condescending, ‘oh whatever you need honey,’ fake out” substitute for respect. Real respect, she says, would send the message that “you have value to the rest of the world beyond you being happy.”
Here are some of the lies we tell to transgender people. My examples are skewed toward male-to-females, as that’s where my experience lies.
Lie #1: You Pass
During the time I spent heavily involved in the transgender community I met hundreds of transgender people. Some used cosmetic enhancements or prosthetics only, some took hormones, some had undergone a few surgeries, and some had undergone every surgery you can think of. General (but very reliable) rule: these people do not pass. By and large it’s just not a thing. And importantly, when someone comes close to passing, the event is wholly unrelated to the interventions they’ve done. Skinny young dudes with good skin sometimes come close with no interventions whatsoever. People who’ve had every surgery known to man sometimes still look like guys in drag.
But we tell transgender people they pass and we further we imply it via “gendering” and insincere compliments about their beauty.
Lie #2: You Can Pass
As mentioned above, interventions generally do not increase the chance of passing. So why does society perpetuate the myth that they do?
Suppose there was a line representing appearance as indicated below. “Masculine” looking people are at the left end, at the value 1. “Feminine” looking people are at the right end, at 200. As it turns out, looking masculine versus looking feminine correlate quite well to sex. Numbers 1 to 100 are men and the average man sits at 50. Numbers 100 to 200 are women, and the average woman sits at 150.
Transgender males who take hormones see themselves move from 50 to 52 . It’s an actual change. There are A-cup boobs there when there weren’t before. There’s a softening of the skin. And because transgender people, like people with other forms of body dysmorphic disorder, spend a lot of time evaluating themselves in the mirror, this difference is heightened to them. They think it’s a 130. But the rest of us see a 52. To the rest of us, a 52 comes nowhere near approaching the most masculine female we know. Strangers who aren’t attuned to the political culture are unlikely to even notice in some cases.
Transgender people think their interventions are working. Everyone else knows better. Neither side knows what the other is thinking.
Consider the hazards of perpetuating the myth “you can pass.” Not only does it encourage the transgender person down the path of hormones and surgery, and the attendant health problems with that, but it does so for literally no objective benefit. That’s just sad.
Cognitive dissonance is a fickle thing and it sometimes wanes (I’ve seen it happen). It’s a hard wake-up call when that waning accompanies a realization that one’s finances, relationships and health have been compromised in the service of a lie.
Lie #3: Sex Isn’t Real
Because of that aforementioned mirror-gazing, transgender people are legitimately under the impression that bolt-on tits and eyeliner create a reasonable facsimile of a woman.
Recently I vacationed on the coast. About a mile away from me a beach security vehicle stopped and the driver opened the door. I expected the driver to be male because, you know, unconscious bias. But the driver was female. She wasn’t especially curvy and I couldn’t see her tits or her eyeliner (if any) from that distance. In fact, she was in a shapeless uniform and had short hair. But it was clear she was female. She started a slow walk toward me and eventually crossed my path, where I could confirm, though it wasn’t necessary, that she was in fact a woman.
People can tell females from males, even at great distances. It’s more than tits and eyeliner. It’s the tilt of a pelvis, the shape of a back, the curve of an ankle, the length of a forearm. Even a female’s cough sounds different from a male’s. There aren’t enough interventions to override this incredibly pervasive cellular information.
People (including children) know what sex other people are because it’s an innate and necessary skill. It matters when evaluating threat, choosing allies, maintaining family relationships, and evaluating sexual partners.
That brings us to the next lie.
Lie #4 Straight Men and Lesbians Want to Date You
My ex once posted that straight men were “too cowardly” to date him. I don’t engage with him but I wanted to scream, for his benefit more than anyone else’s, the much simpler explanation: Straight men like pussy!
There’s a huge amount of propaganda out there about the dating prospects of trans people, especially post-op. The LGBT world promotes the lie that lesbians are attracted not to female bodies or female people, but to invisible female-identification occurring in the other person’s brain and/or to female-impersonating bodily modifications. It doesn’t work that way. Lesbians are attracted to females, not to disembodied tits. Otherwise they could glue a bra to a robot and never leave the house.
The medical community perpetuates another set of myths: that hormones won’t interfere with erections and surgery won’t interfere with orgasm. Finally, the mainstream news is full of stories about trans people with supportive partners or vibrant dating lives. The rare reportage of breakups and divorces places the blame on the partner’s failure to adapt.
Everyone ignores the elephant in the room: people who prefer men prefer unaltered men, and people who prefer women are not satisfied by facsimiles of women.
In an illumination of the two-facedness of this lie, everyone pretends it’s someone else’s job to step up and date trans people. I wish I had a nickel for every person who criticized the way I was managing my relationship, despite telling me they would have bailed after the first confession.
Meanwhile, trans people themselves are all over social media posting, “So weird and utterly inexplicable, but I can’t find anyone to date!”
People care about the sex organs of their partner. They care what they are, whether they work, and whether they can be named and enjoyed without a meltdown on the part of their owner. People care very much. People want to enjoy sex, not ineffectually stroke non-functioning and/or simulated organs.
This may sound mean. But it’s even meaner to wait until transgender people have undergone these interventions before letting the harsh truth sink in.
Pretending that hormones, surgery and a rejection of one’s own sex has no effect on dating prospects is nothing short of cruel.
I Think of You As a Woman
No, you don’t.
You’re not trying to fix him up with your dad. You’re not asking him for advice on natural childbirth techniques. You’re not inviting him to ladies night at the wine bar.
And he has noticed. But he’s choosing to cling to the pleasant lies you tell instead of the unpleasant reality you represent.
Lying isn’t a good thing. I couldn’t keep doing it. I couldn’t keep doing it for the sake of my own soul and I couldn’t keep doing it for the sake of his.
Lying to yourself is even more pernicious than lying to others, because it makes you ill-equipped to handle life. I couldn’t enable that any longer. Enabling a person’s self-deception is harmful to their survival.
This is intuitive–we don’t tell anorexics they need lipo or Michael Jackson he needs another nose job. But it’s more than philosophical. It was my experience in direct practice, as well. The more my ex pursued the comfort of lies, the sicker he became, the more he hated himself, and the more depressed he became–until he was contemplating suicide.
There’s no easy answer. But being honest and ethical has to be a start.
Hi Trans widow,
just a note to let you know how much I have appreciated reading your blog.
I,ve only recently become acquainted with this fraught and violent field. (Odd, given that I’ve been a psychotherapist for getting on thirty years!)
I reckon there is an enormous benefit in listening to “lived experience”; yours has clearly been enormously painful – but somehow you seem to have come out of it as a reflective and decent person.
When “the book” is done, would you send me a link?
All best wishes
Alstokeld@mac.com
Many thanks
Alasdair Stokeld
The fact that young skinny dudes can pass with almost no interventions is an argument for early transition. You say in another post that you oppose children transitioning, but that makes lie #1 and #2 into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Early transition would lower the social cost for everyone: the transperson, those around them who have to deal with them not passing, their life-long friends and partners. Sorry to make it personal, but your ex-husband would not have caused you all this pain if he had been diagnosed as potentially trans at 12 and after rigorous psychological evaluation transitioned at 15.
Nothing makes a lie a self-fulfilling prophesy. First of all, we don’t have to lie. About anything! Regardless of policies around transition. Imagine that–just not lying!
Secondly, I never said that young skinny dudes pass. I said they “come closest.” Lie #2 is a lie, after all. So there’s no “lowered social cost” of making bad replicas of women out of young skinny dudes instead of out of old chubby dudes. We still have bad replicas of women who can’t hide from the fact that they’re bad replicas and invariably end up being depressed about it (trust me, I was there). This is why there’s so much begging and peer pressure around pronouns. Trans people need validation from pronouns. They’re not getting it from the mirror. It’s a house of cards they know, themselves, could blow over at any moment, so please, please, say the right words to them so they don’t have to face that.
Note, too, that young guys get old, and skinny guys get fat–even if castrated young. Perhaps you’ve heard of these guys?
The idea that transitioning children will make them “prettier,” even if that were the case, is not a good argument for impairing their health, fertility, ability to orgasm, and happiness (suicide rates remain stable after transition). Pretty is the least important value in that list. Get this–it isn’t an important value at all!
My ex-husband would not have been diagnosed at 12, because he wasn’t trans at 12. He wasn’t even trans months prior, by his own spontaneous, enthusiastic and completely uncompelled admission. I’m sure you’ve bought into the myth that everyone who says words about their “gender” speaks the eternal and immutable truth, and there isn’t really room here to explain why that isn’t so. There’s a lot more about this particular case in my book–give it a read when it comes out.
As for “rigorous psychological evaluation,” I’m all for it, at any age. It isn’t currently a part of transgender medicine.
If anyone has any doubt about the wrongness of indulging such delusions, look no farther than another common body dysmorphic delusion, Anorexia – and ask yourself the following questions:
1) if an Anorexic person said to you “I look fat, don’t I?” Would it be kind to agree
2) if an anorexic person wants really badly to be called “fatty” would you indulge them?
3) if an anorexic person, especially teen, demanded bariatric surgery would it be medically ethical to have it performed?
4) if an anorexic person demanded that their drivers license displays a much higher weight than the scales do, should that be done?
While I agree with some of your points (mainly that it’s tough for many trans women to pass, assuming they don’t begin hormones until adulthood that is), it’s not impossible. And passing is in and of itself the key to whether or not other people essentially feel they are “lying” to that person. But passing trans people do exist, which you don’t seem to acknowledge.
But considering you do place such an onus on one’s ability (or as you perceive, their inability) to pass, it seems odd that in your response to another commenter about the significance of hormones for trans youth, you switched the notion of passing to just wanting to be “pretty” as if it’s some petty beauty contest. But again considering you think you’re lying if you acknowledge a gender identity opposite of your natural percepetion of someone looking male or female, then you’d also understand why a person having the option of being able to pass (particularly by starting hormones earlier) is more than just wanting to be pretty.
Your comment is a little word salady, but I’ll do my best.
For me, lying is lying, and I’m not interested in doing it. The idea that a particular perception would help ease my comfort with lying is frankly bizarre.
I don’t place any “onus” on trans people to pass. If it were up to me, I’d recommend they give it up. Trans people are who wants trans people to pass. I’ve heard a similar idea that other people are forcing trans people to transition by doing whatever whatever blah blah blah. No. Trans people and doctors invented transition and trans people and doctors are who are interested in its continuation. People are responsible for themselves, and nobody has to do anything, even if *gasp* others don’t respond to them the way they want. In this and all other endeavors, I recommend learning strategies for coping with others rather than trying to change others. Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.
If “pretty” weren’t the standard for MtFs, they’d be happy to look like MtFs–and it would be easier and cheaper for them, too. They could skip any and all costly procedures. But that’s not what they do, is it? Again, trans people’s desire to look a certain way is not to be laid at the feet of people who won’t lie.
I’ve met hundreds of trans people. None have passed. This is not a thing, no matter how often people repeat that it is. Is there somebody, somewhere, who is skinny and under 25, who passes when completely made up and under certain lighting conditions? Probably, but it’s rare enough to be unworthy of mentioning. The more it’s mentioned, the more young people with dysphoria cling to the falsehood that they’ll somehow end up in that tiny percentage if they trade away their health, their orgasms and their thousands of dollars. Talk of passing as if it is an option is quite simply harmful propaganda.