I recently had a conversation about the issue of “Trans”. I was trying to explain how important it is to understand the developmental process of the child and adolescent; particularly the change from child sexuality to adult sexuality, which takes place gradually and often accompanied by emotional pain. For example, that most of us during adolescence feel that our bodies are attacking us. In other words, “body dysmorphia” is a normal process of adolescence not an illness. My point about the difference between child sexuality and adult sexuality, triggered by the sudden arrival of hormones as well as the change in the arrangements of our brains, was that it means that it is impossible for anybody, prior to discovering their adult sexuality at the end of adolescence, to “know” in any realistic way about their ultimate sexuality. To my surprise, my interlocutor replied with some force that he was not interested in discussing adolescence. It took me a while to understand how he could possibly take that position, given that all kinds of ideas about adult sexual identity could only be the result of working through the adolescent process. Eventually it dawned on me that my earliest blog about gender identity, “religion versus science, the relevance to the gender politics confrontation”, anticipated exactly this issue. It was only then that I understood that his view was that we all have souls and it is therefore possible that a soul with a masculine identity might, accidentally, find himself in a female foetus. That would account for a total acceptance of the comment, “I was born in the wrong body”.
From the age of 11 and through until my mid-thirties I made a very deep study of all religions and beliefs. I was desperate for evidence that there is life after death. Eventually I was forced to accept that there was no such evidence and that death for every one of us is the end of our existence. Of course, this in itself tends to stimulate further questions, but my attitude to that is that the very thing that allows us to create a conscious, cognitive, thinking mind, the curiosity drive, because it takes the form of a requirement for us continually to explain to ourselves what is happening, sets up an expectation that there is always a meaning. It takes an effort of will to recognise that there is not always a meaning. Particularly that there is no meaning to life; specifically, mine or any other individual’s.
I was drawn to the disappointing conclusion that there is no eternal life by two contrasting features that I found in my study of religions. One was the repeating pattern connected to mystical endeavours that begins with shamanism, in which part of the process involves some kind of extreme emotional/psychological experience leading to the individual discovering a link, often to an animal, that provides a different perspective on the world. The other was complete disagreement about the mechanism by which the eternal soul enters the body of the foetus. I intend to write about the former phenomenon in a subsequent blog or paper, for the moment I want to point out that the absence of agreement about the way that the soul comes to inhabit the human being seems to me to be a rather clear indicator that this is unlikely to be an actual process. I won’t bore the reader with a list of all the different timings suggested (often within the same religion) because it is easy to get this from the Internet. Instead, my point is only that, because of my own conclusion about these things, it had not occurred to me that the person I was talking to could possibly take seriously the idea that the human essence was separate to the biological human being. And then I remembered my earliest blog about gender politics and the link to religion; I realised, with a sense of both discomfort and despair, that this put me into the same role taken by people like Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens vis-à-vis organised religions. I don’t want to be somebody who peddles my own conclusions as if they are absolute truths because that makes me into another version of a religious bigot, I think it is enough to recognise that the trans lobby’s position depends upon an idea of a soul inhabiting the human body. For me this makes it clear to whom I must address myself; it is not the trans lobby, it is everybody else who might not understand that you can only say, “I am in the wrong body” if you believe that one’s central identity is determined prior to birth and therefore independently of the biology that I think of as being the ordinary truth about our existence.
Just as an afterthought, it is somewhat amusing to recognise that Stephen Fry who is so anti-religion is an active supporter of the trans lobby.