Transgender

A couple of weeks back, Suzanne Moore published an article that brought her in to a twitter storm of abuse from some amongst the transgender community. She is notoriously left wing, a feminist and one of the few successful working class female journalists writing for British broadsheets today. Julie Birchill pitched in to her defence with an article published in last weeks observer. This resulted in the papers offices being picketed and the paper withdrawing the article, apologetically from their website. Today's guardian ran a piece by Deborah Orr, a journalist contemporary of theirs and left wing commentator whose writing is always of a high standard.
Orr puts forward the idea that it matters little what body they come in, feminism is for all women. Whilst I understand the need to put forward a united front and defend the rights for gender realignment there are questions this debate raises regarding mind and body. Firstly if we have rejected mind body dualism, which I believe we should, isn't it wrong to talk in the mind body separatist manner that still dogs discussion? And what is gender? Does it reside in the body or in the mind? And are we not investing to much importance in something that can only be answered from within?
It is a philosophical question to begin with. We live two lives. One can be seen by all around us. The second life is peculiar to the individual; only I am party to my internal life. Many people, I would go as far as to say that all people have delusions about what they are. These delusions are necessary to get on in the world. A common delusion for example could be one of grandeur. Some think they are members of a superior caste. Some think that as babies they were muddled up in a hospital mistake, that they are of royal blood but brought up mistakenly as a commoner. Some believe that they are the messiah, some that they have supernatural powers. Those born with gender dysphoria 'know' that they have been born in the wrong body. Many go through terrible life experiences. The law accepts the condition and is very determined that individuals seeking gender realignment undergo serious perpetration and psychiatry to ensure that they are not deluded. I would not wish to underplay the suffering many go through nor wish to deny them the right to have such treatment.
But if all we know in regards to the mind is true, how does this all stand up? It isn't the degree of conviction with which someone believes something that makes it true. The sad fate of many millions of people throughout history has been to die for belief in a delusion. In effect, in order to believe in the need for treatment we are saying that the mind is more real than the body. That that which does not exist in space, that which has no physical properties, that which only the subject is party to, is more real and should take prescedence over what the rest of the people see.
I remain unconvinced. Because only I am party to my world I know that no one else knows what it is like to be me. But looking at other men with the same biology and organs I can make the empathic leap to believe that they undergo similar pain and pleasure to me. This is the grounding of our morality. I also surmise that I can never know what it is like to menstruate each month, to feel the hormonal changes involved, to know what it is to carry life, to give birth. To claim to know would be an arrogance too far.
As I have stated, I believe in the freedom of the individual over their own body. I do not believe suicide should be illegal if the person is thoroughly screened. I believe I would like the choice when I am old to not die a long slow death just because no one else can see my world from within. These ought to be freedoms we all enjoy. I also believe that anyone believing that they are born in the wrong sexed body should have the right to, if they undergo thorough screening, to have sex change treatment. However, I also believe that gender dysphoria is a delusion. Among so many other delusions with which we live, it hardly matters. What is wrong is the language we use and the reasoning. There is no body mind duality. The mind does not operate in the way we think it does. We are not ghosts within our body machines. A man is self evidently a man, a woman a woman, we all can see, doctors can test with the scientific method. No matter what they might believe they are.