What About Reality? Technology In The Age of Make Believe - Forbes

Surgeon Curtis Crane stands for a portrait at the California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Monday, Oct. 19, 2015. Crane says he’s one of only a few surgeons in the U.S. performing a high volume of phalloplasties -- a booming surgical niche fueled by an increasing number of transgender men seeking to complete their anatomical transition. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg *** Local Caption *** Curtis Crane

I grow increasingly worried about the vast departure from reality our collective societies are embracing and I am even more concerned by how technology is being offered up as the panacea to what are social and cultural problems. Take for instance the fact that girls in the United Kingdom are increasingly identifying as boys with a five-fold increase of referrals of females to the country’s only gender clinic for children. Even today, The Sun has questioned if changing gender today is the new anorexia with an increase in recent weeks of UK papers publishing stories on this very problem. Similarly, in the US over the past month since Lisa Littman’s study on rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) which evidences for the first time that gender dysphoria is now a social contagion, people are growing concerned that perhaps we are using medicine and technology for what are social problems.

Almost one year ago, the NHS published a document on the “Worrying rise in reports of self-harm among teenage girls in UK” and last month we learned that one-fifth of fourteen-year-olds in the UK self have self harmed. Not necessarily unrelated, we also learned that one in three girls in British secondary schools are sexually harassed and one quarter of these girls have been touched in a sexual nature with even female teachers now reporting sexual harassment.

While there is genuine concern for female children who identify as “transgender boys,” there has been virtually no connecting the dots between why these girls might reject their bodies and the social pressures for which most every female going through adolescence has, at one point or another, thought she would like to be the opposite sex. From the unwanted sexual harassment and attention girls receive (after puberty especially)  to the pathologies that ostensibly offer a self-identity as the cure to “gender identity” over, say, how the female child is unable to face the increasingly misogynist present, we are seeing gender being collapsed with the corporeal sex. Yet, gender is a fiction—it’s not real. Gender is a social discourse that tells boys that they have to be tough and not cry, that tells girls that they should be docile and pretty. Gender is what set women back, fundamentally, as for most of human history the lives and bodies of females have been supremely controlled by men. This is why gender is such a dangerous concept as it is essentially inseparable from stereotype.

So the question being asked today by many is this: why are we using technology to “cure” what are largely social and cultural problems? While gender dysphoria is a real clinical condition, in recent years we are witnessing an explosion of those who identify as transgender with every gender identity cocktail being positioned as “transgender” with a specific focus to medicalize children just before they go into puberty. This is also a deeply troubling proposition today as the growing consensus among specialists is that girls who are autistic are disproportionately trans-identified. And of equal worry is that conterminous to this boost to medicalize children is the push to de-medicalize adults who identify as transgender.

So technology and medicine have worked together to come up with this imperfect recipe for gender dysphoria for girls (e.g. double mastectomy, hormone blockers, and later synthetic testosterone). "Imperfect" because technology does nothing more than give a simulation of the opposite sex. In reality, sex cannot be changed and this reality often hits many of these individuals who wake up and realize that they were trying to change socially inscribed sexism by identifying out of their reality of having a female body in a world where female bodies are not valued. 

While technology can be useful to approach some of our social problems related to gender such as the various apps made to help women in India report when they are sexually assaulted or aggressed, technology is not actually changing anyone’s sex. It is merely simulating the opposite sex through various surgical procedures and hormones and while the changes are often welcome to the trans subject, the reality is that we are now heading towards a totalitarian path of viewing gender as intractable, of criminalizing people who critique gender, and most of all, of some groups maintaining that any critique of gender is necessarily bigoted. Yet, reality should matter today, right? And I think most would concede that children’s bodies should not be the petri dish for today’s political culture wars. Yet, here we are and children’s bodies are very much at the epicenter of what is a growing problem between those who propose identity as something that can be technological fixed (in the case of children) or inalienable and innate (in the case of adults).

Larger questions remain. If we are conscious of the terribly regressive problems at the heart of gender identity, why then are we using children’s lives to advance a theory of gender? Would it not be more effective if during their education both boys and girls received feminist education in order to learn about the dangers of gender, instead of enabling them to embrace a stereotype?

In the end, we can claim that everything is just a “construct,” but such a statement would be untrue. Reality matters. It is like the news that emerged this weekend about Queen Elizabeth II being given a mechanical hand to wave at the crowds when she is in a procession to keep from tiring herself. We can advance the notion that mechanics are on a spectrum, but it is an ontological fact that flesh is not wood. So why are we so eager to claim that technology can make men women or girls boys when it so clearly does not, while also avoid the larger socio-political discussions that need to take place regarding the harms of gender on children?

In recent weeks, we have started to see the media open up to opposing viewpoints in the gender discussion allowing for people to question publicly  the totalitarianism that has taken hold of this strain of identity politics.  One can only hope that this fragmentation of gender politics continues and that the voices which push historical materialist readings of the body will prevail.

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