Freud can't explain transgenderism

Unfortunately, being trans is probably just a biological thing

Have been going through The Penguin Freud Reader, and I am blown away by this Freud fellow. As I posted on Notes, I feel like last week I posted This Nietzsche dude has it all figured out and now this week I’m posting This Freud guy has it all figured out! As many have noted, Freud is merely a continuation of Nietzsche. With God dead and all sources of value dissolved, the only way of continuing was to parse ourselves, our own innermost desires and drives. In other words, with human reason no longer able to provide guidance, we needed a new god: our own unconscious.

The idea of the unconscious has always struck me as a bit suspect. Thinking, as an activity, seems too tied to the conscious life. How could there be an unconscious that thinks, without us knowing its thoughts? But this was a bowdlerization of the idea of the unconscious. To Freud, the unconscious is merely the source of our thoughts, impressions, desires. In his telling, the unconscious (an idea that was deeply controversial even in his own day) is simply the part of our mind where psychic impressions are dispatched (as memories) and from which they return, when we actively remember something or when an impression occurs to us. Because it is quite true that a large part of our mental activity seems to be a conversation with something else—thoughts and memories and emotions are handed to us, even though we haven’t consciously called for them.

Freud believed there were rules to the operation of the unconscious, and that it was possible to unpick why we desired some things and not other things.

Of utmost importance to Freud was sexual development: all of our motive power was displaced libidinal energy. The sexual drive was the only truly constructive drive. The other drives, he called “the death drives”. His most interesting concept, I think, was the reality principle: the idea that our ego collects impressions from inside the mind (from the id) and from outside the mind (from reality) and attempts to impose reality upon the id whenever the id’s desires are too difficult. For Freud, this struggle to repress one’s desires was the main manifestation of the death drive.

I think Freud notes, rather astutely, that what he calls the death drive is very similar to Schopenhauer’s willing against life. Left to its own devices, the rational mind often develops a horror of life and a rejection of the self. Schopenhauer in the end concluded that the only true aim of life was to extinguish the will, to actively choose at all moments not to will, so to eventually bring the universe to a close.

Freudian interpretations of human motivations are rather out of fashion, because they’re so unfalsifiable, as Freud himself notes:

A very well-respected researcher…once made a comment about our analytical technique that was as hurtful as it was unjust. He said that when we present our interpretation to a patient we deal with him according to the infamous principle of heads I win, tails you lose [original in English]. That is to say that when he agrees with us, then we are in the right; but when he contradicts us, then that is just a sign of his resistance, so we are still in the right. In this way we are always right vis-à-vis the poor helpless person we are analysing, irrespective of his response to whatever ideas we impose on him…

Psychoanalysis is a delightful, fertile tool, but it is not and can never be scientific.

Yet it’s a mistake to abandon the study of the mind to science, precisely because science is so reductionist. When it comes to human biology, there is a remarkable tendency to build models of the ideal healthy human that are then used as a blunt instrument to bludgeon people who are outside the norm. Science carries no normative value: it doesn’t tell us how things should be, only how they are. But people believe they can turn science into their god, and that by melding science and language, they can say, for instance, “a woman is such-and-such, and you are not such-and-such, ergo you are not a woman.”

Freud offers a different path. I’m fascinated by the theory of development he expounds, where tiny actions and decisions in childhood have such outsized consequences on the psyche. It’s a neat way of undercutting the idea of human beings as self-actualizing, self-realizing autonomous units, without handing over that control to the state or to outside authorities. We are indeed self-realizing, but our project of realization was begun by our pre-rational, ignorant childhood selves, and then iterated endlessly upon itself, so our current self is the product of a thousand aims and decisions and miscommunications in our past.

Freud seems not entirely disapproving of homosexuality: he seems to regard it as a way of assimilating the fear of castration. The homosexual splits himself, imagining himself as already castrated, to dissipate the negative charge of the fear of castration, and acts as a receptive partner for another man (who represents the homosexual’s father). It’s not a very accurate explanation of where gay men come from, because, empirically speaking, the cause of homosexuality appears to be biological. The same is true of transgenderism. In both cases, identical twins are much more likely than fraternal twins to both be gay or both be transgender, which seems like pretty clear-cut evidence that biology is in the mix.

But being gayness and transness are rather large, over-arching conditions. I still think Freud is right to describe the function of, say, repression or the reality principle. In my own life, I think about all I’ve done and repressed. For instance, starting at puberty I began to be overweight, and was around a hundred pounds overweight through my teens and twenties. I also completely repressed all sexuality. And it’s tempting to think of being overweight as my way of protecting myself—I consciously would think, there’s no point even thinking about sex, because I’m so hideous. Once I began to be sexually active in my mid-twenties, I lost all the weight. It’s not that I hadn’t tried before, but I think that my weight was too tied to my libidinal energies—losing weight meant having to think about everything I’d repressed. But once I’d brought my sexual desires to the surface and consciously assimilated them, it was easier to lose weight. Of course weight too has a strong genetic component: lots of people in my family are overweight. But things can have meaning even if we didn’t choose them. I didn’t choose to be trans (certainly not on any conscious level), but womanhood and acceding to womanhood still had meaning for me, and when I transitioned I still needed to assimilate that meaning.

Especially in college, womanhood meant the good life: laughter, friendship, compassion, thoughtful conversation, and freedom from loneliness. I was very lonely, found it very difficult to socialize, and I thought women, quite frankly, had better, happier lives than men. I don’t think that pushed me towards transitioning, though. If anything, it pushed me away. I felt that I needed to fix every other problem in my life before I even considered transitioning. I needed to learn to socialize, needed to date men, needed to date women, needed to have a relationship, just endless delays. The Freudian framework was a huge red herring: it turns out that being lonely, antisocial, and sexless doesn’t make you want to transition; being trans makes you want to transition (and likely causes you to be lonely, antisocial and sexless). Who knew!

I’m not fond of a transmedicalist framework when it comes to models for gender-affirming care (ie the idea that only people who find life untenable in their birth gender ought to be allowed to transition). I have no interest in gate-keeping who is a real trans person and who isn’t. But I personally don’t even understand why a person would want to be trans or to transition unless they were deeply unhappy otherwise, because being trans isn’t, in my experience, particularly cool, impressive, or even transgressive. And I think a lot of people who dress up their transness in Freudian clothes are really fooling themselves. People might say “It was an act of liberation for me to consciously reject maleness and the patriarchy”. But really, deep down, they’re probably just unhappy as a man for the same biological reasons as I was. I don’t doubt that rejecting maleness had that psychological weight for them, and if that’s what got them past their initial resistance, that’s great, but I think absent the biological impulse that makes people trans, no amount of “rejecting maleness” with make a person transition. At the same time it seems wrong to demand that trans people be absolutely double dog certain that transitioning us the right course, because if you are trans, you’ll usually get enough relief from socially transitioning, and then from beginning hormones, that you’ll become certain of your course. To demand that certainty prior to providing medical care (when it comes so easily after care begins) is simply perverse.

I got into an argument at one point with a writer who said I was conflating medically transitioning with being trans. I guess that’s the case. In my experience there are a lot more ways to trans on the internet than there are ways in the actual real world. In the very real actual world, most trans women seem to medically and socially transition. I’ve met a few trans women who weren’t on hormones, but they were still clearly, visibly women. The tall, bearded, balding “woman” is more likely to just be a woman who’s afraid of being a really hideous and very visible trans woman than she is someone with a political or psychological commitment to maintaining some level of masculinity.

I tend to think most trans women and transfem folks know on a bone-deep level one thing: “I am not a man.” And in modern society a not-man is a woman. That’s literally what a woman is, both semantically (woman comes from the old english wif-man, a female man) and in our eye—if our eye doesn’t see any visibly masculine traits then we tend to gender a person as a woman. I personally consider myself a woman, but even if I didn't, there would be an overwhelming pressure to present as enough of a woman that I was able to use public toilets and slot into womanly spaces in the world.

When it comes to transmasc people and trans men, the variety and range of expression seems to be broader, but I’m not a part of that community and don’t have strong opinions.

Being transgendered is not an easy life. I’ve no idea why people are so worked up about it. If anything, Freud’s understanding (of gay people, which I assume he would apply to trans people too) was much more normal.¹ He seems pleased that gay men have managed to work through their repression in a relatively productive fashion. To be afraid of trans people seems utterly absurd, and, honestly, seems like evidence of some kind of sickness or repression on the part of the person with the obsession. We are really not interesting or special at all.

---

Personal Notes

On Wordpress I used to begin each post with some throat-clearing info about myself before getting to the meat, but on Substack I feel more pressure to provide value, so the personal notes go down here.

Substack has been great. I am impressed with the quality of discussion here, and I’ve been loving the community. It is funny that the most popular substacks have mission statements like “we focus on stories that are ignored or misconstrued in the service of an ideological narrative. For us, curiosity isn’t a liability. It’s a necessity” or “We seek to build a free society in which all individuals get to pursue a meaningful life irrespective of who they are” and then you look at the masthead and it’s three transphobes and a guy who thinks Black people are dumber than white people. Gotta love that freedom and lack of ideology!

---

Other Notes

John Pistelli wrote he’s not that worried about library and school bans of books. I used to be like him, I wrote a blog post about it ages ago. And more recently I wrote an article in LARB about how communities have a right to decide what to teach kids.

In some ways, it’s good that communities still feel their libraries and schools are under their own control. Libraries are too important for them to be seen as sites of indoctrination. If communities cannot control what books their libraries buy, they will close the library entirely.

At the same time, let’s be real, these parents aren’t banning the books so kids can’t get them. They know the kid can access information about being gay, if they want to. They’re doing it as a form of terrorism. They want the community to broadcast, “It’s not okay to be gay or trans.” It’s the same reason Scalia wanted sodomy laws to stay on the books. That’s what it’s about. And I think that’s cruel and wrong.

So I think communities have the right to engage in these book bans, but if they exercise that right then they’re being small-minded bullies, and the people they’re bullying are their own crypto-queer kids. You can be a liberal and believe in local democracy while still maintaining your god-given belief that a lot of people out there are doing a WRONG THING.

Unfortunately, this position of mine would be a lot more convincing if people on the left hadn’t tried to get so many folks fired for their jobs because they said or did things the left considered wrong. Like, you know that judge who gave the Stanford rapist a six-month sentence for rape? He got recalled as a judge, which is fair enough. But then he got a job as a girl’s tennis coach, and one of my facebook friends was an alum of the school that hired him, and she got together an online posse and got him fired from the tennis coach job! Like if you think a former judge who gave a rapist a light sentence once should not be allowed to coach high school girls’ tennis, then you’ve got to expect other people to be equally ridiculous in defending their own dumb positions. Whoops!²

(I told her at the time I was against the tennis coach vendetta, by the way, as did a mutual friend who is very into prison and police abolition and felt the six month sentence was fair for a first-time offender! So some on the left at least are pretty consistent).

1. From a letter Freud wrote to the mother of a gay son:

I gather from your letter that your son is a homosexual. I am most impressed by the fact that you do not mention this term yourself in your information about him. May I question you why you avoid it? Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them. (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime –and cruelty, too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis.

By asking me if I can help [your son], you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place. The answer is, in a general way we cannot promise to achieve it. In a certain number of cases we succeed in developing the blighted germs of heterosexual tendencies, which are present in every homosexual; in the majority of cases it is no more possible. It is a question of the quality and the age of the individual. The result of treatment cannot be predicted.

What analysis can do for your son runs in a different line. If he is unhappy, neurotic, torn by conflicts, inhibited in his social life, analysis may bring him harmony, peace of mind, full efficiency, whether he remains homosexual or gets changed.

2. One could reasonably say, “Doesn’t this alumna have a right to register her disapproval at this hiring?” She certainly does! But her disapproval was bad and wrong and silly, and she should not have held such an absurd opinion in the first place, nor should other people have agreed with her, and the school should have at least waited two weeks to see if the firestorm would die down (as it inevitably does). The inability of institutions to just wait two weeks before taking action is rather astonishing, considering their typical slowness on most matters.