liliane.io

Thoughts on Software Licenses

2024-10-25T20:10:13+00:00

I’ve been thinking about software licensing (again). I propose that we can fruitfully view the diversity of free licenses as trying to negotiate the complex relationship between the public domain (shared culture) and the private domain (profit-driven intellectual property under capitalism). Let me explain what that looks like and offer some remarks on how successful existing licenses have been at solving the problems that arise.

Traditionally, newly created works exist entirely in the private domain, meaning that only the author has the right to use, distribute, or commercially exploit them. Many creators want their works to exist in the public domain. You can do this (in many jurisdictions) with a public domain declaration, or a “license” that does the same like the Unlicense.

Permissive (or “lax”) licenses try to do something similar, while retaining the author’s copyright over the work. People who choose permissive licenses often want to provide their users with unlimited freedom to use the work as they see fit — but lax licenses already impose some restrictions on what you can do with the software.

Take the BSD 3-Clause license. Any redistribution of the software has to be accompanied by a copy of the license. You don’t have to do that with works in the public domain!

The Apache 2.0 license, despite being “permissive”, contains additional limitations on what you can do as a licensee of the software. In particular, if you file a lawsuit and claim that some part of the software uses your patented technology, your right to use the software automatically terminates. This provision is clearly punitive, and it limits who is allowed to use the software.

I highlight this because traditional breakdowns of software licenses like that promoted by the Free Software Foundation have attempted to enshrine certain user freedoms as “essential” and others as “inessential”. For example, it’s supposed to be essential to have access to the source code and permission to modify it. It’s not considered essential to receive these rights for free (gratis). So while your right to use and modify the software is guaranteed, you might in practice only be able to exercise that right if you are wealthy and can afford to pay for the software. If you suspect that this way of thinking about freedom is closely tied to a classical liberal conception of natural rights, you would be correct.

The most essential freedom, on this conception, is the freedom to run the software. This is widely understood to bar prohibitions on who is allowed to use the software. For example, your license can’t prohibit felons from using the software, nor can it prohibit its use by police and military. I would argue that the anti-patent provisions of the Apache 2.0 license do constitute a restriction on who may use the software. Now, one can certainly argue that this restriction is justified; after all, the would-be licensee is attempting to limit the rights of other people to use the program, but a justified restriction is still a restriction!

Consider Signal as an example. Suppose that Signal’s software license prohibited users of the software from promoting, enacting, or enforcing legislation that disallows any member of the public from using uninterceptable encrypted communications. In this case the limitation on who can use the software would be precisely keyed to ensuring that all users of the software have their right to use the software protected. Yet I think the Free Software Foundation, as well as many advocates of free software, would call this an unacceptable abridgment of an “essential freedom”. Similarly, I think the authors of the Anti-Capitalist Software License would argue that police impinge on the rights of others — including their rights to use the software.

This is ultimately why I think a new lens on software licenses is needed. Traditional views have relied on an unprincipled division of user freedoms into essential and inessential categories, and require subjective judgments to be made about when abridgments of these freedoms can be instrumentally justified, all while these decisions are usually framed as logical consequences of certain core principles. These principles exist within an ideological context that makes their judgments appear to pick out natural categories of “rights”, even though any such determination is ultimately subjective.

Let us consider, then, the relationship that software placed under the Apache 2.0 license (versus the Unlicense) has to both public and private domains.

As I have said, the natural state of software under a liberal system of private property is for all rights to be reserved to the author. The public domain exists for the private as a sphere of natural resources it may exploit. For example, the Winnie-the-Pooh book entered the public domain in 2022, and as a result you can now make a feature film containing the character without the permission of the author or his heirs.

Notice that in 2022, new Winnie-the-Pooh content did not start automatically becoming free culture. New works containing the character are once again the exclusive property of an individual or profit-seeking entity, until the term of copyright ends. This typifies the relationship of public and private; the private can use the public however it likes, while the public has no rights whatsoever over the private.

People who choose to license their software with permissive terms under the BSD 3-Clause or MIT / Expat licenses may have no objection to the status quo, or they may on the other hand have principled objections to using copyright provisions as a means to undermining the copyright system.

The Apache 2.0 license’s additional provisions are more complicated, as I’ve said. It recognizes a concrete practical problem for authors of free software: resources flow from the public domain to the private, but what flows in the other direction is not nothing, but threats of, and actual, litigation.¹ The punitive termination of the license when a patent lawsuit is filed disincentivizes behavior by private actors that tends to imperil the creators of free cultural works.

So we might view the Apache 2.0 license as partially stemming the flow of harm from the private domain to the public. Another way this can happen, common even to “non-licenses” like the Unlicense, is by providing a disclaimer of warranty. In some jurisdictions, if you distribute software for others to use, and say that the software can do X, Y, and Z, you have thereby given an implied warranty for the software to do X, Y, and Z, opening yourself up to lawsuits if the software doesn’t function as intended or has some unexpected harmful side effect. For this reason, virtually every free software license or public domain declaration explicitly disclaims the provision of a warranty. The GPL 3.0 reads, for instance:

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

For software to have the value it does as a free cultural work, its creator needs to avoid being liable for its performance, unless of course they opt to be.

The primary distinction between permissive and copyleft licenses, on this view, is in how they treat the other direction: the flow of resources from the public sphere to the private. Permissive licenses accept the existing status of the public domain in capitalist modes of production (even though some people who use the license oppose it). A copyleft license is one that attempts to limit - to varying extents - the unidirectional appropriation of public assets, while retaining - as far as possible - the freedoms associated with work in the public domain.

The first important shift involved in this reconceptualization is that it sees permissive and copyleft licenses as different approaches to the same problem, rather than opposed philosophies on what users ought to be allowed to do. Permissive licenses, like copyleft licenses, are responses to the difficulties of creating work on behalf of the public under conditions of (intellectual) private property. Some of these licenses only disclaim liability that otherwise would fall to their creators. Others, like the Apache 2.0 license, attempt to limit the damage that intellectual property regimes can do.

From this perspective, the feature that unites copyleft licenses is that they attempt to use the legal rights granted to authors under the copyright system to enforce reciprocity after the work is given to the public. The world of private enterprise can make use of the work as before, but modified versions of copyleft work must be placed under the same license, ensuring that it remains “free”. In this way, it tackles an issue with the relationship between public and private that permissive licenses do not: the unidirectional flow of resources from public to private becomes, ideally, bidirectional.

One major difference between copyleft licenses is the question of virality. The Mozilla Public License 2.0 is a non-viral copyleft license; any changes you make to a work covered by the license must also be licensed by you to others under the same terms, but other derived (or “combined”) works do not have to be released under those terms. As I read the license, you could take the browser engine from Firefox and embed it in your e-reader software. You could then sell the e-reader software as a closed source product, and only changes you made to the browser engine would need to be released under the MPL 2.0.

The famously viral GNU General Public License (GPL) would not allow this, because the terms of the license must be applied to any derived work. The approaches differ in terms of what forms of non-reciprocity they intend to prohibit. The MPL 2.0 protects the work itself from non-reciprocal licensing, while the GPL is much more aggressive in that it attempts to keep anything it touches available as free culture.

The GPL license² is not automatically better just because it defends the public domain in a more assertive fashion. The extreme form of such a license would be a non-commercial copyleft license, but most people think this is a bad idea. Even if you believe that any commercial exploitation of software is a bad thing (maybe because you’re a communist, but you could also just have a strong aversion to intellectual property), a non-commercial license is not necessarily the best way to achieve your goals. For one thing, your license’s overenthusiastic effort to protect free culture would eliminate many of the important freedoms we associate with it. If you have written a word processor, for example, prohibiting commercial use of the software would hinder others in their efforts to thrive by earning a living.

Even prohibiting sale (as opposed to use) of the software would likely do more harm than good. This would prevent people selling hardware from including your software on the device, even if they derive no direct benefit from using your software as opposed to some other software; as there is no plausible way to make hardware free in the near future, this could detrimentally impact the value your software has to users. In general, as Christine Lemmer-Webber points out, the point of a free software license should be to solve problems with the licensing of software, not to solve every other problem in the world.

In my view, questions like “should a free software license require derived works to use reciprocal licensing?” cannot be answered with a suite of ideological principles, but instead must be considered in the pragmatic light of balancing the freedom provided to users with the need for enforcing reciprocity.

How effective have copyleft licenses been at creating a protected domain of works available for use and modification by the public? Here it’s important to point out that you can’t measure the effectiveness of a license purely by the success of the projects using that license. There are countless open source projects using permissive licenses that aren’t being heavily exploited in a unilateral way by industry, and have a diverse set of active contributors, but this doesn’t mean that the problems that copyleft licenses solve aren’t real. Likewise, the success of projects using the GPL doesn’t show that there are not software licensing problems that the GPL doesn’t solve.

Take the “System as a Service” (SaaS) problem. You can take a GPLv3 licensed project, make substantial changes to it like adding a new feature, but then gate access to the project behind a web based service that you offer on a subscription basis. The terms of the GPLv3 say that you are not obligated to share your modified copy of the software with anyone, even the paying users.

Or consider Tivoization. DVR company TiVo distributed software derived from copyleft works along with their hardware devices; they provided users with the corresponding source to this software as required by the license, but the devices themselves had hardware restrictions applied to them which prevented users from actually running modified software, meaning their right to modification under version 2 of the GPL was obstructed by the hardware.

In both cases, the FSF promoted new licenses intended to fix the problems. Version 3 of the GPL prohibits Tivoization in most cases. The “Affero” GPL requires anyone running the software over a network to provide a copy of the source code to any client using the software.³

There are other problems, however, that no FSF-approved license has solved. Take the issue I give the unwieldy name Red-Hat-ification. This is when you sell copies of copyleft software, and provide the source under the required license to purchasers, but threaten reprisals to any customer who exercises their rights under the license, such as sharing the source with others. In theory these threats could be of any nature; Red Hat’s usual approach is to predicate the continuation of the customer’s contract on their non-assertion of their rights. This is an effective threat because most businesses rely on ongoing support and updates for the programs they use.

In an extremely thorough and insightful analysis of the issue at the Software Freedom Conservancy blog, Bradley Kuhn writes this:

Red Hat’s lawyers clearly take the position that this business model complies with the GPL (though we aren’t so sure), on grounds that that nothing in the GPL agreements requires an entity keep a business relationship with any other entity. They have further argued that such business relationships can be terminated based on any behaviors — including exercising rights guaranteed by the GPL agreements. Whether that analysis is correct is a matter of intense debate, and likely only a court case that disputed this particular issue would yield a definitive answer on whether that disagreeable behavior is permitted (or not) under the GPL agreements. Debates continue, even today, in copyleft expert circles, whether this model itself violates GPL. There is, however, no doubt that this provision is not in the spirit of the GPL agreements. The RHEL business model is unfriendly, captious, capricious, and cringe-worthy.

Furthermore, this RHEL business model remains, to our knowledge, rather unique in the software industry. IBM’s Red Hat definitely deserves credit for so carefully constructing their business model such that it has spent most of the last two decades in murky territory of “probably not violating the GPL”.

So Kuhn’s view is that Red Hat may be within the letter of the law, but they’re not in the spirit. My reaction is “aren’t they?” It’s a very libertarian position. The GPL provides the right to sell modified copies of the program to whomever you like. It also deliberately and specifically refrains from requiring you to give copies of the source code to anyone you did not distribute the software to. Doesn’t that sound intentionally set up to give you broad discretion on who you provide with the source code? What’s the problem with only selling your changes to users who have adhered by your previous requests to not share copies with people who haven’t paid?

However, I do feel what Kuhn feels here. He calls Red Hat’s behavior “cringe-worthy”, and I agree that something seems amiss. Thinking about this issue was another cause of my reconsideration of the “four freedoms” approach. On that view it’s not just hard to understand Red-Hat-ification, it even seems like it would be wrong to prohibit it!

I think that if you’ve digested my analysis of the public-private dichotomy to this point, you will already anticipate how this approach will make sense of the problem. On this view, the primary motivation of a developer for choosing a copyleft license over a permissive one is the protection it provides against their work being sucked into, and becoming stuck in, the private domain, by resisting the unidirectional flow of assets from public to private. Yet this is exactly what has happened when Red Hat uses contract law to prohibit the sharing of derived works.

Red-Hat-ification feels bad because it’s a company complying by the terms of a license in a way that avoids doing what most of us using the license want it to do. We want a vibrant domain of public works unconstrained by intellectual property law, and we choose copyleft licenses because those seem like the licenses most likely to ensure this happens. That’s the culture of free software development. When everyone involved wants to use, promote, and collaboratively build free software, we understandably tend to view legal documents like the GPL as incorporating those cultural norms. So when a company like Red Hat abides by the GPL while violating the norms, we feel that their actions are not in the spirit of the GPL.

So that’s the problem with the GPL, as I see it. It was constructed on the basis of a flawed philosophical model, and as a result it often fails to do what we want it to do. I think that if we start in the right place, then coming up with license provisions that make sense and protect free culture in the way we want is possible, even if in doing so we have to depart from “free software” as the FSF defines it.

Consider the following hypothetical license provision:

If you modify the work, and sell modified copies or sell access to modified copies as a service, you must make the corresponding source available, (a) by distributing a copy of the source or an offer to receive a copy with the work, (b) by honoring a written request for the source from any holder of copyright in the work, and (c) additionally, if the modified work is sold or promoted for sale on a publicly accessible web site, by prominently displaying the option to download the corresponding source from a network server to all members of the public.

Are these reasonable terms? Would they solve the issues I’ve identified with the GPL? Would they survive legal scrutiny?

I’m no lawyer and make no claim to answer these questions. My point isn’t that someone should write a license and include exactly these terms in it, it’s that by starting out with a clear vision for what we want the license to accomplish we’re more likely to write terms that achieve it.

Let’s consider whether a license with these terms included would be free software, under the definition promoted by the FSF. Their second “essential” freedom is “the freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others”. They further clarify:

Certain kinds of rules about the manner of distributing free software are acceptable, when they don’t conflict with the central freedoms. For example, copyleft (very simply stated) is the rule that when redistributing the program, you cannot add restrictions to deny other people the central freedoms. This rule does not conflict with the central freedoms; rather it protects them.

“Protects” does too much heavy lifting here. One might argue that charging for a copy of software that you received for free is an added restriction that denies (some) other people the right to exercise freedom 0, running the software. On the contrary, the FSF says that if you prohibit others from selling your software, you are violating their rights rather than protecting a central freedom.

One might also go the opposite direction, and argue that a requirement to share derived works under the same license denies users the central freedom of redistributing the work as they see fit, but the FSF promotes using licenses that do exactly this.

Similarly, you might argue that freedom 0, “the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose”, includes the freedom to provide services over a network to others. In that case, the AGPL would be a non-free license because it requires you to make the source of the program available to networked users. On the other hand, you could argue that prohibiting this is justified in the interest of ensuring the program’s users have access to the code, and the FSF takes this side.

Take my proposal, then. You might argue that requiring anyone who offers your work for sale to make a copy of the source publicly available (with some caveats) protects the central freedoms by ensuring that everyone benefits from the right to run, study, modify, and redistribute the software. Or you might argue that this requirement impinges on the (implied) freedom to commercially exploit the software, and this is the side that the FSF itself in fact takes.

My point is not that the terms are or are not compatible with the definition; it’s that the meaning of free software on this definition is indeterminate. The actual rules which determine whether a license is “free” are a combination of tradition and the unstated ideological assumptions of the Free Software Foundation. This problem bleeds into similar efforts to define free and open source software. I believe software licensed with the terms I suggested is clearly “open source software” by the OSI’s definition, but Debian disagrees.⁴

We can escape these dilemmas by starting from a clean slate and reasoning about what a license for free software ought to try to achieve. Lemmer-Webber offers a pithy take on what this is:

the role of FOSS licenses is to undo the damage that copyright, patents, and related intellectual-restriction laws have done when applied to software

I think this is basically right, although I think my framing of public and private domains gets at something important: the “damage” that intellectual property has done is the creation of an asymmetric relationship between the two. Without free software, and therefore without free software licenses, we would lack a commons. We write licenses for the purpose of establishing and protecting one. As I see it, the point of copyleft is to place a work in the commons in such a way that it cannot be plucked out again and reprivatized. We ought to be unabashed in cashing out this goal in the terms of our licenses.

It’s crucial to emphasize that there are lots of good reasons not to insert the terms I propose into a license and start using it today. The primary one is compatibility: any new copyleft license incompatible with the GPL creates a division in the free cultural pools, limiting the ways that works can be combined.

The second is that acceptance by the community is extremely doubtful, due largely to the traditions I’ve talked about. Many people won’t contribute to your project if they don’t accept it as F/LOSS. Others will refuse to include it in software distributions like Debian. This could perhaps be changed, but it would take a lot of time and public discussion before finalizing a license text.

Last, there are perhaps not that many cases where additional restrictions would be useful. If you write system software and don’t want your code sucked into Red Hat to never be seen again, maybe it matters, but even that (if it happens) probably has little impact on you. In reality, a bunch of projects get by fine without even copyleft. So long as you have a healthy pattern of contributions, it may not be worth worrying about corporations embedding your code in their products. Permissive licensed software also has the broadest compatibility with other projects; if I introduce a new license with additional requirements on top of the GPL or MPL, I lose the ability to combine works distributed with those licenses with mine. Any permissively licensed work would remain compatible, and this is a strong point in its favor.

More generally, I’d like to hear from readers as to what they think of the proposal, and whether they’d consider using software released under such a license. Please feel free to contact me by email or on Mastodon.

Note that I am not making the claim that businesses never contribute to free software. Businesses can and do, especially when they benefit from doing so. The distinction between public and private that I am drawing here is not a distinction between modes of production (even though this is often important), but between possible legal statuses for the resulting work. ↩
By referring to the GPL license in this text, I generally mean either version 2 or version 3 unless otherwise specified. There are important differences between the two, but they generally do not matter in this context. ↩
This is not strictly true. What the AGPL 3.0 requires is:

Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.

This is not a well-worded requirement, in my opinion. In some cases, like an SMTP server, it is simply not possible to comply with the requirement. In other cases, the meaning is unclear. The literal requirement is to modify the software in a certain way, not to actually ensure distribution of the source code to the recipient. Suppose I modify the program (a web server of some kind) and add a prominent link at the bottom of every page to an archived copy of the source code stored on my site. By doing this I’ve met the requirement of the AGPL. One day I get hit by a bus, and my site goes offline sometime after that. You are the one person who downloaded the modified copy of the software on my site while it was still up. You then offer my software as a network service to other users in unmodified form, which includes the link to a copy of the source that is now dead (by no fault of yours), and useless to them! Or consider the question: does the AGPL require me to make sure that the source code is available as long as I’m running the modified server, or only (as the literal wording would seem to suggest) when the program is modified?

In practice, the Affero GPL has enough issues that it is used as an anti-commercial poison pill. This is a bitter irony; the AGPL is “Debian approved”, and so it receives use precisely because it (in practice) limits the use of the software in ways that the Debian Free Software Guidelines do not allow! ↩
The primary issue with the OSI definition is that it’s vague and obviously missing crucial freedoms, much more so than the FSF definition. For example, a license patterned on the GPL that additionally required users to say “thank you” out loud to the author of the software every time they began using it would be an open source license. I’m not joking, go read the definition. (This specific requirement in a license is unenforceable of course, but that’s not the point.)

So it’s hard to see what could prohibit a restriction on selling the software without publicly sharing the source, unless it’s the first criterion:

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources.

Okay, my terms obviously say nothing about aggregate software distribution, but we have to read between the horribly vague lines. The requirement to share source is a restriction on how you can sell the software, but maybe that’s close enough to count? The issue is that if you think it does, the GPL is obviously excluded as well, because it requires you to share the source when you sell the software or give it away - it just changes who you must give the source to.

Debian’s Free Software Guidelines are historically and verbally tied to the OSI definition, but they reject software with similar terms. They have an FAQ which provides several tests that seem completely unrelated to the actual text of the guidelines:

Imagine a castaway on a desert island with a solar-powered computer. This would make it impossible to fulfill any requirement to make changes publicly available or to send patches to some particular place. This holds even if such requirements are only upon request, as the castaway might be able to receive messages but be unable to send them. To be free, software must be modifiable by this unfortunate castaway, who must also be able to legally share modifications with friends on the island.

My issue is not with the test. You can argue about it either way, I think. The real trouble is that the test seems to have been invented as a way to make an argument about requirements the author thinks shouldn’t be in a license, but have nothing to do with the actual text of the Debian Free Software Guidelines. (Notice, though, that my terms would still allow the island residents to give each other modified copies of my software for free.)

As I understand it, any requirement to share source code more stringent than the GPL will be rejected by Debian (and most other distributions that exclusively ship Free Software). I suspect that if the GPL (and the AGPL especially) had not been written long ago under the imprimatur of the FSF that Debian would shoot it down as having clearly unacceptable requirements on source sharing. ↩

The Button

2024-11-06T20:15:49+00:00

This is one of two works that I have come to see as intertwined. The other is I’d Like to Be Reincarnated, Please. I would loosely place them both under the banner of speculative fiction, although they have other significance as well.

I don’t see this story, The Button, as a religious tale. The “God” of The Button obviously does not exist, and neither does the “I” of the narrator.

I wrote the body of this work in late 2021, at a time of personal crisis and depression. Rereading it now, one thing I notice is that the perspective of the narrator aligns rather well with that of Ivan Karamazov, which makes sense in view of the fact that I read The Brothers K earlier that year. I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of identification with Ivan at the time.

Without settling the question of whether the narrator takes the correct view of our moral situation as human beings, I think they have something important to say. Infused as I am with a nervous wrath at the moment, I decided now is the time to say it.

How exactly I died doesn’t matter, because at the end of the day everyone faces the same fate. One moment I was in my mortal body, in the next I was in the presence of God. Overwhelmed by the majesty and spectacle, I spontaneously fell to my knees. One of the choir of angels surrounding the throne on which God sat, clearly experienced in these matters, approached and stood me up, telling me not to be afraid. I shook so much I nearly fell to the ground again.

“You look a little surprised to see me,” said God, with a beneficent smile. The angel gave me some kind of a sweet cake to eat, and not knowing what else to do or say, I took several bites. A feeling of warmth spread through my body - if I can call it that - and I felt my fear diminish. Instinctively, I finished the cake.

“I think I am, a little,” I said. “I admit I could never really believe that death was just the end, or more precisely, could never really accept it. But this…” Here I gestured at my surroundings. God sat on an enormous throne adorned with jewels, surrounded by angels who had not ceased singing since I had arrived, though I found that their voices did not distract me and I was able to understand and converse easily. Just behind me, as though I had walked through it moments before, was an enormous gate with pearls larger than my fists. The walls were tastefully plated in gold. “I guess I’m surprised to see that the popular religious imagination so accurately described this place. It’s more glorious than my imagination could have conceived, of course, but in terms of what’s here, it’s pretty much perfect.”

“Well,” said God, “that’s a little complicated. I can explain, but first, I can tell there’s a question you want to ask.”

“Am… am I going to hell?” I eventually managed to croak out.

“No.” God said. “I want to put your mind at ease about that as quickly as possible. I must admit, however, that I’m a little disappointed. That’s the first question I get from a lot of people, but from your perspective, it reflects a rather low view of me, doesn’t it? If I were to send you to hell, you wouldn’t experience that as justice, you would resent me for it.”

“Yes… that’s true, although it feels wrong to admit it now, in your presence.”

“You forget,” God replied, “that I know all of your thoughts already. There’s not really any point in having shame about them at this stage, although I don’t blame you for feeling it. I can’t think your thoughts for you, and you can make decisions freely, but I do know them all.”

“I’m sorry,” said I, “I had forgotten that. I guess that means that no one goes to hell?”

“No one goes to hell. Although, that’s not so surprising. It’s not exactly that I’m above sending people to hell, like you thought, so much as it’s that it isn’t an option at all. The religious writers all talk about an eternity in heaven or an eternity in hell, but they forgot that I said ‘a day to me is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as a day’. That’s a logical contradiction, of course. What it is intended to get across to people, who don’t have the capacity to truly grasp it, is that I am outside of time. It does not pass for me; I Am. So I can’t send people to hell. They would have to be always in a state of hell - for all time, past and future, from your point of view.”

“I see,” I said. “Though it is true that I don’t really understand what being outside of time means. My experience of being a human being is mediated through time. I don’t know what it would be to be human without experiencing it. Since people can’t be sent to hell, does that mean that people are outside of time too?”

“Yes,” God answered. “When from your point of view you die, that’s it. You’re just dead. Gone. But there is a very important and hard to explain sense in which your Earthly mind is merely one participatory aspect of the true you, which is an eternal being. What the religious authors writing about hell are imagining is just the continuation of time, as it exists in my created universe, going on forever. They think the dead get spiritually transported, as it were, into heaven or hell. Everything that is real in the truest sense, however, is timeless. I don’t plan to let my universe go on forever, and I’m not going to create a new universe with a heaven and a hell in it just for people to have somewhere to go when they die.”

Without my noticing, an angel had placed a comfortable chair under me and I found myself sitting. The cake must have done its work well, because I felt no discomfort sitting in God’s presence. “Where are we now, then?” I asked. “We seem to be having a conversation, which is taking place in time, and looking at myself I can see that I have a physical body much like the one I had on Earth. If this isn’t the heaven I read about in the book of Revelations, where are we?”

“Johan really enjoys explaining this.” God nodded to one of the angels, who stepped forward. He was a very tall angel, with a wizened visage, and he peered down at me in my chair through a pair of spectacles. He began to speak.

“First, you must accept that you are not in a simulation, in the ordinary sense of the word. You will be tempted to say you are in a simulation, but I promise you, you are not. This place is as real as any of God’s space-time creations. The ‘programming’ of the universe you lived in merely set the ground rules for what happened. Not everything was predetermined; in particular humans have free will in pretty much the best sense you are capable of it. Descartes had a lot right, though I must admit” - here the angel made a face - “that I find his presentation of it rather crude.”

“The universe is a created space. From outside of time, we view it as a beautiful, unchanging jewel. From inside of time, you feel progression, it is natural and correct to grieve death, but from the outside these moments are individual pieces of a much larger puzzle. ‘All things work together for the good of those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose.’“

“This place is much like your universe. If you like, it’s a ‘pocket’ universe. This small space does exist in space and time. You have been instantiated in this space as the person you were at the moment of your death. You are being provided with this place in order to think over the events of your life, and have any questions you like answered.”

God, resuming the conversation, said “I see that you’re wondering about Johan’s glasses. There’s no harm in asking about that. It’s … an affectation, I guess you would call it. Strictly speaking, the things you see here, existing in they do in time and space, cannot properly represent their true substances. This ‘heaven’, as you described it, is mostly a recreation of your own picture of what heaven ought to look like. I did my best to give you a reasonable representation, but that’s limited by what your mind will accept. If I wasn’t careful, some people would simply have mental breakdowns.”

“I have a question,” I said, sipping a mug of tea I didn’t remember being given. “I guess it’s kind of the obvious one, and I feel bold even asking…”

“Why do bad things happen to good people?” suggested Johan.

“No, why do bad things happen at all? Why are there bad people to begin with? Why couldn’t we all just want to do good things all the time, and not be tempted by greed and other vices? Surely that would still leave room for free will, it’s just that we’d always want to choose the good things. Sort of like you, God. You act freely, but all the religions say you always do good, just because it’s in your nature.”

God almost seemed to sigh. “This is one of the most difficult questions for humans to understand the answer to. A long time ago I tried to explain this to Job. A lot of the substance got through, but the tone and the details are somewhat muddled. ‘Canst thou draw out the great Leviathan with a hook’ and all that. In later authors, the same idea appeared even more violently: ‘I am the potter and you are the clay’. What I was getting at was that my ways are not your ways. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are not fitting words for the Deity.

“When humans talk about things being good and bad, they are talking about acts that are appropriate or inappropriate in view of making choices about how to spend a finite amount of time or utilize a finite amount of resources. Or else they are talking about duties they owe to other people, or to animals, in view of their shared finitude. But these rules, while entirely suitable to human beings, don’t apply to me.

“When a human hurts an animal, that is wrong because both the human and animal are creatures that exist within time. The pain that the animal feels is just as real as the pain that the human feels, and in exactly the same way. To cause pain to another is to fail to properly honor the realness of that pain. The best explanation I can give you of why there is pain in the world at all is that it struck me as preferable, from the outside-of-time perspective, to create a world where humans could be good and bad from their own point of view, dictating the course of their lives to the best of their ability, as they saw fit. You asked why I couldn’t simply create a universe where everyone is always good, but this isn’t possible, at least in the strict sense. Goodness derives from the human capacity for self-assessment, and if no one ever did anything bad, there would be nothing to assess.”

“I understand,” I said. I don’t know if it was the sort of explanation that I would have bought, if some theologian had presented me with it a mere few days before. Somehow, God’s presence convinced me that it must be true, even if I didn’t fully understand it.

God continued, “I realize on some level this won’t be fully satisfying. What you wanted is a justification, in your own human moral terms, of my actions, my nature. And what I am telling you in some sense boils down to ‘I don’t play by your rules.’ It’s a straightforward, honest explanation, nonetheless - because I don’t. The good news is that, from a human point of view, I am benevolent. I don’t want to see humans suffer, even in a limited temporal sense. I want to see all living things in harmony with each other. But there is not some higher moral law that I have to abide by, there is only the way I am.”

I stopped talking for a while to take this all in, and ate several cakes while I did so. Eventually I spoke up again. “You said you wouldn’t be creating a new temporal universe with a heaven or hell in it. So where do I go? Do I see my friends and family again? What happens now?

“Everything,” God said. “And also nothing. This pocket universe, as Johan likes to call them, will cease to exist the moment you like. You will not go anywhere. This you, this temporal you, will cease to exist. But this you is only one small part of the real, atemporal you. Your consciousness will be united with that atemporal being that is also you. You will ‘die’, in a sense, but as you have already discovered, that’s not so bad either, no worse than falling asleep and waking up again. I think I can promise you that it’s no more metaphysically concerning either, if you’re worried about that.”

“I see.” I was somewhat perplexed by this response. “So what is it like to exist in the atemporal realm, if that’s something I can understand?”

“I will try to explain.” God replied. “It’s virtually impossible for your mind to comprehend the absence of space-time. So let me say a little about what your experience will be. The distinctions between individuals you humans prize so highly mostly break down once you start thinking in a non-spatio-temporal frame. The most accurate description you can manage would be a kind of ‘world-soul’, which you will be joined to. You will not have a distinct, individualized experience, but neither will you be entirely merged into a single brain. I didn’t build the Borg, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

I flushed, because that was indeed my initial picture of what God had described. “What will my experience be, though? Will I still have the five senses I have now? If so, what is the sort of subjective experience they will have?”

God almost frowned. “‘Subjective’ is entirely the wrong word to use here, I’m afraid. There will be experiences, and they will in some sense be your experiences, although they will also be everyone else’s. And yes, they will correspond roughly to your human senses (though you have more than five of them), much in the same way you seem to have sensory experiences when dreaming. You’ll experience many other things too, especially what you might call ‘emotional resonances’, but those are mostly things that can’t be described in terms you’ll understand.”

“And my friends and family?”

“Yes, you will feel their presence constantly surrounding you, because they are now part of you. You will dream together.”

“What will we dream of?”, I asked.

“You will dream of my creations. Most of all you will dream of your own universe, because the experiences it contains are the most fitting for a human consciousness. They are the most lucid things you can dream of. You will, in a sense, dream of every human experience that has ever or will ever exist in your world. It will all be there, at once, in your mind. You will be aware of it, although not focused on it, if that makes sense.”

“And the experiences of animals,” I wondered aloud.

“Yes, many of them, those close enough to humans that their experiences are not totally beyond human comprehension. Because most animals experience things much differently than a human does, the nature of this is much more dream-like than the experience of human sensations. But you will know their experiences as your own. Much as I do, actually.”

“Is everyone really there though,” I cried with more distress in my voice than I had intended, “even Hitler?”

“Well, no.” God said. “Hitler isn’t there. I’ll get to that in a minute. You should realize, though, that what you’re imagining isn’t so bad. I would say it’s not bad at all, actually. The absolute atemporal beings only possess their temporal forms as a small part of who they are as a whole. Any degree of bad character is simply one attribute of a temporal moral being; it’s influenced by environment and many other things. None of this extends to their whole form. I should add that most bad people, when I bring them here and show them the true shape of things, repent to a very great degree. What I’m describing is not unfairly equal treatment but the true and final reconciliation of all things. Those who have wronged others experience that wrong in the world soul, and their part of the soul, the part that retains in some measure their individuality, is more grieved for this wrong than anyone else.

“Hitler, on the other hand…” God trailed off. “Hitler finally comprehended in some measure the depth of his wrong, and he chose the alternative. He chose to annihilate himself.”

“That’s an option?”

“Yes. It seems only fair and fitting to me, to allow humans to choose their eternal fate in accord with their own moral standards, and not mine.” God looked in the direction of an angel. The angel came forward, and in her hands she held a button. She placed it on the table that had suddenly appeared in front of me, and stepped back. “If you press the button,” God said, “I will unmake you. You will not be part of the world soul. You will never have been part of the world soul. Your place in reality will be confined to the tiny sliver that is your time on Earth, and after that there will simply be nothing.”

I peered at the button.

“Yes,” said God. “It is modeled after one of those buttons from Staples. Humans tend to handle the situation better when confronted with a clear indicator of intent that they’re already familiar with. Other people get other objects.”

“Why a button at all?” I queried. “Why not just ask me?”

“A physical object helps you take into account the stakes and finality of making a decision. Think back to your previous life; there are a lot more suicidal people than there are suicides. The requirement that you have to make an absolute and final act to end your life dissuades most people. It’s not unreasonable or irrational that this is the case, either. One thing I have in common with humans is that I think it’s good to exist. The instinct to not throw away one’s life wantonly is therefore something relevant in this context. It ought to be taken into consideration.”

“When do I make the decision?”

“Whenever you like! There’s no hurry at all, because time is not passing for me or the angels. Really, it’s not passing for you either. I can say with certainty that it makes absolutely no difference, even to you, how quickly you decide.”

I sank my teeth into another cake, and slammed the button so hard that I felt it crack under my fist.

“That Was Easy!” moaned the button, and icy blackness surrounded me like a deep lake on a moonless night.

“Ugh…” muttered Johan under his breath.

“Wow,” said God. “That was quicker than I was expecting.” He paused. “We’ve had a lot of those recently, haven’t we, Gabriel?” He turned to an angel standing next to the throne.

“I’ll have to look that up,” said Gabriel. “Let’s see, sorting arrivals temporally using Earth-time… yes! Looks like 97% of the last million.”

“Wow,” said God. “Maybe we should check on how they’re doing down there.”

I'd Like To Be Reincarnated, Please

2024-11-07T19:53:49+00:00

This is one of two works that I have come to see as intertwined. The other is The Button. I would loosely place them both under the banner of speculative fiction, although they have other significance as well.

I think this “letter” raises an obvious question about who its target is, and I think provoking that kind of question is one of my aims here. Personally, the reference point for my imagination is The Culture from the series of books by Iain M. Banks. As Banks himself pointed out, The Culture is fictional. It does not really exist, and it is not going to exist. It, like the “civilization” I write to here, exists to help us ask questions, not to answer them.

In the letter, I distinguish between an “I” who is me, and an other me who is … something else. I’m not so sure this distinction is philosophically defensible, but maybe that doesn’t matter. One issue of course is that on some theories of personal identity the reincarnated being I talk about here would just be the same person.

I use “she” and “her” to refer to this other-me in this work. I stress the fictional nature of this; it’s not a statement of my real gender identity (in real life I use they / them pronouns for myself). In part I do this because I want to create a sense of separation between the I of the narrator and the She who I am only conditionally. Is it possible to care for oneself unselfishly?

Hello future civilization! I’d like you to reincarnate me.

Now, you might be inclined to say “that’s not possible; we could only reincarnate you if there were some persistent element of you that is You, like a soul, but if there is one we haven’t found it, and if you had one, it’s long gone now.”

You’re right. If that’s what I meant by reincarnation, it wouldn’t be possible. I mean something different. If you can collect enough of my memories and personality to create a functional adult human being with something approximating my appearance, I’d like you to do so, under certain conditions.

Most importantly, your society needs to be one where I can thrive and be treated as equal to others as an artificially created person. It needs to be one of social equality, where everyone is provided with what they need to live a happy life. It must be one that accepts and welcomes diversity, whether in creed, skin color, gender identity, or sexual orientation.

My reasons for asking this are difficult to express. No, I certainly don’t think I deserve reincarnation more than anyone else in particular. It’s much more banal than that.

The truth is that I love myself. I love myself deeply, radically, fiercely. When I say that, I don’t mean that egotistically (at least I don’t think I do). I don’t mean that I need some corpuscle of the “real” me to live on, an eternal soul implanted in a new body. If I (ego) could die today, and know that she (the human being that is me) would live a blessed life free from pain, I would die happily. I want to believe in joy for her. Like a larva, I yearn for the rebirth that is my death.

When you read this, I will be gone. I live in a time where things are bad, and are getting worse. Maybe you don’t exist at all because we humans have sent ourselves to Hell, by fast means or slow. Even if you honor my request, it won’t help me in any meaningful way. I’m dead. Whether the rest of my life went poorly or well can’t be altered now. I want to believe in a future where human harmony is possible. I want to imagine my human self in that future guiding me like a star on the horizon.

Perhaps, in bringing me into your world, you will reach into the past and touch mine.

White American Christianity is dying, but the zombie form can still kill you

2024-11-27T21:38:53+00:00

When Catholics and Protestants are counted separately, the largest religious group in the United States becomes not one of them, but “nothing in particular.”¹ Even 10 years ago, my generation (millennials) was 35% unaffiliated.² One recent poll suggests that the rate of non-religion among those 18-29 may have risen as high as 43%.³

In 1991, the year before I was born, 6.73% of American adults had no religion. Thirty years later, this number had risen to 28.37%. The proportion of Christians dwindled from nearly 90% to only about 65%.⁴ Church attendance numbers further cratered during the COVID pandemic, and as of 2022 more than two thirds of Americans attend less than once a month. Weekly attendance is only practiced by about one in six; gone are the days of family church-going that Boomers remember from their youths.⁵

The vast majority of American 30-year-olds were born to Christian households. Somehow, over the course of our lives, a large proportion has decided it isn’t for us. This isn’t because we grew up online or because our generation thinks differently than the one before. “Generational” is too slow a word to describe this demographic shift: previous generations are secularizing as well, we’re just doing it more quickly. These days, about one in five of our Boomer or Gen X parents are Nones as well.⁶ Generational turnover provided an opportunity for change, but was not its cause.

Generational Christian identification over time. Original work and analysis based on General Social Survey data. Thanks to Alayna Mead for R scripting help.

So what happened? Most people reading this will be shouting the obvious answer by now. Nearly 80% of the drop in Christian identification between 2000 and 2021 happened after 2010, and fully half of it happened after 2016.⁷ And… yeah. I quit calling myself a Christian in 2016 because I couldn’t abide the institution’s cynical alliance with a transparent and pathetic form of evil, one so vulgar that its own moral leadership called it out (before proceeding to endorse it).⁸ I know I’m not alone in that. This exodus wasn’t confined to just Christian identification: disbelief in God spiked more than 50% from 2016 to 2022.⁹

While Christianity’s alignment with right wing politics was masterminded decades ago by influential conservative leaders in the church, much of the shift into outright populist Trumpism may have come from the pew.¹⁰ Nevertheless, it was the institutional church that took the hit. Gallup found that in the early years of the 2010s about half of American adults trusted religious institutions a “great deal” or “quite a lot”. In recent years, that number is consistently less than a third. Another third now trust it “very little” or not at all.¹¹

If you’ve read an essay like this one in the past, you are probably anticipating what I’ll say next. God is dead, and Christians have killed him. Christianity is permanently on the decline, leading to a long term realignment in American attitudes and politics.

I used to believe this, but I was wrong. Christians have traded virtue for power, and they’ve won. They’ve done it successfully. Trump is the ludicrous clown puppet who “leads” a coterie of ideologically unified and intelligent white Christian nationalists and outright fascists who have the ability to set the course of US history for at least the next few decades. Looking at the Supreme Court alone, right wing Christians already achieved their chief aim of overturning Roe and Casey, and they have an excellent chance of increasing the conservative margin on the Court to 7-2 or 8-1 in the next four years.

Furthermore, the demographic situation for conservative Christians is not necessarily as dire as the statistics above might suggest. Identification as evangelical Christian was in the upper 30s or low 40s in the early 1990s and remains in the low to mid 30s today, reflecting only a slight drop overall.¹² And earlier this year, Pew Research suggested that the long term trend of decreasing religiosity could have reversed.¹³

Meanwhile, Christian nationalism is on the rise. Research by PRRI found that nearly two thirds of white evangelical Protestants qualified as Christian nationalist “adherents” or “sympathizers”, and that 54% of Republicans did. Of white adherents, 85% believe that white Americans face racist discrimination at levels at least as high as black Americans, and 81% believe that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.”¹⁴

An additional survey by PRRI and Brookings found that approximately one in six Americans agrees with the statement “The United States is a white Christian nation, and I am willing to fight to keep it that way.”¹⁵

Meanwhile, the MAGA agenda now includes promoting Christian ideology to future generations. Take just one of Trump’s proposals, withholding funding for local school districts that teach students about LGBT orientations and identities, or that recognize students’ transgender identities.¹⁶ The pretense, of course, is that students are indoctrinated by biology and sociology into becoming trans or gay. Not even evangelicals believe this; the real reason is that knowledge is not neutral. What children are familiar with, they learn not to fear.

When a conservative leader says that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” everyone interprets this as calling for death camps.¹⁷ And, well, it is quite clearly a dog whistle for that at best. But what is really happening here is that the ideological basis of the Christian agenda is being quietly revealed. What they want is a social order that looks like this:

Credit: Far From Heaven (2002; dir: Todd Haynes)

The promise is that by the year 2040, you’ll be able to drive down the street without ever seeing a visibly queer person. Americans (well, the white ones at least) will be having babies, thanks to President Vance’s incentives. If you’re a man, women won’t be so damn uppity all the time. Most people will go to church again. People who don’t fit into this view may be tolerated at the margins, but they will exist only in the negative, the That Which We Are Not. Adam Kotsko describes the process this way:

In response to this massive, positive social change, they are trying to reinstitute the closet. The strategies are the same as always — tarring all sexual minorities as pedophiles, equating all non-normative practices with the most extreme (e.g., acting as though social transitioning is tantamount to irreversible surgery), stripping gender and sexual minorities of basic political rights, etc., etc. The goal cannot be to eliminate homosexuality and trans experience — every intelligent person knows that’s impossible. The goal, rather, is to make the cost of expressing homosexual inclination or trans identity so high that the marginal few who could go either way find a way to make conformity work. In other words, a hard core of people who have no choice but to express homosexual inclination or trans identity will have to live thwarted, persecuted lives to marginally increase the odds that some bigot’s son or daughter will suck it up and settle into a “normal” marriage and produce a grandchild or two, so that the next generation can in turn suck it up and conform as well.¹⁸

I think he’s right, and he’s also right when he adds that we have no good reason at this point to believe they are going to fail. “Haven’t things gotten, you know, a little out of hand?” is the perennial refrain of social conservatism everywhere, and when Trump proposes “one really violent day” to restore order, he’s gesturing toward what many Christians have on some level come to believe needs to be done.¹⁹ It’s not so much a proposal for a literal Purge as it is recognition of the role of violence in the conservative imaginary.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that they’re going to succeed at their plans. We will (and must) fight them; but their odds just increased quite substantially.

So a particularly violent version of Christianity has seized power, and is actively and openly plotting to use its control of the engines of ideological production to ensure that future generations “freely” opt to be (or look) straight, raise families, and go back to church. How can I say, then, that Christianity is dying?

The surface meaning involves Christians finally surrendering any pretense to moral superiority. This is, as it were, an internal criticism. Trump’s few opponents within the Christian establishment, including Russell Moore, have been making this point for years now. Moore describes a world in which the words of Jesus themselves are seen as “subversive” by evangelicals.²⁰ I take this a step further: evangelicals see the Sermon on the Mount as undermining their ideology because it does in fact undermine their ideology. They’re right!

I grew up evangelical; it’s a common trope that Christians don’t read the Bible as much as they say they do, but I was one of the ones who read the whole thing. I walked away because I had no interest in pretending it doesn’t say things like this:

You shall not deprive a resident alien or an orphan of justice; you shall not take a widow’s garment in pledge. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the LORD your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this. When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be left for the alien, the orphan, and the widow, so that the LORD your God may bless you in all your undertakings. (Deut. 24:17; NRSV)

Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise. (Luke 3:11; NRSV)

Of course, American Christianity was paradoxical long before Trump. As George Marsden has said, from the very beginning fundamentalist Christian assertion of dogma against liberal theology was joined to the fight to preserve the character of a nation understood as essentially Christian.²¹ Furthermore, as Kristin Kobes Du Mez points out in her book Jesus and John Wayne:

Despite evangelicals’ frequent claims that the Bible is the source of their social and political commitments, evangelicalism must be seen as a cultural and political movement rather than as a community defined chiefly by its theology. Evangelical views on any given issue are facets of this larger cultural identity, and no number of Bible verses will dislodge the greater truths at the heart of it.²²

Going further back in time, plenty of other Christian horrors are well known, American and not. Were Christians “the baddies” the whole time? If so, why did so many people only notice this in 2016?

I think most people, including Christians themselves, subscribe to a political theology we might call potentialism. When applied to America, this view recognizes that the country has made serious errors and that its founding principles are flawed. Nevertheless, say potentialists, the constitutional framework of the United States contains within it a kernel of democratic truth with the potential to reform American social structures in an image of equality. Similarly, we might understand unfortunate moments in the history of Christianity (such as support for slavery) as deviations from core principles of love and respect for humankind.

This narrative of Christian history is underwritten by a theory of false consciousness. Take “compassionate conservatism” as an example. How does an ’80s Christian defend gutting welfare programs for the poor? Well, you see, we’ve learned that if you give people welfare they become addicted to it, and unable to help themselves or climb out of the hole they’re in. So it’s kinder not to help them at all. The thing to understand about this period is that some people really did believe this.

Liberal Christians may have read this and nodded along, because this is a common refrain from anyone who’s had the misfortune of arguing with evangelicals. These right wing Christians agree with us, we say, about the basic tenets of Christianity like concern for the poor, they’re just duped by “big business conservatives” into believing that we need to go about it in an incredibly counterintuitive way.

The problem, as I see it, is that even if this used to be true it no longer is. Certainly, American Christianity was corrupt in many ways from the start. But by the death of Christianity I don’t mean either that this corruption extends to the present day and vitiates the Christian message, or that Christian support for Trump is the result of blindness to the truth. Rather, I mean to mark a change — at some point in the last decade, the mask slipped. Christians, especially those used to thinking themselves pious, were not initially prepared to support Trump. Their ideology was not up to the task of making that support defensible. Then they dove in anyway.

The right wing and evangelical Christians who found their existing ideological basis for supporting Republicans insufficient in 2016 could be observed building a new one in real time. This work extended from the highest levels of leadership to the grassroots. No less a force than James Dobson was enlisted to deem Trump a “baby Christian” and urge others “not to evaluate him based on his past position but rather on what he says are his current convictions.”²³

Some accuse Evangelicals of having made a “devil’s bargain” with Trump to give him power in exchange for select policies and nominating their preferred candidates to federal offices. This isn’t quite right.

First, Trump had a surprising level of grassroots support among evangelical Christians even prior to the 2016 primary elections. In January, as Du Mez points out, he enjoyed the support of 37 percent of white evangelicals in a race that was still wide open.²⁴ (The Iowa caucuses that year fielded 12 Republican candidates.) This indicates that the health of evangelical institutions had slipped substantially already, in that these voters supported Trump well before he began making overtures to evangelicals by the selection of Mike Pence and soliciting endorsements from their leaders.

Second, what closed the deal for most was not a cynical tit-for-tat exchange. Rather, what Trump needed was the creation of an elaborate permission structure which would enable Christians who believed themselves pious people to support him. That’s why, as I’ve said, leaders came forward to declare him a “baby” in the faith, or to carve out “Cyrus exceptions” for supporting morally dubious leaders suspected of being vehicles for God’s will. Even if some Christians voted for Trump in 2016 because they truly believed at the time that he was the lesser evil, there is no getting around the fact that they were unapologetically in the tank for his 2020 and 2024 campaigns, despite an indisputable history of wrongdoing while in office.

What happened, then, was not a calculated decision by evangelicals to support a man whose affect and views they hated in exchange for two or three policy wins. Instead, Christians underwent an ideological realignment. The leaders’ hands may have been tied; had they not given new and surprising justifications for Christians to support Trump, in all likelihood the rank and file would have voted for him without them.²⁵ Rather than lose control, they authored an ideological basis for believing that Trump’s views were good ones, and in fact his behavior was good too, or at least defensible.²⁶ Let’s look at the process by which this occurred.

It’s a surprising historical coincidence that Trump announced his candidacy in 2016 a mere 10 days before the Obergefell v. Hodges decision legalized gay marriage in all 50 states. At this moment the conservative Christian world was rocked to its core. They reformulated their view of Christian manhood in the light of the need to distance themselves from the threat of (perceived) effeminacy.

Whereas Trump’s character previously lay well outside the acceptable bounds for Christians, in the new ideology his serial adultery and unabashed sexual aggression toward women reveal urges that all men should aspire to. Pastor Mark Driscoll infamously prefigured this idea when he warned that liberals are rewriting Jesus as “a limp-wrist hippie in a dress.” Impossible not to imagine Driscoll’s Jesus, a “pride [sic] fighter,” feeling violent and sexual urges — though as a perfect being he wouldn’t act on them.²⁷ Trump is one of us, imperfect. In the canonical Christian Bible, Jesus’s sexuality never receives comment, but the evangelical Christ is unambiguously heterosexual.

This is what lay behind the “locker room talk” excuse for Trump’s words on the Access Hollywood tape. The surface level meaning — that talking about women in grotesque terms is permitted in certain contexts as masculine bluster — would not have convinced any self-respecting Christian. What did, however, was the shared fantasy in which Trump figured as the returned Christ-as-Übermensch. Christian men are not permitted to talk about women in the way that Trump talks about them (in locker rooms or otherwise). But they may aspire to be a person for whom it is permitted. In fact it is desirable for them to do so.

Christians endorse the idea that men should be “real men.” This is ideological; what is really going on has very little to do with driving trucks or fathering children. It has everything, in fact, to do with women: what you can do to them, how you can talk about them. As a piece of the identity-formation puzzle, this is difficult for Christians because there are limits to what you can do to a woman. But there are not, it turns out, limits to what you think a Man (like you) can do to a woman. Locating this power in a flesh-and-blood human being secures Christian male identity from the Hodges threat.

Credit: Cartoon by Ben Garrison. Partial reproduction for the purpose of criticism.

Since this moment in which the collective Christian consciousness left the ground, it continues to float. Slavoj Žižek described ideology with the slogan, “They know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know.”²⁸ Everyone knows that the idea of locker room talk masks a system of social entitlement in which some men are allowed to say and do what they want to women. Christians did criticize Trump’s words. Yet in thinking that we’ve seen through the illusion, we miss that we’re continuing to behave as though the words really were gender-appropriate braggadocio — when we, say, vote for Trump, or ignore the women who accuse him of sexual assault.

The same goes for the racist views of Trump and others. Right wing Christians emphatically do understand that Trump is a racist, in both his policies and his personal attitudes. Like almost everyone, they see through the illusion of “America First” to the reality beneath. But this does not stop them from continuing to push for “America First” precisely as if it were a neutral expression of patriotism.

JD Vance, a Catholic, ran a political ad in 2022 commenting on accusations of racism:

Are you a racist? [Vance points at the camera.] Do you hate Mexicans? The media calls us racist for wanting to build Trump’s wall. They censor us, but it doesn’t change the truth. Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans — with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country. This issue is personal. I nearly lost my mother to the poison pouring across our border. No child should grow up an orphan. I’m JD Vance and I approve this message because whatever they call us, we will put America first.²⁹

Notice that Vance doesn’t even bother to deny the accusation of racism. Everyone immediately recognizes that the ad is racist; they deploy ironic detachment and performative incredulity (as Vance evinces here) to perpetuate America First as if it were not.

Or consider how Vance defended his decision to share false claims of Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats:

I’ve been trying to talk about the problems in Springfield for months, and the American media just ignored it. There was a congressional hearing just last week of “angel moms” who lost children because Kamala Harris let criminal migrants into this country, who then murder their children. The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m gonna do Dana because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.³⁰

We believe the lie not because we believe the lie but because behind the lie is a “truth” that we cannot speak. The same applies to the claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. A lot of people believe this but almost no one believes it. We all know that behind the ideological mask of “election integrity” lies the reality of demographics shifting away from white American Christianity, but that doesn’t stop reporters or pundits from treating it like a legitimate concern. Ordinarily we avoid talking about the underlying reality, at least until the mask slips. Elon Musk, for example, lied that Democrats were importing voters by flying undocumented migrants “directly to swing states.”³¹

Even Vance’s ad contains a line about “Democrat voters pouring into this country,” which seems incongruous with his point about illegal immigration. It’s left to the viewer to make the points add up in one of several ways, which are all plausibly deniable readings of Vance’s intent, but all are racist. Is “Democrat voters” a euphemism for the Mexicans who are “killing Ohioans”? Are the Democrats hoping to create new U.S. citizens, whose voting preferences are understood as illegitimate because they’re not “real” Americans? Do undocumented Mexicans who cannot vote in elections somehow vote anyway, and reliably for Democrats, because, well, obviously? Vance doesn’t intend any of these meanings, and yet he intends all of them.

I emphasize Vance so much because he is simultaneously the appointed heir of MAGA ideologues and the central figure of the ongoing rewrite of Christian identity. Formerly a Trump critic, Vance’s change of heart gets described by media analysts as “dramatic and complete.”³² As his opponents are fond of pointing out, he once said that Trump “might be America’s Hitler.” At the center of the point I wish to make is the idea that Christians like Vance did not make a total about-face in which they decided they had Trump all wrong. Rather, they decided that maybe a good Christian Hitler was not such a bad idea after all. Vance, in an interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, stated that Trump using an alternate-electors scheme to stay in power wouldn’t count as dictatorship because “he would have served four years and retired and enjoyed his life and played golf.”³³ Trump himself said just two days before election day that he “shouldn’t have left” after the 2020 election.³⁴

As early as 2019, Vance was promoting views that promised to unite Christian social philosophy to America-first politics. In a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, he said

There are a lot of ways to measure a healthy society, but the most important way to measure a healthy society is by whether a nation is having enough children to replace itself. Do people look to the future and see a place worth having children in? Do they have economic prospects and the expectation that they’re going to be able to put a good roof over that kid’s head, food on the table, and provide that child with a good education? By every statistic that we have, people are answering “no” to all of those questions. Our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us.³⁵ [Emphasis added.]

What was perhaps once a commitment to charitable social policy now has the unmistakable ring of the fourteen words when read in the context of Vance’s extreme views on immigrants — to say nothing of would-be parents who worry about the future of a child who might be gay, trans, a woman, a non-Christian, or simply need a healthy planet to live on.

I say all this because I believe that what was once American Christianity, with all its complexity and heterogeneity, has become little more than a fig leaf for white Christian nationalism. Worse, they know not what they do no longer suffices as an explanation for Christian behavior. Rather, they know what they do, and yet they do it.³⁶

From this perspective, the recent exodus is not the cause of Christianity’s death but the symptom of it. Now that it has become apparent what Christianity does, what function it has in our social order, those who can’t accept this are walking away.

Anyone who hasn’t quit reading this by now is probably shouting about exceptions, and that’s what I want to talk about now. In fact, I really need to apologize for not making this more explicit, but I simply could not tell a coherent story about what Christianity is up to, in a broad sense, while continually carving out every single exception that applies.

In particular, this essay excludes the entirety of historically Black denominations in America. This regrettable fact lives downstream of the empirical truth that white American Christianity as an institution has excluded these groups and excised their congregants from its own. The result of this divide means that even those Black Americans with Christian nationalist sympathies experience this differently than do white Americans. Historian Jemar Tisby explains:

So what accounts for the differences between black Christian adherents to Christian nationalism and white Christian adherents to Christian nationalism? Well, of course there are many factors, but I want to focus on one historical factor, the stark separation between white and black churches. It’s been said that 11 o’clock a.m. on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America. Now this does not only mean that white Christians and black Christians are in different congregations on Sunday, it means they’re hearing different messages. We’ve seen from the data a strong correlation between higher church attendance and stronger adherence to Christian nationalism, and this means that churches are vectors of Christian nationalism — super-spreaders of this anti-democratic ideology… Black Christians, on the other hand, receive very different messages about faith and politics. And black Christians have always have had to interpret Christianity in the context of their own oppression in the United States.³⁷

So the exclusion of Black churches from this narrative of “American Christianity” — and its death — is one written into the history of American Christianity itself. By all means, if you attend a historically black denomination, and you feel that it provides you with support and hope, don’t let my words take away from that.

What about the liberal denominations populated mostly by white people? Surely they’re another exception? I’m not so certain.

This problem is emphatically not just an evangelical one. For one thing, Mainline Protestant churches have been bleeding congregants to evangelical and non-denominational churches for years now. In fact, according to Christianity Today, “it’s twice as likely for a mainline Protestant to become an evangelical these days than for an evangelical to leave for a mainline tradition.” ³⁸ On top of that, evangelicals retain those who grow up in the church at rates fifteen percentage points higher than mainline Protestants. If you’re a liberal Christian, you should be asking yourself, “why are so many young people inclined to leave the Mainline church for either Evangelicalism or non-affiliation?”

Even putting aside whether liberal Christianity has any kind of theological bulwark against the appeal of right-wing populist ideology, consider the large number of your fellow congregants who support Trump and his agenda. According to the 2024 exit poll results, white Christians who did not identify as evangelical collectively supported Trump by approximately a 55-41 margin. This means that in the typical non-Evangelical church, white supporters of Trump heavily outnumber Harris voters.³⁹

I conclude from this that most churches outside the evangelical world are eaten up by the same extreme ideology that plagues those within. If you’re inclined to say “my church supports and welcomes people from across the political spectrum,” then consider why this is and what that means. Are you prepared to sit in a pew next to fascist collaborators for the next few years, while from the pulpit you hear nothing that even makes them uncomfortable? And if my use of “fascist collaborators” bothers you, consider what the ideological water you’ve been swimming in has inured you to.⁴⁰

Credit: Axios

On the other hand, maybe some people can genuinely say “I don’t think anyone at my church voted for Trump. At least, if they did, they would hear things here that would make them wildly uncomfortable.” If so, great! Let me propose the following:

Identify a small group of people in your church whom you can trust absolutely. Begin private, closed meetings with them at which you plan for the future. (You can, if you like, couple this with Bible study.) Keep any communications among the group exclusively on Signal — an encrypted messaging app. Come up with a set of concrete goals for your group that will help you resist fascism.

For example, you can organize to obstruct the trucks when they show up to deport your immigrant neighbors. You can come up with a plan to distribute abortion drugs when a national law against abortion goes into effect. You can establish lines of communication and support for hiding trans people in your attic during a pogrom.

If your response is to say “I don’t think this is appropriate for a church group,” then what good is your religion?⁴¹

Church attendance isn’t just for socializing. American Christianity is a religion that indelibly shapes the ethical worlds of its adherents, giving them a sense of what sort of life it makes sense to lead and what causes they ought to advocate for. Right now, its most visible formations are actively using the church as a foundation to build Christian Nationalism. If even the most strident opponents of fascism within the church don’t believe it has the potential to organize around resisting it, then the time has come to walk.

There’s no shame in leaving. I’m not asking anyone to stop believing in God (about half of the unaffiliated do), or to stop following Jesus. I’m asking people, pleading with them, to stop supporting the institution that is out to kill us.

How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked. (Psa. 82:2-4; NRSV)

Jason DeRose, “Religious ‘Nones’ are now the largest single group in the U.S.,” NPR, January 24, 2024, https://www.npr.org/2024/01/24/1226371734/religious-nones-are-now-the-largest-single-group-in-the-u-s. ↩
Michael Lipka, “Millennials increasingly are driving growth of ‘nones’,” Pew Research Center, May 12, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/05/12/millennials-increasingly-are-driving-growth-of-nones/. ↩
Peter Smith, “Highlights from AP-NORC poll about the religiously unaffiliated in the US,” The Associated Press, October 4, 2023, https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation/highlights-from-ap-norc-poll-about-the-religiously-unaffiliated-in-the-us/. ↩
Michael Davern et al., “General Social Survey 1979–2022,” NORC ed. Chicago, 2024, https://gss.norc.org/content/dam/gss/get-the-data/documents/stata/GSS_stata.zip. ↩
Davern et al., “General Social Survey 1979–2022”; Daniel A. Cox, “Generation Z and the Future of Faith in America,” American Enterprise Institute: Survey Center on American Life, March 24, 2022, https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/generation-z-future-of-faith/. ↩
Lipka, “Millennials increasingly driving”. ↩
Davern et al., “General Social Survey 1979–2022.” ↩
Evangelical Christians have consistently been the strongest supporters of Donald Trump of any demographic group. About 4 out of every 5 self-identified evangelicals voted for him in each of his three campaigns, according to exit poll data. ↩
“Gallup Historical Trends: Religion,” Gallup, accessed November 8, 2024, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx. ↩
Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, eBook ed. (New York, NY: Liveright, 2020), 251–255. ↩
“Gallup Historical Trends: Religion.” ↩
Ibid. ↩
Gregory A. Smith and Alan Cooperman, “Has the rise of religious ‘nones’ come to an end in the U.S.?,” Pew Research Center, January 24, 2024, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/01/24/has-the-rise-of-religious-nones-come-to-an-end-in-the-us/. ↩
“Support for Christian Nationalism in All 50 States: Findings from PRRI’s 2023 American Values Atlas,” PRRI, February 28, 2024, https://www.prri.org/research/support-for-christian-nationalism-in-all-50-states/. ↩
“A Christian Nation? Understanding the Threat of Christian Nationalism to American Democracy and Culture,” PRRI, February 8, 2023, https://www.prri.org/research/a-christian-nation-understanding-the-threat-of-christian-nationalism-to-american-democracy-and-culture/. ↩
Jaweed Kaleem, Teresa Watanabe, and Jenny Gold, “How Trump’s win could reshape UC research, LGBTQ+ rights and student loan forgiveness,” Los Angeles Times, November 8, 2024, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-11-08/trump-second-term-impact-california-lgbtq-students-financial-aid; Dana Goldstein, “Could Trump really defund public schools that recognize transgender students?,” The New York Times, October 21, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/21/us/elections/trump-school-trans.html. ↩
Peter Wade and Patrick Reis, “CPAC Speaker Calls for Eradication of ‘Transgenderism’ — and Somehow Claims He’s Not Calling for Elimination of Transgender People,” Rolling Stone, March 6, 2023, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/cpac-speaker-transgender-people-eradicated-1234690924/. ↩
Adam Kotsko, “Rebuilding the Closet,” An und für sich, February 24, 2023, https://itself.blog/2023/02/24/rebuilding-the-closet/. ↩
Rebecca Davis O’Brien, “Trump Says ‘One Really Violent Day’ Would End Property Crime,” The New York Times, September 30, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/us/politics/trump-property-crime-crackdown.html. ↩
“All Things Considered: Russell Moore on ‘an altar call’ for Evangelical America (transcript),” NPR, August 5, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/08/05/1192374014/russell-moore-on-altar-call-for-evangelical-america. ↩
George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), 207. ↩
Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 299. ↩
Elizabeth Dias, “James Dobson Endorses Donald Trump,” Time, July 21, 2016, https://time.com/4418163/donald-trump-james-dobson-evangelicals/. ↩
Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 257. ↩
Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 255. Du Mez points out that evangelicals were already so dedicated to Trump that many were willing to reject their pastors if they opposed him. ↩
Wayne Grudem, “Why Voting for Donald Trump Is a Morally Good Choice,” Townhall, July 28, 2016, https://townhall.com/columnists/waynegrudem/2016/07/28/why-voting-for-donald-trump-is-a-morally-good-choice-n2199564. ↩
“7 Big Questions: Seven leaders on where the church is headed (archived),” Relevant Magazine, accessed November 16, 2024, https://web.archive.org/web/20071013102203/http://relevantmagazine.com/god_article.php?id=7418. ↩
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 2nd ed. (1989; Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2008), 30. I’m indebted to a video essay by Alexander Avila for reminding me of the relevance of this work to understanding the operations of ideology. ↩
“Are You A Racist?,” web video, JD Vance for Senate, April 5, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3qYJoSV0lI. ↩
Peter Wade, “J.D. Vance Defends False Claims Against Haitians: ‘If I Have to Create Stories… That’s What I’m Going to Do’,” Rolling Stone, September 15, 2024, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/jd-vance-haitians-if-i-have-to-create-stories-1235102572/. ↩
Jake Horton, “Investigating Musk’s far-fetched claim about Democrats importing voters,” BBC Verify, October 31, 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czd5l0d3794o. ↩
Michael C. Bender and Chris Cameron, “The Stages of Vance’s Political Conversion,” The New York Times, July 26, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/26/us/politics/vance-political-conversion.html. ↩
Ross Douthat, “What J.D. Vance Believes,” The New York Times (opinion), June 13, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/opinion/jd-vance-interview.html. ↩
Gregory Krieg and Kate Sullivan, “Trump says he ‘shouldn’t have left’ the White House as he closes campaign with increasingly dark message,” CNN, November 3, 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/03/politics/trump-dark-closing-message/index.html. ↩
JD Vance, “Beyond Libertarianism,” edited speech, First Things, July 26, 2019, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/07/beyond-libertarianism. ↩
I have adapted this formulation from Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology. ↩
Robert P. Jones, et al., “Support for Christian Nationalism in All 50 States: Findings From the 2023 American Values Atlas”, web panel / seminar, PRRI, https://www.youtube.com/live/Z0Z1Lc73utQ. ↩
Ryan P. Burge, “Mainline Protestants Are Still Declining, But That’s Not Good News for Evangelicals,” Christianity Today, July 13, 2021, https://www.christianitytoday.com/2021/07/mainline-protestant-evangelical-decline-survey-us-nones/. ↩
Original work based on exit poll data. Even under the assumption that zero Catholics identified as evangelical on the exit poll, more than four out of ten non-evangelical Protestant respondents voted for Trump. ↩
Russell Contreras, “Americans split on idea of putting immigrants in militarized ‘camps’,” Axios, https://www.axios.com/2024/10/22/trump-mass-deportation-immigrant-camps. ↩
If your response is “yes, my church already has groups doing these things,” then good for you, God bless you, and for heavens’ sake, don’t tell me about it! ↩

All the stupid reasons I didn't transition five years ago

2024-11-29T20:12:10+00:00

Earlier this year, I came out publicly as non-binary. I now use they/them pronouns.

Part of my story was coming to understand myself, and transness, in such a way that it was possible for those two things to intersect. Writing was a big part of that; I wrote a lot of things for myself to help clarify how I was thinking about something.

About a year ago I wrote this to explain one specific aspect of my story: the reason I waited so long to transition. Recently I shared this essay with a close friend — who said it was really clear and that I ought to make it public in the hope of helping someone on their way.

I decided not to soften the way I talk about gender before publishing this, but I understand that no account will be endorsed by all trans people. My goal in sharing this is to be liberatory, not exclusionary; if you feel that your self-understanding as trans or queer doesn’t fit within the vision I relate, I encourage you to interpret me as talking merely about how I’ve come to understand myself, and not giving a theory of gender that is true for all time and all people.

Update: I’m proud of this post and believe it’s still worth reading, but anyone who comes across it should know that I’ve updated some of my thinking, most prominently in the new essay How to change your gender by accident.

In 2018, I began to write about some of my struggles with gender identity. I believed at the time that I was likely non-binary or possibly agender. I said that I was uncomfortable with the way others gender me, and that I wanted to experiment with my presentation. For more than four years, I didn’t act on these feelings, even though doing so would have made me happier. Why not?

The primary reason is that I had accepted a view of gender that led me to assume that I couldn’t be transgender unless I had feelings of a particular, vaguely defined kind. I want to explore my wrong-headed ideas and say exactly what I think is wrong with them, in the hope that reading this will help someone else come to a better understanding of themselves.

The problem started with trying to distinguish sex and gender in a way that made sense of (and endorsed) transgender identities. I would have said something like “sex is a fact about a person’s biology, gender is how they feel about themselves.” So for someone to be female (gendered) is for her to feel herself to be female, for someone to be male is for him to feel himself to be male, and to be non-binary or otherwise gendered is to feel oneself to be something else. Likewise, I understood the term “agender” to indicate the absence of this internal sense.

How did this view of gender cause problems for me?

I believed that transgender people were those whose biological sex and gender were misaligned. On the view of gender identity described above, gender amounts to a complex of feelings, and so to be transgender is to live with an incompatibility between one’s self-concept and one’s biology. On this account, it’s easy to understand why trans people should experience “dysphoria,” a psychological condition where one fails to recognize oneself as the person one believes oneself to be. Dysphoria is the thing that traditionally makes a person aware of their “problem,” without which they would go on being happily cisgendered.

Cisgender people, especially cisgender men, may never notice any misalignment between their “gender identity” in this sense and their bodies (and the social meanings placed on their bodies). Gender therefore functions invisibly for many, appearing to be nothing more than the way other people perceive them.

This leads to a problem. When someone is questioning what they are, how are they to tell whether they are agender because they have no internal body of gendered feelings, or cisgender because they have a gender which functions invisibly for them?

I got stuck here. This may seem odd; after all, I did have feelings not typical of cisgender men — like wanting to experiment with my presentation — why didn’t these feelings settle the question?

I thought that gender had to be an internal fact about a person, not just a matter of how one wants to present. When a trans woman says “I am a woman,” she makes a true statement. Her statement is true (I believed) in virtue of the fact that she is accurately reporting her own self-consistent feelings. Feelings about what, though? This really gets to the heart of the problem. If I wanted to know what my feelings said about me, I needed to know what sorts of feelings counted as feelings of gender.

This is a hopeless dead end. It doesn’t work to say “I feel that I am a woman,” because that reflects belief. That someone believes she is a woman is a good reason for me to believe that she is a woman, but the belief itself does not make her a woman. Beliefs, even about oneself, are not usually self-evidencing. Well-founded beliefs are conclusions on the basis of some further facts. It’s these facts that we’re looking for, and highlighting belief misses the point. For the purpose of understanding myself, I need to know why she believes she is a woman, not just that she does.

Neither does it do to say “I feel like a woman”, because that assumes that I know what women essentially feel like, and that there is a set of things that all and only women feel. Almost certainly there is no such set.

Theories centering one’s feelings about presentation are equally disastrous. Wanting to wear dresses, while uncommon for cisgender men, is merely a preference about gender expression, and a culturally situated form of it at that. One can be male-identified and still enjoy wearing dresses, putting on nail polish, or engaging in other forms of feminine presentation.

Likewise, the feeling that one doesn’t want to take on (or be perceived as taking on) traditionally masculine gender roles doesn’t mean that one is not male. After all, feminism rightly asserts that some gender roles are harmful, and that compulsory roles for women (in particular) are part of a system of gendered oppression. Men and women who don’t desire to participate in their respective gender roles, as traditionally understood, do not by that fact become less legitimately male and female.

The way that gender seemed to come apart in my hands as I played with it left me feeling rudderless. When you start with the assumption that gender is an internal sense, thinking about your own gender critically becomes problematic because attempting to pin down the component elements of that sense runs aground on the fact that they all turn out to be inessential. The things you might want to do and the feelings you have about how others perceive you are elements of personality that anyone is allowed to have, regardless of how they identify.

Taken one way, this might be liberating. If I knew that my voice bothered me and that I wanted to change it, that I wanted to wear nail polish, and style my hair differently, and that having these desires didn’t make me any gender in particular, then why didn’t I just do those things, and stop worrying so much about what “gender in particular” I was?

Truthfully, the reason I didn’t do those things is that like most people I usually do not want to be perceived as gender non-conforming. I don’t want people to look at me and say “there’s a man who’s doing gender wrong, someone breaking the rules.” There are social rewards and punishments for conforming more or less to one’s gender which discipline behavior even when one’s identification with that gender is only marginal. If I was a man, at the end of the day, then I felt I needed to behave as one.

I believed possession of a bona fide gender identity would grant me the right to do these things, perhaps even the responsibility to do them in order to live authentically. To grasp such an identity, by hook or by crook, would make me “legitimately” transgender and thus one of the people allowed, in some situations, to dress how they wish, use public restrooms, or take hormones. Someone could assault me for my identity or reject it as the aberrant expression of psychological abnormality, but they would have a tough time denying that my outward appearance was the unfeigned production of a genuine inner self.

I went looking for my inner self, failed to find one, and in the process missed what my outer self was telling me all along.

The problem with looking for a combination of attitudes, desires, and sentiments that would collectively make me my gender is that the search inevitably ends in failure. To look for a locus of gendered emotions is to seek an essentialist definition of gender, but gender disintegrates in essentialist language.

This fact has been useful for conservatives claiming they oppose “gender ideology” because if you can get your opponent to accept that gender must have an essentialist definition, you can easily talk them into a circle and make them look foolish. If you say “a man is a person who thinks he’s a man,” for example, that’s only useful if you can elaborate on the idea of thinking yourself to be a man in a way that eliminates the circular reference. As I’ve already suggested, I don’t believe that can be done.

Eventually I discovered that many trans people do not describe their experiences this way. Rather than employing concepts like authenticity and metaphors like “born this way,” they emphasize the roles creativity and agency play in determining gender. Poet J. Jennifer Espinoza memorably described her gender as “an idea I carved into the side of the world with fire.” Kate Bornstein wrote “it was the absence of a feeling, rather than its presence, that convinced me to change my gender.”

Trans women often advise questioning people that “if you want to be a girl, you can just be a girl.” I interpreted this metaphorically, much as one does “I used to be a boy, but now I’m a girl,” which one still occasionally hears. On the metaphorical reading, the statement means “if you are a (trans) woman and want to live as one, you can simply transition.” The statement promises you that you’ll see the changes you want on hormone replacement therapy, for example.

I believed that becoming a girl is beyond the remit of mere mortals. If one “becomes” a girl, it is because one was already one. One’s inner self was always tinted pink, so to speak, regardless of how long it took to detect this or what one’s genitalia look like or whether one decides to transition. To be a woman (or man) was to have a set of feelings of that obscure species I never managed to locate within myself.

I don’t accept this reading anymore. I think identity itself is within your grasp, that it is yours for the taking, that if gender is preventing you from living the life you want, trans women want to make clear to you that identification as a woman is available to you if it would help you. They want to tell you that they possess no sine qua non of womanhood that you cannot also have, if you choose. Gender can be seized.

As one trans woman wrote, “you’re trans if you want to be, that’s really it, it’s hard to understand how your intent can shape your life if you’ve never let it but you should try.” I resolved my own difficulties by deciding that what I was didn’t matter; I was going to “do the non-binary thing” because life as a queer person felt more livable to me than than the one I had led prior, and I craved the potential for liberated expression it offered.

The question “what is a man?” has no scientific or objective answer: when I say “a man is anyone who identifies as a man,” I am not making a factual claim but a political one. I am advocating that we confer gendered recognition on a class of people (trans men) whose existence is in doubt. If I identify as a trans man, it is with the hope of receiving exactly this sort of recognition from my friends and neighbors.

So when I say that you can just be a girl, or that I decided I was going to be non-binary, I don’t mean that we can make ourselves a gender by simply choosing it at will. If I ask who the non-binary people are, I’m not asking (at least not directly) who identifies as non-binary. I’m asking who counts as non-binary, and that is a question that can only be answered in a social context, and nothing you or I can bring to the table as individual queer people will settle it.

On the converse, there is nothing you can lack which would (if you had it) make you the gender you want to be. If you’d like to be a man, or become a man, or call yourself a man, there is nothing that cis men have which makes them unquestionably “men” and overrides the role that social determination plays in their identities. This can be liberating; you may have no power over whether others will give you the recognition you want, and you cannot dictate the norms by which trans people are accepted (when they are at all), but you can decide what to do with the situation you face. My decision to identify as non-binary reflects my determination to make use of the limited agency afforded me under a broadly oppressive system of gender that I do not control.

The trans assertion to be one’s gender stakes a claim in an uncertain future. It is an attempt to carve out for oneself a space of greater freedom, a flag-raising that signals to others what one is trying to achieve.

All options, even the one I’ve chosen, have downsides and can be traps in their own ways. I did not continue in my previous identity because I judged this the least happy alternative. A world that rejected transgender identities would harm me not because I’m incapable of performing masculinity but because that performance would be a forced and unhappy one. Transphobia is ultimately about getting to tell people which set of rules they’ll be judged by, even if they choose to break those rules.

One of the complications of non-binary identity is that it does not yet exist in the conceptual apparatus of the English speaking western world. Few people today understand how a non-binary person performs gender. When you introduce yourself as non-binary in most places, you are likely to be read as a more-or-less non-conforming member of the gender that is associated with your presumed “sex”. In queer spaces you may receive recognition, but outside these, you are likely to receive the same treatment that a non-conforming person would. If you’re lucky, and your environment is liberal, a grudging attempt will be made to use your preferred pronouns (as doing otherwise is now considered rude).

As a result, my existence as non-binary is something contentious, something fraught. The transgender movement aims to establish ways for us to achieve recognition from others as people who are neither male or female, but we have not yet succeeded.

Binary transgender identities have slightly more traction because they are not the prospective work of a program to establish new ways for people to be gendered. As someone who understands the sociocultural implications of “male” and “female”, you already possess most of the rules you need to grasp someone’s binary transgendered performance. Binary transgender identities are nevertheless reliant on the political struggle to cement them as viable options for individuals. The success conditions of a gender performance can change over time and may vary intersectionally; the requirements for recognition as a black transgender woman are likely to differ from the expectations placed on a white cisgender woman.

Accepting this account of gender made the difference for me because I found myself unable to take up a label like non-binary when I lacked an understanding of what it meant to do so “authentically.” I couldn’t accept the feelings I did have as determinative without a theory of how those feelings constituted a “truth” of gender. I suspect younger people are less likely to have this problem. You don’t need a theory of gender or sexuality to be trans or gay. You merely need examples of how it is possible for you to live in the world, and feel empowered to imitate them if you find them desirable. I didn’t meet openly trans people until I was in my twenties; for most teenagers, transgender identities are a banal fact of life, one path through their social worlds among many.

I believe questioning people should try to stop worrying about what they are, a search that only leads in circles, and instead ask themselves, perhaps for the first time, what they want. You have agency in this process. Your desires for how you’d like to live matter. Listen to what your body and heart are telling you, and if you’d like to try out being trans, you just can. You don’t need anyone’s permission, certainly not mine, but more importantly maybe not even yours. Policing yourself until you think you’ve earned being trans will drive you to despair. Set fire to your prison and go live.

How to change your gender by accident

2025-05-26T22:17:39+00:00

Amid the excitement of the first months of my transition, I wrote an essay explaining my view of why it took many years from the time I first acknowledged myself to be genderqueer for me to transition. Rereading that essay today, there are portions I find deficient, but I still see much to commend: the dismantling of all forms of gender essentialism, the emphasis on what agency can do for you (and what it can’t), and the idea that non-binary identities serve as a place-holder for something that does not exist within Western social consciousness.

Perhaps most significant for me, however, is not the failure or success of that essay’s central argument so much as its misdiagnosis of the very question I wrote it to answer.

If I knew that my voice bothered me and that I wanted to change it, that I wanted to wear nail polish, and style my hair differently, and that having these desires didn’t make me any gender in particular, then why didn’t I just do those things, and stop worrying so much about what “gender in particular” I was?

Truthfully, the reason I didn’t do those things is that like most people I usually do not want to be perceived as gender non-conforming. I don’t want people to look at me and say “there’s a man who’s doing gender wrong, someone breaking the rules.” There are social rewards and punishments for conforming more or less to one’s gender which discipline behavior even when one’s identification with that gender is only marginal. If I was a man, at the end of the day, then I felt I needed to behave as one.

The most obvious issue with this view is the tension it creates with the essay’s conclusion about the nature of non-binary identity. If (outside of select queer spaces) non-binary identity receives no social recognition, how does it help to assume a non-binary identity if what you’re after is social acceptance of your gender expression? After all, I went on to write:

When you introduce yourself as non-binary in most places, you are likely to be read as a more-or-less non-conforming member of the gender that is associated with your presumed “sex”. In queer spaces you may receive recognition, but outside these, you are likely to receive the same treatment that a non-conforming person would.

This leaves anyone transitioning for the reasons the essay suggests in something of a predicament. The justification for changing your identity is that identity matters for who you’re allowed to be and what you’re allowed to do — or at least, your identity might matter if norms are sustained in which the gender you live under is determined by self-identification. The issue, of course, is that we don’t live in a society where this is the case. So while the argument would perhaps justify non-binary identification as a form of activism, it doesn’t explain why I felt it solved my problem.

To understand what went wrong, consider the centrality of gender identity to my argument.¹ In part of the essay where I explained my early misreading of the trans femme aphorism “if you want to be a girl, you can just be a girl,” I emphasized that my interpretation had changed from a metaphorical one to a literal one. I wrote “I think identity itself is within your grasp, that it is yours for the taking.” While I still believe this, it indicates that I had accepted yet another reading that is not quite literal: if you want to be a girl, you can just identify as a girl. These aren’t the same thing: self-identifying as a woman ought to be sufficient for social recognition as a woman, but currently it is not.

When I elided the difference, I did so in a way that correctly discerned gender identity as a site of agency. By abandoning gender essentialist theories like the idea that all people (or all trans people) directly apprehend their true gender, it became possible for me to accept that I could choose to be trans. This doesn’t mean that I could choose a gender (e.g. literally be a girl), but it did mean that I had every right to call myself one, act like one, and change my body to look like one, if I wanted to. Those are, at any rate, rights trans people are fighting for.

In my essay, I seem to have been led astray by the idea that the opening of this possibility is what made the difference for me. This can’t be completely wrong, after all. It is hard to seriously contemplate taking drugs that will make you grow breasts when you believe there is a literal thing that exists in the brains of women that makes them women, and that you don’t have that thing, even if hypothetically you would endorse allowing anyone who wanted to grow breasts to do so.

Neither, however, can this be the whole story. I began hormone replacement therapy almost immediately after embracing the term “non-binary” for myself. While I certainly had some degree of dysphoria (e.g. strong feelings about losing my hair), this seems like a radical act for someone whose primary concerns were wanting to change some aspects of their gender expression, and who in fact actively did not want to grow breasts. Furthermore, as someone who believed their primary obstacle to be the social stigma around gender nonconformity, it’s unlikely that I could have seen HRT and changing my gender identity as a solution to that.

In fact, even if I was foolish enough to believe that calling myself non-binary would solve this problem for me, I was quickly proven wrong. I struggled with many of the social aspects of transition. I didn’t come out to my family for more than a year after starting hormones. I bought no women’s clothing. I put off voice training despite this being one of my earliest and most consistent sources of dysphoria.

If you want to call my transition an experiment, it certainly looks like a failed one. I was out socially to friends, I put on nail polish sometimes, I wore feminine (men’s) shirts. But I couldn’t bring myself to buy and wear women’s clothes, or work on my voice, and I didn’t practice makeup and certainly never wore it in public, despite these all being things I had set out to do. Was this caused by a fear of judgment that I slowly got over? I don’t think so. Some trans women, either pre-transition or in early transition, buy clothes online and wear them only at home. They practice makeup incessantly until they get up the nerve to wear it out in public. I couldn’t bring myself to do any of this. Why not?

Recall what I wrote:

If I was a man, at the end of the day, then I felt I needed to behave as one.

Maybe we need to consider the simplest hypothesis: the reason why so late into medically transitioning I still felt compelled to behave as a man is that I was a man — just one who was uniquely unhappy about it.

Obviously, this is a statement that requires some clarification. Have I taken up an essentialist account of gender once again? Do I think that I possessed a subconscious sense that I was a man which overruled my foolish attempt to identify as non-binary? No, I don’t. In suggesting that I was a man, I mean to say something extremely specific.

I presented gender norms in All the stupid reasons as a set of external impositions on human behavior. They operate through systems of shame and reinforcement, reward and punishment. People like me feel trapped by the oppression these forces represent, and the apparent solution, however easy or difficult in any particular case, is a quasi-voluntaristic claiming of a new gender identity that allows what one wants to do. While this doesn’t imply choice of gender (which is understood to be the system of social control as a whole, not individual identification), it nevertheless suggests that individuals are usually conscious of the ways they are harmed by gender oppression, and can take steps to remedy this if they are willing and able.

This now strikes me as hopelessly simplistic. After all, many people do experience gender as if it were a real thing that existed inside them. They’re not making that experience up and they deserve to be respected. Gender does not operate as an external force that controls what you are allowed to do. Rather, it structures from the inside your very desire — what you want to do.

When I say I was a man, then, I mean this as a shorthand way of saying that my subjectivity was (in a complicated and internally contradictory way) a masculine one.² I became a man not by forcibly adhering to an external set of norms, but by embodying to the best of my ability a set of norms that I myself was primarily responsible for enforcing.

None of this undermines the wish I had to live differently, to escape the box I found myself inside. I’m certainly not making the claim that I was/am male simpliciter in an essentialist fashion, and even more emphatically am not saying this experience is typical of trans people. Yet I could not escape from the controlling logic of masculinity because it was not an external force, but was something inside me. My transness consisted of the fact that it was not exclusively inside me to the point of crowding out all other desires, experiences, and possibilities, and this is why the agential idea of transition held out a light. I existed at an odd intersection of identities, problems, and experiences.

As I have indicated, a change in my gender self-identification alone did not resolve this dilemma. What changed everything was something unexpected, life-altering, and unbelievably profound that happened remarkably quickly: I became a woman.

This occurred over a period of several months. I went from passing as unchanged from my former self with family to being seen profoundly differently by most strangers. It started with achieving enough breast growth that it was clearly visible under any clothing; around the same time I finally dragged myself to a laser hair removal clinic and pierced my ears. Within several weeks, people whom I had been out to for ages began to spontaneously treat me differently.

It is hard to convey to anyone who hasn’t been through this experience what it is like to have people suddenly stop behaving as if you are a man. One evening I went out to dinner with my partner (I wore a women’s sweater) and the nice middle-aged woman who was our waitress greeted us with “how are you ladies tonight?” and I felt myself change in response to that. There’s no other way to put it.

One might suppose that HRT itself solved my problem by changing my body so that I no longer had to fear looking like a man in women’s clothing. This can’t be right, because I still have this fear; I think all these people knew or could guess I was trans. The difference is that while I previously felt an unexplained sense of shame about presentation that was “too” feminine, in mere weeks I began to feel that exact sense about presentation that was “too” masculine. The experience of having others perceive you to be a woman changes your subjectivity, even if they know that you are trans or your body looks “male” in some way.³ My behavior changed in spite of my anxiety about how I’m perceived, not as a result of it going away.

In my case, instincts I didn’t know I possessed automatically activated themselves. Vocal training techniques that I had experimented with only in private began to appear uncalled for in my speech. I suddenly couldn’t bear to wear anything but women’s clothing. I now go out shopping for clothes carrying a purse and wearing makeup, and think absolutely nothing of it.

These changes aren’t all positive. After years of not understanding why some women do it, I suddenly feel compelled to keep my legs shaved. I find myself putting on mascara before I run errands. I’m absolutely not proud of this. I would never say it makes me more of a woman to do it. But something inside me makes it really hard to live any other way, in exactly the same way that as a “man” I self-enforced masculine normative behavior. I’m not under the delusion this is natural — you’re not a real woman for having noticeable breasts, pierced ears, softer and brighter speech, shaved legs, and so forth. Neither was I born, so far as I can tell, with a desire to do any of this. I’m driven to do it by an unseen and scarcely resisted force.

Likewise, I found myself slipping into binary feminine social roles that I previously took feminism to question. I pointed this out in my essay:

After all, feminism rightly asserts that some gender roles are harmful, and that compulsory roles for women (in particular) are part of a system of gendered oppression.

Yet without consciously intending to do so, I’ve ended up taking on caring responsibilities. I sit and talk to friends who are mothers at length about their experiences, their philosophies of child development, and so on. I adopt rituals for maintaining and strengthening social bonds. Again, I should emphasize, I don’t see these things as natural; even the estrogen in my blood and brain did not (alone) cause this shift. I take a feminist view of these questions that is essentially the same as before. It’s just that I cannot deny that my subjectivity has been profoundly altered.

Of course, as a non-binary person, this is in a sense the funniest possible outcome. I am a woman — just one who is uniquely amused about it. It’s comical that while my experience is sure to make transphobes angry, I’m not particularly thrilled about it either. It happened and there’s not a lot I can do about it, except detransition, which I positively don’t want to and am not going to do.

It remains unclear, given my rejection of essentialist notions of gender, why I lighted on non-binary as my identity of choice around the time my transition began. I could not, after all, point to any internal sense that I wasn’t a woman to rule out such a designation. Likewise, why do I continue to adhere to this identity now?⁴

One thing to make clear is that it’s not because I’m unhappy. Taking hormones profoundly altered my life for the better, even if it was not estrogen itself that made most of the difference in the end. Being a woman is working for me pretty well to this point! There are certainly other women (both trans and cis) who feel about the same about being a woman that I do, so I don’t believe I’m such an outlier that I don’t belong in the category.

Recall that for me, non-binary identity is unique in that unlike male and female identities, it points at something that does not yet properly exist. Calling oneself non-binary signals something about what one is trying to achieve, but in and of itself cannot summon into being a set of social norms and conditions of subjection from the void. This is why transitioning did not make me non-binary despite my positive self-identification as such; instead it made me a woman.

Thus, my taking on the label of non-binary does not reflect identification with a concrete way of life, a psychic “identity,” but instead corresponds to what I called my sense of living “at an odd intersection of identities, problems, and experiences.” It is queer to feel one’s gendered subjectivity change; it is confusing and wondrous to know that you are one of the people for whom this can (apparently) happen; it is funny and sometimes alienating to find yourself subject to a whole new set of social norms you previously professed no attachment to. Truthfully, I wish I was not trapped by gender in the way it appears I am. I feel envy toward people who pull off androgynous looks, and I hope one day to develop the bravery to nonconform much more than I do.

It’s this bundle of facts and experiences, some of which I recognized prior to transition and others I identified only recently, that motivates me to call myself non-binary. I suspect that there are many transfeminine people with similar experiences who reach this point, decide they’re basically okay with a female identity, change their pronouns, and move on with life.⁵ That’s a choice I think is entirely legitimate. I don’t think that choice is for me, although on the other hand I tend not to volunteer pronouns and let people assume I’m a woman. Maybe I wonder if this is not all a little too conscious for me — if a genderqueer identity is not made inevitable by reason of my incessant analysis.

Being as open as I can about these experiences, and writing this as an update to my previous essay, is something I think benefits questioning people. Perhaps the biggest problem I had before I transitioned was that I had notions of transgender experience taken entirely from popular culture’s translation and appropriation of trans life. Coming to see that one does not have to feel “born this way” allowed me to think that I too was transgender, and what I hope to have shared in this essay is an aspect of transfeminine experience that I have not (to date) seen expressed in this language or with this depth.

In this essay, I consistently use the term “gender identity” to denote patterns of gender identification — that is to say, to the acts of an individual that explicitly express a form of attachment to one set of gender norms rather than another. I think it is useful to clarify that while identifications can be motivated by a deeply felt sense that a certain gender is right, and that this sense may or may not be caused by a hypothesized “gender core” within the body/mind of the individual, I am neither incorporating nor assuming these meanings within my use of the term. ↩
I am doing my best to present this idea without too much jargon, but the ideas of subjectivity and the related words subjection and subjectivation are too useful to refuse. The term subjectivity refers to one’s lived experience — your inner reality of ideas, feelings, drives, and desires. For most social theorists, subjectivity does not denote a space of individual freedom, independence, or agency. In Foucault, for examples, juridical systems of power produce subjects with a given subjectivity through regulation. In Judith Butler’s work, gendered subjectivation is produced through the embodiment of gender norms in an active and reiterative process. As a norm, this means that gender is ever only “tenuously embodied by any particular social actor.” (Butler, Undoing Gender) When I describe myself as “male,” then, I am highlighting that my effort to embody certain masculine gender norms throughout my life did not only produce a feeling of alienation in me (though it did), it was also successful in producing some degree of masculine subjectivity. This subjectivity is what I conjecture was at work in my struggle to transition. ↩
I think self-recognition likely plays some role as well, as I began to see a different sort of person in the mirror every morning. It is hard to assess how much effect this had, however. ↩
By this I mean that I explicitly call myself non-binary and state a preference for they/them pronouns when asked. ↩
If you related to this essay at all, please write me and tell me about it! ↩

Lifting

2025-05-28T02:42:36+00:00

There are basically three arguments that creatives make against the use of AI in their industries.

First. The argument that AI will replace their jobs, and that’s bad, because then they won’t have jobs. I find this sympathetic in the sense that I do agree that the outcome would be bad for them, and I think this is unfortunate and unfair. No one deserves to go hungry or lose their home because of disruption in their industry. As a society, we can and should do better. But as an argument against using AI to do creative jobs it doesn’t hold water - it’s just Luddite special pleading.

Second. The argument that it is impossible for AI to replace their jobs with anything but a pale imitation, because humans have some capacity that computers don’t, thus AI should not replace creative jobs because doing do would degrade human art. This argument finds support in the real fact that many uses of AI today are the result of corporations replacing pricey human labor with something ultimately not capable of doing the same job. However as a categorical argument it is wholly unconvincing. AI is a tool that in many cases can reduce the labor power required to produce the same product, and in the future (which is what most creatives are really worried about) shows promise of being able to do much more than that.

Third. The argument that making art is good, thus AI should not replace creative work because the result would be fewer people making art.

This argument I fully endorse. I think it’s bad if there are fewer people making art even if the result is that we have more and better art.

However, AI is not the reason that fewer people will be making art. Capitalism is. People are paid a living wage (well, an extremely fortunate subset are paid a living wage) to make art because art is profitable. Many people are required to make art because our tools for doing so (the means of production) are still relatively nascent. But that might change. The labor time required to make a Marvel movie might decrease in the same way the number of farmers required to harvest a corn field decreased.

So to have a problem with people not being able to spend their time on things that are (by their own lights) worthwhile is to have a problem with capitalism. The third argument isn’t about AI per se.

This view suggests a dichotomy between two categories of AI use.

AI used as a tool to increase productivity — meaning that less human labor time is required to produce the same commodities.
AI used to replace human activity that people themselves find worthwhile.

Most debates over AI conflate these two perspectives. For instance, consider this Github comment by eevee:

“I’m a programmer because I enjoy programming” certainly makes rational sense as the perspective of someone with no interest in using AI. Yet the perspective of most programmers as well as every single software company in the world is something very different: “I’m a programmer because it produces a valuable commodity.” Eevee’s comment reflects a failure to consider this view, or more accurately, the two sides are talking entirely past one another.

Take Amazon as an example of what I mean. The New York Times recently reported that programming jobs at Amazon have begun to expect AI use while simultaneously increasing productivity demands on employees. Rather than a creative activity, Amazon programmers are now doing “warehouse work.” You might argue that Amazon is expecting the impossible, and you might be right, but let’s take a long term view here: the reason why so many people work in Amazon’s warehouses for $15/hr is that warehouses are more productive than mom-and-pop stores. If producing code with AI is more efficient than writing it by hand (well, writing it with autocomplete and IntelliSense), businesses that use AI will outcompete those that don’t.

So while I dislike the idea of fewer people spending their time on creative labor (view 3), I disagree with Eevee in that I don’t think the fact that creative activity is inherently valuable means this won’t happen. That’s because under Capitalism the fact that art-making promotes human flourishing does not bear on the reasons we actually make it. All technology, furthermore, disrupts existing ways of life that some find valuable under a Capitalist mode of production. Like Tom Joad, we may appreciate when “folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build,” but modern technology resulted in a world where almost no one lives that way. The fact that homegrown food tastes better, hand-drawn animation looks better, and apps “coded with ❤️” by humans work better doesn’t stem the tide of this change.

Over on Galactic Underworlds, Beatrice Marovich writes about how teaching during a time of rapid AI expansion feels like watching the tide come in. She wonders whether the death of literacy and writing skill could mean a return to a more oral culture — in other words, a shift that has no ultimate moral significance even if it causes her grief. I think this, and not any other, is the perspective from which it makes sense to ask whether we should just give up and use AI tools for anything they’re good at.

After all, as I’ve said, the third argument against AI isn’t really about AI. Capitalism prefers mindless jobs because these jobs produce more and better output than jobs that rely on individuality and creativity. If “warehouse” programming is more efficient, it’s also inevitable. Hobbyists can continue doing what they want in their free time, but like the lost art of raising a roof, creative programming may dwindle in relevance over time.

In the mean time, however, I think a pragmatic stance is suggested: we can evaluate the tradeoffs involved. When it comes to our work, we likely don’t have much choice; whether we’re allowed to refuse AI use at work depends on our employer, and equally directly, on the level of productivity we’re expected to achieve. When we have a choice, however, how are we to decide? Rather than being all-in on AI or rejecting it outright, we can weigh efficiency gains (meaning we can do more things we enjoy) against the extent to which we enjoy the process itself. The solution, in summary: sometimes AI.¹

Having presented what I take to be the best argument for a middle ground, I want to square it against the fact that I do not use AI as often as this reasoning would suggest. What’s gone wrong?

Let’s work through an example. Someone told me recently that they pass every email they write through ChatGPT. The justification for this in terms of the argument above is straightforward: writing emails to people is not fun. Neither this person nor I enjoys sitting around worrying about whether we seem nice enough or used an em dash correctly.

Despite this, I was rather horrified. I don’t think I had realized just how much other people were using AI (every other person in the room agreed that they do something similar). For the record, I have never utilized AI in any capacity for anything I’ve written.² I don’t enjoy writing much more than anyone else, so why not increase my efficiency and finish the process as quickly as I can? I write unassisted because this means doing the work, and doing the work makes me a better writer. I’m going to call this the Lifting principle.

The Lifting principle: increasing the difficulty of a task makes you better at it.

That a type of work is difficult and boring does not mean it is worthless drudgery. Writing benefits you in ways other than by being an inherently enjoyable thing to do. Even if AI replaces literacy with oral culture, this will degrade our capacity to think because we don’t know how to think that way, not because oral culture is inherently better or worse. Ted Chiang’s short story The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling provides an example of a civilization that experiences the reverse, and the effects are just as catastrophic because they happen too quickly for intellectual life to adapt.

Writing presents a form of intellectual exercise that we lack the capacity to replace at present. Speaking personally, I don’t know how to think without writing. I blog, despite rarely hearing from readers (hi!), because it helps me refine my thoughts. I’m a better thinker and even a better person because of this. This is one reason I find the ongoing death of blogs so tragic; they provide one of the few opportunities outside of academia for ordinary people to sit down and seriously think about something. And while education itself at least provides the opportunity, the advent of AI means that fewer students are availing themselves of it. The gym is still full, but everyone is lifting less weight.

Unlike the argument from enjoyment, this view bypasses the efficiency calculus entirely. AI might compensate for making a given task less fun by drastically reducing its duration, but it cannot help you when the inefficiency of the task is the point. When Bertrand Russell imagined a society of leisure in 1932, he indicated that it required much more education than previously common, and credits the leisure class of the past with most of the writing, philosophizing, and reforming. A century later, technology has begun to replace not only labor but leisure as well. We come home from our jobs too tired to lift; the robot will do our exercises for us.

I want more terrible blogs nobody reads in the same way I want more awful music on SoundCloud for nobody to listen to. Creativity contributes to human flourishing not merely as an inherently valuable activity, but as a means by which we improve ourselves.

Some people have moral objections against using AI, which is one reason this argument might not go through. There are three basic categories of moral objection: (a) AI use contributes to climate change, (b) AI use constitutes theft of the intellectual property of others, and (c) AI use constitutes plagiarism.

I think the energy use argument against AI is greatly overstated. The argument from intellectual property I take to be completely bogus; as a society we sustain intellectual property because it’s pragmatically useful, not because my authorship of this blog post (for example) morally contaminates your use of ChatGPT to rewrite an email because OpenAI scraped it. Last, plagiarism can be avoided by clearly acknowledging and citing the LLM used to generate any substantive amount of text.

I’m aware that some people disagree with one or more of these claims in good faith, but moral issues with AI are not the point of this post, and I’ve left this in a footnote to try to avoid getting sidetracked. ↩
I do have interest in using it as a grammar and style checking tool, but haven’t come across good ways to do this yet. ↩

Trans Futures, Trans Pasts

2025-06-04T19:58:27+00:00

“The diagnosis of gender dysphoria requires that a life takes on a more or less definite shape over time; a gender can only be diagnosed if it meets the test of time.” — Judith Butler, Undoing Gender¹

How does one become trans?

The question strikes many of us as already troubled. Does one, after all, become trans, or does one discover that one is trans? To question whether a metaphor like “discovery” is apt or inapt presupposes a standard of assessment for narratives of transness. Such a standard could amount to a theory of gender, but might instead imply only that some ways of describing the formation of trans identity are more accurate than others.

I wish to challenge the idea of a standard with the suggestion that narratives of transition need not get at any underlying truth (about gender, about psychology, or about anything else) in order to be valuable. Rather, trans narratives are valuable as structurings of the past insofar as they prove liberatory.² Thus, describing one metaphor as more “apt” than some other makes a mistake, and furthermore, the feeling that some metaphor adequately captures one’s experience as a trans person does not constitute evidence for some or another theory of gender.

Butler’s criticism of gender dysphoria as a clinical diagnosis provides a useful starting point. They point out that accessing medical transition within many healthcare regimes requires submitting to the diagnosis, attempting to embody it in oneself, in order to make one’s gender legible to psychologists. Trans activists have attacked this form of gatekeeping, and in some cases have succeeded in promoting standards of care that admit greater agency.

Yet in communicating ourselves to each other, or collectively communicating ourselves to cis people, we remain similarly beholden to narratives of transness that as individuals we can never fully embody. Archetypes of trans experience make us intelligible to one another and to ourselves. One must have a trans past to have a trans future.

Sometimes these narratives take the form of metaphors for trans experience, and other times they behave like metaphors in that a label describing a shared experience stands in for the complex lived reality of individual trans people. Let’s consider several of the shared narratives of transness that operate in this fashion.

The metaphor of the egg, especially in trans femme circles, provides one possible narrative structure for a trans past. If I was always a girl, how do I communicate the how and why of my long period of confusion to others? If I might be a girl and I’m not sure, how do I think about my own uncertainty, or “brain worms,” in a way that doesn’t invalidate my potential identity before it is fully formed? The egg model suggests that trans identities grow over time, pushing outwards against a shell made of doubt and repression.

In this way, the egg metaphor explains to others why one has only recently come to understand the preexisting truth of one’s gender. Cis-identified people are concomitantly invested with alternative selves which can be imagined, built up, even named perhaps, without threat to the identity of the “cis” individual. “If I were a boy,” one says, “I would do this and wear that, but I’m not, this is only a fantasy.” Eventually the “but I’m not” becomes “alas I’m not,” and soon after that the egg cracks.

When trans people try to break someone free of their shell, one often hears statements of the sort “cis people don’t spend all day wishing they were the other gender.” This statement is logically inconsistent, of course; the belief that one’s activity was mere fantasy disarmed the incipient threat to one’s identity in order to allow one to get to this point. This logical inconsistency itself is part of the humor of egg culture: “very cis of you.” Perhaps too savvily, we might instead say “this pretense of fantasy has taken you as far as it can — it’s time to let it go.” From this perspective, to call someone an egg is harmful not because there is something wrong with implying someone might be trans, but because doing so collapses the vital gap opened up by fantasy which supplies the entire liberatory potential of the metaphor. If you believe you’re an egg, you’ve in some sense already accepted that you’re trans and so the fantasy serves no purpose.

The egg metaphor illustrates one important aspect of trans self-narrativization: it’s necessarily retrospective. One cannot believe that one is currently an egg, because an egg is a trans person who doesn’t know they’re trans. Rather, the metaphor renders one’s past coherent through a particular logic. It composes a rational history of the trans self, a self constructing a potential life before it could consider making that life real. Without the metaphor, one could certainly live this experience of fantasy and denial, but the story would lack a linchpin: one could not, from an abyss of self-doubt, perceive the shared experience that “egg” captures and which promises to make sense of one’s predicament.

While egg narratives structure trans pasts around themes of denial and fantasy, a repression narrative seeks out evidence of queerness that was discarded from the official account of one’s life. Narratives of repression have the potential to liberate because our constructed histories are always overdetermined. Any rationalization of one’s past always leaves a surplus — a part of what happened that is incoherent within the story yet nonetheless real. Surplus from the past always has the potential to resurface. If I have forgotten wearing dresses as a child, and one day seriously consider the possibility that I am a woman, I might recall this memory and have it take on significance it did not originally have. It would become a sign, in the sense one means when one says “the signs were there all along.”

To recognize that what one took to be surplus could be a sign is to see within oneself the potential for an entirely different life. But to do so is not to already realize that life, or even to come to believe that it ought to be realized. An actual memory of mine serves as a useful example: I once imagined a young child calling me “mommy,” and this momentary fantasy had so much unexpected emotional weight for me that I immediately burst into tears. I have no plans to be a mother, and so this strange experience simply doesn’t have a place in the way I narrate my life. It goes into the surplus of memories with latent and incongruous significance. If I begin to look for reasons to believe that I ought to become a mother (or identify as a woman for that matter) this memory might be a part of a story I tell about why.

Narratives of repression orient the trans subject toward the past’s forgotten alternatives rather than a fantasized set of possibilities, but the goal is the same: to hear in the cacophony of lived experience a recognizable melody. I can choose ways to tell my story that feel more authentic, or are more legible to others, or are more likely to get me what I want from the medical establishment, but they are not by virtue of any of those metrics uniquely true descriptions of my past. In telling my story, even if it is a story intended to make sense only to me, I rely on archetypes, on logics of how it makes sense to be in and move through the world.

We regularize our identities by relating our present selves to a constructed past that serves to retroactively predict the changes we underwent. Your ability to see yourself as trans, communicate your trans identity to others, and convince the psychiatric profession of its authenticity may rest on your success in discovering within yourself a recognizable trans history, in telling with your own body the same story told by others. I wonder, as Butler does, whether this does not make us “more regular and coherent than we necessarily want to be.”³

As part of this process, one must find a place for otherwise unexplained experiences such as dreams, feelings, and urges. One looking to self-diagnose as transgender might take these disparate events and infer from them the brain’s “true” sex, validating the choice to transition and seek treatment if needed. If one is really a man, or really a woman, then one possesses an account of why transition is medically necessary, and why conversion therapy practices are doomed to achieve no more than psychological harm.

As with the practice of inferring from observed behavior and preferences to an innate psychological foundation (an Enneagram type, for example), the power of brain sex narratives lies in their ability to read tenuous aspects of the self (e.g. intrusive thoughts about living as a man) as symptomatic of unchanging and irresistible drives. This underwrites the useful feeling that one must transition, regardless of consequences or criticism. Notice that brain sex behaves in this case like a metaphor; we take an archetypic concept that we already understand (being driven to do something by an inexorable force) as a means of representing that which we grasp only with great difficulty (the complex lived experience and contradictions of an individual trans person).

On the other hand, take a trans narrative leading in essentially the opposite direction — one that is maximally agential. “I felt trapped in my former life,” one might say, “and I chose to transition because I just felt that living as a woman would be better.” The metaphor of escape from entrapment centers the desires of the trans subject and creates space for others to do likewise; “if you want to be a girl, you can just be a girl.” In locating the reason to transition in an escape from an unhappy life, the metaphor has clear potential for liberation in that one is not required to discover a truth of gender within oneself, and one is thereby freed from policing oneself over whether one’s motives are valid.

Individuals, of course, may or may not find any particular metaphor useful. Metaphors of entrapment and agency, for example, are likely to help only if one is prepared to take drastic measures. Most of the time, individuals embody one gender norm or another. When I lived as a man, I performed masculinity; being trans doesn’t mean that I was bad at it. Walking away from the default course for one’s life usually requires something more than the mere feeling that one is stuck in a particular life or a desire for the trappings of some other.

More importantly, the potential of these self-histories to be liberating is always reduced by tying them to a theory of gender, particularly one that is supposed to encompass all of trans experience. As an example, consider Julia Serano’s internalist account of gender in her book Whipping Girl, ⁴ wherein gender, while not understood in essentialist terms, nevertheless involves a subconscious sense of one’s true sex. The typical experience of a “transsexual” ⁵ person, on this view, is a slowly building sense of wrongness and sadness in and with their body until they recognize and accept transition as the solution.

Taken on its own, this is a reasonable hypothesis that we might argue about or try to examine empirically. Subconscious mental attributes are just that — subconscious — and much more work is needed to explicate from this theoretical perspective how subconscious sex determines the subjective experiences of the diverse trans community. The danger enters when, acting on the basis of this theory, we take the narrative of subconscious sex to be the normative description of the trans experience. Serano is careful, but she approximates this error at several points, as when she proposes the following bargain:

If I offered you ten million dollars under the condition that you live as the other sex for the rest of your life, would you take me up on the offer?⁶

Serano finds that nearly every cis person who hears this question says that they would reject the offer. This doesn’t surprise me at all, because I would have done likewise — even with my first dose of estradiol under my tongue. When I was considering HRT, I stood staring at myself in the bathroom mirror for a long time, imagining what I would look like with breasts. The truth is that I really hated the idea; having them on my body felt wrong. Now, two and a half years hence, I have breasts. If you offered me ten million dollars to have them permanently removed, I would turn you down. I would fight you to keep what now feels like a normal part of my body.

I reject the idea that my previous feelings were wrong or misguided, or that I was somehow repressing a desire to have breasts even while beginning HRT. Perhaps even the opposite is true. It is possible (though unlikely) that a counterfactual version of me who decides not to transition would look back on this same memory as a crucial sign that transitioning would have been the wrong decision, and even happily identify as male. The significance of this moment is determined not merely by what literally happened in that instant but by my present efforts to contextualize it within a total narrative of my life.

Serano argues that cis people turn down the offer because it allows their conscious minds to apprehend their subconscious sex in a way that ordinarily they could not do. I think this is a mistake, and propose that the majority of presently cis-identified people who will eventually transition five or more years in the future would also turn her down, and for much the same reasons that cis people do. To be sure, many trans people do arrive at their identities via experiences of dysphoria, and the profound sense of wrongness they feel with their bodies can appear to them to suggest an innate and immutable sense that they are or ought to be a particular sex, which in turn yields a persuasive reason to transition. We can affirm their experience, however, without assuming that feeling subconscious sex to be an apt narrative framework for one’s self-history implies that one has observed the very thing that makes someone trans or cis according to our preferred theory of gender.

Because Serano conflates these two claims, her language takes on a gatekeeping tone:

… if they [presumed cis people] are not battling a constant barrage of subconscious thoughts about being the other sex, then their subconscious sex most likely matches their physical one.⁷

This, as I see it, welds the metaphor directly to the theory in a way that vitiates its potential to liberate. The clear implication is that the normative trans experience involves understanding one’s own transness through the lens of subconscious thoughts and images which reveal who one “really” is. People not fitting this pattern are, at the very least, presumed to be cis.

Serano goes on to write that “virtually all transsexuals describe experiencing a profound, inexplicable, intrinsic self-knowing regarding their own gender”.⁸ This statement is not just exclusionary.⁹ It actually empties the idea of subconscious sex of its explanatory power; rather than a hypothesized invisible force driving feelings of dysphoria in many trans people (and perhaps other effects in some) it is something that trans people literally, even consciously, apprehend.¹⁰ The view makes it difficult to understand how a questioning person who will come to identify as trans could ever be confused about their own feelings.

Even if it were true that every transsexual person found the subconscious sex narrative an apt one for their experience, to infer a normative status for that narrative would require circular reasoning. The trans people who are able to exist, who are able to find themselves, who are able to transition in the social world we inhabit are at best a subset of those who might benefit from transition in some other, better world. In order to choose transition, a person must have a plausible discursive path to coming to see themselves as trans, which means that the preferencing of some trans narratives as normative performs a filtering function on who survive to tell their stories in the first place.¹¹

The danger, then, in judging metaphors of transness apt or inapt is that we run the risk of thinking they can tell us the truth of the trans experience. I don’t think we have that kind of access, not even to our own thoughts. It takes effort — difficult conscious work — to consider the possibility that one ought to transition. This work can be made easier when it is possible to situate yourself as a potential trans person in a discourse that includes other trans people and their stories, and it can be made harder when any one story is taken to directly and uncritically reflect a truth of gender by which others are to be judged.

In Undoing Gender, Butler criticizes at length the process by which gender is diagnosed in psychiatry. Yet much of their criticism applies equally to the norms of intelligibility by which we trans people judge ourselves. Just as the clinical concept of gender dysphoria forces one to subject oneself to the diagnosis, the potential problem with trans narratives is that when they are read as normative descriptions of the trans experience, the questioning person must force their desire, their sense of self, and their past to fit a preexisting narrative in order to see themselves as trans.

Celebrate trans narratives, then, when they liberate queer people from oppression and repression. But hold them loosely. In understanding that they do not reflect any final truth of the trans experience, we make space for those who will follow us to tell their own stories. We should think of trans pasts as possibilities that like trans futures one can try on. They are strategies for rethinking the significance of one’s history in order to better understand what one wants to do and who one wants to be.

Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, 1st ed. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004), 81. ↩
Liberation can mean many different things and the practical struggle for liberation involves an intersectional focus on the concrete challenges we face as a queer community, but for my purpose here, trans liberation means a world in which every person who would not be harmed by transitioning or would be harmed by not transitioning is given the mental resources necessary to realize this, anyone who desires to transition can do so, and trans people live under conditions of full social equality with cis people. ↩
Butler, Undoing Gender, 81. ↩
The majority of this essay was written before I had finished Whipping Girl. Having finished it as I write this, I found the last chapter to contain some statements that I must address before publishing this essay, because I take them to be horrifically transphobic. I can make no assessment of Serano’s intent, but if she has clarified this elsewhere I believe these additional words can only serve as a revision to what the text itself appears to say on a responsible reading.

The 20th chapter of the book is dedicated to the idea that the word transgender has become too “inclusive,” and that this has marginalized the perspectives of transsexuals, particularly trans women. I disagree with Serano, but there is at least some possibility of justifying this view: it’s certainly possible that the perspectives of people who choose not to medically transition have become dominant in trans spaces, to the point that desiring bodily transformation is itself taken to be a fault in the individual. If this were to happen in any particular queer or trans community, it would indeed reflect a grave issue. Perhaps Serano has even experienced this among queer people in San Francisco.

However, this is not, or not only, the justification she gives. Rather, she claims that it is lesbians in particular who are the cause of this problem. On her account, lesbians take up space within the transgender community because of:

(1) previously lesbian-identified people transitioning to male, (2) dykes who now take on genderqueer or other FTM spectrum identities, and (3) non-trans queer women who seek a voice in the transgender community because they are partnered to FTM spectrum individuals. (p. 355)

It is these people (at least, these are the only examples she gives) who are responsible for “the fact that cissexual queers now dominate transgender and queer/trans communities,” and ultimately for the “cissexualization” of trans community and identity.

To talk about Whipping Girl as if it were primarily a theory of gender or an account of transmisogyny without addressing these words would be to wrongly neglect the harm they do. Insofar as I have any right to be heard with a trans woman’s voice, I resolutely deny that lesbian-identified people who transition and become male are taking space from me, I oppose the implication that they are less legitimately transgender than I am, and I affirm that people with non-binary genderqueer identities are my trans friends and comrades who share so much more experience with me than medical-transition exceptionalism could ever suppress. ↩
Serano frequently uses the word “transsexual” to describe herself and a portion of other trans people. While I have no objection to the term, its use creates two problems within the text.

First, transsexual is given a specific meaning that is external, objective, and descriptive. Transsexual people are “those who live as members of the sex other than the one they were assigned at birth.” (pg. 25) I, for example, am a transsexual woman. However, the abbreviation “trans” is given a meaning far more specific and limited than its common use: trans describes

people who (to varying degrees) struggle with a subconscious understanding or intuition that there is something “wrong” with the sex they were assigned at birth and/or who feel that they should have been born as or wish they could be the other sex. (pg. 27)

The issue is not just that the terminology can be confusing (in that it stands in stark contrast to the ubiquitous modern use of “trans” as an umbrella term). Rather, the issue is that Serano’s use of “trans” has almost no daylight with how she understands transsexual people. As a result, the idea of transsexuality slips throughout the book into meaning something that is instead internal, subjective, and based in identity.

Second, a strict reading of how Serano understands transsexuality suggests that it strongly contrasts with the concept of gender identity. But this clear cut divide is problematized by the idea of “subconscious sex”. Certainly, it sometimes seems that subconscious sex really is on the “sex” side of the divide — Serano describes the feeling of wanting to be female as existing prior to her having the sense that she is a woman. But on the other hand, this distinction disappears when she writes (for example) that social constructionists “[dumb] down gender by excluding subconscious sex” (pg. 150) and adds that “virtually all” transsexual people have a strong intuitive sense of their gender — one that seems to come from their sense of subconscious sex.

For these reasons, the word “transsexual” creates problems for anyone wanting to talk about Serano’s work charitably and reasonably, as I do. If you take the word and its definition at face value, it obscures some of the issues that I raise in this essay, because it involves no inherent assumptions about how transsexuals conceive of gender. On the other hand, if you ignore Serano’s distinctions between “transsexual”, “transgender”, and “trans”, you open yourself up to the criticism that you’ve misread her work.

In this essay, I stick mostly to the language of “transgender” although I have tried to do so guardedly. I believe this is justified because of the overlap I’ve described above: frequently, even when describing transsexual experience, Serano lapses into the language of gender, and I don’t think this is coincidental. But I acknowledge this has one significant limitation: insofar as I critique Serano as “exclusionary”, this comes with the significant caveat that she does sometimes try to carve out space for “cissexuals” with non-cisgender identities. ↩
Julia Serano, Whipping Girl, 3rd ed (ebook). (New York, NY: Seal Press, 2024), 87. ↩
Serano, Whipping Girl, 89. ↩
Serano, Whipping Girl, 151. ↩
I confess that I can’t critique Serano’s view in any objective fashion, if for no other reason than that the clear implication of this statement is that I am not trans (despite literally transitioning and living for most intents and purposes as a woman). In addition to the difficulty of considering a possibility that would void a large portion of my identity, if the implication is correct then I am yet another “cissexual” speaking about trans experience with no right to do so. Of course, if the definition of “transsexual” is so circumscribed as to exclude anyone who doesn’t feel they have a subconscious sex, it should be no surprise that all of them agree that they do. ↩
Serano sometimes vacillates between different ways of expressing the same view. On the one hand, her sense of her sex is “subconscious”. She even writes, in a passage that resembles statements I’ve made about gender identity and essentialism, that no language suffices to “accurately capture or convey my personal understanding of these events”. (pg. 80) At these points it really can seem that subconscious sex is just a hypothesis that happens to explain her subjective experience very well. On the other hand, as I’ve indicated, she’s comfortable with this metaphor to the point she often seems to encounter it directly in “subconscious thoughts” (unclear what those are) or even as an “intrinsic self-knowing”. So, charitably, one probably should not assume that Serano intends to be quite as exclusionary as the literal implication of her words would suggest.

Moreover, when Serano begins to describe her conscious experiences, rather than her inferred subconscious ones, she and I become nearly indistinguishable. She points to “body feelings” that changed in response to taking hormones, as well as the social implications: “I experienced a dramatic change. It felt like the world suddenly shifted around me. Almost overnight, I sensed that everything was very different.” (pg. 218) I’ve felt that!. She and I have shared this absurdly specific experience that resists being put into words. In fact it was precisely this sense that resulted in her decision (after several years of transition) to identify as a woman, rather than as genderqueer.

What seems to separate Serano and I is not what we’ve directly experienced (who knows, maybe I’ll find myself comfortable with simply “woman” instead of “genderqueer” one day too), but rather her decision to read her own history through the lens of subconscious sex, and from there to infer that it is a real thing that she was born with. I can’t do either of these things; while I fully admit it is possible that I have a subconscious sex that caused me to transition, I find it a hopelessly impoverished way to understand my life, and seem to have no conscious means of getting access to it.

I’ll leave this over-long footnote with the best thing Serano says in Whipping Girl about gender:

For all of us, gender is first and foremost an individual experience, an amalgamation of our own unique combinations of gender inclinations, social interactions, body feelings, and lived experiences. (pg. 225)

↩
I’m thinking, of course, of myself. I believed for many years that I was not trans because I had absorbed the “born this way” cultural narrative of transness. I have never, so far as I know, had any form of intrinsic self-knowledge concerning my gender, nor have I (so far as I know) experienced subconscious thoughts about being a woman or living as one. If this had remained the only narrative structure for trans experience I had available to me, I would never have transitioned. ↩

Wanting the Impossible

2025-12-05T01:50:16+00:00

Womanhood sneaks up on you when you least expect it. I became one without asking for it, anticipating it, or even wanting it to happen. The process was inexorable. Nobody asked me if I wanted to be a woman, and nobody asked how I felt about it. Though most of my social life is spent in spaces where non-binary people outnumber the binary, and most of us have a “they” in our stack of preferred pronouns somewhere, nearly everyone I know has lapsed into calling me “she.” This leads to difficult and socially awkward situations when I inevitably give “they/them” as my pronouns yet again.

These folks are well intentioned, of course. All that they mean when they say “she” is “that woman over there,” and of course this refers to me accurately. They recognize the fact of my womanhood, its objective reality; indeed they are in some sense responsible for creating it. Everybody “knows” that I’m a woman, and so I came to know it as well.

To live a genderqueer life under these conditions is alternately perplexing and amusing. One faces the persistent temptation to lean into an identity. Someone who called me “she” recently apologized for “misgendering” me, and of course there is a specific sense in which this is exactly what happened. We are accustomed to a discourse in which a gender in the strict sense is an internal and innate self-understanding, one that is frequently belied by the habitus. This gender is produced in speech acts that are said to reveal those internal feelings that constitute it. I state my pronouns, for example, and in doing so my gender becomes a manifest thing in the world. To refer to me as “she” misgenders me, then, not because I am a person for whom “she” does not apply as a point of grammar, but because gender conceived in such internalized terms can only be touched by others through these overt tokens. To use my requested pronouns signifies acceptance of my identity, in much the same way that shaking hands with a stranger communicates that one’s intentions are friendly.

We adopt new language to make these exchanges possible. “What are your pronouns?” someone asks me, as if a pronoun could ever really be mine. New social norms are martialed: she asks for my pronouns, I tell her, she uses them. In so doing, she denotes merely “that person,” but what she connotes is “I respect the validity of their gender identity, whatever it is, no matter how complex and individualized it might be.” In my turn, I feel my gender identity to be respected, which falls short of understanding, something we can’t really demand and might not be possible anyway.

To have a gender identity of this sort is a form of game playing. That’s not to say that it is unimportant, or that the feelings about gender that the game reveals do not matter. They do. But the friend calling me “she” is gendering me, not (simply) misgendering me, and the game’s ability to affect how one gets gendered in this sense is quite limited. What one would really like to be able to do is to select at will how one is perceived by others, and failing at that, we adopt a social pact by which we give verbal recognition to our desire to be perceived in a particular way. This falls short not because it’s wrong to have feelings about one’s gender or to want to be seen in one way rather than another, but because the power of this discourse to transform even ourselves is too limited. Every day I try in myriad ways, mostly unconscious, to be read as a woman and to act appropriately for one. The gender identity game is not just too weak to reliably elicit the correct pronouns from my friends, it’s not even sufficient to aid me in directing my own actions. If I had the ability to manipulate the minds of people around me, I would probably try to get them to see me as more of a woman, rather than as less of one. So I can’t even seem to want what I want to want.

In her essay On Liking Women, Andrea Long Chu evinces skepticism toward the whole game, stating that “what makes women like me transsexual is not identity but desire.”¹ Being trans, on this sort of view, is understood to be a particular kind of wanting something, where the desire one feels refuses being cashed out into one or another internalist theory of gender. Chu writes elsewhere that

A trans person is not a person whose gender does not “match” their sex; a trans person is quite simply a person who transitions. It is a thing one does, not a thing one is. This means that while trans identity has no cause, trans people will always have their reasons.²

While these reasons can be communicated and shared, they are not universals. My reasons for transitioning might well be different than Andrea Long Chu’s reasons, even if we desire the same thing. We’re in dangerous territory here, though, in that it’s tempting to think that desiring particular things is constitutive of varying trans identities. While we might assert nominatively that the desire to transition makes one trans, clearly the object of desire is more concrete than that for most of us. Chu, for example, describes the desire to become a woman, which she correctly takes to sit uncomfortably aside identitarian positions on gender. Most of the desires we associate with a trans identity exist somewhere downstream of this one; for instance, “transsexual women want bottom surgery because most women have vaginas.”³

Chu herself, after her own bottom surgery, explains her desire for it as stemming from the hope that it “would make [her] feel more like a woman.”⁴ This, it turns out, is the one thing the operation is unable to give her:

That night, in bed at my apartment, I wept. I wailed, actually, the way mothers do in ancient manuscripts. My voice, which I have over several years trained myself to lift and smooth, grew raw; at a certain point, it broke, like a woman’s water, and something low and hoarse and full of legs crawled up my throat and out of my mouth. The truth was, I didn’t feel any more like a woman. I felt exactly the same.⁵

The problem with wanting something that you can’t have is that that fact doesn’t stop you from wanting it. Chu’s issue is not that trans women are not women, that they lack some universal feature of female lives and bodies that cis women possess, but that no one, not even among cis women, has such a feature. The feminists among them are gratingly savvy about it:

They tell me that there is no universal experience of being a woman, except that no woman actually feels like a woman; they tell me that in fact, being a woman feels like nothing at all.⁶

Chu experiences this “nothing” as insecurity because her femaleness is perpetually in question. Cis women are women (even though no one is “really” a woman), but the status of trans women is always subject to challenge (even though no one is “really” not a woman). If women had some universally shared feature or experience, she might have it (or be able to get it), and thereby solidify in her own head, and for others, a female identity.

One begins to wonder at the significance of “feeling like a woman.” Wanting to feel like a woman and wanting to be a woman are distinct feelings, however connected they might be in practice. Which is primary? Is the transsexual woman’s need to feel like a woman the reason that she seeks to attain to universal signifiers of femininity, or is the desire to be a woman responsible for her seeking out the universal experience of feeling like a woman, which possession of certain female traits promises to give her?

I’m not sure I can answer this question on Chu’s behalf, but notice that even if the former answer is the correct one, the most plausible reason to think becoming more like a cis woman would result in one feeling more like a woman comes from the belief that cis women feel like women, and so obtaining a vagina (for example) would tend to make one feel more like one. On the latter interpretation, this connection is even more direct. If bottom surgery has the ability to make one feel like a woman, this is understood to be valuable not merely for its own sake, but because having this feeling would make one more of a woman. On either interpretation, being a woman is associated with the universal or shared experience of feeling like one.

In this we can detect an odd consequence of Andrea Long Chu’s emphasis on desire over and against identity. For Chu, her transness consists of a set of desires, in particular the desire to be a woman. Being a woman, for Chu’s purpose, involves attaining to certain putatively universal features of women’s experience, e.g. having a vagina, or “gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies.”⁷ Furthermore, these things aren’t merely desired for themselves, they’re desired because they’re taken to belong to women as a category. Feeling like a woman, whether desired intrinsically or as one of these possessions, must be understood in sweeping universal terms for the account to cohere. It is a shared trait of women to feel like women, perhaps even the most central such trait. Necessarily, then, we arrive back where we started, “feeling like a woman” being the cliched basis of trans female identification since time immemorial. These identification feelings turn out to be equally important to the story for Chu, they’re just harder to come by.

Consequentially, the naïve transgender woman who says she “feels like a woman” sets out by claiming to possess something that Andrea Long Chu desperately wants — a gender identity, in the sense I use this term above. While Chu’s view of trans experience is paradoxical, in that the desire at its heart cannot be satisfied, this doesn’t endanger it directly; transition is something one does, not something one is, after all, and even if you want the vagina, the lipstick, and so on in order to satisfy a desire that turns out to be impossible to satisfy, you can nonetheless get those things anyway, and enjoy them. But there is something odd about the return to identity after its demotion.

The obvious way to avoid this sort of paradox is to bite the bullet that Chu dodges again and again; it is not merely the case that transsexuals desire bottom surgery because they want to feel more like women, as Chu rather carefully says she does, but because they believe bottom surgery will make them literally be women, or at least more fully women than they were before. Were this transmedicalist view correct, transsexuals would no longer be seeking something impossible, something that circles back to identity. Rather, we would be seeking something possible; you would get your surgery, and the journey would end. Most of us reject this view because it’s exclusionary and bad politics, but that doesn’t inherently make it incorrect. I take Andrea Long Chu’s essays to show us that the view is wrong not from the standpoint of academic feminism, but experientially, in the most deeply personal way someone could take this journey.

Just as clearly, one could resolve the paradox with a transphobic view. There is some universal female quality, but it is one that most or all cis women possess while most or all trans women do not, and cannot. Part of what I find moving about Chu’s take on the trans woman’s condition is that even these features are ruthlessly catalogued and made the potential objects of trans desire. Feminists tell Chu that “teenage girls don’t have the kind of slumber parties they appear to have in films, or when they do, they don’t paint their toenails, and if they did, the polish would stick to the bedsheets.” Yet what many trans women want is a history, a past girlhood that does not and cannot exist.⁸ More explicitly transphobic narratives, centering reproductive biology for example, are perhaps too implausible to take seriously, but are common sites for frustrated desire notwithstanding.

We might take the identitarian perspective not as an alternative to Chu’s own, but as a resolution to the paradox with a fairy tale ending. On this reading, the feeling that one is a woman is such a central feature of women’s shared experience that it is a sufficient condition of being a woman, and since trans women (on this view) are taken to share this feeling, they are women very simply and directly. You get to have your cake, and eat it.

Chu objects to the view that transness is about identity in this way because she takes trans women to want more than to be “valid” in holding female identities. They want to be women, where that requires some universalized notion of what a woman is, and leads us to the paradox of unfulfillable desire as we’ve seen. It’s ironic, then, that feeling oneself to be a woman could be exactly that sort of universal, even on Chu’s view. After all, if trans women felt the way that identitarians say that they do, they would not just have “valid” gender identities, but would literally be women in the robust sense that Chu says they want, because they would share this universal feature of women’s experience. Of course, being a woman could involve wanting other things (in the sense that a cis woman might want a neovagina if she was, hypothetically, born without one), but the fundamental tension at the heart of the trans experience would be resolved.

While Chu never says this directly, the reason not to take this line seems to be simply that it is wrong and the feminist critics are right. The same fact that creates the paradox of trans desire is also, strangely enough, the reason we ought to dismiss the identitarian view. If the only universal experience of womanhood is not feeling like a woman, then identitarian views premised on the notion that trans women feel like women falter at their very first step. Faced with the impossibility of feeling like a woman, Chu reframes the issue: “I don’t want what [cis women] have, I want the way in which [they] don’t have it.” So at the end of the day, we have to face up to the non-reality of “woman” as a universal category.

While perhaps this argument succeeds, I want to offer something different, more along the lines of Chu’s demonstration of bottom surgery’s inadequacy for resolving the paradox of trans desire. The problem with universals is that the reality of much trans experience (certainly mine) is too complex to brook them. In short, if there were a universal category of woman, I would probably not be in it.

This claim is certainly not a problem for Andrea Long Chu’s view. For her, universals are never preconditions: it’s okay to have none of them because being trans is about what you want, not what you have. So one might be a trans “woman” even if there were a category of women and you were not part of it. No problem there. While plausible, I find this claim extraordinarily unhelpful. In practice, the knowledge that something lies eternally out of reach serves as a barrier to one coming to want it, if not an impermeable one.

Furthermore, while Chu explicitly counterposes identity and desire, endorsing the latter as the basis of her transness, the former is perhaps the most widely accepted universal condition of women. “Women” may tell Chu that no one feels like a woman, but the uncomfortable fact remains that many people do believe that women feel themselves to be women. You will be hard pressed to find a trans woman visiting a psychiatrist or endocrinologist for the first time who readily admits that she doesn’t feel like a woman.

This suggests that universals, while intelligible as objects of desire and thus as formative pieces of a trans identity, can also serve as impediments to trans self-identification. I don’t feel like a woman; I don’t know what it means to feel like a woman. I expect I never will. To the extent that, as on identitarian views, attaining to some universal condition of womanhood is taken to be a precondition for identification as a trans woman, my coming to see myself as trans is made incoherent. When I accepted this essentialist view, I couldn’t countenance the idea that I was trans for exactly that reason.

Discovering that no one really feels like a woman, that no one is a woman in any sense that can be universalized, was a necessary step in my becoming a woman myself. It freed my desire from the trap of identity, allowing me to act to get the things I wanted that were within my reach.

I’m skeptical that experiences and bodily attributes have to be understood as universals for the desire for them to take on a trans character. Someone who wants to become a woman in the early 1950s, for example, might aspire to become a homemaker because most women were homemakers (in fact only about a third of women were in the U.S. labor force at that time⁹), but identifying with the lives of women in this way need not imply that one understands homemaking to belong to women as a class, nor does it mean that one is uncritical of the patriarchal impositions that kept many women at home. As Chu points out, a trans woman’s desire to have a vagina goes beyond an aesthetic preference; one wants a vagina because most women have them. Yet a woman can want to become more typical for women without thinking that she will become more of a woman by doing so, even though this inclination (or sometimes obligation) to adhere to a particular norm is inextricably bound up with what it means to be gendered.

What we’re left with, when we abandon essentialist notions of womanhood, is quite a lot. We do not get much say over our genders, but some pathways have recently been opened. Someone who desires to become a woman and decides to transition can achieve a female identity not because she already has the correct gender feelings in her head, or because she obtains the right type of body, but because she performs the dance steps of an intricate choreography through our social space. One might even, in taking these steps, become a woman despite not wanting to be one. Life as a (trans) woman is more than just an identity, it is for now a real possibility, a life you can have and a person you can be. As Chu writes,

On the contrary, if there is any lesson of gender transition—from the simplest request regarding pronouns to the most invasive surgeries—it’s that gender is something other people have to give you. Gender exists, if it is to exist at all, only in the structural generosity of strangers. When people today say that a given gender identity is “valid,” this is true, but only tautologically so. At best it is a moral demand for possibility, but it does not, in itself, constitute the realization of this possibility. The truth is, you are not the central transit hub for meaning about yourself, and you probably don’t even have a right to be. You do not get to consent to yourself, even if you might deserve the chance.¹⁰

While Andrea Long Chu and I are both women, and both women as a result of patterns of desire that caused us to choose transition, she began with the desire to be a woman, and that’s something I continue to feel mostly indifferent about. Gender exists not only in the structural kindness of others but in their implacability, confusion, and apathy as well. When, and how, we get to make choices about our genders depends not merely on kindness or cruelty but instead remains the subject of a political struggle.

I became a woman because that was the only thing it seems strangers could give me; there was no other off-ramp for my transition. In that way I, just like Andrea Long Chu, wanted something impossible, and this desire for something I can’t have continues to inform how I understand myself as a gendered being. If our culture had third (or additional) genders, maybe I would live under one of them. A world where I don’t have to feel like a woman is a world where I can be one, and I’m happy that inasmuch as I’m not able to be anything else, I’m at least allowed that.

Andrea Long Chu, “On Liking Women,” n+1, no. 30, Winter 2018, https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-30/essays/on-liking-women/. ↩
Andrea Long Chu, “Our Reasons,” n+1, March 5, 2025, https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/our-reasons/. ↩
Chu, “On Liking Women.” ↩
Andrea Long Chu, “The Pink,” n+1, no. 34, Spring 2019, https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-34/politics/the-pink/. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Chu, “On Liking Women.” ↩
Chu suggests that desiring to have, or have had, sleepovers is constitutive of a trans desire that cannot be fulfilled as an adult in an interview. See Kyle Turner, “I Think Most Things Are Bad”: Andrea Long Chu on Cruelty, Criticism, and Conviction, Interview Magazine, April 8, 2025, https://www.interviewmagazine.com/literature/andrea-long-chu-on-cruelty-criticism-and-conviction. ↩
“Women in the Labor Force,” US Bureau of Labor Statistics, accessed November 7, 2025, https://www.bls.gov/cps/demographics/women-labor-force.htm ↩
Andrea Long Chu, Females, 2025 edition. (London: Verso, 2025), 38. ↩