The Transmedicalist Case for Non-Binary Acceptance | An Asian Trans View

Today, I want to talk about the actual transmedicalist view on non-binary people. This is in response to the rumor prevalent in some circles, like Breadtube for example, that transmeds don't accept non-binary people, or somehow think of them as invalid. In turn, this has made transmedicalism unpopular in these circles, even leading to hostility towards our ideas in some cases. As a transmed, I have been nothing but supportive of non-binary people, and this is fully consistent with my transmed beliefs. Therefore, those rumors are completely rubbish. In today's episode, I will fully explain everything, in detail.

Let's start with this: what are transmed views? Basically, taking the word literally, transmedicalism is a belief that the root cause of someone being trans lies in the medical, or biological science, realm. It's simply a belief that the trans phenomenon should be explained using medical science, and not postmodern philosophy or the radical feminist branch of critical theory. Now, I'm not denying that there are a few transmeds who judge other trans individuals' validity by how much dysphoria they experience, but that's not how scientific transmedicalism should actually be practiced. Nor is that attitude representative of transmeds at all!

So what's the medical science view we are talking about here, and what are its implications? Traditionally, a slightly over-simplified way to talk about it is the so-called mind-body mismatch, that is, female brains in male bodies, and vice versa. Of course, there's much more complexity to it, from genetics, to hormone receptors, and other aspects of molecular biology. But the picture is that, because of the complexity of genotype to phenotype translation, and the complexity of human development, especially in the fetal stage, there is a very real chance that one may end up with an incongruent set of gendered characteristics. This incongruency can cause gender dysphoria, including physical dysphoria and relational dysphoria, and it can be debilitating. The only way this dysphoria can be substantially relieved appears to be via gender transitioning in many cases.

Now, once you understand and accept this picture, there really is no reason to not accept non-binary people. Given that the whole medical science view of the cause of being trans is essentially rooted in the body being part-male and part-female to some extent, acceptance of the validity of non-binary people is a very logical extension. There's no reason why a transmedicalist view could lead to non-acceptance of non-binary people.

What transmeds refuse to accept are justifications of non-binaryness rooted in postmodernism or critical theory, for example the idea that gender is a social construct, or that gender is performative and that one can reconstruct gender simply by altering the performance of gender, or that gender is a class in a Marxian sense. However, this is not being applied specifically against non-binary people. Transmeds also cannot accept binary trans narratives, or even cisgender narratives, that are rooted in postmodernism or critical theory. Like elsewhere in life, science and postmodernism just aren't usually compatible. Those of us who value science must therefore oppose postmodernism. This does not mean we don't accept non-binary identity however. As we just saw, the science alone is enough to justify the acceptance of non-binary people, there's no need for postmodernism at all.