How Theory Harms Trans People and the LGBT Community | Trans Sandwiched #2

Welcome back to Trans Sandwiched by TaraElla, where we talk about how trans people are now sandwiched between political forces with their own agenda on all sides, and what it means for us. Today, I want to talk about how theory, specifically the various theories that can be largely grouped under the umbrella of postmodern critical theory, is harming trans people and the LGBT community, in more ways than one. I believe theory is the biggest obstacle we have in front of us right now, which is why we must discuss it.

Let's start here. In recent years, I have noticed a decline in the level of psychological wellbeing in the LGBT community. Despite things having objectively improved throughout the Western world for LGBT people in the past 20 years, I have never seen so much anger, frustration and pessimism among my fellow LGBT people. During the time I was in college, conservatives in most US states and several other countries like Australia actively moved to ban gay marriage, but even then LGBT people weren't so angry and frustrated. From my high school days to the present, gay marriage went from being legal in zero countries to being legal in most of the West; anti-discrimination laws have been gradually extended, you can no longer be fired for being LGBT, but LGBT people seem to be getting angrier all the time. And this doesn't make sense to me. Digging deeper, I came to the conclusion that postmodern theory was the culprit of this change.

Back in the 1950s, the psychologist Julian B. Rotter developed the idea that people could be placed on a spectrum of having an internal locus of control on one end, vs an external locus of control on the other end. People with an internal locus of control believed that they were in control of, and responsible for, the successes or failures in their lives, and Rotter observed that they had high achievement motivation. This, of course, is an essential ingredient for success in life, as well as a key factor in psychological health. On the other hand, postmodern critical theories teach women and various minorities, including ethnic minorities and LGBT people alike, that our fate is being determined by an oppressive system that won't let us succeed, and this doesn't really change even with the various aforementioned legal reforms, which I think is nonsense, but it's what they would have us believe. Postmodern criticalism is effectively encouraging us to develop an external locus of control, which is both bad for our mental health and make us less successful in our own lives. I therefore like to argue that these theories are actually more effective at oppressing minorities and keeping us down, than whatever the most bigoted reactionaries out there can dream of.

Similarly, another 20th century psychologist Abraham Maslow, most famous for his 'Maslow's hierarchy of needs', observed that self-actualizing individuals, people who were able to reach the highest level on his pyramid model of development, shared several important characteristics. Among them was being grounded in reality and being committed to the truth, things that are actively discouraged by postmodernism. Self-actualizing people were also spontaneous, creative, and not rigidly bound by social conventions, the opposite of what postmodern criticalism would impose on us in the form of making everything problematic, telling us to 'check our privilege' all the time, and forcing a whole new and unnatural way of speaking and relating onto all of us because they believe that language shapes reality. In other words, postmodern criticalism actively prevents us from reaching our full development according to the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which means that it is literally regressive!

Besides acting to harm our psychological health, theory also exerts a negative effect on the conversation around trans issues in the wider world, leading to fewer successes and more backlash when it comes to trans rights. This also happens in multiple ways. Firstly, postmodern theory essentially teaches us that we don't have to work with reality. As if reality itself is simply a social construct that can be altered at will, simply by changing our language, or forcing other people to change their language. However, human beings are just like any other living being on this planet, and are completely subject to the basic rules of biology, especially evolutionary biology. Certain things, like our sense of gender both in ourselves and in the outside world, or whether one is attracted to another person or not, are hardwired into all of us, because it would be evolutionarily adaptive to do so. No language games can change that. This is why, when it comes to nature vs nurture, I come down strongly on the nature side, and I believe there is plenty of empirical evidence supporting my stance. Anyway, the important thing to know is, life is full of inherent limitations, and effective solutions need to take these limitations into account. We need to take empirical reality as it is, and compromise with reality's limitations to reach effective solutions. The trans community of 10 years ago understood this, but today's trans activists seem not to.

Secondly, the very presence of theory, much of it unscientific, has served to confuse the fundamentals of the conversation on trans issues. For example, there has been a fixation on the question of whether gender is a social construct, which is a core belief of the postmodern criticalist worldview. I personally strongly disagree with the idea of gender being a social construct, because I think the empirical science says otherwise. However, that is not the important point. The important point is that, we shouldn't be focusing on these pointless philosophical debates. We should be focusing on the reality of trans lives, and what could be done to make those lives better. We should be focusing on the actual difficulties faced by people who are suffering from gender dysphoria, rather than the philosophy of what gender is. Trans lives are real lives, not some hypothetical academic question. We want practical solutions that work, not philosophy or theory that only works on paper.