WHY TRANSSEXUAL?

WHY NEO-MONEYISM?

6/15/22

We tend to use the word ‘transsexual’ when most people today would use the word ‘transgender.’ This is an intentional choice that may seem old-fashioned or dubious to some, so we’d like to offer an explanation of why we prefer this term despite its historical baggage. We also introduce a technical term to describe political adherents of anti-trans chauvinism.

We hold that all TERFs (‘trans exclusionary radical feminists’) are unwitting disciples of Dr. John Money, who we consider the Godfather of so-called "Gender-Critical" feminism. Though it may appear at first that there's a profound contradiction between the TERF's ideology of pure biological determinism and Dr. Money's ideology of pure social constructivism, we shall see that these pair of opposites are unified by a singular motivation to prove that trans people are disordered and should therefore be subjected to conversion therapy. In the former case, transsexuals are believed to have a disordered brain which deceives them into misidentifying their sex in the same sort of way that a schizophrenic hears voices that aren’t truly present, and, thus, a treatment of the brain is in order to 'fix' them. For Dr. Money and the constructivists, transsexuality is a matter of pure psychology and self-perception; that, in other words, any person, under the right circumstances, could be influenced or taught to hold a transgendered identity (indeed, this is the logic of social contagion). In fact it's in this very light that Dr. Money coined the term gender identity: to imply that trans people's sense of self is delusional, that it is a purely learned behavior, and that therefore it could be unlearned. In the final analysis, Dr Money’s constructivistic ideology was, just as much as the TERF’s deterministic ideology, little more than the expression of the desire to prove that conversion therapy could be a viable alternative to gender-affirming care. This is readily obvious when one reviews his twisted and unethical experiments, which not only failed, but left several people scarred for life. Take, for instance, the tragic case of David Reimer, who is perhaps the only case in history where someone was truly coerced into medically transitioning: after being raised as a girl and forced to transition from childhood, Reimer would nevertheless go on to insist that he was boy, and after discovering what was done to him, he eventually killed himself. The gender-critical movement is, whether they recognize so or not, heir to these failures and to this ideology. It is an ideology founded on the singular principle of transgender extinction — the singular desire to see transsexual people removed from public life — be it by coercion, by suicide, or, all else failing, by detainment and execution. It is for this reason that we refer to the gender-critical feminists as ‘Neo-Moneyists.’ Idealism, materialism; Paleo-Moneyism, Neo-Moneyism; for the anti-trans chauvinist these are merely post-hoc justifications for their hatred of trans people, from which everything else flows downstream.

One of the great ironies of our Neo-Moneyists is their hypocritical claim to “material reality,” biology, and monism. But when one says that they have changed their sex because they have changed the material characteristics associated with their sex, and another says that one’s sex is an immutable characteristic determined at birth regardless of how ones physiology changes, which of these positions is idealist, metaphysical, or an invocation of dualistic “gender souls”? To be unambiguously clear, it is the latter of the two.

In rejecting Dr. Money’s “identity” focused pathology, we hope to reaffirm that for us, our sense of self is, roughly speaking, fixed — and that it is our bodies which are flexible. For this reason we hope to reclaim 'transsexual' from those who believe transing one's sex is impossible. We likewise reject the ‘transmedicalist’ definition of transsexual as someone who has specifically undergone gender-affirmative surgery. We consider anyone who is compelled to alter their body, to bring it into greater congruity with their self image, as a transsexual; we use the umbrella term 'trans' to signify the broader community of people compelled to alter their gendered expression or to transition socially.

When we refer to gender, we want to be clear that we refer to the set of gendered social relations which reproduce and define the patriarchal mode of exploitation, which finds its historical basis in the division of labor and the patrilineal family form. Moreover, we also reject the term ‘identity’ to describe one's self image, in part because we view this term as misleading, as though such image is an active choice or a mere preference. We do not “identify” as men or women anymore than a person of color “identifies as black” — these are categories which are assigned without any active input or personal agency. In the case of the transsexual, our being coercively identified as a man or as a woman, where such identification is incongruent with our sense of self, is what produces ‘gender dysphoria.’ Indeed by identification we do not mean ‘personal recognition,’ but an imposition of gendered social relations, and that our ceaseless hyper-awareness of this imposition is a heavy burden. What produces the ‘sense of self,’ we may never understand. But what is certain is that it is not hereditary (not simply genetic) and, indeed, if anything good could be said about Dr. Money, it's that he proved that it’s not strictly learned or taught either. In the end, it matters little why a given person has a cross- or inter-sex sense of self, the fact that this phenomenon has existed throughout every form of social organization makes it quite clear that it is a natural phenomenon not likely to ever be repressed, and on this basis we fight for a world that is systemically capable of accommodating our existence. Like it or not, we exist, we're real, and we’re certainly not going anywhere!