I once read of a man who identifies as a hippopotamus. This nugget relating to postmodern cultural realities put me in mind of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hippopotamus”, whose hero progresses from “rest[ing] on his belly in the mud” to “tak[ing] wing/ Ascending from the damp savannas,/ [As] quiring angels round him sing/The praise of God, in loud hosannas.” I doubt that this present-day self-identified hippo exists today in a state as glorious as that of Eliot’s beast, but that is not of interest to me.
What is interesting is how any human being could think himself capable of entertaining the faintest concept of what it is to be a hippopotamus at all. The hippo himself doesn’t know who or what he is.
The same goes, of course, for a boy (or man) who thinks he is a girl (or woman), and vice-versa. As a novelist, I have created many female characters from my imagination: a radically different thing from thinking I am, even while at work, that woman myself. Most, though by no means all, of my characters are modeled on real, flesh-and-blood women, I have known, a few of them intimately, allowing me to combine close personal observation with novelistic imagination and well-grounded intuition.
But this, as feminist critics would tell me, is far from the same thing as being, or even “feeling like,” a woman—which is partly why, in their minds, I have no business writing about a woman, or women, at all. Perhaps they have a point—or perhaps they simply cannot concede that Tolstoy created a realistic and convincing character like Ann Karenina despite not sharing her biological sex, though numerous readers of both sexes for more than a century have been convinced that he did: a triumph, let us say, of artistic genius over human biology and psychology. The undeniable facts are that the Russian writer created Anna without becoming a woman himself, or even receiving doses of estrogen while composing his novel, and that no transgendered male author has matched the feat, or even attempted it. Had he done so, we should certainly have heard all about it through the adoring media singing loud hosannas around him.
What trick of the mind and of the emotions could possibly cause a young boy to “feel” that he was born a girl, or a young girl to “feel” that she was born a boy? Perhaps the sexual confusion results from the fact of his or her lack of awareness of possessing the characteristics that social experience and social expectations associate with masculinity and femininity, or even—in the case of so-called “non-binary” children—with either of these qualities.
In which case, what convinces them that they know what having those characteristics feels like, as opposed to appearing like? The answer, of course, is that their adult enablers assure them that they do, and send them for radical medical treatments that can (apparently) do almost everything save alter their chromosomal composition. A cruel and sacrilegious trick, of course; but then we live in a cruel and sacrilegious world.
I suppose that, should I wish to, I could produce an amusing, fictional, and fantastical literary representation of what being a hippo “feels like,” having already done so in a children’s book, with the hippo exchanged for a lion. That lion, however, bears little or no resemblance to what a zookeeper would recognize as leonine psychology, emotion, and behavior. Nevertheless, I have never thought that I “felt” like a lion, or supposed I could imagine being one, despite having a wide familiarity with the species as a former zoo worker.
Nor, for that matter, has it ever crossed my mind that, despite twenty years of marriage, I could “feel like” my wife. So how is it that professional medicos experienced in disorders of mind and body can persuade themselves that a twelve-year-old child “knows,” through observation, intuition, or this almost mystical condition of “feeling” that he (or she) actually belongs to the opposite sex and should be medically “enhanced” to “feel” as if she (or he) does? The answer, obviously, is less mass insanity than the tremendous—and in this case diabolical—power of the postmodern fad, as infectious as COVID-19 and infinitely more dangerous and destructive.
Back in the 1960s, a teenage female pop star performed a song in which, though insisting that her heart “filled with joy” at being a girl, still, “sometimes, yes sometimes, I wish I were a boy!” Understandable in a child, so far as the feeling goes. But also where—once upon a time—it stopped cold.
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I’ve been identifying as a Stegosaurus lately. I figure, if you can’t beat them, join them. But if I go to confession as a stegosaurus and confess my dinosaur sins, do I have to go back again when I’m feeling like my old self to confess my human sins? Or does confession cover everything? So confusing!
Eugene Ionesco wrote “Rhinoceros”, a very powerful play in which ordinary people transformed into rhinoceroses as they accepted Nazi propaganda.
Another popular option in the Ego-Drama is to go all the way and marry oneself as a sologamist.
https://steelturman.typepad.com/thesteeldeal/2007/01/in_love_with_hi.html
https://www.zenger.news/2020/11/10/man-marries-himself-in-sologamist-ceremony-after-fiancee-calls-off-wedding/
Back in the 70s, i read “Conundrum” by Jan (James) Morris, one of the first transgender accounts. Two incidents remained very clearly in my mind. The first when, at age 6, while playing under the piano, he was struck by the thought that “God made a mistake. I should be a girl”. The second at the end of the book, when, as Jan, he found himself having difficulties opening wine bottles and backing in or out of the garage. (I remember the wine bottles; I may be mistaken about the details with the garage.) In other words, living as a woman, he absorbed the cultural stereotypes of women at that time which said that women had difficulties pulling corks and backing cars.
There is no physical reason why all of a sudden he should find it difficult to do something that he had never had any problems doing as a man. He was letting himself be influenced by cultural stereotypes and it affected his motor reactions.
I think that it would be worthwhile to study how much “feeling” like a boy or “feeling” like a girl is influenced by what one’s surrounding culture expected a girl or boy to act like.
Personally, I have never understood why a girl should like pink. I have no problem with associating a baby shower with pink or blue depending on the baby’s sex, but to expect the child to prefer one color or another simply because of its symbolic value in a certain culture is a form of manipulation. It’s similar to the cultural expectation that I grew up in where cooking and sewing were women’s work until it reached the professional level of being a chef or a tailor, when it became something only men could do. Thank heaven we’ve gotten beyond that!
P.S. My favorite color is not pink but green. I find it very restful.
As barely a casual reader is such matters, yours truly proposes a “scale independent” aspect of the poorly received Laudato Si…What!? The scale-independent parallel between global and fetal endangerment…
In less than 43,000 words, Laudato Si might have simply explained that, in the enormous and dark vacuum of interstellar space, “Our Common Home” is a very strange and wonderful amniotic sac. Same for the personal version, of which St. John Paul II explained that new techniques of abortion are “poisoning the lives of millions of defenseless human beings as if in a form of ‘chemical warfare'” (Centesimus Annus, n. 40).
How many chemicals? In a very few of the skyrocketing cases of dysphoria–those cases which are not simply cultural and peer-driven, etc.—-what might be (only might be!) the role of fetal exposures to endocrine destructive chemicals (EDCs)? And, if so, how then might these exposures be limited or corrected instead of labeled as cause for Aztec physical mutilation?
https://www.endocrine.org/patient-engagement/endocrine-library/edcs
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7073082/
“In many well-documented cases of high-level fetal exposures to known EDCs such as DES, certain PCBs, and DDT, the answer to the question of whether exposure is associated with gender-related effects [!] is clearly yes. But high-level exposures such as these are relatively rare and isolated. The debate today centers on low-dose exposures—generally defined as doses that approximate environmentally relevant levels—and the idea that low-dose intrauterine exposure to some EDCs during certain critical windows of development can have profound, permanent impacts [!] on subsequent fetal development and adult outcomes” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1281309/
Are EDCs another scientific crisis which, in a few genuine cases of dysphoria, might be handled better by the Church than was the Galileo thing? The global and fetal amniotic sacs (Cupich’s so-called “rabbit hole”), both similarly at risk?
Let’s suppose you are totally correct, and chemicals are causing these transgender self identifications.
The correct response should be to identify the cause, if that is the case, and to attempt to cure them, not hand them over to a medical profession intent on mutilating them further and calling it medicine. Then coercing us to accept them as who or what they identify as and according them the title of “aggrieved minority” and awarding them undeserved protections.
The assertion that a form of chemical poisoning is causing this transgender misidentification falls empty when there are trans species who identify as a hippo, or dog, or cat, or bird.
As an amateur author who has often tried to write compelling female characters, I find the comparison to fiction-writing very apt here. The difference is that the artist/author seeks to portray that which he or she is not, without having any sort of misguided idea of losing their true identity…which allows us to have characters that are created by people who are very different than them. For example, Jane Austen was never “a single man in possession of a good fortune”, but we still consider her Mr. Darcy an iconic character.
This is the healthy approach, not the modern world’s misguided attempt to make men into women and women into men.
I once thought I identified as a tomato. However, in time I realized that that perception was likely engendered by my love of tomatoes–eating them that is.
It occurred to me at about the same time that it would not be appropriate to eat myself (if that were somehow even possible). It was at that point I further discerned that my identification was on the order of a fantasy that had no realistic prospect of fulfillment.
Accordingly, long story short, I went back simply to eating tomatoes, usually with a little salt and sometimes pepper, too.