I identify, therefore I am: The illusion and danger of gender self-identification
The Cartesian principle “I think, therefore I am” seems to have been replaced by “I identify, therefore I am.”
A commentary on “Trans TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney says 'women can have bulges' (published in the Daily Mail on November 1, 2022)
25-year-old Dylan Mulvaney has been identifying as a girl since March 12, 20221. According to his own statement, he felt a change on the very first day of being a girl: Not only did he cry “three times” on that day and ordered dresses on the internet that he “can’t afford”, he also pretended to be okay when somebody asked him how he was feeling, even though he wasn’t okay at all – just the way girls do.
On day 74 of being a girl, Mulvaney talked about an experience he had at a shopping mall: Dressed in a formfitting top and skinny leather shorts, he was stared at by the people at the mall. In a moment of great insight, he realized that people were probably staring at him because of the bulge that was clearly visible in his leather shorts. “I forgot that my crotch doesn’t look like other women’s crotches sometimes because mine doesn’t look like a little barbie pouch”, Mulvaney said. To promote normalizing the fact that his very female crotch has a bulge, he starts singing in his TikTok video: „Normalize the bulge! We are normalizing the bulge! Women can have bulges, and that’s ok. We’re not gonna stare at their crotches!”
This person has over nine million followers on TikTok, made a lucrative deal with Ulta Beauty in October 2022, and was invited a month later to talk to the President of the United States of America at the White House.
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Before we dive into why normalizing and even celebrating people like Mulvaney is a very slippery slope, we need to precisely define two different situations: On the one hand, there are people with real gender dysphoria who cannot reconcile their felt gender identity with the biological reality of their bodies, like for instance a woman who feels like a man inside. These people often suffer greatly from their dysphoria and are in psychological treatment. Many gender dysphoric people, especially young people who struggle with their gender identity during puberty, turn out to be homosexual and can lead a happy life later on. For a very tiny minority medical transition can be a solution to their agony. In the process of transition, a person’s physical appearance is changed with the help of hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery such as mastectomies, breast implants, vaginoplasty or phalloplasty in order to imitate the other sex (which is extremely complicated, a fact that is often ignored). After an often tedious transition, these people continue their social lives in their new gender identity.
On the other hand, there are men who like to dress and behave in a “feminine” way or women who like to dress and behave in a “masculine” way, meaning that they want to defy social gender stereotypes. This so-called gender atypical behavior has practically been normalized in the Western world where everyone can dress and behave any way they want – as long as it’s within the boundaries of decency. When the German rail transport company Deutsche Bahn decided to allow their male employees to wear skirts for example, Marcel Peithmann quite aptly commented: “Only the bourgeois are upset by such a decision […] As long as I’m not forced to affirm someone’s self-perception, it’s all the same to me.”
However, we are sliding into a situation where these two cases are mixed up with one another. A situation where men throw on a skirt (or alternatively fake breasts, more on that later) and – like Dylan Mulvaney – declare themselves to be women overnight. A situation where the felt and imagined reality of a person becomes the ultimate truth, completely decoupled from actual reality, and where this self-perception is uncompromisingly being imposed on other people.
A prominent example in Germany is representative Tessa Ganserer (formerly known as Markus Ganserer) who became a member of the German Bundestag for the Green Party thanks to the party’s internal female quota. Ganserer is neither biologically nor legally a woman, meaning that he has never undergone sex reassignment surgery (which, to be very clear, will never turn a man into a woman), nor has he changed his sex legally in his passport. Ganserer’s self-perception and feeling are enough for him to walk through life as a “real woman”, get a seat in the Bundestag thanks to the female quota and then pose as a victim of misanthropy and transphobia whenever somebody refuses to accept his self-image or even questions it.
If a person’s own self-perception is declared the absolute truth, which even trumps factual, biological reality, we are rapidly approaching a very dangerous kind of totalitarian and dogmatic thinking that will not allow for any deviating opinion. Because if everyone stipulates their own truth, then what is truth? Who can still question this truth? Truth and lie conflate as objective reality is eliminated as the only common denominator. This might have considerable consequences as the case of Norwegian feminist Christina Ellingsen shows: Ellingsen is being accused of “hate speech” because she disagreed with the chair of the Norwegian LGBQTI+ organization FRI, Christine Marie Jentoft, when he claimed that he as a transwoman (i.e. biological man) was a “lesbian” and “mother”. This legal charge is possible because since 2020, section 185b of the Norwegian criminal code protects “gender identity and gender expression” against “hate speech”. Sentences like “transwomen aren’t women” or “only women can be mothers” can therefore be a criminal offense.
In Canada – thanks to Bill C-16 which was adopted in 2017 and enabled, among other things, legal prosecution of people who use the wrong pronoun when addressing another person – things even went so far that a father was judicially prohibited from addressing his own daughter as “she”. The case of Rob Hoogland, who was forced by the court to accept his 14-year-old daughter’s gender reassignment, is an especially dramatic one since Hoogland not only lost his right as a parent to fight for his daughter’s best interest, he also had to go to jail for it. Hoogland could face up to five years of prison because he called his daughter, well, his daughter.
In hindsight, Jordan Peterson's vehement rejection of Bill C-16, for which he was ostracized by many, was basically prophetic. Peterson had already understood back then that a bill which forces people to use a certain language (in this case a person’s “preferred pronoun”) can be the first step towards a totalitarian abyss. Back then, people were heavily criticizing him, telling him that he was exaggerating, that it was just a pronoun, and everyone should just choose their own pronouns. But cases like Hoogland’s and Ellingsen’s show that nowadays there can be severe judicial consequences for stating a simple biological truth, which is also expressed in a personal pronoun. Conservative podcaster Matt Walsh once perfectly summarized the absurdity of the whole pronoun debate in an appearance at Dr. Phil, saying: “You can feel however you want. I could sit here and say that I feel like a tomato plant, but that doesn’t mean that I actually am those things. You can have whatever self-perception you want, but you can’t expect me to take part in the self-perception […] You don’t get your own pronouns, just as you don’t get your own prepositions or your own adjectives. It’s like if I were to tell you: My adjectives are handsome and brilliant and whenever you’re talking about me, you have to describe me as handsome and brilliant, because that’s how I identify. Makes no sense.”
The peak of misguided tolerance of any kind of “gender expression” was a recent case of a male trans shop teacher in the Canadian province of Ontario who, besides a blonde wig, was wearing massive fake breasts the size of balloons with their fake nipples basically jumping out at you through his tight t-shirt. Thanks to Bill C-16, which protects gender identity and gender expression at all costs, there is a man with huge fake breasts teaching minors how to saw wood, while parents’ worries and outrage about the inappropriateness of the situation are being ignored by the school. According to the school board, the gigantic fake breasts are part of the trans teacher’s gender expression, therefore everybody must accept them – this shows complete disregard for the fact that the problem isn’t the teacher’s transsexuality but how he expresses it. Nobody dares to openly state that this is in fact a biological man who probably suffers from autogynephilia and who indulges in his sexual fetish in front of minors. Stating this, however, would mean to challenge and deny the trans teacher’s self-perception, which is now a criminal offense in countries like Norway and Canada.2
Germany is well on the way to a similar legal situation as in Norway and Canada. Disguised under the laudable title “Fighting against hate speech against LGBTI people” (because who is in favor of hate speech?), the Green’s bill intends to expand paragraph §130, section 1 of the German criminal code to “all genders and transsexuality”. This means: Misgendering a trans person or refusing to address him or her with the “right” pronoun can be charged with hate speech. Combined with the so-called self-identification bill (Selbstbestimmungsgesetz) which would allow 14-year-olds (!) to change their gender once a year (!!) by simple declaration (!!!), this would mean the complete and utter deconstruction of biological sex as a concrete reality. If everyone can just annually declare to either be a man or woman, and if this declaration is made a legal reality, then we’re paving the way for a society in which the most fundamental truth of all truths – the immutability of biological sex – is being denied.
Consequences could be far-reaching and devastating: The aforementioned cases show how this would pose a massive threat to freedom of speech, but not only that. This bill would make a mockery of the idea of separating the sexes in certain important contexts. Separate bathrooms, separate changing rooms and women’s shelters would be a thing of the past. Women’s prisons would be opened to biological men identifying as women – a legal loophole that can have serious ramifications, as the case of Demi Minor has shown, a convicted murderer who identifies as a woman and was therefore placed in a women’s prison where he impregnated two inmates. Women’s sports would be nullified because if trans women enter women’s sports, women won’t have any chance at athletic success, as the case of trans swimmer Lia Thomas has proven. Medical research according to sex – where women have been underrepresented for decades as medical studies are often biased due to a majority of male test persons – would be nullified, too. Moreover, we’re putting vulnerable groups like victims of sexual assault at risk, as the case of a cancer patient shows who specifically requested a female nurse due to her experiences with sexual abuse. She was assigned a male nurse identifying as a woman. When she refused to be cared for by him, the hospital accused her of transphobia and canceled her critical surgery. In addition, statistics according to sex – which are indispensable for science and research, but also for criminal prosecution and fighting against crime – lose their validity if every man can be a woman and vice versa. Not to mention the sociocultural and psychological repercussions, especially on children and teenagers, who would be even more confused about the supposed decision about their biological sex than they already are in puberty anyway.
The question is: Where does all of this lead to in the end? When we have reached the point where anyone can change their sex by simply declaring it, where it’s enough to put on huge fake breasts and a blonde wig to legally qualify as a woman, and where a 25-year-old TikTok star can claim that women have penises and that this is completely normal, then we have to think about how far we want to go with this kind of limitless acceptance and denial of objective reality. Do we want the Cartesian principle of “I think, therefore I am” to be replaced by “I identify, therefore I am”? Self-identification above everything else?
British influencer Oli London for example self-identified as a female Korean and underwent a dozen surgeries to get closer and closer to looking like an Asian woman. The German Martina Big also underwent various surgeries, injected melatonin into her skin and got herself gigantic silicone breasts because she felt like an African woman inside. In a world where a man can be a woman, why should it be any less acceptable that a white person should be Asian or African, if they so identify (this is called transracialism by the way)? If you can change your sex any way and whenever you want, why not other biological attributes like your ethnicity or your age?
The fact is: Biological sex is immutable. Sex is not the same as a gender identity. If we conflate these two things within a legal framework, we will open the way to the erosion of the most essential reality that has literally defined humanity since the beginning of time: the fact that there are men with sperm and women with ova, and that this biological fact cannot be changed, no matter how much you want it to. You might be able to live your life in another gender identity on a social level. But only to a certain degree. No clothes, no make up, no hormone therapy, no surgery and no feeling in the world will make a woman out of a biological man or vice versa. Only when we are allowed to state this without being accused of hate speech will we be able to open the dialogue to find adequate solutions for how to better integrate transsexual people without infringing the rights of other vulnerable groups (in this case especially women). But a trans woman is a biological man and a trans man is a biological woman. A person’s self-perception is not the highest good – the highest good is still the truth.
About the author: Born 1987, with roots in Germany and the Philippines, living in Spain. Constantly curious and eager to learn new things. Freedom > safety. Your own opinion > groupthink. Coffee > tea. I strongly recommend watching “What Is A Woman?” by Matt Walsh
Die deutsche Version des Artikels findet sich hier:
A (of course highly polictically incorrect) parody of this video can be found on Tyler Fischer‘s Twitter.
One might wonder what would happen to a real woman standing in front of a class of minors with her huge breasts and wearing no bra.
This is tremendous. Excellent piece - so much information all in one place. This will be most useful to share and send to people.
Thank you.
This is a fabulous, fabulous article. I have read a lot of these ideas before, but the Divine Ms. M spells them out with great clarity, much like Eliza Mondegreen does. Keep up the good work! I'll be reading your posts from now on.
Here in the United States, the cursed conservatives, who have unwarranted power because of the way our government is set up, may in fact be a blessing. They are turning out to be a capable blockage for such nonsense as this. I'm a liberal myself, but not an idiot, which is my saving grace.
The trans nonsense is eventually going to be defeated, but it will take time, possibly decades.