In a headline-catching study just published by the CDC, and not a peer-reviewed journal, the CDC claims that it has found that 3.3% of high school students are “transgender” because they disagree with the gender stereotypes assigned to them at birth.
This claim, as presented by the CDC, is false.
Specifically, the CDC has institutionalized the bias that lies at the heart of all bad trans research: the enormous difference between what trans people say their experience is and what researchers tell trans people their experience must be, and creating systems based on what they’ve decided to tell trans people their experience is.
Bad Science: Toxic Pedagogy
The study defines gender as gender stereotypes, gender identity as identifying with those stereotypes, and being transgender as not identifying with the stereotypes assigned to you at birth:
Gender refers to the socially constructed norms and expectations imposed on persons according to their designation as male or female sex at birth. Gender identity refers to a person’s sense of self and personal experience of gender. Transgender persons are those persons whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth, whereas cisgender describes persons who identify with the gender aligned with their sex assigned at birth.
Suarez NA, Trujillo L, McKinnon II, et al. Disparities in School Connectedness, Unstable Housing, Experiences of Violence, Mental Health, and Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors Among Transgender and Cisgender High School Students — Youth Risk Behavior Survey, United States, 2023. MMWR Suppl 2024;73(Suppl-4):50–58. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.su7304a6
The history of transgender research is predominately defined by institutionalizing what cisgender researchers say transgender people experience by systemically negating what transgender people have to say about their experience.
As a trans person and long-time trans activist, I know that gender is not merely stereotypes, as much as both hate groups and disco-era researchers agree that it should be.
Sex and Gender
Understanding the difference between sex and gender is the basis of all transgender research. Unfortunately, many researchers do not understand the difference.
“Sex” refers to the material body attributes related to reproduction; “gender” references our thoughts about it. Sex references body attributes that exist in material reality: they have actual mass and can be weighed and measured. These living body attributes have actual geometry and can be physically touched.
Gender refers to all that is associated with our subjective experience of the material reality of sex. This includes the subjective experience every person has of their phenotype attributes both privately and within social contexts; gender is the condition of being sexed; it is the language, laws, social structures, and thoughts associated with a body’s material attributes that are perceived as being sexed.
While gender certainly includes gender stereotypes, it is not merely gender stereotypes alone, as the CDC asserts. Researchers who choose to perpetuate this myth are effectively gaslighting transgender people, those who care about us, and society as a whole.
Note: a small glossary of terms used by trans people—and historically misused by researchers—is provided at the end of this article.
The Cis Experience of Sex and Gender
Many thousands of cisgender men get breast reduction surgery for gynecomastia every year. The breast matter that is removed exists in material reality and is an attribute of his body; his subjective experience of that material is gender.
The social systems he encountered related to this surgery is gender. The memories he experiences around his gynecomastia is gender. The behavioral, linguistic, and systemic reactions other people have associated with his sexed attributes and his surgery, both individually and collectively, is gender. In other words, gender is all that is subjectively experienced and communicated related to a sexed body attribute that exists in material reality.
There is a concrete difference between material body attributes associated with reproduction—sex—and sexing, which is gender. If someone is experiencing something associated with sexed body attributes, it’s gender, as such experiences only exist through the phenomena of human cognition.
For many decades, transgender and intersex people have had their material condition defined by myopic institutional pedagogy. As a matter of science, wielding pedagogical power to reduce this exceptional aspect of humanity to mere stereotypes alone is unethical in the extreme.
Lying about Gender Causes ROGD
Debunked hoax theories around the cause of trans experiences are everywhere and while it’s not terribly important that Uncle Jimmy-John saw on his MAGA feed that trans people are grooming children into being trans, it’s a problem when the Brown University School of Public Health makes this claim in a peer-reviewed science journal.
A Brown University researcher believes that gender is gender stereotypes, that gender identity is identifying with those stereotypes, and transgender is not identifying with the stereotypes assigned to you at birth. This is the epistemic foundation of ROGD, and the CDC just endorsed it. The gaslighting the CDC has enshrined within public health pedagogy is the very epistemic foundation of the anti-trans bunk research industry.
Researchers: LISTEN TO TRANS PEOPLE
If you’re a researcher who wants to base your gender research on the notion that trans people transition because of gender stereotypes, it is unethical for you to proceed with your research.
Going back to the example of a man having gynecomastia surgery, as a biased researcher, you might wonder how such gender surgery is fundamentally different from the surgeries trans people get. A man with excess breast tissue wants to better resemble the male body stereotype so that he can feel more comfortable in his body in society. How, you might ask, is that different from what trans people do?
The reason the above hypothetical cis experience of “gender dysphoria” seems to be similar to the experience of trans “gender dysphoria” is cis supremacy. Regardless of what I or many other trans people (going back to the 1950s recordings of trans people explaining their experience to cis people) have to say about our experience, cis researchers axiomatically believe that the trans experience of gender is like the cis experience of gender. It isn’t.
When I say “gender dysphoria,” it might be helpful for cis researchers to hear “phenotype dysphoria” instead of “stereotype dysphoria.” When I say “dysphoria,” it might be helpful for cis researchers to hear “torture.” When I say that at the age of 5, my “gender dysphoria” was so significant that I was praying at bedtime to die, I am saying that my subjective experience of phenotype was so painful I was suicidal by the age of 5 because it was torturous. My issue wasn’t being unhappy wearing pink rather than blue; my issue was that I was experiencing torture.
If you, as a researcher, choose to pretend that such an experience is the same thing as a man wanting better-defined pecks or a woman wanting larger breasts, your level of bias is too extreme for you to ethically proceed with your research. Should you move forward, despite your bias, it will be because you are using the power imbalance that exists between me, as a trans person, and you, as the epistemological arbiter of my experience. If you do this, you take advantage of your research subjects and negate your epistemic responsibility. Such behavior is unethical.
If a high schooler tells you that they are “transgender,” do not substitute their experience for what you assert their experience to be: a mere disagreement about gender stereotypes. Please hear me:
- Gender is not merely “socially constructed norms and expectations.”
- Gender identity is not merely “a person’s sense of self and personal experience of [socially constructed norms and expectations].”
- Transgender is not merely a person “whose [identification with socially constructed norms and expectations] differs from their sex assigned at birth.”
While the CDC’s study has some excellent and critically important information about the social determinants of health for those surveyed, it nonetheless validates the unethical mischaracterization of practically all anti-trans “research”: the unsupported axiomatic presupposition that trans people transition merely due to gender stereotypes alone.
Glossary:
Biological:
Within trans discourse, “biological” refers to physical living matter. Within anti-trans discourse, “biological” refers to ontology, not to material existing in physical reality. Anti-trans activists will say “biological man” when they mean “ontological man.”
Biological Sex:
Genotype and phenotype. Anti-trans activists often use this term to support ad naturam arguments –implying that a post-transition trans or intersex person’s body is no longer biological— or as an equivocation for ontological sex.
Cisgender (Cis):
Short for cisgender. Cis is Latin for “on the same side [as].” In other words, it’s a term describing non-transgender people. In the same way, one might say trans women, one can say cis women. Cisgender means “denoting or relating to someone whose sense of personal identity corresponds with the gender assigned to them at birth.”
While the cis and trans lexical binary was used to reference gendered behavior in Western sexology since at least 1914, it is commonly asserted that trans activists only recently coined this naming convention as a slur. Anti-trans platforms commonly censor this term.
Note: The “sense of personal identity” in the definition of cisgender does not refer to gender roles. Identity and role are two different things. For instance, just because LGB people’s sexuality violates assigned heteronormative gender roles, that does not mean that lesbians, therefore, don’t identify with the gender assigned to them at birth: female.
Female:
One whose genotype, phenotype, and/or social persona is regarded by society as being typical of the political class “woman.”
Gender:
A generic term we use to refer to any/all aspects of gender orientation, expression, and identity; gender role, stereotype, and hierarchy; and/or, any mental contextualization of the material reality of genotype and phenotype sex.
Gender Dysphoria:
Phenotype dysphoria. The experience of extreme and long-lasting (often stretching back to one’s earliest memories) mismatch between one’s gender orientation and phenotype.
Gender Dysphoria may also refer to the DSM-5 diagnosis. Before the publication of the DSM-5 in 2013, clinical “gender dysphoria” could mean discomfort with one’s gender role. The transgender community strongly condemned this clinical view.
Gender Expression:
The complex and nuanced ways humans communicate gender identity and orientation.
Gender Identity:
When most trans people speak of gender identity, they mean gender orientation. Gender identity can also mean the contextual labels we use when socially constructing sexed personas. Therefore, “gender identity” within trans discourse may refer to gender orientation, one’s sexed persona, or both.
Note: Within anti-trans discourse, “gender identity” tends to refer to one’s sexed persona or gender role.
Gender Orientation:
One’s primary experience of one’s phenotype sex.
Gender Role:
In sexism, gender roles function to promote a culturally perceived sex-segregated society. Being placed into a role is something that culture forcibly does to people, and in this way, nobody may choose to live in a gender role. Should society deem that one is a male, that person will be placed into a male role; should society deem that one is female, that person will be placed into a female role.
Note: Anti-trans activists claim that trans people medically transition due to gender role envy.
Gender Stereotype:
In sexism, sex-segregated norms and taboos are propagated throughout society by culture. They are applied to those who are perceived by culture to be either male or female. These norms and taboos produce culturally prescriptive forms that help social systems identify people within its binary constructs.
Note: Anti-trans activists claim that trans people medically transition due to gender stereotype envy.
Male:
One whose genotype, phenotype, and/or social persona is regarded by society as being typical of the political class “man.”
Man:
A political class that is pressured by culture to subjugate women.
Phenotype Dysphoria:
The experience of extreme and long-lasting (oftentimes stretching back to one’s earliest memories) mismatch between one’s gender orientation and phenotype.
Sex:
A social identifier assigned to babies at birth. In a narrow scientific connotation, “sex” connotes the bimodal distribution of material phenotypic and genotypic attributes related to reproduction.
Sex Binary:
The view of patriarchy that there are only two types of sexed bodies, male and female, and that these genotypic and phenotypic body attributes are an immutable natural category. The sexed binary erases or marginalizes both intersex and transgender people who transition to a different sexed phenotype (binary or nonbinary) than that associated with their sex assignment at birth.
Sex Essentialism:
The uncritical belief that “sex” is reducible to a discrete attribute that, once identified, causes the entirety of the body to conform to the binary category of either male or female.
Transition:
The constellation of processes a trans person undertakes to physically, legally, and socially move from one sexed identification to another.
Transgender:
An umbrella term that may encompass a variety of people, including transsexuals, cross-dressers, drag kings and queens, as well as bigender and androgynous individuals. Transgender came into common usage during the 1970s, but the earliest known use was in 1965 to refer to transsexuals who wanted genital reconstructive surgery. Today, the term is used to refer to individuals who are not cisgender. Researchers must identify in what way a research subject might identify with the term “transgender” rather than presuming a trans person shares the researcher’s understanding of their identity.
Transsexual:
A person whose phenotype aligns with or is in the process of aligning with males if assigned female at birth or female if assigned male at birth.
Trans man:
A person who was sexed female at birth and who, through the process of transition, has or is developing a male phenotype.
Transphobia:
Within trans discourse, the “phobia” in transphobia usually refers to the tendency to reject (e.g., a “hydrophobic” substance) non-cisgender people, issues, causes, or concerns.
Trans woman:
A person who was sexed male at birth and who, through the process of transition, has or is developing a female phenotype.
Woman:
A political class that is pressured by culture to be subordinate to men.