Gender is an idiom of distress that is incredibly salient right now

With Eliza Mondegreen on why we want to un-sex

The young writer behind the nom de plume Eliza Mondegreen is one of the sanest voices in the heterodox space on gender today. “Gender” is a term many of us have stopped using because it’s acquired a multiplicity of contradictory meanings. In classic feminist criticism, “gender” is the cultural interpretation of sex difference (pink and blue; dolls vs roughhousing; Instagram vs video games; working with people vs working with things; extensive emotional vocabulary vs controlled emotions - and on and on). In the last couple of decades, however, the term came to mean “gender identity”, an inner sense of identification with a sex: your own or the opposite sex or neither. We are in an age in which, say, a boy preferring dolls, the company of girls, and flamboyant dance, may be presumed to have been “born in the wrong body”. The boy’s “gender identity”, such is the vocabulary that will be available to him as he’s growing up, just might happen to be “girl”. 

More people have embraced the term “gender [identity]” than jettisoned it. It’s working its magic in every corner of culture and society, especially in environments prone to social contagion. Ontario hasn’t kept track, but in the UK, where the NHS centralizes data collection, the referrals to Gender Identity Development Services at the Tavistock and Portman Trust have risen within the last decade from under 250, mostly boys, to 5000, two-thirds of which are adolescent girls. In Canada or the US, you would most likely have noticed the new developments in schools, where the policies of not questioning any kind of tween or teen self-identification have quietly taken over. (The provinces, some of which have already done so, find themselves having to legislate back the mandatory acceptance of self-ID without parental knowledge.) 

Where does the need to declare oneself of opposite or no sex come from, though? What psychic need does it satisfy? This is the question that interests Eliza, who’s written about gender in the always interesting British online magazine UnHerd and on her Substack, as well as in research papers and conference presentations. She’s an American working on a Masters degree at a Montreal university, in a multi-disciplinary mental health research program. Just as she was beginning to write about gender a few years back, it became dangerous for one’s employment to do so, and a pen name was in order if she was to keep her job in an American public health agency. Many things have changed since, but you still can’t write freely about the magic dust of gender without risking your employment, especially in the academe. She will, she tells me, once she’s done with school, merge the research she’s published under her real name with the general readership pieces she’s produced under her pen name. But we’ll know her as Eliza for a while longer. 

We talked over Zoom earlier in February. I was heading to Montreal a few days after our chat for the Swedish queen opera, so we met for coffee. I’ve learned of her love of visual arts, fiction, and travel, and we discovered a shared love of Italy (and we’re both fans of Natalia Ginzburg…but then again, among those who’ve read her, who isn’t). 

LP: I’m super curious about your research. Where do you go for research on gender identification and self-actualization? 

EM: For my academic research that means either being buried in literature or down the online rabbit holes. But I try to understand the topic from all sides. I've gone to transgender health conferences that accommodate multiple different perspectives. I try to have as many in-real-life meetings with people from an exploratory background or an affirmative background as possible. So I've had a lot of really interesting one-on-one conversations. For my journalism work, I do a lot of interviews with people who approach the issue in different ways. It could be parents, it could be detransitioners, it could be people who have transitioned and they're happy that they did it, but they maybe have some concerns about others going down that path. I just did a really fun interview with a woman who is big in what she calls the online nerd woman world. Of fan fiction and arts. And it was basically a conversation about how she watched gender colonize this online universe.

I really will talk to anybody. Because I'm attached to a university, I go to all kinds of talks that are on the topic or on unrelated topics. There was a very interesting one about multiple personalities recently. And there's plenty of material on campus.

Would you say this is mostly an online phenomenon? And it would not be so widespread were it not for all these forums and rabbit holes and fan cultures? 

By this, you mean: so many young people coming to see themselves in these terms and seeking transition? The way that I see it is: I see gender as an idiom of distress that is incredibly salient right now. And people of all ages with all kinds of different life experiences and often difficulties or wounds or things like that… the framework through which they are understanding the things in life that are hard, the things that aren't working, why they're stuck - that framework is gender. And in the past, we see idioms of distress generally as being these pretty local phenomena that don't really translate from one culture to another. And I think now the kind of affected locality is the internet, which is everywhere. The medium in many ways is Anglophone – the English language.

It's interesting to be in Montreal because of the divide between Anglophone and Francophone culture. There is a real difference in the uptake of gender, although in the three years that I've been here things have changed. When I first started, I found that Francophone culture here was very hostile to these ideas about gender and the customizing of the language and transitioning kids and all of these things.

Are the Francophones catching up? They’ll have to really invent a new way of speaking about they/thems, for example.

Yeah. And there are efforts to do that. I'm not sure that they're any more popular than the term Latinx.

I’ve asked Eliza to send me some art that she likes, and chose these three works by the Finnish painter Elga Sesemann (1922-2007)

Would you say it’s mostly a youth culture phenomenon, the rise in cross-sex identification? 

It definitely seems to be concentrated among younger people. But in these online communities, you really can find people of all ages. And I mean, women in their 60s who have always identified as lesbians, for example, and now they are coming to see themselves in this new light. Lots of middle aged men coming to realization after either discovering a brave new genre in pornography, or their partner gets pregnant… It can be any number of weird triggers for middle-aged men. It really does speak to people across many different demographics even though the huge flood is young people 

Does it presume a certain degree of education, a certain ethnic background, what's your experience? 

Those things are a lot harder to assess; I have to rely on online self-reports and often you don’t have that kind of information or you don't know if you can trust it. I have heard a lot of speculation that it's especially likely to appeal to people who are from a higher socioeconomic status. I think this really fits into our understanding of gender as a first world problem. But that said, we also have out in British Columbia, I am forgetting the man’s name… There's a very prominent gender clinician out in British Columbia who was bragging that 50% of his practice with kids seeking transition are kids in foster care.

What.

Yeah and he was talking about it like it was this great win for inclusivity and instead it's like holy shit, you don't stop to think about why this enormous over-representation of foster kids. There was just no curiosity about why on earth would kids who experience this dislocation and rejection and all kinds of other issues - why would this be a feeling to them. 

I find that there are a lot of things that we kind of assume about this population. There’s been some talk about the representation of the super gifted kids among them and also some of them are autistic, maybe we would have called them kids who have Asperger's a few years ago before we tried to retire that label. And there do seem to be a lot of kids who are these very intelligent creative over-thinkers but there are also a lot of kids who, if you're reading their writing, are not showing those trademarks of intelligence and curiosity. I would say that the appeal of gender has just broadened so much that it's very difficult to say who is it going to speak to at this point in time because in the early 2000s it would have been, like, it's going to speak to kids who would have otherwise grown up to be gay. And now it could be lonely autistic boys who are terrified to talk to girls. It could be very feminine heterosexual boy-crazy girls who think that they're gay trans guys..

Wait, what. The super feminine girls who believe what?

Yeah the gay trans guy phenomenon. And they will come into these communities and they will describe themselves as being extremely feminine, being happy being feminine. They love makeup. They love wearing dresses. They will talk about how they can't wait until they get top surgery because then they can wear dresses and maybe people won't misgender them.

And they have this aspiration to partner off with gay men. Of course the men that they actually meet who are interested in them are going to be bisexual or they're going to be kind of opportunistic straight men… so it’s curious to think about what's going on with this particular demographic of the feminine straight girls identifying as gay trans boys. This is something where that fanfiction culture comes into. There's been since the early 2000s this interest in slash fiction (writing gay relationships into different TV shows) and it seems to be commonly cited by women who go on to identify as gay trans boys. Their awakening was reading these fanfiction relationships stories about gay men. But these were written by straight women.

Is all this what Kathleen Stock would call immersion in fiction - having an alternative life? 

I think it is basically this epidemic of unrecognized symbolization.

To a boy or a man of a certain kind, the woman is a very powerful symbol and what she symbolizes to him might be, if they’ve been rejected, she symbolizes being desired. If you’re talking about girls and women and they're looking at boys and men and identifying with boys and men, what boys and men symbolize to them is, not infrequently, freedom. Sometimes it's a way around the limits, some of which are self-imposed and some of which are real, hard limits; for example, reproductive burden is not falling evenly between the sexes. That’s inescapable. But we want an out.

And this kind of unrecognized symbolization that I think is at the basis of trans identity is why it is completely impossible for people who identify as trans to ever explain what it really means to them to be a man or a woman. Like, what does it mean to identify that way? What are you relating to? They hate to be pushed to answer this question.

And everything that they offer up is woefully inadequate.

Yeah, stuff like clothes and makeup.

Right, and they know that it doesn't sound like it adds up, but also that they have these incredibly intense feelings around it. It's a symbol that they are trying to absorb, make comfortable in their bodies.

Would you say it's mostly girls? It's probably changing very fast, but when the GIDS Tavistock numbers came out a few years back, it was mostly girls, not wanting to be women. Do you think it's evening out?

I still think that it's mostly girls, but the number of boys also seems to be rising, it's just not rising as fast. If we didn't see the thousand-fold increase in girls, we would wonder what's going on with boys but because the girls are so dramatic the boys kind of get eclipsed.

I think that’s right, it’s female people not wanting to be women and girls because when they are talking online about how they know they're trans or how they know that they're boys or men, the conviction is all negative. It’s all about doubting your identity and feeling really unsure what you are except for the firm knowledge that you are not a woman.

They know that they hate their periods, their breasts, being seen a certain way, being treated a certain way, so the basis for conviction is this kind of self-rejection of sex and not a positive identification. It remains fuzzy what would it actually mean to be a boy or a man.

Something that you wrote about recently stood out for me: the trans-identified women on these forums explaining how they’re failing at femininity, failing at beauty, and essentially saying, oh, we'll never attain this, so we might as well give up being women, because these are the demands and we’ll never meet them. I mean, who among us didn't have similar thoughts about ourselves? That we’re failing beauty standards? ‘Feminine’ and ‘female’ are almost completely overlapping here.

Yes, it's like the band of acceptable femininity has gotten much narrower and I think that that really started to happen when I was a teenager. I think the culture became really hyper sexualized and there was just a lot less room for gender nonconformity than there had been with women who were maybe growing up in the 1990s rather than going through their teenage years in the 2000s. And I think that that has only gotten worse. When I talk to Gen X women, they will often say, it wouldn't have occurred to me that I needed to be feminine to be thought of as being a woman. And that the kinds of things that a “non-binary” woman is gonna make such a big deal out of, it would have been completely unremarkable.

Yes! And of course us Gen Xers idealize the 1970s. When we look at the cultural archaeology and ads from the 70s and all the toys and clothes are marketed for everybody. We had that window, and from the 1980s on, it’s all downhill into blue and pink. 

We seem to have lost a lot of range. 

One of the things that I found so curious about studying these female communities online that are around being trans or non-binary is just how feminine they are and how much more conventionally feminine their interests are than in the gender critical communities where there are all kinds of unconventional women. I find that very interesting. The way that they see themselves, see women's roles, the way that they express themselves—since we can probably acknowledge there's such a thing as a stereotypical feminine way of maybe expressing feelings, focusing on feelings—the things that they talk about. Many female-to-male and the non-binary communities are just obsessed with clothing and your body and the different things that you're concealing or revealing.

It’s paradoxical but my sense is that women who identify as trans are much more conventional than your average woman. Are you familiar with the Overit forum? Over there there's a much broader range of topics and expressive styles from the women who participate, a much broader range of perspectives on what femininity means and there are a lot of women who are just really unconventional weird women and they're okay with that.

And kind of by definition, a woman who is going to transition is a woman who is not okay with that. Like, she has her own idea of the right and the wrong way to be a woman. Which is of course cutting against the gender critical idea that woman is an adult human female, and that's very freeing. It's just your existential situation. And you can do with it whatever you want.

What are some of the forums that you’re following? 

For my academic research I hang out on the Reddit forums FTM, FTM men, FTM over 30, and the two detrans sub-reddits. But I keep track of a much broader range of them. I do monitor the Male-to-Female forums too; the one that is a real trip is called Translator. They're almost all middle-aged autogynephiles. It’s really a bunch of men talking about their lives falling apart but getting support for it from other people. You can do it sister! kind of support. It will be topics like, “I came out to my wife and she wants to divorce me and I feel really invalid” or, “I came out to my therapist and he said that I'll never pass as a woman and I feel really invalid” and then everybody's like No, you look great! Or, “I put my face into FaceApp and is this even possible for me” and of course the answer is no but everybody would be like “oh yes it's totally doable”. It’s a wild place. 

So it’s a support group? 

It's a support group for people who need a different kind of support than the kind that they're getting there. I would say.

Have you noticed if the lockdowns made any difference in any of these spaces?

So, early in lockdown, I saw a lot more activity on the detransition forums. And I thought that that was the way that things were going to go. Because a lot of people would go on the detransition forums and they would say, you know, once I was stuck in my apartment all the time and I wasn't gendering myself I realized it was all bullshit and it didn't matter. But that was the first three months or so. Then I don't know what happened, if we hit a certain point of isolation and derangement, but in 2020 there was just this enormous uptick in people “realizing that they were trans”.

There was this sad and hilarious article I think in the UK’s Independent that referred to the pandemic as a mass egg cracking event. Realizing that you're transgender means that you're, like, hatching. 

Maybe this is just me but I remember being a student and summer would come along and you'd be away from school for a couple of months and you would have these fantasies - well, I would have these fantasies where I would come back and I would be cool. And grown up. I would be attractive to everyone. I think that among the many other things going on in the pandemic one of them was, I'm going to emerge from lockdown and out of this chrysalis - transformed.

It’s a big project. This new identity. 

You come to a point in life where some kind of transformation is being asked of you and there's this diversion from whatever kind of growing up or changing that you need to do into trans. You see it with kids who are having trouble navigating puberty and moving into adulthood. You see it with college students who aren't sure what they want to do when they grow up and maybe it's really scary but if they're trans now they have this road map and also this excuse to not hit the other milestones that they might be afraid of because they're trans and how could you expect them to. And you also see it, curiously, with a population of women who are in their 30s and 40s and have young children and they're coming out as transgender. I think that one of the motivators there is, after you have kids as you hit your middle age as a woman, you kind of have to come up with this new script for your life and our narratives about aging are not very kind to women. So you don’t have to accept any of it if you can be a man. 

Sadie/Jude Doyle comes to mind. And I know an academic/poet who came out as nonbinary in her late fifties. On Instagram.

Yeah, you've kind of run out of the young woman plot where you, especially if you're a straight woman, you attract a mate and you have children and then it's like, oh shit, what am I supposed to do now? So you get this new plot.

Do you see this wave subsiding, going the way of anorexia, for example?

Well, I'm not sure that wave has subsided. But I think that there is a certain core of people who have a kind of a severe formless distress or discontent with life and that they are going to attach themselves to whatever narrative is the most compelling in their time. The reddit forum for women who are over 30 that I mentioned? When I look at that forum I think these are the same women who would have been in the recovered memory movement and they would have had their lives fall apart for that reason. They might have gone even further into the satanic panic and now they are in the gender thing and whatever comes after gender, these are the same women who will be in that too.

I think right now the recruiting pool for gender is a lot bigger than that and a lot of the people for whom it's more of a phase, they're going to get unblocked in some other area of life and they're going to be able to move out of it hopefully with as little damage as possible. But there is just going to be this kind of core of people who just have deep problems around self rejection and problems of living and a desperation for an answer. And they will either cling onto this after it has lost currency for everybody else or they will migrate to whatever the next iteration is. 

Abigail Shrier's new book is about whether we’re over-therapizing our teens and turning them into life-long neurotics. Is our self-understanding, today, over therapized, do you think? Would at least some of our malaise not be solved by going out, helping other people, learning to create something with our hands? 

I think that there are some people in some situations for which having that kind of space to think through things with another human being is going to be really useful. But I think my sense is, especially with kids, there is this large zone of people who are basically fine and need to touch grass, as we say, and that's going to be much more helpful than coming at problems in the language of mental health and dysfunction.

I've been so interested in the kind of scripts that different cultures attach to suffering. And if it’s a script that you're expected to keep reading from for the rest of your life or is it one where you get better. Our ideas about what depression is have really changed over time. It used to be, we understood it to be about six months of acute distress after which you get better and that was what happened to most patients who were depressed enough to be institutionalized in the 1940s-50s. Now that we have these different treatment models, it's often understood to be this lifelong condition that you're going to medicate forever. I think it’s something that we can never entirely un-mediate: the stories that we're telling about it really matter.

I was reading Suzanne O’Sullivan's book The Sleeping Beauties again recently and she's talking about Grisi Siknis which is this kind of culture-bound syndrome from Central America that affects young women. It’s basically going crazy publicly. One of the things that was so interesting about that particular script was that, you have this brief period of intense turmoil, the community rallies around you in a certain way and then you get better - within a pretty short time frame. That's it. 

And I think that therapy for a lot of people means trapping them in the kind of thinking that goes: I am this kind of a person with these kinds of problems and I just have to manage them forever.

There’s that famous book which argues that the language from Anglo-psychiatry increasingly defines all the disorders of the psyche - and that all the other cultures are getting neurotic in ways that are more and more American. 

Oh yes, Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche. And this is something that we see in these kinds of communities all the time. It's not the language of relating to the world in a healthier, more immediate way and making your relationships work better. It is the language of avoidance and management and suffering. 

A diagnosis gives you purpose, in a way.

Yeah and there's also the crossover between diagnosis and identity, which I think is really careless. You know, these kids will say, it's not just my gender but it's also my anxiety, it's my OCD. There's this ownership and it's something that’s an integral part of you and one of the things that comes up a lot, especially with gender but sometimes with these other things too, is the concern or the suspicion that an effective treatment will take something away.