drafting "Virginia Prince and the Hazards"

(This is for a school presentation; I don't know if it's really worth
repurposing for the blog, but it felt right to compose in the blog
repository, not least because I don't do non-blog "word processing"
these days.)

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+Title: Virginia Prince and the Hazards of Noticing
+Date: 2024-12-10
+Category: commentary
+Tags: autogynephilia, Virginia Prince
+Status: draft
+
+_The Stonewall Reader_, edited by Jason Baumann (as a project for the New York Public Library, probably with the intent of being used as a course text for classes like the "Queer Literatures and Media" class at San Francisco State University for which I am writing this[^reader]) features an autobiographical vignette by Virginia Prince. The obligatory about-the-author blurb before the piece reads:
+
+> Virginia Prince was a pioneering transgender activist who published the magazine _Transvestia_. In this essay for the magazine, she recounts her personal journey with her gender identity and how it affected her intimate relationships.
+
+[^reader]: Books that people read for themselves (rather than to pass a required class to get their degree/job-ticket) don't usually brand themselves as "readers."
+
+Having a passing familiarity with Prince's work, I think the reference to "gender identity" here is anachronistic—and it's an anachronism that seems representative of a distortion propagated by contemporary LGBTQIA+ ideology.[^lgbtqia-plus] I fear that readers born in the 21st century, whose political consciousness did not intersect the era before "Trans Women Are Women" was a pillar of progressive dogma, are liable to interpret Prince through the lens of a modern ontology that fits neither reality, nor how people at the time thought about the events Prince describes. The revolution establishes a new language, which makes it impossible to represent what even its own founders were actually saying.
+
+[^lgbtqia-plus]: Some may question the use of the word "ideology" here: being gay or trans isn't an _ideology_, the objection goes. Indeed. But what people who can say the term "LGBTQIA+" out loud with a straight face have in common, is.
+
+Specifically, the language—the _ideology_ of "gender identity" casts "gender" as a psychological property known to the individual by introspection, with the implication that everyone has a gender identity in the same sense. The [GLAAD Media Reference Guide](https://glaad.org/reference/trans-terms/) makes this laudably explicit: "Everyone has a gender identity," it claims, defining _cisgender_ as characterizing "a person whose gender identity is aligned with the sex they were assigned at birth". The implied ontology seems to be one in which the main (or possibly only) psychological difference between women and men is a gender identity "switch" in the brain of which it is of the utmost importance to honor and respect but which doesn't otherwise have any particular properties. This is not a trivial claim that can be asserted by definition!
+
+But if we aren't committed to believing in a gender identity "switch" in the brain, we're left with a lot of questions that our Society's pro-LGBTQIA+ political faction has an incentive to not answer, or even allow to be asked—but whose implied answers undergird what the movement is even trying to do. If Virginia Prince was not a "woman trapped in a man's body", what was she? 
+
+Well, she told us. Prince a.k.a. Arnold Lowman's claim to fame—the reason she's a historical figure worth excerpting in _The Stonewall Reader_—is as the founder of the Society for the Second Self, or Tri-Ess, a support organization for heterosexual crossdressers. (Thus the title of the magazine _Transvestia._) Tri-Ess specifically excluded homosexuals, and Prince was vocally critical of sex reassignment surgery. This viewpoint, in which straight men who wish they were women are a sexual minority with their own interests, but distinct from gay men who sometimes perform in drag, and certainly distinct from actual women, seems to be in the minority today.[^actual-woman] I'm concerned that this distinction will be lost on students in the current year reading _The Stonewall Reader_ for gen-ed classes under the gender studies department at R2 universities—even though it's right there in the text. From the piece excerpted in _The Stonewall Reader_:
+
+> I had imagined that being rather shy with the girls I had created a "girl" for myself using my own body and therefore, since I was now going to have a real girl all my own, I would have no need of such artificiality. Many of those who will read this will recognize the feeling and also the error of it.
+
+[^actual-woman]: As evidenced by how _gauche_ the phrase "actual woman" sounds to the modern ear. Everyone knows what it means, but only a curmudgeon like me _talks_ like that (and even I know how to code-switch).
+
+In other autobiographical work, Prince was a little more explicit (emphasis mine):
+
+> Starting at the age of about twelve I found myself fascinated with wearing my mother's clothes on all occasions when the family would be out. _It was sexually exciting and thrilling_ but it was also frightening and it gave rise to a tremendous load of guilt and shame. [...] I went through adolescence with those worries, and I kept on dressing on every occasion when I thought I could do so safely. _While it started out as an erotic experience each time_, there came a time when, after eroticism had run its course, I discovered that there was still a very special pleasure in "being" a "girl". Instead of just being an erotically aroused male in a dress, I found that I was somehow different. I did not know for years what was going on—or more properly what was coming out. It was that part of myself that had been hidden and suppressed in all my growing years—just as it is in all men. It was my other half, that half that when openly expressed is termed feminine.[^cowan]
+
+[^cowan]: In Vern Bullough (ed), The Frontiers of Sex Research, quoted in Zagria Cowan, ["Virginia Prince (1912 – 2009): A conflicted life in trans activism"](https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/2024-03-12_65efd6ce5a1da_Virginia_Prince_A_conflicted_life_in_tra.pdf)
+
+This is a pretty common self-report among non-androphilic trans women: acknowledging an erotic dimension to cross-gender fantasies, but minimizing it in favor of a theory of suppressed femininity.
+
+I ... don't buy it? That is, I believe that people are telling the truth about their subjective experiences, particularly since [I have a similar story to tell,](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)[^my-story] but [I think it's possible for people to be mistaken about the _causes_ of their experiences](http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/)[^psychology-is-about]. When Prince writes about the error of imagining that getting married would cure his[^pronoun] transvestism, that doesn't mean that suppressed femininity is a better casual explanation than the "inverted" (onto the self) heterosexuality of "I had created a 'girl' for myself using my own body"; an alternative hypothesis is that inverted heterosexuality doesn't un-invert itself just because an actual woman is available.
+
+[^my-story]: Zack M. Davis, "Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems", _http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/_
+
+[^psychology-is-about]: Zack M. Davis, "Psychology Is About Invalidating People's Identities", _http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/_
+
+[^pronoun]: Earlier in this work, I've been following _The Stonewall Reader_ and other sources in saying "Prince ... she", but _in the context of what this sentence is saying_, "his" seems appropriate.
+
+
+
+[TODO— lessons from my mid-term plan—
+
+ * There seem to be at least two etiological trajectories leading to MtF transsexualism, distinguished by sexual orientation: homosexual transsexuals (basically, the far right tail of feminine gay men: “inverts” in classical terminology) and autogynephilic transsexuals (in Anne Lawrence’s immortal phrase, “men who love women and want to become what they love”). (It doesn’t have to be two ontologically strictly distinct types for the model to be useful.)
+
+ * You can totally see this in our readings when you know what to look for. E.g., Arnold in Torch Song Trilogy is clearly HSTS. (The theory summarizes the regularities that are already there.) And they can be high-dimensional—it's hard to pinpoint the je ne sais quoi that screms femininity
+
+ * Thus, the culture concept of “trans” as a single cateogry that “carves reality at the joints” (and even more so, “LGBTQ” as one thing) is a historical artifact of how various political fights have played out in Western culture. (E.g., Most of the trans women in western countries are AGP-taxon; they’re not really the equivalent of, say, the Somoan fa’afafine, who are HSTS-taxon. Lesbians and gay men and AGP men largely live different lives and don’t necessarily naturally congregate. &c.)
+
+ * Queer, or LGBTQ, then, can be seen less as a natural sexuality category, but more of an ideology, like a religion. (“Political religion” is an apt phrase.) It’s not (just) that people are queer and naturally find that the LGBTQ community represents their interests. The causality goes the other way, too: people get socialized (at, e.g., university classes like this one) into LGBT culture and identify with it.
+
+ * The political religion is not necessarily in its neurotype-demographic members’ interests! E.g., a lot of AGP men are better off not transitioning given the inadequacies of current technology. A lot of “pre-gay” kids in the current year are getting socialized as trans, which is not obviously in their long-term interests. The oppositional aspects of LGBT culture are a choice; people who have the same underlying neurotype need not embrace smashing the heteropatriarchy. (It’s plausible people of the same neurotype in the past were disproportionately monks and nuns, respected places within Society’s power structure despite not being part of a standard reproductive unit.)
+
+]
+