This is funny, but it’s also kind of serious. The APA has basically taken the position that what has previously been understood as “deviant” sexuality and gender ideations are perfectly healthy and only require affirmative care, and traditional sexual and gender ideations are fundamentally diseased (disease classification is connected to harm, and they’ve declared them fundamentally harmful) and require confrontation and correction. So queerness is good and healthy and traditional masculinity is bad and pathological.
It’s a big deal when that’s the official position of the dominant medical society for mental care. Especially when you consider that the majority of all past and present humans fall into the category of traditional gender expressions. They’re not just saying that traditional masculinity can go wrong or can become pathological, but that it is pathological, that it is inherently abberant and needs correction in itself, just for being itself. It’s something men need to be cured of.
Apparently being a manly man is quite an awful thing. If you don’t do something about it, it might even turn you not-gay, or worse, anti-gay (the most dire of social and psychological diseases, right up there with racism and sexism and transphobia). Those are at least some of the worst risks, according to the APA. And because it is pathological and unnatural, it has no excuse, and does not qualify for affirmative care or validation, like transgenderism or homosexuality or other alternative (but actually natural and essential) sexual and gender identities.
This position essentially argues that to be not-gay or not non-gender-nonconforming is, fundamentally, a disease. And to be gay or gender non-conforming is the definition of healthy masculinity. Basically, the best man is a trans man (or possibly a trans woman, depending on how you view them). They’ve either fully divested themselves of the toxic culture of men, or inhabited masculinity from a position free from it.
Setting all the ethical and psychological arguments aside, if that’s the case then what kind of #@$%ed up species are we? Who makes a species that’s supposed to work like that? And what’s the long-term plan for the future of the species? And how did we make it this far, if half of the species has been, essentially, a disease plaguing and distorting us and doing everything wrong for millennia? And if we “correct” that disease, what happens to the species?
Traditional men do have one thing going for them. They’re responsible for 100% of all the pregnancies throughout human history. Even gay and trans men who had children did it with a woman, using their penis, bowing to the toxic conventions. Traditional masculinity has a toxic hegemony and monopoly on impregnation. Which is a problem, if they’re fundamentally an abberation, a mistake, a disease. Someone needs to get on that so we can eliminate that problem and get rid of these monstrous apes that have plagued us for all of history with their abberant sexual identities and grotesque cisgender sexual activities.
It’s funny, because a while back I wrote a blog article arguing that the ideal feminist woman, the ideal modern woman, was a trans woman. That they had a better claim to the crown of feminism than a ciswoman possibly could. And that article was provoked by arguments I had heard from trans women along exactly those lines, that the future of feminism belongs to trans women, not traditional women, who were fundamentally toxic because of their ties to traditional gender roles and power structures.
I went through the arguments offered and found that, within the context of prevailing feminist and psychological theories, the trans activists were right. They did have a better claim to being the most true and healthy version of femininity, because their identity fundamentally challenges and upends gender norms. But that was just a review of the arguments of activists. I wouldn’t have expected the APA to back me up.
So here we are. The ideal, healthy version of men and women is now some version of a gay, transexual, gender-nonconforming, or other such person. The ideal man is a not-man (in the traditional sense), and the ideal women is a not-woman (in the traditional sense). The future belongs to the not-thats, to the rebellious and creative counter-cultural heroes of innovation and counter-programming. What that means for the species identity and its future isn’t clear, but it is clear that it will subvert your expectations, and that’s the cultural currency these days. Someone better get on the horn and explain this to Russia and China and all those uncontacted tribes in the Amazon so they can be saved from the diseases that plague them.
I have to add an asterisk regarding gay people, though. Most of them were never making the argument that they were the normative case and should replace it. They had a sense that they were an alternative, not the standard, and still beholden to the breeders to keep things going. And even, in some cases, to have something to stand in alternative to.
Most of them weren’t looking to supplant or eliminate normative sexuality and gender identitites, they just wanted to be added to them. That’s a very different argument than the argument that heterosexuality and traditional gender itself is a disease and an abberation, and not one that can be tolerated or accepted among varying alternatives, but one that must be confronted and corrected.
In fact the whole category of being gay is really under threat by the newer, fancier concepts underlying gender nonconformity, trans identity, queer theory, and whatnot. Gay identity is still very tied to and dependent on heterosexual identity concepts (and realities). It’s not clear that if those heterosexual identitites fall that gay identities won’t fall with them. Which is probably why more and more gay people are questioning the direction of their own advocacy organizations, like Stonewall.
Some gay people are legitimately concerned that gay identities are being erased by trans arguments, or that they’re being called out as bigots by identities more marginal than their own. It’s not correct to assume that there isn’t any internal conflict within the world of the acronym crowd. MF only contains two identities, and there has been a heck of a lot of conflict and disagreement between those two. Is it likely that there would be none among a group of five to twenty six letters?
Anyway, don’t only expect to see cisgender, heteronormative men and women push back against this shift in classification. There is a whole host of people who have some something at risk in such a massive change in the way we view our species.
Making Nobody Happy 