This is the fifth installment in my series reviewing Preston Sprinkle's book Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church, & What the Bible has to Say. Click HERE for the Intro to this series where I discuss my thematic concerns with the book and for an index for the full series.
A transgender person is anyone whose gender identity does not align with the sex they were assigned at birth.
I need to foreground the standard definition of what the term transgender means before we launch into this chapter because this is where all the prep work Preston Sprinkle did in the previous two chapters, introducing the subject and defining a bunch of terms in ways that suit his arguments, really starts to pay off in tragically misleading ways. The definition above doesn't actually conflict with the one Sprinkle provided at the beginning of Chapter 2—an umbrella term for the many ways in which people might experience and/or present and express (or live out) their gender identities differently from people whose sense of gender identity is congruent with their biological sex—but keeping the original front and center will do a lot to show how far Sprinkle wants to drift from it.
We also need to keep in mind Sprinkle's deployment of trans* with the asterisk which he is using as a sort of larger umbrella than the term transgender above:
...some people put an asterisk after the word trans, styling it as trans*, when they want to use it as a broad umbrella term to include a whole range of identities that aren't strictly transgender, such as nonbinary, genderqueer, and the like. I'll do the same in this book.
As I referenced in the intro to this series, Sprinkle's choice to use trans* with the asterisk is decidedly non-standard and was not standard in 2021 when the book was published. I would love to know who the "some people" from the above definition actually are; unfortunately Sprinkle didn't provide any citation for that portion of Chapter 2. I was able to locate trans* in 2 out of 5 online glossaries of LGBTQ+ related terms and in neither of them was there an indication that trans* indicates identities that don't already fall under the trans or transgender umbrella. The closest thing to that claim was the observation that using trans* rather than trans does a better job of expressing inclusion of certain non-binary identities. That may be where Sprinkle got the idea but if so then he has made a leap from the claim that one term is better at expressing an inclusivity that both are intended to express, to the claim that one expresses a greater degree of inclusivity than the other. In effect he has taken the step of reifying a distinction that is not intended by any original users of the term.
Sprinkle structures Chapter 3 around brief explanations of his different categories of "trans*" people. So far as I have been able to find this taxonomy is unique to Sprinkle.
So Let's buckle up dive in to his categories:
Gender Dysphoric Trans*
Sprinkle is, at some level at least, aware of the fact that gender dysphoria is a particular experience, one for which transition is really the only recognized treatment. Sprinkle is perfectly correct to observe that "some trans*-identified people experience gender dysphoria, and some don't" but he goes on to assert that "For those who do, there are two broad categories: early-onset gender dysphoria and "late-onset gender dysphoria" which is technically true since trans people who experience gender dysphoria do begin experiencing it at a variety of ages and the late vs early onset has been used in the past but then there are a lot of ways that people who experience gender dysphoria can be divided into categories (severity of the dysphoria, birth assigned sex, those who do and do not decide to transition etc...) it is worth noticing now that this particular taxonomy happens to serve his purpose later in the chapter.
Regardless, Sprinkle goes on to focus on early-onset gender dysphoria and immediately spreads some misinformation. His concluding paragraph on the topic claims "And for most kids [gender dysphoria] goes away. According to all available studies done on the persistence rate of dysphoria in kids, 61 to 88 percent of early-onset dysphoria cases end up desisting; that is, the dysphoria goes away over puberty". He does have a footnote for this assertion and in it he admits that "this 'desistance' rate has been the subject of much controversy," (which already calls into question his main text claim about "all available studies") and then cites a paper justifying conversion therapy for trangender kids from his own organization his own organization and a blog post from James Cantor, a notoriously transphobic psychologist whose "work" around transgender people has been critisized by multible mainstream medical associations. Both cite a number of studies but this 2016 piece by Brynn Tannehill demonstrates just how horribly flawed the assumptions, methods, and processes that went into making up that "61-88%" desistance rate are. To hand wave those serious methodological flaws as "controversy" and to hide even that away in a footnote and away from the main text is, frankly, misleading to the point of being dishonest. Further, since the release of Sprinkle's book, studies have been released setting the number at a whopping 6% of children who present with gender dysphoria and go on to desist, making the audacity of Sprinkle's claims and the severely biased nature of his "research" rather starkly apparent. I would very much encourage you to read more about this HERE (this video is a nice tl;dr by the author) and decide for yourself whether or not Preston's numbers are accurate and whether the language and certainty he projects in the main text are justified.
Non-Gender Dysphoric Trans*
Before we get into what Sprinkle has to say in this section I want to be clear that "experiencing vs. not-experiencing gender dysphoria" is not a way in which trans people categorize ourselves. The fact of the matter is that on the one hand it is true that someone does not have to experience dysphoria to be trans—to be trans is to have a gender identity which doesn't align with the sex you were assigned at birth, whereas gender dysphoria is an experience of distress that is caused by said misalignment, so if you are trans, you don't become less so by not suffering as a result—and on the other hand gender dysphoria manifests in many different ways and many people who do experience dysphoria do not recognized that that is what they are experiencing for quite a while.
So with that as background, Sprinkle starts this section off in what is becoming typical of his misleading-while-giving-himself-a-technical-out method: he quotes a trans YouTuber claiming to be "1000% transgender" and also to identify 1000% as the gender he was assigned at birth. In the footnote to this strange claim, Sprinkle allows that the YouTuber in question later retracted that statement but Sprinkle apparently didn't think that fact deserved a place in the main text. More troubling, he goes on to use that retracted quote as a jumping off point to start talking about a "'self-ID' perspective" in which "if you say you're trans*, then you're trans*" which itself is a starting point for him to begin discussing trans-medicalism (without naming it). It is unclear what the retracted quote has to do with dysphoria or what purpose Sprinkle thinks it is serving in his book and the Sprinkle's claims about self-ID are, again, a severe misrepresentation of what trans people actually think and say. The claim "if you say you're trans then you're trans*" does not, when spoken by the community, mean that speaking the phrase "I am trans" will magically grant a status of transness. It means that people should not be required to demonstrate or perform misery or suffering in order to be recognized as trans. Some trans people, for instance, do not experience gender dysphoria but they do experience gender euphoria when they are able to live into their actual gender identity. It means that each person is in the best/only position to know whether the sex they were assigned at birth aligns with their gender identity.
Sprinkle ends the section by misrepresenting Natalie Wynn as saying that performance is all there is to gender, and then citing Blaire White as disagreeing. Sprinkle doesn't provide a citation for either woman so his claim that Natalie Wynn "says that if you live like a woman, then you're a woman" is hard to verify but, as someone who has watched most (all?) of her video essays I can very safely say that that quote does not represent anything like the full complexity of Wynn's views on what constitutes womanhood or transness. Meanwhile Blaire White is, for sure, a transmedicalist but whose views can't really be said to represent anything close to a consensus or even established position in contemporary transgender discourse (popular or academic). Sprinkle ends by asking (and not answering) "Which one is right? And why? What does it mean to be trans*" an odd question given that he has already provided his definition.
Trans* Experience Vs. Trans* Ontology
Sprinkle does...a lot with this section of the chapter. It is worth reiterating that he purports to be descriptive in each of these sections and does not write as though he were making an argument but as though he were reporting on the phenomenon of transness. That mode of writing allows him to wildly over-represent extremely minority accounts as nonetheless representative of trans people. For instance, in this section he spends most of his time talking about two people: Kat and Dan. Kat is a woman who identifies as transgender but also as the sex she was assigned at birth. She identifies as transgender because she experiences gender dysphoria but, for religious reasons, has chosen not to transition or to identify as the man or non-binary person she actually experiences herself to be. (Sprinkle does not provide all of this information but he interviewed a Kat on his podcast and I am working from that.
Meanwhile the picture that Preston paints with "Dan" (I was unable to determine who Sprinkle is talking about) is both representative of what people generally actually mean by "transgender" and is also rather wildly revealing of Preston's actual beliefs given that he introduces "Dan" by misgendering her and then switches to she/her only after punting on the question of pronoun usage.
We will have to wait for the next chapter before Sprinkle actually weighs in with anything like an argument on this question so before moving on I will note again that, in this section Sprinkle presents as representative, a view that is—at best—such an overwhelmingly minority view that most transgender people would find it baffling—it wouldn't even register as a common mistake or dispute.
ROGD Trans*
Sprinkle takes two paragraphs to introduce this as a concept then punts to Chapter 10 granting, at least, that "Lots of discussions (and heated debates) surround ROGD" (Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria). It is worth noting that he also identifies the derogative term trans trender in this section and objects to it's use not because it "can feel like it's invalidating someone's experience" as such but because that "is never a great way to start a relationship. Sprinkle's concern is evangelistic and propagandistic, rather than person-centered. He also includes the claim that "there does seem to be a good deal of evidence that social influences are one reason some (perhaps many) teenagers and young adults identify as trans*" Which, for any reasonable definition of "a good deal of evidence" is a false claim since the only study which has even purported to support ROGD was so methodologically flawed that the journal which published it chose to take it down for amendments and to moderate its conclusion.
I will engage with Sprinkle's actual arguments and debate in my response to Chapter 10 so for now here are several articles pointing out the flaws in the ROGD "theory":
- Julia Serano: Everything You Need To Know About Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria
- The Journal of Pediatrics: Do Clinical Data from Transgender Adolescents Suppport the Phenomenon of "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria"?
- Medical News Today: What is Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria?
And here is an excellent podcast episode with a case study of the harm caused by ROGD
Seduction of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria
Seduction of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria
Trans* Detransitioners
Detransitioners do exist and they absolutely need to be heard. Sprinkle reasonably referrs to detransitioners (people who had transitioned to at least some extent who choose to go back to living as their assigned gender) as "another group of (former?) trans* people" since the degree to which detransitioners identify as trans is significantly varied. After that, though, Sprinkle goes on to list potential reasons for detransition and comes up with: dissatisfaction with "the operation"1, depression and anxiety not going away after transition, and fading ROGD. He provides no citation though so I looked it up. In fact, in 2021 the NIH released a significant study on the reasonons for detransition and found that:
In this national study, 13.1% of TGD respondents who had ever pursued gender affirmation reported a history of detransition. To our knowledge, this is the first study to systematically examine reasons for detransition in a large national sample of TGD adults. The vast majority of participants reported detransition due at least in part to external factors, such as pressure from family, nonaffirming school environments, and sexual assault. External pressures such as family rejection, school-based harassment, lack of government affirmation, and sexual violence have previously been associated with increased suicide attempts in TGD populations.
 |
| credit Sophie Labelle @AssigneeGarcon |
short section and it is well worth asking why not. Also, while that study was published after Dr. Sprinkle's book he had access to similar data in one of the largest ever surveys of transgender people published by the National Center for Transgender Equality which found that only 9% of respondents had detransitioned for any of the reasons in Sprinkle's list while, again, the vast majority of detransitioners cited a lack of family/social/medical/financial support.
Autogynephilic Trans*
This isn't a thing. Sprinkle does allow that "it doesn't exist and you're transphobic if you say it does" is a position that people take on this topic but, as we have seen him do several times already, he uses format and insinuation to give the impression that autogynephilia has far more legitimacy that it. in fact does. First, note that he conjoins "autogynephilia doesn't exist" with "an you're transphobic if you say it does" thereby putting everyone to whom the idea sounds even vaguely plausible on the defensive against any argument against the existence of autogynephilia. In this section Dr. Sprinkle provides a definition of autogynephilia as a term which "describes an experience where a biological male is erotically aroused at the thought of himself as a female" which isn't quite accurate. The term in fact was developed by Ray Blanchard as a category of paraphelia (think kink or fetish) in which a man is turned on at the thought of himself as a woman, thus when people say that "autogynephilia doesn't exist" they do not mean, as Sprinkle assumes, that no man (or trans woman) has ever been turned on by thoughts of being a woman, they mean that autogynephilia is not a paraphilia, nor is it a category of trans woman. You see the problem? Sprinkle uses the weak defition (the experience of being aroused at a particular concept) as his defintion but they goes on to act as though people identifying with that experience (Sprinkle cites two friends of his and two other individuals who identify with autogynephilia) as supporting the claims of people who use the hard definition of autogynephilia as a paraphilia. He is equivocating.
Spinkle makes the rather strong statement in this section that "based on everything I've read and the people I've talked to, I believe without a doubt that some trans* people are autogynephilic" which he then supports with reference to the two friends one of whom, he admits, doesn't even experience "autogynephilia" as something erotic—which is rather the whole deal when it comes to any traditional "hard" definition of autogynephilia.
OK so I had better explain a bit more about what autogynephilia purports to be and why I opened this section declaring that it "isn't a thing". First I need to state that autogynephilia isn't a thing because every major psychological association rejects it both as a legitimate category of trans person and as a diagnosable paraphilia. Generally one runs into autogynephilia being proposed either as a sort of alternative to "real" transness, or as an argument that trans-ness generally is nothing more than an elaborate fetish. The former is rather personally frustrating to me as it was my own youthful exposure to the autogynephilia-as-fake-transness idea that persuaded me for over two decades that I was "not actually trans".
The core problem, in both instances (autogynephilia as a category of trans women and autogynephilia as a paraphilia) is that cis women are also routinely aroused in ways that involve understanding and imagining themselves as women. It is actually relatively rare to find a cis woman for whom imagining herself as a woman is not at least a part of her erotic fantasy life which means that when a trans woman finds that thinking of herself as a woman is a component of her erotic fantasy life she is just...experiencing the standard fantasy life of a woman.
Sprinkle has to have been aware of this (prior to the publication of his book I actually shared several resources with him which clarify those problems with the theory) but goes to great lengths (I will examine them below) to give the impression that autogynephilia is somehow nevertheless a live option in the trans community but he somehow never gets around to mentioning the fact that, as a theory and as a category it has been roundly discredited by the psychological community. He does recommend Alice Dreger's book Galileo's Middle Finger (Dreger is a historian) for "a punchy review for some of the controversy surrounding autogynephilia" but fails to mention that Dreger is generally understood in the trans community to be transphobic and a supporter of quack pseudoscience. In fact all four of the people cited in the main text of this section (Alice Dreger, Ray Blanchard, J Michael Bailey, and Anne Lawrence) are all thoroughly anti-transgender partisans whose work has been thoroughly debunked.
Citation & Misrepresentation
I can't end this section without mentioning one last galling choice Dr. Sprinkle makes in this section. In footnote 12 Sprinkle provides citation for the claim that "Trans* people themselves hold a wide range of opinions on autogynephilia" by citing Julia Serano and Miranda Yardley. This is, of course, technically true inasmuch as it is possible to find someone in any category who believes almost anything. Trans people (particularly trans women) who believe that autogynephilia is a legitimate category of transgender person (and/or a real reason that someone might think they are trans without actually being trans) are, however, very much on the fringe. Thus, Dr. Sprinkle's habit of "listing views" without ever(?) distinguishing between mainstream and fringe views ends up subtly misleading the reader. Saying that "American women themselves hold a wide range of opinions on patriarchal polygamy" and then citing that with two specific women who have written on the subject would technically be a true statement but would give the misleading impression that patriarchal polygamy is a live option in the United States when it simply isn't.
Dr. Sprinkle's choice of women to list as representative of the spectrum of views on this is itself rather a tell sort of cops to this problem. I have cited Julia Serano frequently in this series and will continue to do so because she is an excellent authority transgender theory in US, particularly among transgender women. Serano holds a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from Columbia University, has published in multiple academic scholarly journals, and wrote the seminal book on transgender theory and feminism: Whipping Girl (A text Sprinkle has admitted to not having read prior to the publication of his book despite having been referred to on on multiple occasions); Miranda Yardley holds a bachelors degree in accounting, runs a music magazine, and has written some articles about trans theory on her personal website. These two sources are not equal, but none of that is going to be apparent to a casual reader of Embodied.
If this sort of misleading mischaracterization were a one off then I could reasonably be accused of nit-picking here. Unfortunately it is representative of Sprinkle's approach throughout the book.
Mental Health Concerns Among Trans*
It might seem a little bit precocious but I want to note that the titles for most of these sections are grammatically incorrect. "transgender" "trans" and even "trans*" are all adjectives. Just as it would be grammatically incorrect to say "Mental Health Concerns Among Short" it is incorrect to say "Mental Health Concerns Among Trans*". This is not, on its own, a serious issue but it does suggest that Dr. Sprinkle is not actually all that familiar with transgender people and transgender discourse. To the average cis person those grammar errors probably don't stand out much, but to a trans person they read like the glaringly bad grammar that they are.
As to the content of this section, despite its length, the problems are fairly easy to summarize. Sprinkle notes the well documented correlation between people on the autism spectrum and who have various mental health issues, and people who are trans. He then goes on to speculate rather oddly on the possibility of an autistic person who has OCD who "has an ongoing obsession with the idea of becoming the other sex". He then has a paragraph talking about making sure that people don't think they are trans due to factors actually rooted in a mental health concern or in their being autistic, and a final paragraph reminding his readers that: "It would be untruthful to assume that every biological male who identifies as trans* is autogynephilic or on the autism spectrum of has an underlying mental health issue" which is accurate enough but gives the impression that there is some significant portion of people who think that they are trans but are actually suffering from some mental health condition or are autistic and somehow confuse that for trans-ness. That theory doesn't hold up to the data we have about trans people now and it didn't hold up to the data we had when Sprinkle first published the book.
In general the enormous missing piece in Sprinkle's analysis in this chapter is the whole concept of minority stress which has already been document (and had well before Dr. Sprinkle wrote this book) to have a significant impact on the physical and mental health of queer people generally and transgender people specifically. In fact is now also well documented that affirming health care and social support can largely to totally mitigate any increase in mental health challenges transgender people might experience in contrast to our cisgender counterparts. The conclusion of this 2016 report (four years before Dr. Sprinkle published Embodied) from the American Academy of Pediatrics is worth quoting here:
Socially transitioned transgender children who are supported in their gender identity have developmentally normative levels of depression and only minimal elevations in anxiety, suggesting that psychopathology is not inevitable within this group.
Trans* As Internal Homophobia or Misogyny
The reasoning in this section is somewhat twisted. Sprinkle's basic thesis is that some people transition, not because they are trans, but because they suffer either from internalized homophobia or (in the case of some cis women) internalized misogyny. It is not clear to me how Dr. Sprinkle justifies calling these people "trans*" given that his definition of "trans*" would seem to preclude any category of people whose gender identity doesn't actually differ from the sex they were assigned at birth. If Preston Sprinkle wants to warn about cis people transitioning for bad reasons, that is one thing (though I would argue that the data I have been citing throughout this piece rather undercuts his idea that this accounts for any significant number of people who choose to transition) but it doesn't justify his categorizing people who don't fit his own definition of "trans*"ness as trans*.
It is worth saying the meantime, that the evidence he provides to support his assertion that the "story of [transness as] repressed homophobia is more widespread than you might think" consists entirely of a single cis lesbian who transitioned for a year and a single paywalled article from The Times which Sprinkle summarizes as "Some therapists wonder if certain parents who are highly supportive of their child identifying as transgender could be motivated by a homophobic fear about their child being gay" [emphasis mine]—hardly the sort of evidence that ought to be required for a robustly stated "is more widespread than you might think" from a professional academic. To be fair, Dr. Sprinkle does go on to provide adequate citation for his claim that Iran performs gender transition procedures and outlaws homosexuality but it is not clear to me how that reinforces a claim about what might motivate cis people in countries where homosexuality is legal and where trans people are more likely to face both social stigma, violence, and repressive laws than our queer cis counterparts.
As to the misogyny claim, Sprinkle's evidence consists entirely of a single anecdote and an online non-scientific survey (I was not even able to locate a methodology statement) which seems to have circulated primarily in anti-trans spaces. In fact when I googled the author and survey Sprinkle cites here (footnote 21 of Chapter 3) all I was able to find was a reference to a survey in a tweet from a Twitter account entitled "Detrans Voices" @FtMDetransed which provided two screenshots of a Google Forms survey and a link to request access to the Google Forms Survey. The author Sprinkle cites (Haley Mangelsdorf) seems to be either a ghost or a pen name as a search for that name brings up only a link to a zine which I have not been able to track down, and a reference to the survey on 4thwavenow a notorious anti-trans website and forum. It seems likely that Sprinkle got this source from one or the other of those sources, but it is odd that he would see fit to include this as a citation in his putatively academic text.
Listening Love
This final section in the chapter starts of pretty well. Sprinkle's thesis for the section is that Christians need to be more loving towards trans people and I am all on board with that. Unfortunately he tries to illustrate the importance of that by going back to his story of Kat who detransitioned(2) after working with a woman at Kat's church who listened and responded with "I'm not sure. But I'd love to explore this with you" after Kat asked her What God thinks about transness and transition. I say "unfortunately" but it is also helpful that this provides a bit of a "mask off" moment in the book. The strong impression you get reading this section is that for Sprinkle, the goal of Christian interactions with trans people is for us to not transition. The second to last paragraph sums it up as:
Some people might enjoy being instructed by a person who seems to have all the right answers—a two-legged Google with a mouth that never seems to shut. But I think most people are like Kat. They want to know the truth, but they want to find it with a friend.
Preston Sprinkle wants his cis Christian audience to guide trans people away from transition or even really identifying as the women, non-binary people, and men that we are; he just wants them to be nice while they are doing it. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar after all.
Series Index
Footnote
1. I have no idea why Sprinkle focuses on "the surgery" here since plenty of detransitioners detransition after taking HRT without any surgeries, while the regret rate for gender affirming surgery is only 2%. It seems that Sprinkle may be going more for shock value than for an accurate representation of the state of affairs. He spends some time speculating on the possiblity of and autistic person suffering from OCD
2. According to Sprinkle Kat identifies as transgender despite now identifying with the gender Kat was assigned at birth on account of still experiencing gender dysphoria. It is worth noticing that this does actually place Kat outside of Sprinkle's original definition of what it means to be transgender.
No comments:
Post a Comment