The Sweetest Poisons: Preston Sprinkle's "Embodied" Chapter 3: Varieties of Trans. A Review

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

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

 Note that Sprinkle's three reasons don't appear as any of the major reasons for transition. In fact the reasons Sprinkle highlights account for, at most, 18% of reasons for detransition while a lack of social/medical/familial/financial  support (which, I would argue, Sprinkle is contributing to here) account for the "vast majority" of cases. That is not the impression that Dr. Sprinkle conveys in this
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

Intro

Part 1—Chapter 1: People

Part 2—Chapter 2A: Terms

Part 3—Chapter 2B: Sex and Gender

Part 4—Chapter 3: Varieties of Trans 

Part 5—Chapter 4: Male, Female & The Image of God

Part 6—Chapter 5: Gender Stereotypes

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.  

Bareface Revisited: C.S. Lewis and the Identity Claims of Transgender People

Prologue to the Second Edition

This is an update to a piece I wrote 4 years ago. Think of it as a second edition. When I wrote the original (which is still available HERE) I knew that I am a trans woman but was not yet out. Writing about this topic under those conditions was always complicated for me. On the one hand it was a topic I felt almost compelled to write about and to weigh in on and at the same time, recognizing my own apparent social location and not wanting to betray truths I was not yet ready to share meant writing with a sort of artificial distance from my subject matter—I had to write as though my first hand knowledge were second or third hand instead and as though those concerns which impact me directly instead applied to "those I care about". Certainly it helped that I had read a lot on the topic (and have read more now) and that I do care a great deal for all of my trans siblings who are affected by this topic, but that distance led me to feel that, as much as I like this essay—and it is one of my personal favorites—it was never as strong as it might have been. 

Recently a friend of mine brought my attention back to this piece mentioning that he had found it helpful in relating to trans people in his life and, on a whim, I re-read it and found that while I still believe the the core argument is strong, I wanted to re-write it so as to fully own its contents and form. Thus I have chosen to edit and re-formulate to my hearts content, in some places bolstering lines or reasoning that some readers found thin and in other places merely updating the language and the phrasing to more accurately represent my own relation to the subject matter. I hope you enjoy it. 

On Historical Method

To my best knowledge C.S. Lewis never directly interacted with an out transgender individual or commented on the validity of the identity claims of transgender people. Because he lived and died before much of the current understanding of transgender experiences and identities had been developed it would be anachronistic to claim that he supported (or would have supported) transgender people in our identity claims. And because even the most logical of individuals is likely to be influenced and limited by the prejudices and beliefs of their own context it would be foolish to claim with certainty that Lewis—if he were around today—would affirm transgender people's identities. The "what would this person think of this if they were alive today" game generally not worth playing and I do not intend to take it up here. Instead, what I do think I can demonstrate is that there is ample material in Lewis' work to construct a strong argument in favor of the validity of the gender identities of transgender individuals—an argument which Lewis, if he had been consistent to his own professed assumptions and beliefs—would have been compelled to accept. That is not to say that his thinking is easily compatible with the different models—there are more than one, and for many of us theory only comes after experience and attepts to fit itself to what we already know—which transgender people put forth in defense of our identity claims; in fact Lewis' thinking doesn't quite map on to any one of the dominant models today. What his ideas and methods do establish, however, is a model both for conceptualizing transgender gender identity claims from an orthodox Christian perspective, a structure of reasoning which recommends (demands even) trusting the gender identity claims made by transgender people, and a perspective on the denial of those claims which frames them as a particular sort of sin.

It is probably worth stating here that Lewis did comment on homosexuality generally and on lesbian and gay sex specifically in his published and unpublished writing. While he was arguably less condemning than some of his contemporaries, he was not affirming of gay and lesbian sex and (in That Hideous Strength) did engage in what can, at best, be described as queer-coding at least two of his villains. As I have written elsewhere, I do not intend any apologetic for this view on Lewis' part—I believe he was wrong—and anyone who might hope to "recruit" Lewis as a post-mortem advocate for LGB acceptance should be aware of his views, though I would be very interested to see an analysis of his overall thought which might contextualize his stated position as contradicting his philosophy and theology as a whole.

Vocabulary, Terminology, and Background Theory

This essay makes regular reference to much terminology which is specific to the contemporary (2023) conversation around or about gender, transgender people, and transgender identities. Readers unfamiliar with that conversation, or who just want to review/refresh their understanding of the relevant language will find a helpful glossary HERE. While I will occasionally be nuancing some of the contemporary definitions (particularly the theory behind the word gender) in order to bridge the linguistic gap between Lewis life and our current moment, these definitions should fit my general usage.

To be clear, I do not at all mean to suggest that Lewis was saying the same thing that contemporary transgender theorists, gender theorists, and queer theorists are saying. I am hoping, here, only to develop a particular argument out of what C.S. Lewis can be demonstrated to have thought based on his published work and which arrives at the conclusion that we ought to affirm the gender identity claims of transgender people. While I certainly do hope that this argument will convince those who share many of Lewis' assumptions and beliefs to take that conclusion seriously, I am not suggesting that transgender people need the affirmation of Lewis' thought or argument structures. Transgender theory and philosophy is already being done effectively by transgender academics, theorists, theologians, and advocates. I have provided links to some of their work throughout and at the end of this piece.

Some Background on The Identities of Transgender People and Reality Enforcement

In her essay Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance trans philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher identifies an impulse for reality enforcement as the primary motive behind transphobia generally and anti-trans violence in particular. She claims:

While there are many features associated with reality enforcement, it has four essential ones: identity invalidation, the appearance-reality contrast, the deceiver-pretender double bind, and genital verification. Identity invalidation is the erasure of a trans person's gender identity through an opposing categorization (e.g., a trans person sees herself as a woman, but she is categorized as a man). This invalidation is framed in terms of the appearance-reality contrast (e.g., a trans woman may be represented as "really a man disguised as a woman"). And this contrast is manifested in one of two ways that constitute a double-bind for trans people—namely, passing as nontrans (and hence running the risk of exposure as a deceiver) or else being openly trans (and consequently being relegated to a mere pretender). Genital verification can be a literal exposure (as with Brandon Teena, Gwen Araujo, and Angie Zapata) or else a discursive reveal through euphemistic comments like "was discovered to be anatomically male." These disclosures anchor identity invalidation in the notion of genitalia as a kind of concealed reality.

The core problem for trans people here, according to Bettcher, is fairly straightforward and entirely insidious. The on-the-ground fact for trans people is the regular denial of our experiences of themselves, reality as we experience it. Though different trans people articulate it in different ways, the experience of a denied identity is a constant. Reality enforcement as Bettcher explains it is the dynamic by which transgender people experience oppression and opposition in the world. The four ingredients which make up reality enforcement begin with a direct denial of the transgender person's gender identity claim. To use a transgender woman for an example (this would be a woman who was thought to be a boy when she was born and therefore assigned "male" initially): In the face of the transgender woman's claim that she is really a woman, identity invalidation occurs when someone else (the denier) insists on categorizing her as a man—the denier says, in effect, "no you are not really a woman". The denier explains the situation (using Bettcher's "appearance-reality contrast") by claiming that the transgender woman is really only disguised as a woman. The fact of this assertion and explanation means that the transgender woman is always in the double-bind of either being open about being transgender, which results in deniers labeling her as a pretender, or passing as nontrans/cisgender, which risks being "found out", having deniers label her a deceiver. In both of these situations the denier generally references the transgender woman's genitals as "proof" of her "real" status.

Pixabay

Of course there is a danger here that in referring to this dynamic as "reality enforcement" we might give the impression that those who engage in it genuinely are on the side of reality and that the complaint is only that they are being unkind in enforcing it on the affected trans person. But that would be a total misunderstanding of Bettcher's work and of the case of transgender people overall. In Trapped in the Wrong Theory Bettcher begins by acknowledging that reality is fundamentally contested in the interaction between a transgender person and someone who denies the trans person's gender identity. Thus the term reality enforcement does not refer to someone enforcing reality as it is(1) but to someone enforcing what they believe reality to be.

One implication of this for any third party observer is that, like it or not, they are shunted into the position of referee or judge in the case of the transgender person. Short of ignoring the conversation entirely—a choice which comes with its own, fraught, consequences—the  observer, cisgender(2) or not, is left having to choose first which version of reality to endorse and only second whether or not they will enforce it.

C.S. Lewis and Obligation to Reality

Now it is clear to me that C.S. Lewis would have recognized a preeminent duty obligation to Reality insofar as he was able to know it. In his essay Man or Rabbit he reflects:

The question [Can't you lead a good life without believing in Christianity] sounds as if it were asked by a person who said to himself 'I don't care whether Christianity is in fact true or not. I'm not interested in finding out whether the real universe is more like what the Christians say than what the Materialists say. All I'm interested in is leading a good life. I'm going to choose beliefs not because I think them true but because I find them helpful.' Now frankly, I find it hard to sympathize with this state of mind. One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing [emphasis mine].

Given that Lewis thought that the drive to know reality is one of the things which distinguishes humans from animals we must conclude that he would have applied this drive to the question of the contested reality between the transgender person and the denier. Thus we can safely conclude that he would have rejected the possibility of simply walking away from, ignoring, or refusing the question. He would also have refused to side with one reality-claim or the other based only on what would have made one or another party most comfortable or even safest. Lewis would have insisted on confronting the question straight on: Is the transgender person who claims to be a woman really a woman or really not a woman? Is the transgender man who claims to be a man really a man or really not a man? Only after answering that question, or deciding that it is finally un-answerable, can we approach the further question of whether or not reality ought to be enforced.

And I want to comment that as a trans woman and a fan of C.S. Lewis I find this remarkably comforting. A little too often I find that we end up consigned to a sort of "second class womanhood" by people who shy away from rigorous exploration of the claims of transgender people in favor of sort of provisionally accepting that the polite/pc/nice thing to do is to "treat us like" women without ever recognizing the ontological weight of our claims. 

The Core Question

Let us, then, look at the claim through as Lewis-ian a lens as possible: A person (the transgender person) is claiming to be a woman. A second person has denied the claim. When a transgender person makes a claim to a particular gender identity we generally cite our own experience of ourselves in relationship to the world. The evidence that the trans person cites (our own experience of the world) is subjective insofar as we are the only person with direct access to it but it is also a claim to an objective reality (we are claiming that we really are a particular gender). Against that the denier, depending on their background and inclination, will generally cite the transgender person's body as evidence against us. The irony here is that a transgender person's body is an objective reality which both the transgender person and the denier likely agree on. Our disagreement has all to do with the meaning of the transgender person's body as it relates to their claim, a fact which is worth at least commenting on to observe that this is all very awkward for trans people for the same reason that is is awkward for anyone to engage in significant discourse with someone over the contested meaning of our own body—we are talking about what is intimately ours while they are not talking about what is intimately theirs.

In any case, Lewis clearly outlined his process for thinking through apparently unlikely claims (claims which entail what Bettcher calls the "appearance-reality contrast") in the opening passage of Miracles:

If immediate experience cannot prove or disprove the miraculous, still less can history do so. Many people think one can decide whether a miracle occurred in the past by examining the evidence "according to the ordinary rules of historical inquiry." But the ordinary rules cannot be worked until we have decided whether miracles are possible, and if so, how probable they are [emphasis mine]. For if they are impossible then no amount of historical evidence will convince us. If they are possible but immensely improbable, then only mathematically demonstrative evidence will convince us: and since history never provides that degree of evidence for any event, history can never convince us that a miracle occurred. If, on the other hand, miracles are not intrinsically improbable, then the existing evidence will be sufficient to convince us that quite a number of miracles have occurred.

Following this outline, Lewis would first want to know is whether the gender identity claims of transgender people are intrinsically possible. If he believed that they were, indeed, possible he would then have gone on to ask how probable those claims are.

Possibility and the Sex-Gender Distinction

Would Lewis, then, have thought that the transgender person's claim is possible? A person who is claiming that they are five foot eleven inches tall and also that they are forty seven feet three inches tall must be wrong—not because I have never encountered a forty seven foot human before—but because being two different heights at the same time and in the same sense is a contradiction in terms. The transgender person, however, is not making a contradictory claim (here we head off one ridiculous accusation which is routinely directed towards the trans community). The transgender woman acknowledges (though she likely finds it more than a little rude for people to keep harping on it) the fact that, in some aspects and depending on whether or not/to what extent she has medically transitioned, her body aligns more with what most people expect from men than with what people expect from women. Read carefully, the transgender woman's claim is that she is a woman in spite of the fact that her body was identified as typically male back when she was born. Her appeal is to something (her gender) over and above her prominent sex markers. Therefore, so long as Lewis was willing to grant a distinction between sex and gender, we must conclude that he would have found the claims of transgender people at least possible.


As it turns out, Lewis not only recognized the sex-gender distinction, he positively endorsed it. In his novel Perelandra Lewis explores, among other things, the possible nature of angels. In that context he concludes that angels have a gender but not a sex, and he goes on to theorize about the relationship between the two.

When Ransom, the protagonist of Perelandra, encounters the angelic Archons (referred to in the text as Oyarsa) of Mars and Venus, Lewis describes those spirits (he is very clear that they do not have physical bodies but that "when creatures of the hypersomatic kind choose to 'appear' to us, they are not in fact affecting our retina at all, but directly manipulating the relevant parts of our brain") in a way which reveals much of what Lewis understood about sex and gender. It is worth noting that Lewis published Perelandra in 1944, well before the contemporary distinction between sex and gender gained any popular currency(3).

Both the bodies [of the Oyarsas] were naked, and both were free from any sexual characteristics, either primary or secondary. That, one would have expected. But whence came this curious difference between them? He found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. One could try—Ransom has tried a hundred times—to put it into words. He has said that Malacandra [the archon of Mars] was like rhythm and Perelandra [the archon of Venus] like melody. He has said that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre. He thinks that the first held in his hand something like a spear, but the hands of the other were open, with the palms towards him. But I don't know that any of these attempts helped me much. At all events what Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender. Everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certain inanimate objects are masculine and others feminine. What is masculine about a mountain or feminine about certain trees? Ransom has cured me of believing that this is a purely morphological phenomenon, depending on the form of the word. Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary, the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine [emphasis mine]. Their reproductive functions, their differences in strength and size, partly exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity... he of Malacandra was masculine (not male); she of Perelandra was feminine (not female). 

There is a lot here so let me break it down in to three specific observations:

First, Lewis clearly thought that there is a meaningful difference between sex and gender(4). The legitimacy of this distinction forms the core thesis of this passage. While Lewis seems to define sex in nearly the same way that contemporary sex and gender theorists do (as a physical phenomenon linked to reproduction, body morphology, etc...) his definition of gender is noticeably different—so much so that his definition is the subject of my third observation. Still it is clear from this passage that Lewis would have granted the fundamental plausibility of a claim which relied on distinguishing sex from gender.

Second, Lewis insists that gender, rather than sex, is the more fundamental property. Notice towards the end of the passage that he refers to gender as "as reality" whereas he calls [biological] sex "merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity [gender] which divides all created beings". For Lewis gender is a metaphysical property whereas sex is a physical property. Lewis understood humans to be composed of both a material and immaterial/spiritual/metaphysical part. As he says in The Screwtape Letters:

Humans are amphibians...half spirit and half animal...as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time, means to change. 

The distinction between "spirit" (which Lewis understood to be, among other things, the location of gender) and "animal" implies the possibility that a given individual in a world of imperfect and changeable bodies might very well find that the aspect of them which is body does not correspond, or in Lewis' words "properly reflect" the gender of their immaterial aspect. In an attempt at rectifying that incongruity, Lewis would necessarily have privileged the immaterial gender as determinative and recommended correction of the body. Further, since Lewis locates spirit in "the eternal world" he would not have seen gender-corrective therapy as a real possibility for anyone. Sex, as an aspect of body, is potentially subject to change. Gender is not(5). 

To anticipate an objection that has become all too common among Christians over the last decade, yes this is all rather platonic. That is because Lewis was, in addition to being first and foremost a "mere Christian", rather an ardent Platonist who was eager to accept what Platonism had to offer philosophically so long as it did not contradict his Christianity. While there are certainly worthwhile conversations to be had about the place of platonic philosophy in Christian theology it should be accepted across the board that some degree of Platonism has never been understood to be disqualifying to orthodox Christianity. Further for any Evangelical reader it will be important to recognized the the much loved Lewis/Tolkien understanding of Christianity as "myth become fact" is an equally (and relatedly) platonic concept, one which Lewis enunciates most famously only a few pages from this selection on gender in Perelandra.

Third, Lewis' understanding of gender was unusual both in his own time and today. In broad strokes contemporary gender theory attaches two distinct meanings to the term gender and those two meanings are, in some cases, both affirmed by individual theorists. In the first meaning gender references a socially constructed set of conventions. Here gender (often disambiguated as gender expression) means the set of social expectations and roles which a society attaches to women, men (and potential third + genders as well). The whole concept of gender as a performance is rooted in this view and has its origins in second wave feminism. In the second meaning gender is as an identity (in this usage gender is often paired with the term identity forming the two-word term gender identity) or a deep seated sense of self. Here gender or gender identity is something that each person has or possesses and which is rooted in the experience of the self. This meaning is a later development, associated more with queer theory and third wave feminism. Lewis' usage is distinguishable from both of these. He understands gender to to be a metaphysical reality which pre-exists sex and is, in fact, something which biological sex must reference in order to find meaning. In Lewis' view, Masculine and Feminine gender are the realities which male and female(6) sex are images of. There is much that could be said about this and it is probably not quite a comfortable stance for any of the major participants in the contemporary discussion over transgender identities. His usage and understanding probably gets closer to Julia Serano's Intrinsic Inclinations model though, unlike Lewis, Serano locates the property in question (Serano's closest equivalent to Lewis' gender is her coinage subconscious sex) in the psyche or subconscious rather than in any clearly metaphysical or spiritual part of the human person(7). For our purposes the key implication of this is that Lewis clearly believed that a person's gender was something more true, more lasting, and more definitive of that person that their biological sex (organs, hormone levels, body shape, etc...). 

In this usage I am still trying to work out whether or not Lewis can properly be called a pioneer. J.R.R. Tolkien (who shared a writing society and informal philosophy club with Lewis) seems to reference a similar view of gender in The Silmarillion where, speaking of angelic beings he says

the Valar take upon them forms some as of male and some as of female; for that difference of temper they had even from their beginning, and it is but bodied forth in the choice of each, not made by the choice, even as with us male and female may be shown by the raiment but is not made thereby

and I have found some intimations of the same view in Owen Barfield and Charles Williams but I have not yet worked out whether this was something that they collectively arrived at, one convinced the others of, or something they all received from their shared love of medieval and romantic literature and theology.

From Possibility to Probability

So Lewis would certainly have seen the transgender person's claim—to be really a woman in the face of the denier's claim that that the transgender person is really not a woman—as possible. The next logical question then is: given that the claim is possible, is it probable? Just because a person makes a claim which is possible does not mean that we are under any obligation to accept the claim as true. If someone tells me that it is snowing in June, I can accept that snow is a possibility without having to believe that it is actually snowing in my vicinity at the moment. If I am told that someone has graduated from Yale, I can believe that Yale exists and that people do graduate from that institution without accepting that this particular person has really earned a diploma.

What should stand out almost immediately when we imagine how C.S. Lewis might approach the question of probability is the fact that Lewis was remarkably clear headed when it came to assessing relative probabilities of events insofar as he had a keen grasp on the distinction between something which is uncommon and something which is improbable. It is improbable that a given individual, chosen at random, will be or become the president of the United States of America specifically because there are very particular requirements one has to meet in order to achieve that status; that is to say that being the president of the United States of America is an exceptionally uncommon experience. However, it is not at all improbable that, at any given time, there will be some person who is the president of the Unites States, quite the contrary. Since transgender people generally claim that our experience of our own gender is a minority experience, Lewis would not have seen the fact that transgender claims are uncommon as an indication that they are, in any way, improbable. Again from Miracles:

How could they [miracles] be surprising unless they were seen to be exceptions to the rules? And how can anything be seen to be an exception till the rules are known? If there ever were men who did not know the laws of nature at all, they would have no idea of a miracle and feel no particular interest in one if it were performed before them. Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary. Belief in miracles, far from depending on an ignorance of the laws of nature, is only possible in so far as those laws are known.

The overall probability of a particular person being in a situation which runs contrary to the way things commonly occur in nature would, for Lewis, depend on the particularities of the exceptional situation. Here things become a little more difficult for us. Transgender people do not claim a gender identity on the basis of the miraculous. Rather the claim of a transgender person is that of the minority report. Transgender people specifically claim that the experience of gender incongruity (having a gender identity which is at odds with the sex they are assigned by others on the basis of anatomy) is a natural but relatively uncommon phenomenon. The only way to test this claim would be to have objective third-party access to each transgender person's gender identity. But gender identity, as Lewis understands it, is not available to this sort of empirical observation. As Bettcher and other transgender theorists (notably Julia Serano) have pointed out, the major obstacle/double bind that transgender people face in the realm of reality enforcement is that those who successfully alter their bodies to align more closely with the gender identity they claim are discounted as "deceivers" whereas those whose bodies do not reflect the social-construct expectations of the gender identity they claim (or who claim a gender identity which is not familiar to the popular imagination) are discounted as "mere pretenders". From Bettcher's Appearance, Reality, and Gender Deception: Reflections on Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Pretense

To the extent that it is within the power of a transperson to generate a convincing appearance, then, they will be confronted bu the no-win option of trying to pass (and running the risk of being exposed as a fraud) or else revealing themselves (and coming out as a masquerader or deceiver). And to the extent that it is not within the power of a transperson to generate a convincing appearance or, if it is to control the information that is circulated and available about their status, they may still find themselves represented as a pretender. In effect, because gender presentation and sexed body are viewed in this way (namely as correlated appearance and reality), in all possible permutations, they will have their identity relegated to a mere appearance and find themselves either open to charges of wrongdoing or relegated to somebody who plays at make-believe

Thus both Lewis—who sees gender as a metaphysical reality—and contemporary transgender theorists—who mostly see gender as either a social construct or as a personal identity—end up categorizing gender identity as something objectively real but ultimately only subjectively knowable(8) and therefore un-testable given the current state of our technology(9).

From Probability to Credibility

To recap then, Lewis would likely have seen the reality claim of a transgender person—to be really their identified gender—as possible but he would have been unable to determine whether the claim was probable. This, though, does not imply a dead end to the question. In fact, some of Lewis' most famous material demonstrates the approach he took to claims wherein there was no way for external observers to objectively examine the evidence. He would look to the credibility of the source: In his most famous novel The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe Lewis deploys a piece of reasoning (the logical tri-lemma) which mirrors one he uses to argue for the divinity of Jesus in Mere Christianity . In the novel the older Pevensie children (Peter and Susan) approach the professor in whose house they are staying because their little sister, Lucy, has been making claims which run contrary to their own experience and expectation of the world and which they have been unable to objectively verify. Specifically, she has been claiming—accurately as it turns out—that a particular wardrobe in the house is, under some conditions, a portal to another world. To further complicate matters, their brother Edmund has specifically claimed that Lucy was "only making it up" after she asks him to corroborate her claim.

The degree to which this scenario parallels the reality enforcement scenario described in Bettcher's essay is really astounding. Lucy, like the transgender person, has made a claim which, at face value, seems to be contradicted by general experience. Edmund, like Bettcher's denier, has specifically contradicted Lucy's claim. Peter and Susan, standing in for society at large, find themselves engaged in reality enforcement and are initially inclined to enforce Edmund's claim against Lucy(10). In this analysis, we should understand the professor to be a mouthpiece for Lewis' own analysis of the situation. When the children bring their questions to the professor, he asks them which of their two siblings is usually more trustworthy and they respond that they would generally trust Lucy and that the only reason they don't now is due to the apparent implausibility of her claim and their subsequent inability to independently verify her experience. The professor responds as follows:

‘Logic!’ said the Professor half to himself. ‘Why don’t they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.’ [emphasis mine]

Or in Mere Christianity Lewis uses this structure of reasoning to argue that, contrary to popular expectation, Jesus of Nazareth was really God:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this mans was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.

Again we have a situation where someone is making a claim which, at first blush, flies in the face of popular expectation, which is not (at least not anymore) subject to external verification, and which is roundly denied by people who cite popular experiences of the world in defense of their denial. We are, therefore, perfectly justified in concluding that Lewis would have applied this specific logic tool to the question of transgender gender identities and reality enforcement. Specifically he would have told us that there are really only three possibilities: the transgender person is either lying, insane, or telling the truth.

What do they teach them in these schools?

Before I apply Lewis' trilemma to the question though I want to head off one further suggestion that the transgender person may actually be mistaken. I do not think that Lewis would have granted this possibility on the grounds that we are specifically asking about something (gender identity) which Lewis believed people have and which he thought could be perceived directly. Still, even if the possibility is granted (expanding the trilemma into a tetralemma), the fact remains that the transgender person in question—being the person with the most data regarding their own gender—is in a better position to know their own gender than any outside individual. If they are mistaken, then they are more able to know that than anyone else and must therefore be treated as the authority on the subject.

The idea that transgender people are lying about our identities is not one that I think Lewis would have entertained for long. The simple fact of the difficulties trans people face and the suffering we endure in order to live into our gender identities ought to undermine any serious suggestion that we are lying about it. People rarely—if ever—lie consistently, insistently, and persistently when the consequences of being believed is increased suffering on their part. In the instance of transgender identity claims, the claim only benefits the person making it if it is true since the concomitant suffering is only worthwhile if it purchases a deeper, more fundamental, satisfaction.

The suggestion that transgender people are simply insane is suggested more frequently, most often by conservative pundits who most often latch on to the fact that gender dysphoria is often (though not universally) experienced by transgender people, and is a listing in the current version of the  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5). However, the association of gender dysphoria with insanity—and specifically a form of insanity which would prevent a person from accurately experiencing reality—is misleading, sloppy thinking at best and a deliberate misrepresentation at worst. A person who experiences gender dysphoria is not delusional(11) they merely experience discomfort (sometimes to the point of anguish) based on the incongruity between their gender and the sex they were assigned at birth. As the professor says of  Lucy "ten minutes conversation will tell you she is not mad".

It is worth pausing before moving on to the third option (that transgender people are telling the truth about who we are) to notice that in fact those most prone to engage in programmes of reality enforcement against transgender people seem forever trying to have it both ways. They want to accuse us of being insane ("deluded" is form of the charge with the most currency today) while treating us as though we are liars. The hate and vitriol with which anti-trans pundits ranging from TERFS to white Christian Nationalists attack and condemn transgender people would be entirely out of place when dealing with someone who was deluded or insane; they make accusations of insanity but behave as though we were liars.

Having ruled out the possibilities of lying and insanity, the inevitable conclusion, given Lewis' beliefs and methods of reasoning would have to have been "For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that [the transgender person] is telling the truth". Regardless of how difficult it might be to believe the gender identity claims of trans people (we cannot really control what we believe after all) Lewis' methods and metaphysics require that we trust transgender people who, after all, are the only ones with any access to our individual gender status.  

This gets us most of the way towards an understanding of how C.S. Lewis would have engaged with the reality claims of transgender people but I think there is value in pushing it one step further. Thus far I have been treating the whole business as a purely intellectual question. To leave it at that—as a mere proof in an intellectual "ivory tower"—would be a tremendous disservice to the transgender population who (as Bettcher pointed out) face serious and even life-threatening consequences as a result of popular perceived reality enforcement.  I think that Lewis's writing has a little more to tell us about the ethical and moral nature of reality enforcement when it is used to oppress people whom we have an obligation to trust rather than mistrust. 

The Implications (for Lewis) of Mistrusting Transgender People

Lewis cared about the core of who a person is—the real person—,and believed that that core is almost always hidden. In fact "becoming who you really are" is very much a theme in much of Lewis writings —think back to his language about the true Narnia in The Last Battle. It is seen best in the transformations he has various characters undergo when they enter (usually through bodily death) into the place where "all the sad things come untrue" and "for which they found they had been longing their whole lives without knowing it"; the place "for which they were really made". In fact Lewis suggests that one important outcome of the Christian life was to become fully what a person, in one sense, already was. He puts this most succinctly in The Screwtape Letters when he has the senior demon Screwtape admit:

When He [God] talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever

Another example would be the man tempted/tormented by lust in The Great Divorce. Lewis describes the man (and his lust) both passing through a process of spiritual death only to be resurrected as beings which are described in near demi-god like terms:

Next moment the Ghost gave a scream of agony such as I never heard on Earth. The Burning One closed his crimson grip on the reptile: twisted it, while it bit and writhed, and then flung it, broken-backed on the turf. 

'Ow! That's done for me,' gasped the Ghost reeling backwards. 

For a moment I could make out nothing distinctly. Then I saw, between me and the nearest bush, unmistakably solid but growing every moment solider, the upper arm and the shoulder of a man. Then, brighter still, and stronger, the legs and hands. The neck and golden head materialized while I watched, and if my attention had not wavered I should have seen the actual completing of a man—an immense man, naked, not much smaller than the Angel. What distracted me was the fact that at the same moment something seemed to be happening to the Lizard. At first I thought the operation had failed. So far from dying, the creature was still struggling and even growing bigger as it struggled. And as it grew it changed. It's hinder parts grew rounder, the tail, still flickering, became a tail of hair that flickered between huge and glossy buttocks. Suddenly I started back, rubbing my eyes. What stood before me was the greatest stallion I have ever seen, silvery white but with mane and tail of gold. It was smooth and shining, rippling with swells of flesh and muscle, whinnying and stamping with its hoofs. At each stamp the land shook and the trees dindled. 

The new-made man turned and clapped the new horse's neck. In nosed his bright body. Horse and master breathed each into the other's nostrils. The man turned form it, flung himself at the feet of the Burning One, and embraced them. When he rose I thought his face shone with tears, but it may have been only the liquid love and brightness...which flowed from him. I had not long to think about it. In joyous haste the young man leaped upon the horse's back. Turning in his seat he waved a farewell, then nudged the stallion with his heels. They were off before I knew well what was happening.

Thus the transgender person who abandoned identification with the sex they were assigned at birth in favor of their real gender identity would have been moving in the direction of sanctification. The transgender woman who insists "I am a woman" evidences a spiritual breakthrough and spiritual health. It is vital that we not forget that the temptations of security and acceptance all push the transgender person to accept (or at least acquiesce to) the denier's declaimed reality; nobody familiar with their situation ever accused a transgender individual of cowardice for identifying as transgender. Just as important, Lewis would have understood the person who works to prevent someone recognizing and affirming their own real selves (in this case a transgender person living into their gender identity) to be doing the work of the devils—preventing another's spiritual and holistic growth. Bettcher's reality enforcement enacted against transgender people is something Lewis's thinking would decry not only as sinful but as a particularly virulent form of sin; one which he found important enough to devote an entire novel to exploring.

Reality Enforcement as the Sin of False-Love

Bareface (a reference to being one's true self, denying any mask or veil) was the working title of Till We Have Faces the novel C.S. Lewis considered his best(12). The book is a re-telling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche told from the perspective of one of Psyche's two older sisters. In the original myth, the beautiful Psyche is sacrificed to the gods but ends up being rescued by the West Wind and carried away to a mansion where she is then married to the god Cupid. The one condition that is placed on her is that she is not permitted to look at her husband (whose identity she does not know). He leaves before she wakes each morning and only returns in the dark of night. Psyche is immensely happy with this arrangement until she is visited by her two sisters who convince her to violate the one rule by waiting until her husband falls asleep and bringing out a candle to look at him. Psyche follows her sisters instructions and is initially delighted to discover that her husband is the beautiful god of love. But in her excitement she spills some hot wax on him waking him up. Immediately he flees and leaves Pscyhe alone in a field. Psyche then undergoes a series of trials and suffering in order to eventually be reunited with her love.

Cupid and Psyche

Lewis' retelling of the myth centers on Orual, the older of Psyche's two sisters. In Till We Have Faces Orual is ugly and lonely as a child. She finds comfort in her tutor (a man she calls "the Fox") and in her little sister Psyche (who calls Orual "Maia") as well as a few other characters whom she loves and who love her in return. At the point in the story where Orual finds Psyche (whom she had thought dead—sacrificed to the God of the Mountain). Lewis introduces a poignant example of reality enforcement. Psyche experiences herself to be living in a palace, but Orual sees only an empty field. In the following, you will want to note Lewis' return to the formula of the trilemma we have already encountered in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Mere Christianity:

For some strange reason, fury—my father's own fury—fell upon me when she said that. I found myself screaming (I am sure I had not meant to scream), "Stop it! Stop it at once! There's nothing there!"

Her face flushed. For once, and for the moment only, she [Psyche] too was angry. "Well, feel it, feel it, if you can't see," she cried. "Touch it. slap it. Beat your head against it. Here—" she made to grab my hands. I wrenched them free.

Stop it, Stop it I tell you! There's no such thing. You're pretending. You're trying to make yourself believe it." But I was lying. How did I know whether she really saw invisible things or spoke in madness? Either way, something hateful and strange had begun. As if I could thrust it back by brute force, I fell upon Psyche. Before I knew what I was doing I had her by the shoulders and was shaking her.

the scene continues with Orual trying to dissuade Psyche and eventually comes to a head when they begin to discuss Psyche's husband

"Oh I can't bear it," said I, leaping up. Those last words of hers, spoken softly and with trembling, set me on fire. I could feel my rage coming back. Then (like a great light, a hope of deliverance, it came to me) I asked myself why I'd forgotten that first notion of being mad. Madness; of course. The whole thing must be madness. I had been nearly as mad as she to think otherwise. At the very name madness the air of that valley seemed more breathable, seemed emptied of a little of its holiness and horror.

"Have done with it, Psyche," I said sharply. "Where is this god? Where the palace is? Nowhere—in your fancy. Where is he? Show him to me? What is he like?

She looked a little aside and spoke, lower than ever but very clear and as if all that had yet passed between us were of no account beside the gravity of what she was now saying. "Oh, Orual," she said, "not even I have seen him—yet. He comes to me only in the holy darkness. He says I mustn't—not yet—see his face or know his name. I'm forbidden to bring any light into his—our—chamber."

Then she looked up, and as our eyes met for a moment I saw in hers unspeakable joy.

"There's no such thing," I said, loud and stern. "Never say such things again. Get up. It's time—"

"Orual," said she, now at her queenliest, "I have never told you a lie in my life"

In the end Orual resorts to threatening Psyche's life and her own suicide in order to compel Psyche to accede to her (Orual's) understanding of reality(13). The result in Lewis' version as in the original, is that Psyche loses everything she had been given and is set a series of impossible seeming tasks in order to get back what she lost. Orual, ultimately separated from Psyche and, eventually, everyone whom she loves and who loves her in return, lives out most of her life as the ruling queen of her country. She writes out the account we read in the novel as her complaint against the gods and her primary charge against them is that, by not allowing her to experience reality as Psyche had—that is by keeping the palace invisible to her eyes—the gods are responsible for Psyche's tragedy as well as her own. The novel ends at the end of Orual's life when she is granted a sort of mystical vision or spirit journey to the mountain of the gods where she is given the opportunity to "bring her complaint against" them. But when she begins to speak she finds that the words she speaks against the gods are not what she had originally intended—the story we have read thus far—but a different speech which she acknowledges to be truer than what she had intended. As part of that accusation-which-is-really-confession, Lewis has Orual declaim the following:

But to steal her love from me, to make her see things I couldn't see... oh, you'll say (you've been whispering it to me these forty years) that I'd signs enough her palace was real, could have known the truth if I'd wanted. But how could I want to know it? Tell me that. The girl was mine. What right had you to steal her away into your dreadful heights? You'll say I was jealous. Jealous of Psyche? Not while she was mine. If you'd gone the other way to work—if it was my eyes you had opened—you'd soon have seen how I would have shown her and told her and taught her and led her up to my level. But to hear a chit of a girl who had (or ought to have had) no thought in her head that I'd not put there, setting up for a seer and a prophetess and next thing to a goddess... how could anyone endure it? ... Oh, you'll say you took her away into bliss and joy such as I could never have given her, and I ought to have been glad for her sake. Why? What should I care for some horrible, new happiness which I hadn't given her and which separated her from me? Do you think I wanted her to be happy, that way?

Notice that the bitterness of Orual is directed, among other things, at the fact that her vision of reality was not the one which would ultimately allow Psyche's happiness (and before this point can be brushed away remember that Lewis understood happiness in Aristotelian terms as ultimate fulfillment of a self—eudaimonia). How closely that parallels and makes sense of the anger and fear we find in the transphobia which is daily hurled against transgender people. The sin here is great and terrible specifically because it is the sin of a twisted love. It is the love which refuses to love another on any but its own terms. Because the denier cannot (or will not) make the move to empathy for the transgender person, cannot (or will not) recognize the validity of the trans person's account of reality; they must make every effort to destroy that which they cannot give and will not share. In fact those last haunting lines "What should I care for some horrible, new happiness which I hadn't given her and which separated her from me? Do you think I wanted her to be happy, that way?" would fit perfectly into the mouths of every parent, partner, or family member who rejects a trans person for coming out as who we are.

The final title comes from a passage near the end of the book where Orual asks "How can [the Gods] meet us face to face till we have faces?". Orual is redeemed in the end only after she sees herself for what she has really been, both truly loving and beautiful and truly ugly and hateful. Lewis ends his last novel reminding us that health, happiness, flourishing are only possible when we know our true selves.

“Yes,” my friend said. “I don’t see why there shouldn’t be books in Heaven. But you will find that your library in Heaven contains only some of the books you had on earth.” 

“Which?” I asked. 

“The ones you gave away or lent.” 

“I hope the lent ones won’t still have all the borrowers’ dirty thumb marks,” said I. 

“Oh yes they will,” said he. “But just as the wounds of the martyrs will have turned into beauties, so you will find that the thumb-marks have turned into beautiful illuminated capitals or exquisite marginal woodcuts.”

- From the essay Scraps in the collection God in the Dock

Footnotes

(1) I suspect, but am not sure, that Dr. Bettcher holds reality to be finally unknowable. Thus she occupies herself in Trapped in the Wrong Theory with an exploration of the power dynamics which are created and exploited against transgender people who operate out of two specific models of trans identity.
(2) Cisgender means only "a person whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth" or more simply "a person who is not transgender".
(3) It really is vital to keep in mind that this was written in 1944. One hopes to avoid anachronistic criticism of an enunciation of gender theory years ahead of its time.
(4) It is possible that Lewis is one of the first modern authors to have publicly made this distinction. Whereas Perelandra was published in 1944, the research I have encountered to date locates the earliest examples of this distinction in either the 1950's or the 1970's. Here are a few links to that effect but more research needs to be done on this topic. Muehlenhard and Peterson in Sex Roles 2011, Debbie Cameron on the Philology of Gender 2016, Joanne Meyerowitz How Sex Changed Chapter 3
(5) an exception to this rule (that spirits do not change) might have involved the process of sanctification or glorification (though to my knowledge Lewis used neither of these terms). However, Lewis closely followed Boethius in his understanding of time and the mutability of soul so it is entirely possible that he would have denied even this exception.
(6) and, I suspect, Lewis would have included intersex bodies as well.
(7) Julia Serano coined the term subconscious sex for her first book Whipping Girl. The concept is at the core of her proposed Intrinsic Inclinations model.
(8) with the exception that Lewis would have claimed that the gender of individuals is objectively known by God and possibly by any other being which is able to perceive simple spirit.
(9) The current brain-sex hypothesis, if it turns out to be valid, would suggest that sufficiently high powered and accurate brain-state and brain-structure analysis and observation might eventually give us a method to empirically verify gender identity claims.
(10) the fact that, in the story, Edmund knows that he is lying is ultimately irrelevant to this analysis. Peter or Susan could just as well be stand-ins for the denier.
(11) Check out this piece at Debunking Denialism for a thorough run-down on the difference between gender dysphoria and delusion.
(12) Lewis is said to have worked with his wife Joy Davidman Lewis on this book to the extent that some of his friends at the time have suggested that she was almost a co-author of the novel.
(13) Threats transgender people are all too familiar with.

Transgender Resource Recommendations:

1. Julia Serano: Books and Blog
2. Austen Hartke Book and Youtube channel
3. Talia Mae Bettcher: Learningtrans resources and class  
4. Susan Stryker Transgender History