The Ancient Thread of Misogyny
What drives trans identified men like Munroe Bergdorf? The psychiatrist who introduced the term gender identity thought it was revenge against women and said he'd found proof in Papua New Guinea.
Another day. Another example of a culture that is losing its moorings. I’m talking, of course, about Munroe Bergdorf, a man who has devoted his life to looking like a porn star, being chosen as a UN Champion of Women.
If recent photographs of Bergdorf were filtered any more heavily his face would end up as two pin holes and a smear of sponsored lipstick. He’d look like he was wearing a mask. Which in a sense he is. What lies behind the mask though? What is going on inside Bergdorf’s head? Or that of any man who cuts his body up to perform a parody of women?
The question is whether trans activists like Bergdorf merely amplify the background radiation of our society’s sexism or if he expresses a trans-specific type of woman-loathing. Many observers of the ‘gender wars’ who are keen to try and remain ‘neutral’ like to comfort themselves that the misogyny expressed by activists like Bergdorf is just a bug in the system. The exception that proves the rule.
What though if misogyny drives the whole project, and always has done? As one of the major pioneers of gender ideology and early champion of so-called ‘gender affirming healthcare’ Robert Stoller bequeathed to Bergdorf and other trans activists the narrative they now parrot, the structure of thought they inhabit and the way they see the world. He also coined the very term ‘gender identity’. Yet his own work is steeped in contempt for women and he identified transsexuality and tranvestitism as attempts to get revenge on the female of the species.
To probe Stoller’s own views let’s return to the story I began last time of his strange journey to a remote rainforest in Papua New Guinea. It may be the most revealing in the history of gender identity. That’s because Stoller was convinced he would find among the Simbari the motherlode of his work: the process by which ‘gender identity’ was constructed …and therefore the origins of transsexuality.
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Robert Stoller came to Papua New Guinea in 1979 to test his theory about gender identity. This theory argued that the roots of trans identification in men lay in a type of childhood trauma. Stoller wasn’t the only gender wizard to buy into this idea. John Money, Richard Green and Harry Benjamin all signed up to their own versions of it. Stoller’s status as the man who introduced the term ‘gender identity’ gave his claim particular weight. Unlike them though Stoller set out to prove the theory was right. His trip to Papua New Guinea was designed to show the theory wasn’t just a cobbled-together description of a modern, faddish phenomenon (how very dare you) but an insight into a universal aspect of human behaviour.
This was a bold claim since the theory, like the rest of Stoller’s work, is a confused jumble. It ran like this: when they were little boys ‘trans identified males’ felt their core identity of maleness threatened existentially. Their subsequent identification with the “feminine’ was their life-long attempt to mitigate those infant fears and heal their psychic pain. To explain the source of that original trauma, Stoller turned to a well-thumbed recipe his psychiatric colleagues had been recycling since Freud and beyond.
This told of a distant father but above all…an overpowering mother. Yes, bet you didn’t see that coming. This, Stoller said, led to deep-seated confusion in the little boy. His ‘gender identity’ as male was called into question by him spending too long and too intensely in the embrace of his mother in a kind of psychic symbiosis. This was even more damaging if the mother had reservations about maleness or masculinity and men in general. Perhaps from her own mother’s failure to feminise her properly. Or if her relationship with her son’s father was so ruptured she idealised her son as the answer to all her prayers
We could easily get sidetracked with the details of Stoller’s theory. They include more penis envy and castration anxiety than you can throw a big phallic stick at. But since psychiatrists have been arguing about those for decades let’s leave that to them. Wake us up when you’ve decided guys.
Another reason we shouldn’t sweat the details is that Stoller was unable to observe for himself any of his patients’ experiences when they were infants. How could he? They only came to him as troubled adults and he had to fill in the blanks. The only thing he could explore was the state of mind of his trans identified patients during therapy sessions. What is relevant to us now is the fact he reported in his sessions a visceral hatred, fear and desire for revenge upon women. What’s even worse is Stoller didn’t think that was a bad thing. He celebrated it.