In a recent piece for The New York Times, Jack Turban — a California psychiatrist who has made his career by promoting and practicing the medical “transition” of children — wrote, “The most basic part of gender identity is what I call our transcendent sense of gender. In a way that goes beyond language, people often just feel male or female.” He adds, “As is the case with many emotions, it’s hard to describe this transcendent feeling in words. But it is the foundation of our gender identity, the scaffolding we’re born with.”
This talk of indescribable, transcendent feelings is just a roundabout way of saying we have gendered souls, that there is a masculinity or femininity to us that is more real than our bodies, and which our bodies must be reordered to match, so far as it is possible, on demand.
This belief in an insubstantial gender identity is mystical, not medical, which is emphasized by Turban’s efforts to argue that research “suggests these transcendent gender feelings have a strong innate biological basis.” But the closest the research he cites comes to demonstrating such a “biological basis” for a “transcendent feeling” is speculation about possible genetic sources for transgender identities. Furthermore, even if some people have a genetic predisposition toward being uncomfortable with their sex, a propensity to dislike one’s body is not proof of a “transcendent” gender identity.
Turban undermines his theory of transcendent (but somehow also biologically based) innate gender identities even more when he turns
