What It’s Like To Be Trans in 2021

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The fundamental experience of being trans right now, in 2021, is being eternally sandwiched between forces bigger than yourself. Forces with their own agendas, who use trans people for their own purposes, who shout louder than we ever can, because they have access to the mainstream media and other levers of power and influence. Their narratives drown out that of real trans people and their experiences struggling with gender dysphoria, and ultimately serve to confuse the conversation around trans issues among the general public. This, in turn, paralyzes any hope of progress, and even causes backlash, a backlash that is keenly felt by trans people around the world.

Let’s not sugarcoat it. Being sandwiched like this is hard, sad, and frustrating. However, it has also given me some insight. This includes, most importantly, insight on why certain groups or political factions act the way they do, and what ultimately drives their agenda. My experience of being sandwiched has taught me that, often, all sides are hypocrites, who ultimately only want that one thing they are obsessed with in their mind, and they are willing to trample on other people to achieve it. What Nietzsche called ‘Will To Power’ is not only alive and well in the 21st century West, it is also very scary. Being trans, in our current context, has awakened me to the huge problem of agenda driven discourses and so-called movements plaguing the world around us.

My journey to understand the forces confusing the trans conversation led me to unexpected places: revolutionaries who essentially want to do the equivalent of changing the color of the sky. Reactionaries who essentially want to go back not to the 1950s, but all the way back to before the Enlightenment happened. People who believe that free speech simply isn’t important at all. Other people who claim to defend free speech, but only when it’s speech they like. People who think that divisive identity politics would somehow lead to liberation for all. Other people who claim to oppose identity politics but are really practicing it in stealth. This show is, to a great extent, all about these forces, their hypocrisy and logical inconsistency, and the harms they are doing to both the trans community and the wider world.

Indeed, my aim in starting this show was twofold: firstly, I wanted to improve the quality of the trans discourse, so that we get to better understanding, which is essential for progress on trans issues. I wanted to dispel the myths that are being injected into the conversation by people with their own agendas on all sides. I wanted to prevent, as much as possible, people on all sides from playing trans people like a political football. I don’t know if one small project, started by one person, can really do all this. But I decided that, failing this, there would still be another reason for this show: when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. Now that I am awake to all the toxic forces trying to shape our society, culture and politics, even if I can’t stop them, maybe I could at least expose them, so more people can be awaken, like myself. That would at least make what we, as trans people in the early 21st century, are going through meaningful and productive, in some way.

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How Theory Harms Trans People and the LGBT Community

I want to talk about how theory, specifically the various theories that can be largely grouped under the umbrella of postmodern critical theory, is harming trans people and the LGBT community, in more ways than one. I believe theory is the biggest obstacle we have in front of us right now, which is why we must discuss it.

Let’s start here. In recent years, I have noticed a decline in the level of psychological wellbeing in the LGBT community. Despite things having objectively improved throughout the Western world for LGBT people in the past 20 years, I have never seen so much anger, frustration and pessimism among my fellow LGBT people. During the time I was in college, conservatives in most US states and several other countries like Australia actively moved to ban gay marriage, but even then LGBT people weren’t so angry and frustrated. From my high school days to the present, gay marriage went from being legal in zero countries to being legal in most of the West; anti-discrimination laws have been gradually extended, you can no longer be fired for being LGBT, but LGBT people seem to be getting angrier all the time. And this doesn’t make sense to me. Digging deeper, I came to the conclusion that postmodern theory was the culprit of this change.

Back in the 1950s, the psychologist Julian B. Rotter developed the idea that people could be placed on a spectrum of having an internal locus of control on one end, vs an external locus of control on the other end. People with an internal locus of control believed that they were in control of, and responsible for, the successes or failures in their lives, and Rotter observed that they had high achievement motivation. This, of course, is an essential ingredient for success in life, as well as a key factor in psychological health. On the other hand, postmodern critical theories teach women and various minorities, including ethnic minorities and LGBT people alike, that our fate is being determined by an oppressive system that won’t let us succeed, and this doesn’t really change even with the various aforementioned legal reforms, which I think is nonsense, but it’s what they would have us believe. Postmodern criticalism is effectively encouraging us to develop an external locus of control, which is both bad for our mental health and make us less successful in our own lives. I therefore like to argue that these theories are actually more effective at oppressing minorities and keeping us down, than whatever the most bigoted reactionaries out there can dream of.

Similarly, another 20th century psychologist Abraham Maslow, most famous for his ‘Maslow’s hierarchy of needs’, observed that self-actualizing individuals, people who were able to reach the highest level on his pyramid model of development, shared several important characteristics. Among them was being grounded in reality and being committed to the truth, things that are actively discouraged by postmodernism. Self-actualizing people were also spontaneous, creative, and not rigidly bound by social conventions, the opposite of what postmodern criticalism would impose on us in the form of making everything problematic, telling us to ‘check our privilege’ all the time, and forcing a whole new and unnatural way of speaking and relating onto all of us because they believe that language shapes reality. In other words, postmodern criticalism actively prevents us from reaching our full development according to the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which means that it is literally regressive!

Besides acting to harm our psychological health, theory also exerts a negative effect on the conversation around trans issues in the wider world, leading to fewer successes and more backlash when it comes to trans rights. This also happens in multiple ways. Firstly, postmodern theory essentially teaches us that we don’t have to work with reality. As if reality itself is simply a social construct that can be altered at will, simply by changing our language, or forcing other people to change their language. However, human beings are just like any other living being on this planet, and are completely subject to the basic rules of biology, especially evolutionary biology. Certain things, like our sense of gender both in ourselves and in the outside world, or whether one is attracted to another person or not, are hardwired into all of us, because it would be evolutionarily adaptive to do so. No language games can change that. This is why, when it comes to nature vs nurture, I come down strongly on the nature side, and I believe there is plenty of empirical evidence supporting my stance. Anyway, the important thing to know is, life is full of inherent limitations, and effective solutions need to take these limitations into account. We need to take empirical reality as it is, and compromise with reality’s limitations to reach effective solutions. The trans community of 10 years ago understood this, but today’s trans activists seem not to.

Secondly, the very presence of theory, much of it unscientific, has served to confuse the fundamentals of the conversation on trans issues. For example, there has been a fixation on the question of whether gender is a social construct, which is a core belief of the postmodern criticalist worldview. I personally strongly disagree with the idea of gender being a social construct, because I think the empirical science says otherwise. However, that is not the important point. The important point is that, we shouldn’t be focusing on these pointless philosophical debates. We should be focusing on the reality of trans lives, and what could be done to make those lives better. We should be focusing on the actual difficulties faced by people who are suffering from gender dysphoria, rather than the philosophy of what gender is. Trans lives are real lives, not some hypothetical academic question. We want practical solutions that work, not philosophy or theory that only works on paper.

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The TaraElla Story

This is the story of my journey, as an LGBT author and singer-songwriter navigating the ever-changing media landscape, and constant cultural upheavals of the early 21st century. My journey towards embracing a positive attitude to life, to our differences, and to the world in general. I have chosen to tell my story in the hope that it will inspire others, and I hope that more people do this too. I am grateful to the stories of other people, and their life journeys, for inspiring me over the years, and getting me through hard times. Life is interesting, and what we learn from it can be unexpected. I wish to contribute to the vast pool of stories already out there, in the hope that one day, my story could be useful to another person out there, who needs a bit of inspiration.

This book combines content from my 2021 works 'A Trans Popstar's Story: Being Trans and Chasing Dreams During Quarterlife', 'Eight Lessons from my Quarter Life Period' and 'The Background and Context of Moral Libertarianism' to paint a complete picture of my journey so far. 

Available at:
Amazon
Smashwords (free)
Open Library