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Illustration by Yuree Chang

The Queen Of Truscum

Blaire White is looking for a rational explanation for gender identities. She’s not going to find one.

Apr 19, 2020

Blaire White — the radiant right-wing darling — is one of the most high-profile transgender Trump supporters of all time. She is well known for her snowflake-smashing, anti-Social Justice Warrior perspective spouted in a number of YouTube videos such as Trans-Retarted, [Upset Trans People]((https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv_ZHfObyuA), Sensitive Tranny Thinks Words Are Violent and The Weirdest Trans Person Ever.
But Blaire doesn’t brand herself as a self-defeating provocateur. Rather, she claims the identity of a transgender activist. To her credit, through cordial interviews with figures such as Jesse Lee Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Tomi Lahren, Steven Crowder and Dave Rubin, she has likely exposed hundreds of thousands of watchers to her identity, allowing for a wider understanding of transsexualism in no uncertain terms.
In an interview with Yahoo News, Blaire White explained her influence: “I can’t think of another trans person in the media right now that could go on all the conservative shows that I’ve gone on to have a conversation and open minds.”
Propping up Blaire’s rhetoric is transmedicalism, the notion that there is a strict medical gate-keeping system for transgender identity and anyone who does not suffer from debilitating dysphoria is either going through a phase or hopping on a trend. Tumblr has attached a disparaging term for such a perspective, known as “truscum”. A truscum is defined as an individual who views the need for medical intervention as a non-negotiable requirement for an individual to be valid in their transgender identity.
But with the truscum perspective often comes the delegitimizing of identities where gender is expressed in non-normative ways.
Blaire has previously said, “I think [non-binary identities] are largely bullshit. I think they’re super arbitrary. I think they’re super meaningless. I think people who take them on are usually extremely boring and have nothing else to their personality … [non-binary identities have] no basis in science … they have no evidence backing them up or pointing to their validity whatsoever. Transgenderism, on the other hand, is neurologically observable [and] gender dysphoria is medically diagnosable.”
This statement is extremely narrow, and rife with misinformation. This is not only because many in the non-binary community, can in fact, experience dysphoria – but also because of a crucial misunderstanding.
Unfortunately for Blaire White and the truscum crowd, the science on binary transsexualism doesn’t conform with their way of thinking.
A study done in 2015 by Aston University in England looked at the composition of 160 structures in 14,000 male and female brains. Remarking on the study, author Hope Reese notes that “researchers could not find any scans that had all ‘male’ traits or all ‘female’ traits — physical attributes such as weight or tissue thickness … The images were, literally, of a mosaic … [people are] trying to force a difference into data that doesn’t exist.”
Furthermore, studies determining a distinctly male and female brain do not provide clear-cut evidence that a scientist would be able to identify a single brain as male or female. Brain differences between men and women are statistical averages of things like grey and white matter density, not distinct anatomical structures. In other words, while there is a certain percentage of male or female brains that differ in their structural features, these differences are not as cut and dry as transmedicalism implies. It's an oversimplification to use data showing trends among brains as proof for transmedicalism as there is significant overlap, often to the point of being impossible to differentiate, between male and female’s brain composition. More pointedly, no doctor requires a brain scan before administering a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, nor will they refuse treatment based on observed structural features of a subject’s brain. Gender, first and foremost, is a feeling.
According to psychologist Gina Rippon the notion of a male and a female brain can be described as an arbitrary “hunt for differences.” According to Rippon, in the early 1950s, male scientists “looked at society and they saw that women were … inferior to men in their place in society ... And they took that status quo and then said, ‘Well, we’re researchers entering an amazing new world of understanding the brain, so we’ll show that these differences between men and women come from differences in their brains.”
Despite the logical fallacies and misogynistic origin, the transmedicalist perspective can be seen as a source of comfort for some in the community, as it is a manner in which transgenderism can be rationally explained to a mainstream audience who may otherwise turn their backs completely. To this extent, it’s a more science-sounding stand-in for mushy platitudes such as “male souls trapped in female bodies.” This is the agenda undergirding most of Blaire’s rhetoric on transsexualism.
But transmedicalism and Blaire White’s dogma fit perfectly within the worldview of a bigot: where a scientific mistake points to the reason as to why an individual is different, rather than an understanding that there is no “correct” manner in which a brain should be structured when it comes to gender identity. By capitulating to this perspective, transmedicalism not only harms the non-normative individuals whom the theory delegitimizes but also transexuals who are inevitably impacted through “rational” explanations to their sub-cisgender status.
Nobody has the power to be a gate-keeper for the transgender community, especially when the criteria appear to be chiefly, superficial aesthetic and physical appearance. Paternalistically assigning a minority group legitimacy only increases the degree to which they are marginalized and othered. True equality requires inclusion for all within the LGBTQ+ community.
Ari Hawkins is a Senior Opinion Editor. Email him at feedback@thegazelle.org
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