When I say I am not all onboard with this transgender thing, it is for reasons that some would find to be unexpected. Whereas most people who object or are hesitant towards transgenderism are so because of moral/ethical positions, mine is an existential concern. In one of his great works “The Sickness unto Death,” the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. writes about the “despair to not will to be one’s self” and/or “the will not to be a self.” Basically, he talks about the troubles people have with immediacy and desiring immediate self-clarification, self-identification, and self-confirmation. It is about the desire for the security to be who one really is as an individual. But self-disapproval with the original self causes one to find an immediate fix and so often this fix relies on externalities. How this relates to my existential concern towards transgenderism is that though I don’t believe all transgenders are insecure, more or less, I have an educated hunch that a great deal of them are existentially insecure. They do not like who they are, they don’t like the person who they see in the mirror who possesses the original body of sex at birth. So, some of them will think about gender reassignment. What is more problematic is the immediate blessing that society gives to such individuals. Rather than facing the reason why they are not content with who they are, they decide to make the gender conversion, and making such a dramatic change, they leave behind those unlikeable elements of the previous self; by doing what they have done, they believe they have solved them, when in fact, they have negated them.
Again, this does not mean all transgenders are like this. But I believe some are.
Case in point: Keira Bell, trans teen in the UK. This occurred before she was sixteen but was feeling insecure and depressed during the early teenage period in which she still went by the pronoun ‘he’. Well, going to see professionals to help him with this, they told him that he should do sex reassignment and undergo hormonal therapy — the works. But afterwards, Keira Bell did not fair better at all. In fact, it proved to only worsen her condition. And of course, she could not reverse it, because once those hormone changes are implemented, they cannot be reversed; that, or it’d be a very difficult process to do so. Now, Keira is even more dissatisfied with himself/herself/themselves…and so now has to live with that mistake.
And so that is why I hold a good degree of scrutiny towards the modern transgender movement. No, I do not view them as freaks and I do not feel disgusted by being around them — quite the opposite, actually. It is just that I have this concern when I see them because I cannot help but wonder if they are searching for something that isn’t there.
