Everybody wants to be validated. However, a heterosexual woman, who dates exclusively men, who everyday is told she is a member of the homosexual community, is invalidated. Invalidation such as this happens every day to the primary transsexual patient. We invalidate her by marching in her name in parades and celebrations, creating third-designation “trans” bathroom signs, and in queer bureaucratic classifications; this is a form of systemic discrimination. And we invalidate her by lumping her into the LGBT umbrella within postmodernist academic discourse; this is a form of obfuscation. Primary transsexual patients are not queer. They are heterosexual men and women, and treating them as queer has adverse affects on their dignity and self-respect.

Lumping in transsexualism with homosexual politics stems from a reductive conceptualisation of sex. If one sees sex as reduced to just the chromosomes, then the male-to-female transsexual, defined by those chromosomes, is just a “fake” woman or a “type of homosexual” man. But sex has many other defining facets than just the chromosomes. You can measure sex: yes, according to chromosome or “karyotypically”, but you can also measure it anatomically, gonadally, hormonally, legally, and apparently. A post-operative transsexual woman is: karyotypically male (as in she has XY chromosomes), anatomically female (as in she has breasts and a vagina), gonadally neuter (as in she has neither testes nor ovaries), hormonally female (as in her estrogen and testosterone levels are in the normal range for a female), legally female (as in it says Female on her birth certificate), and apparently female (as in she looks, sounds, and acts like a woman). If we’re keeping score, that’s: 1 point for male, 1 point for neuter, and 4 points for female. If we are going to define sex according to all the different ways of measuring it rather than reducing it to just the chromosomes, then clearly sex change is real. A male really does become a female after sex reassignment surgery. Therefore, unless she is a lesbian, it is incorrect and unfair to include the transsexual patient in homosexual pride events or in bureaucratic LGBT categorizations.

Because of this fundamental change of sex, it is unfair to include transsexual patients in the “transgender” umbrella either. The term “transgender” encompasses so many different phenomena with so many different etiologies that it is essentially meaningless. In the sense that transgender means cross-dressing, a transsexual woman is a woman wearing women’s clothes, not a man wearing women’s clothes, so that label is incorrect. In the sense that transgender is a conscious postmodernist deconstruction of “the patriarchy”, a transsexual patient is just a beneficiary of modern medicine, suffering a medical condition and prescribed a medical treatment, and any such medicine abstains from political ideologies feminist or otherwise, so that label is incorrect too. Therefore, it is unfair to classify the primary transsexual patient as transgender.

Obfuscating the transsexual medical condition with queer identity politics harms patients. Medical Services Commissions often deny medically necessary surgeries for primary transsexual patients when they mistakenly believe the surgeries are “transgender change of appearance surgeries” and therefore cosmetic rather than medically necessary. It takes years of appeals to correct the commission’s mistake, and in the meantime the patient has to go about her life with non-functioning sex characteristics. As a less traumatic example, if a transsexual patient is categorized as LGBT, she may be sent to the gay men’s health clinic rather than the Centre for Disease Control to get a check-up. It is harmful to treat a transsexual patient as homosexual or queer.

Transsexual patients are discriminated against every time that transgender activists hold an “F- the Cis-tem March” or whine about transgender bathrooms or demand others conform to their made-up pronouns. This is because these activities draw attention onto a group that is just trying to fit in. Transsexual patients don’t need you to let them use the bathroom; they’ve been doing it for almost 100 years without anyone noticing until now. Transsexual patients don’t demand that you use fake pronouns that change nearly daily; they just want the correct he or she pronouns that anyone else would expect. And primary transsexual patients are not marching in the streets proclaiming their transitions; they just want to fit in and be accepted as the gender they are, with as little attention paid to their medical condition as can reasonably be expected. Transgender activists erase transsexual patients’ identities as men or women by forcing a false “transgender” identity upon them instead. How can a woman be accepted as such if you force a “transwoman” identity upon her? But transsexual patients can’t speak up to right this injustice. If someone does, he or she is immediately outed and his or her secret medical condition is revealed to the whole world. As soon as this information is revealed, people treat a person differently.

We treat a person differently because gender is not a spectrum. Gender is quantum. That means there is a set number of genders and you can only be one at a time. You either treat a person as a male or as a female. If it’s a baby, you would treat it as neuter until the sex is determined. If gender was a spectrum, then gender dysphoria would be felt on a nice even gradient. Let’s use the male-to-female for example. The most dysphoria would be felt on the masculine end of the spectrum. The middle of the spectrum, or androgyny, would be characterized by less dysphoria. And eased dysphoria would be felt on the feminine end of the spectrum. But actual lived results in at least one case show high dysphoria being gendered masculine, higher dysphoria being gendered androgynous or “trans”, and eased dysphoria being gendered feminine. These observed results show that gender is not a spectrum. The patient experiences more dysphoria being gendered “trans” or androgynous than being gendered masculine. In this case, gender dysphoria is not felt on a nice even gradient. Just as it only takes one white crow to disprove the hypothesis that all crows are black, so too it only takes one gender dysphoric patient to disprove the hypothesis that gender is a spectrum. This particular patient is a primary or “true” transsexual and so feels intense gender dysphoria and identifies as a female and not a “trans person”.

As I said, if gender is not a spectrum, then it is quantum. There are a certain number of genders, and the mind classifies nouns into one or another. In French, there are two genders, masculine and feminine. In English, there are three, masculine, feminine, and neuter. If something is borderline or androgynous, then in the viewer’s mind it oscillates between masculine and feminine, often tending more towards one than the other. The transsexual starts as one gender, goes through a borderline or androgynous stage, and ends as the other gender. This process requires no fundamental transgender ideology in order to justify patient access.

And just as there is no requirement to hold transgender ideology in order to support transsexual medicine, so too is there no requirement to withhold support for religious reasons. If transsexual patients really are men and women, than any Old Testament injunction against cross-dressing does not apply. And in the New Testament, Jesus healed a man who was born blind; he didn’t refuse to heal him and say “God doesn’t make mistakes”. Arguing outside the Bible, someone might just say transsexual operations are simply unnatural. But so is turning a tree into lumber and eventually into a chair. Being unnatural doesn’t make something wrong.

If supporting transsexual medicine doesn’t mean you have to also support transgender ideology, and being religious doesn’t mean you can’t support transsexual medicine, then what else does that mean? It means that transsexual patients can even vote Conservative. The Marcusean coalition of minorities does not get to claim every transsexual as a token victim-minority vote. Transsexualism is just a mental illness with a surgical treatment, and patients come from all political persuasions.

A conservative transsexual artist would manufacture her practice into a weapon of peace by making work that is not strictly about her medical condition. And by not advertising the fact that she is transsexual, rather by living her life as any other female would.

And now just a note about pronouns. I tend to support Jordan Peterson’s position on gender pronouns. For gender is a fundamental aspect of language. And language is a fundamental aspect of culture. Any coercion to use new words not found in the native language is an attack on the native culture. These new words are gender-hostile rather than gender-neutral, representing an academic attack on the fundamental category of gender itself. I like living in a gendered world and do not tolerate neologism pronouns that destroy gender. Transsexuals are either men with masculine pronouns or women with feminine pronouns, so remember that transsexuals are not the ones playing the unconventional gender pronoun game.

Please treat transsexualism as a medical condition. Nothing more. Nothing less. Transsexual patients are real men and women. Transsexuals are not seeking special rights for pronouns or bathrooms or marriages; they already have all their human rights. Transsexualism has nothing to do with the LGBT or transgenderism.