"Trans Butchery"

I'm a Klimt, Melonfuckers

Professional train wreck Jordan Peterson has been found more than once by Canadian courts to be someone who lies about his expertise. He always wants you to think of him as expert, even as he frequently sloughs off responsibility using weasel words. He’ll vacillate between “just asking questions” and calling people stupid or insane for not agreeing with his wild ass statements. You have to wonder how he gets away with this, and one part of that answer is that he seems to love the enduring, popular lie.

This goes against the idea that he might be an original thinker, of course. But you shouldn’t let that surprise you: every mediocrity wants others to see them as great. On September 5th Peterson released another entirely unoriginal whine piece published in the NY Post (though, honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it’s just a reprint originally published in the Globe and Mail or something). The Post titled it, “I’m being professionally canceled for my moral stance on trans butchery”.

What a crock.

Let’s take this bit, as it seems to most pithily express the bit I’m most interested in countering:

Every clinical psychologist who is holding his or her tongue in the face of the increasing tide of surgical butchery sweeping over the equally silent medical profession is therefore guilty of egregious malpractice by omission.

We will look back in the decades to come at the absolute catastrophe of the “gender affirming” movement with the same horror we view the days of lobotomies and eugenics.

There is no increasing tide of surgical butchery. “Butchery” and the synonym “mutilation” are frequently on the lips of trans hating bigots, but trans surgeries, properly performed and when undertaken only at the informed request of a trans person, is neither butchery nor mutilation. The rising tide is of such informed requests, and Peterson’s attack is on the agency of trans people.

This attack echoes many others’ cissexist attacks over the years, though he is in the unusual and unenviable position of facing accountability from his professional licensing board over them. Set that aside for the people who have spent years or decades specializing in the professional ethics of psychologists, and the rest is offensively routine.

Since long before the days of Janice Raymond’s Transsexual Empire trans haters have been quick to call surgical reconstruction “mutilation” or “butchery”. Mary Daly certainly engaged in the rhetoric. As have politicians — almost exclusively Republicans recently in the US, but it was a bipartisan attack for many years — and comedians. So-called TERFs (few of whom are actually radical feminists, though they certainly had their foremothers in feminism with Daly, Raymond, and more) have almost gleefully taken up this language.

Literally my entire life, reconstructive surgeries for trans people have been described this way by those who hate trans folk’s agency. It draws, of course, on the truism that creation and destruction are exemplified by the same acts. Lapis lazuli is ground into powder, entirely destroying beautiful stones, that some of the most beautiful paintings might be created. The creation of the most artistic Shaker furniture requires the utter destruction of gorgeous, living trees. And not even the most talented chef on earth can create the proverbial omelette without breaking eggs.

What makes Gustav Klimt or Mennonite carpenters or Anthony Bourdain artists and not butchers?

The crux is this: they are artists because we love and appreciate the outcome; they would be butchers if we hated what they created.

And so it is when you hear someone describe as mutilation or butchery the surgeries that trans people seek in the process of creating trans beauty.

The surgeries themselves are not different from, say, an elective mastectomy of both breasts when a malignancy exists in one. Many women with good reason to believe they will have a high rate of recurrence might choose that, and the doctors who treat such high risk patients frequently donor those requests. Peterson isn’t roaming the internet bent on characterizing these surgeries as butchery, nor are his cissexist comrades in arms.

This reveals the crime Peterson et. al. believe is being committed: trans people, exercising their own agency, choose to create their own trans lives rather than forego them in the name of cissexist supremacy. They are not shocked or outraged at double mastectomy and associated chest reconstruction when done to improve the quality of life of cis cancer patients. They are only shocked and outraged when trans agency creates trans beauty. Their ire and hatred rise only when lives of trans authenticity and happiness result.

We are artists, sculpting bodies as we create joy, create autonomy, create a world of autonomy and possibility.

They call this process butchery and mutilation only because they despise the outcome.