The Reality Gap and the Maximization Fallacy

It’s a false promise that gay men can seamlessly integrate themselves into the straight dating world through surgeries.

DO YOU PREFER TO LISTEN INSTEAD OF READ? YOU CAN HEAR ME READ THIS ARTICLE TO YOU WHILE YOU DRIVE OR DO YOUR DISHES OR WHATEVER! VOILA:

Ophelia Benson highlights a Reddit post that’s making the rounds on social media, pictured here:

Benson rightly and accurately points to the gap between the rhetoric around trans identities (among gay men specifically, in this example) and the reality of their daily lives as transwomen:

Where are all the trans allies? Why aren’t they rushing to date and fall in love with and marry and have children with their trans beloved?

We know why, and they know why, and that could be the very reason they get so busy raging at feminist women for continuing to defend women’s rights.

It’s a false promise that gay men can seamlessly integrate themselves into the straight dating world through surgeries. This is not the reality of the dating scene today, and it’s not going to become the reality soon, or ever. That’s just not how human dating and mating works. And unfortunately, the false promise of integrating into the heterosexual relationship landscape is the primary reason many gay men take on transgender identities. It’s also a major reason why parents so enthusiastically embrace the suggestion that their feminine sons, who they suspect will end up gay, can grow up to be transwomen instead. They think that they’re maximizing their kids’ future dating chances by medicalizing them out of the limited dating market of gay life (only about 2 or 3% of men are gay or bi), when in fact they’re setting their kids up for even more severely limited dating prospects.

I think this is why so many gay men kill themselves after having the operation.

For the vast majority of humans, our partner’s sex is his or her most vital characteristic.

We’re hard-wired to this for obvious evolutionary reasons. Sure, some gay men might date feminine-presenting men, but none would date masculine-presenting women. Likewise, straight men will date masculine-presenting women, but they’re unlikely to date feminine-presenting men, even men who’ve undergone surgeries and now claim to be women. For most humans (though not all), when it comes to sexdrive, sex trumps gender.

The notorious “masc-for-masc” problem

The gay men who tend to date feminine-presenting men are more likely to be feminine-presenting themselves, however. The more stereotypically masculine gay men generally go for other masculine men. This is the notorious “masc-for-masc” problem, and it generates a lot of resentment among feminine gay men who are primarily attracted to masculine men.

The tension between gay men’s own instinct to present femininely while at the same time finding feminine presentation in others unattractive can lead to self-hatred. They sometimes feel marginalized in the gay dating market. (Though that feeling is often exaggerated and distorted by their own self-hatred: in reality, feminine gays get fewer dates than the beefcake dreamboats — duh! — but they still do ok.) For them, adopting a transgender identity is a way to try their luck in a different dating market — a brand new “me” in a brand new town, kind of thing.

And to an extent, some of them do find short term luck, so long as they remain young and thin, shave their bodies completely, get breast implants or stuff a bra, and most importantly, retain their genitals. Anyone who remembers the old “alternative weeklies” (the New York-based Village Voice, The Seattle Stranger, LA Weekly, NOW Toronto, etc.) knows that they were largely funded by the back page ads, a substantial number of which were for “shemales” — a fetishistic fantasy for ostensibly straight men who want to try… er, other positions… with women, or the closest simulacrum of a woman for sexual purposes they can find.

A typical page near the back of an old copy of NOW, Toronto’s alternative free weekly bar mag. These magazines used to be the at centre of city culture, especially nightlife: they were the go-to for concert & club listings, theatre & art reviews, and more. And they employed many cities’ culture vultures. Much of it was financed by transgender prostitution through ads.

These connections don’t typically become solid, long-lasting, psychologically healthy relationships, though. There’s money involved; there’s shame and secrecy involved. (Money, shame, and secrecy go both ways in these pairings: when the “straight” men aren’t covertly buying sex from “shemales,” the “shemales” are covertly bribing young “straight” deadbeat freeloaders to stay with them as lovers.)

I myself was a feminine gay man attracted to much more masucline men than myself, and for a time I felt guilt, shame, and confusion about the mismatch, so I can somewhat understand what these men are feeling. But in the late ’90s I worked at a trans bar, and what I saw there was profoundly sad, in a deep, fundamental way not easily remedied with flags and parades and campaigns for better “representation.” I came to suspect that there was a structural dysfunction at the heart of the transgender subculture.

Lately I’ve come to see that transsexualism among gay men is mostly* driven by straight men with fetishes. They’re the johns perusing the back pages for “shemales,” who exploit and give false hope to confused feminine gay men; and they’re also the pimps who hang around the community centres and the seedy bars (and now, the online apps and forums) to coax vulnerable gay men into transgender identities. They’re the ones who put the glossy marketing on transgender ideology and pressure the parents and the doctors to look the other way at the fact that gay men seldom do well in the long term with transgender identities.

*Though, again, not entirely — there are always outliers and I know for a fact that there are happy homosexual transsexuals, rational and intelligent, too, who respect the boundaries of women’s spaces and who don’t deny the facts of biological sex. And I’m very fond of many of these transsexuals.

The Maximization Fallacy

I mentioned up top that parents of gender nonconforming boys are trying to maximize their kids’ future prospects by seeking transgender interventions for them.

I think there’s a lot to this psychological phenomenon. In our current age of smartphone-fuelled information overload, the urge to maximize our “gender presentability” is a huge driver for the whole transgender trend, beyond just the feminine-gay-male-to-transwoman demographic.

We’re being bombarded with ever more images of ever more exaggerated sex stereotypes. In this environment, people are coming to believe that their prospects for success in life depend on fitting into narrower parameters of gender presentation. It’s not about what’s merely acceptable, it’s about what’s optimal. You’re legally free to gender-present any way you want now. So the question has become, what’s the best way to gender-present in order to get you where you want to be in the social landscape?

The gender movement thinks it’s flinging open the gates of free gender expression, liberating everyone to express their gender however they wish. But really, all this extra attention being paid to everyone’s gender expression is just making everyone feel overcautious and cling harder to stereotypes for fear of missing out on the biggest markets — the most social or dating capital — they can access through their gender expression. Counterintuitively, with all the world’s faces and styles looking back at us all the time through our devilishly addictive little smartphone apps, the result is that the majority of us end up cautiously limiting ourselves to a narrower, not wider, scope of diversity in gender expression.

Here’s an analogy: it’s kind of like the music industry. We all thought that Spotify and the streaming era would usher in a golden age of music diversity. When all the music in the world is available to everyone all the time, it would lead to a broadening of musical tastes, where everyone is free to explore and find their own bespoke micro-genres of music. But that isn’t what happened. What we got is the opposite: virtually all popular music sounds the same now, and the vast majority of the money and listening time generated by the music industry is concentrated among a smaller number of artists than at any time before. Scan the Billboard 100 today and you won’t find much genre diversity at all. If you’re not Taylor Swift or Drake, don’t quit your day job. Hold onto your genres, music lovers, or you’re going to lose them to the pop hegemony of ultra-maximized music marketeering.

(Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that genre and gender come from the same latin word, and in romance languages — French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese — they’re still the same word.)

In a world of infinite possibilities, the only way to stand out is to fit in, harder.

If there isn’t already a name for this phenomenon — correct me if there is, but I can’t find one — I’d like to coin a new term: the maximization fallacy. In a world where every listener is connected to every artist, in a world of infinite possibilities, the only way for those in the business to stand out is to fit in, harder: to find whatever sounds have the most listeners right now and try to get in front of them. The music market — or at least, the profitable part of it — didn’t transform into a constellation of little subgenres, because most everyone clustered to the most popular sounds for fear of missing out on revenue. And that’s created a feedback loop: people like what’s familiar, and they’re only being familiarized with a small menu of sounds today.

It’s true that there’s also a countercultural reaction to that — there are in fact more “indie” and “alternative” non-pop-music oriented bands than there have ever been before — but they just make up the really long tail of non-moneymakers at the end of the profit chart, splitting an ever smaller piece of the pie among their ever-growing ranks.

But back to trans. Today’s transgender craze isn’t the first example of maximization affecting gender: it happened with toy marketing beginning around the 1980s, too. Many people have noted that toys didn’t used to be so divided along gender lines. Sure, Barbie and G.I. Joe date to the ‘50s and ‘60s, respectively, and baby dolls and toy guns predate those by a century or more. But as television created an explosion of toy marketing around Saturday morning cartoons, market researchers focused in on the moderate preference for dolls among girls and “action figures” among boys, and marketers in turn competed among each other to exaggerate their toys’ marketing towards either one or the other sex in an effort to maximize their profits.

There is a modest natural difference between average boys’ and average girls’ toy interests, but by the mid-’90s it became wildly, toxically exaggerated in toy stores as toy marketers sought to extract profit and gain market dominance by exploiting that small margin of difference. This in turn only exacerbated gender stereotypes and increased the difference between boys’ and girls’ toy interests. A classic feedback loop.

By the ‘90s, the monopoly behemoth Toys ‘R’ Us kept boys’ and girls’ toys in completely separate aisles, and there wasn’t even space to present a toy on a store shelf if it wasn’t sex-identified. Feminists took note and had some success in pushing back against stereotypes in children’s marketing. In Canada and elsewhere, governments intervened and even outright banned advertisements marketed at children during morning cartoon programming blocks because of their negative gender stereotyping, among other things.

The aggressive sex-segregation of toy marketing was a result of television’s unfettered access to kids via ads during cartoon programming. By the late ‘90s, a feminist backlash had success in pushing back against it, as seen on The Simpsons when Lisa sued the makers of Malibu Stacy dolls.

But I digress. To come back to feminine gay men, they’re trying to maximize their dating prospects, and in the warped media landscape with its toxic stereotypes and rigid costumes for men and women, put into hyperdrive by social media, more and more feminine gay men have come to believe they’re better off trying on the other outfit, so to speak. And even before they come to see their environment through this distorted and inaccurate lens, doctors and strangers online and even their parents are setting it up for them.

(This post is about gay men, but, HOO BOY I could talk just as long or more about how the same phenomenon is happening with girls and lesbian women.)

So in part, the transgender fad among young people is yet another side effect of both the safetyism of modern-day parenting and the detrimental mental health effects of too much social media exposure: both lead people to fear that gender nonconformity will ruin your chances at success in life if it isn’t corrected in our hypercompetitive online world.

The notion that feminine men can’t get dates in the gay community is completely false. They do just fine on the dating market. Recently I was a bartender at a gay bar, and I saw plenty of feminine gay guys find success and happiness out there. Sure, they’re not going to be the Big Man on Gay Campus, but their prospects are far from hopeless. And as they get older, they’ll come to realize that their prospects for finding healthy, long-term love and creating families of their own are actually higher if they stay true to themselves and avoid the temptation to try and camouflage their sex with medical treatments.

It’s a terrible irony, then, that some gay males’ desire for a “traditional, conservative” love life is what drives them into the arms of transgender ideology, and it’s also the very thing that often ends up preventing them from achieving it in the long term. This is an important message that gay men need to hear, especially the ones whose gender dysphoria is rooted in their sense of loneliness and low self-esteem with regard to their dating prospects.

Speaking of music, you can see this very conflict playing out with Kim Petras. He was one of the youngest patients of transgender medicine ever — among the earliest cohort to be subjected to the puberty blocker protocol. Now 30, he’s an international pop star (with a hit album called “Slut Pop”) and virtually every single one of his songs’ lyrics is explicitly about being superficially accepted in the heterosexual dating market. His entire image is wrapped up in the fantasy that sexchanges can allow gay men to gain sexual attention from the conservative, masculine heterosexual men they so often covet, with added resentful misogyny against the women to whom straight men are attracted, to boot. (His line, “What’s up, this is Kim Petras and I fucked your boyfriend” is a TikTok meme.)

My heart breaks for men like the “passing 29-year old” posting on Reddit that he wants to kill himself because he can’t find a date post-transition. I know all too well the confusion about being a young, gender nonconfirming gay man, and the pain and loneliness it brings. I want society to show them that they can have happy and healthy relationships just as they are. We need to be honest with them: it’s true, they might not always be as popular as the gay men who manage to hypermasculinize themselves, the gym boys, who back in my day, us femmy gays used to resentfully call “the Aberzombies” for their matching Abercrombie & Fitch preppie clothes. But there’s love and acceptance waiting for them nevertheless. Because human beings can’t really change sex, and in the dating market, sex always trumps gender.

Let’s not forget that these men are victims, and let’s focus the ire of our activism towards more deserving targets, like the doctors who look the other way, and the especially predatory autogynephilic men who lurk on Reddit and elsewhere, with the deliberate intent to mislead such gay men for their own personal gains.

Do me a favour? Please read that man’s words from Reddit again. And imagine them in my voice, as I do when I read them. Because I could so very, very easily have found myself in this man’s position, were I born a few years later than I was:

I'm at the end of my rope.

I'm 29. Post-op. I pass. And yet I can't find one guy I'm attracted to and who's willing to give me a shot. It's been years. It's gotten to the point I don't think that there is a guy out there who I like, who likes me and who's real. I don't believe I can ever get married, let alone get a family.

I'm so fucking alone. I don't attract guys. The only men that I fall in love with are video game characters, or my own imagined guys.

I'm so tired of trying my best, always trying to be so damn sociable, to go out, only to get rejected. I'm so tired of dating apps being filled with creeps, of transphobes, of guys uninterested in me beyond one night stands. I'm so, so, so tired of being alone.

I don't know how to get one guy to go on a date with. I don't know where to find guys I'll like and who'll like me back. I don't know how I'm supposed to find love. I don't know how to come to terms with the fact I'll likely end up alone forever.

I think I might kill myself.

If you enjoy my writing at all, if you like me, understand that this man is an alternate me, trapped in a horrible alternate universe.

(This is adapted and expanded from a post of mine at Butterflies and Wheels.)