In this instance of my newly-minted interview series, I spoke with Corinna Cohn, a self-described “transsexual” who travels the country to support proposed bans on gender transition for minors. You can learn more about Corinna's story here.
After consuming copious quantities of meat at a Korean grill, Corinna and I meandered through a park, became distracted by a live jazz show, then trespassed into a church garden where we settled in for a chat. We discussed the modern search for meaning, postmodernism, and the possibility of an afterlife, among other things.
Shannon: What is your heterodox origin story?
Corinna: My heterodox origin story? I'm just an ordinary person. My favorite question as a child was always “why.” Do you remember those character books for kids that had the boxy or the circle characters, and they're supposed to teach you a moral lesson? My dad bought me Mr. Nosey. They were these real passive-aggressive moral-building sorts of books that parents got kids in order to address their character flaws. And my sister got one too, that was supposed to address her character flaw: Little Miss Bossy.
Shannon: Ooh, that's a bit of a sexist stereotype. OK. You call yourself a “transsexual.” Why do you use that word when it seems to have fallen out of favor?
Corinna: Why do I use that word, instead of “transgender?” Is that the rest of the question?
Shannon: Probably.
Corinna: “Transgender” is one of those newfangled words that's supposed to be inclusive, and descriptive of everybody, but when you start tearing down boundaries and start knocking letters around, it happens pretty quickly that the words—instead of becoming inclusive—become more elusive.
No really knows what it means. Is transgender the guy who wears a wig on the weekend and wants his wife to take him out to dinner and pretend that he is a girl? Or is transgender somebody who does the full medical conversion and tries to live in society as a member of the opposite sex? It could mean anything. A drag queen might be considered transgender by some people. These young individuals who call themselves non-binary think they're a form of transgender.
So I don't affiliate with any of those things, necessarily. But I did undergo a process of cross-sex medicalization, starting as a teenager. So to encompass that experience—which by the way, I'm distinguishing from an identity—to encompass that experience I use the word “transsexual.” Transgender doesn't mean anything to me. All sorts of people who I would never have ever in the past recognized as transgender call themselves transgender.
The Washington Post published a survey earlier this year on all these people who call themselves transgender. Something like 60% of them, or a little bit more than 60%, use a word other than trans woman or trans man to describe themselves. And then out of this whole population that calls themselves transgender, I think only one in six medicalize. Or maybe it's a one in three medicalize and one in six have surgery.
At the time that I transitioned, male to female transsexuals would have been 80% of the trans community, easily. Now we're maybe 12% or 10%.
Shannon: You and I have spoken several times about postmodernism. I'm inclined to believe that no one believes it; they just repeat its claims in an effort to sound clever. You believe that people believe it, and it's behind transgender activism.
Corinna: Yes.
Shannon: Postmodern thought seems so irrational. What is it about it that appeals to people?
Corinna: I don't think it's irrational, because one of the ideas behind postmodernism is: we construct our reality using words, so if you can change words you can change reality.
Shannon: But postmodernism specifically critiques reason—that makes it irrational by definition. Its arguments are irrational because they don't value reason.
Corinna: All right. I think there's something to open up and explore there. I'm no defender of postmodernism. I think most of the people I run into who embrace some form of postmodern ideology, whether it's gender ideology or queer theory, seem to have a real difficult time agreeing on what is real and what isn't. Because if something is real and it offends them, they try to come up with a bunch of definitions that make something unreal.
So if they're really upset that they can't change their sex, then they just keep deconstructing the term “female” until it's in these little atomic parts and the pieces don't go back together anymore. “Oh, well, if I have breasts and if I have a vagina, and if other people think I look like a woman, then doesn't that make me a woman?” “Oh, you can't see anybody's chromosomes unless you take their biosample and put it under a microscope after filtering it over and over. How can how can that be a basis of sex?”
Shannon: But you don't think that's just a justification rather than an actual belief
Corinna: No! They're trying to reset their understanding of reality by breaking all of this stuff apart and refitting it to mean what they need it to mean.
Shannon: But why has that taken off?
Corinna: I'm not a philosopher, I'm just an ordinary white collar Midwesterner. But as far as I can tell, there's sort of been a collapse in meaning and a collapse in identity, in a way.
Shannon: The crisis of modernity.
Corinna: The crisis of modernity. That's fine. People don't know what what to do anymore.
Shannon: Why is there a collapse in identity though?
Corinna: I think it's because we've really hit a high amount of wealth. Have you in your memory gone to bed hungry? I haven't. The only times that I've ever gone to bed without shelter is because I decided that it was recreational to go out and camp. But that's a choice. And even the poorest people in our our society—we talk about homeless people, but a lot of people who are homeless have an opportunity to get shelter. Might not be great shelter, but a lot of the people who are without a home are by choice.
Shannon: What was our identity, then, before we were so affluent?
Corinna: We strived. We struggled. So at some point you had to go learn a trade, because there were very very few knowledge-based jobs.
Shannon: And that gives you an identity?
Corinna: Well, yeah. It gives you a set of habits. It gives you something that if you're not doing it all the time, your survival will be placed at risk. So you look at a lot of the previous generations, fathers would hand down their trades to their sons.
Shannon: Modern jobs don't fulfill that?
Corinna: No. Modern jobs are of very little value. There's a lot of essential services: keeping the lights on and the water running. But most of us, you and I included, are doing things that are just—the further and further you make improvements, the more specialized the jobs are—and we're just doing stuff that we're doing because we've over-specialized.
Shannon: Why is that bad? Or why doesn't that give us an identity?
Corinna: There's too many factors mediating between our labor and our survival. So me sitting at a computer clicking things all day is not pulling plants out of the ground. It's not skinning an animal. It's not butchering anything. Like, I don't weave anything. Nothing that I use on a day to day basis was crafted with any hands I'll ever meet. So we're layers and layers away from anything that produces tangible value at this point. So how do you have meaning?
Shannon: So our work is unsatisfying, then.
Corinna: Yeah. So here's the thing. You're in this world where you can have a pretty high amount of insurance that there's nothing that you can fuck up so badly that you won't be able to get a meal that day. And there's no work that you can do that really, directly or even indirectly, translates into value that you can understand. You're just doing stuff for other people, maybe even for other people's entertainment. So we're distracting each other, mostly.
And then faith is has basically started to evaporate. Churches are declining 2% to 3% a year. And the search for meaning—we're numb about it. So looking to God or faith for answers to any of our questions is not answering anything. But gender sounds like it has a lot of potential!
Maybe that's the reason everything feels dead and unsatisfactory and boring and why it seems like you have no place or meaning in your life. Maybe call yourself non-binary and suddenly “Hey, actually, when people call me they/them that's very affirming. I feel different about myself.” It's just sort of like a drug.
Shannon: That doesn't seem big enough to replace meaning and faith and hands-on work.
Corinna: It's not. It's like feeding sucralose to a hummingbird. They'll go to the feeder and drink it, but it doesn't give them any nutrition.
Shannon: So the rise in transgender identity is because people are looking for meaning.
Corinna: Yeah. There's a big gender complex now. There's a medicalization pathway. There's material things that you can do to realize your gender identity. You can take testosterone. You can have your breasts removed. You can grow a beard. Like all of these are material things that sort of manifest a meaning or purpose in your life. And now, there's a whole series of goals you can set for yourself. You were adrift before. You didn't know what you were going to do. But now you've got your gender reassignment plan. So now there's all of these little boxes you can check off and as you do, you can say “I'm doing it, I'm doing it, I'm reaching my dreams. I'm becoming my authentic self.” Right? Then you get to the last box and you go “Uhhhh.... why aren't there any more boxes? I don't feel like I'm done yet.” There's no more boxes to check. Like: “Fuck, now I feel empty again. Now what?”
Shannon: Are we influenced more by nature or nurture?
Corinna: You're talking about our personalities, our habits, our behaviors? What do you mean by nature versus nurture?
Shannon: Some people seem to think we're influenced mostly by nurture and have a clean slate; other people think we are almost completely a product of our chemical makeup and stuff.
Corinna: Have you ever studied the phenomenon of a feral child? I think if you see what happens with a child, that is either the apocryphal feral child, one that's been raised out in the wilderness by bears or wolves or something, but there's also feral children who are just children who've been locked in bedrooms and neglected by parents, but in either case if you look into any of the stories of these feral children, they're just, they never become functioning adults. They miss critical socialization periods.
Shannon: So you think nurture? I didn't expect that.
Corinna: Well, there's gotta be a lot of nurture because even the way that we're able to learn languages—like the the words that we learn, the concepts that we learn—influences how we develop, right? Yeah, I think nurture is a big part of it.
Shannon: You don't really primp very much. Do you like fashion?
Corinna: When I was younger, I liked it a little bit more. I feel like it's sort of useless, now.
Shannon: Why do you think that changed?
Corinna: I think I know at least one reason and it's sort of uncomfortable to talk about. It's—I've only been in one relationship over the last 10 years. Sex is very unsatisfying for me because of the surgery I had. I've gotten involved in a number of different activities, trying to meet people, but I don't want to be in a relationship under false pretenses. And the fact is that straight men are not into transsexuals, really. And gay men are not really into transsexuals. And if you're not out trying to meet somebody and find a mate then the impetus to dress nicely and try to impress somebody just isn't there.
Shannon: What music are you listening to?
Corinna: I don't listen to that much music. This morning. I started off wanting to listen to some XTC. Do you remember XTC? So I listened to the song “Sacrificial Bonfire” from Skylarking. It has been in my head for a while.
But I don't know—all the other stuff that's modern, I don't like it too much. Every once in a while there's something OK but it gets really very very overproduced and that seems soulless to me.
Shannon: I agree. What are you reading?
Corinna: I'm reading Mr. Nosey.
Shannon: No you're not.
Corinna: No, I'm not. What am I reading now? I'm finishing a book called Time to Think by Hannah Barnes.
Shannon: Ah, yes. Do you like it?
Corinna: It's informative, and it's well written. Then I was gonna queue up your book.
Shannon: Oh, really? Cool. No hurry.
Corinna: I'm not in a hurry, but I gotta get to it at some point. The Open Society and Its Enemies is the next book I'm queuing up after yours.
Shannon: If you could push a button and eliminate the internet, would you?
Corinna: No. I think that would be a bad idea, to take out the whole internet. But I like this idea of pushing buttons and changing things.
Shannon: What is something you feel uncertain about?
Corinna: Everything. Gosh. It's easier for me to come up with a list of things that I'm certain about.
Shannon: OK, What are you certain about?
Corinna: I'm certain that there's no afterlife.
Shannon: Why are you certain about that?
Corinna: It just would be preposterous if there's an afterlife. If there is an afterlife, what would humans need to do to get there? It would have to be some place. Right? Even if it's in a dimension that we can't perceive, because we're Flatlanders, the afterlife would have to be somewhere. How would we get there?
Shannon: This isn't plausible?
Corinna: No, it's silly. When you swat a fly, do you think the fly goes to the afterlife? We had a cow and a chicken and a pig for dinner. Do you think any of those animals are going to be waiting for us with a little angry glint in their eye when we make it into the afterlife? That seems preposterous. I hope there's not an afterlife. I have eaten a lot of chicken. These chickens are going to come after me in the afterlife. Why would humans go to the afterlife, but not the flies and the chickens and the pigs? And the dinosaurs? We die, there's just this very crowded plane full of dinosaurs and gnats and just masses and masses and masses of mosquitoes. Gross.
Shannon: What keeps you up at night?
Corinna: YouTube.
Shannon: [laughs]
Corinna: I sleep like a baby. I don't ever have any anxieties or worries keeping me up at night. If I have a superpower, it's: I just go to sleep.
Shannon: I guess I mean, what's bothering you. What's your big concern in the world.
Corinna: So there are basically two categories of problems. The ones that there's absolutely nothing that you can do about, and the ones that you can. I don't really worry about the things that I have no control or influence over.
So the thing that I do have some worries about. To me, all of this gender stuff is really a path to mislead young people. I really don't care if somebody who's 25 or 30 or 40 years old decides they want to have cosmetic surgery to make themselves look like the opposite sex. As long as they're competent, as long as there's some sort of making sure that this isn't somebody who's actively in a state of delusion. Let's put some some reasonable control on, not just like drive-through sex changes.
But these kids are being lied to, particularly these young ones, they're being transitioned at five, six, seven, four, three. They're really being subjected to severe abuse under this delusional framework, that somehow this is necessary or helpful for them. When really what it's going to do is make them confused, alienated, dysfunctional adults. And that does bother me quite a lot. I feel a personal responsibility to try to stop it. And I do have influence over it. So that is something that occupies my thoughts.
Shannon: That's why you've been traveling and testifying in favor of these bans on youth gender medicine.
Corinna: If it makes any difference at all, for a politician to hear my story, and for them to factor in whether they want to regulate this field, so that children are not being just automatically factory-transitioned. Great. I have a duty to do so.
Shannon: Are we near the end of human civilization?
Corinna: I hope not. But if we are, then I guess that'll be bittersweet. There's some really annoying people out there who, if I'm in the same sinking ship that they are, I'll at least have that warmth as I go, like: it's both of us now.
Shannon: When we do go out, what will take us out?
Corinna: Realistically? I was alluding earlier to the fact that the work that we do so marginal, we're so specialized that we do not appreciate how fragile we've turned the world into. You go into a grocery store and you go through the produce, how much of that produce do you think is even grown in the United States? Some of it is, but a lot of it isn't. So if we have something bad enough happen that takes out our global transport system, which COVID almost did, we could have mass amounts of knock-on effects: lack of food, lack of energy, lack of critical parts to keep the infrastructure going.
So I think that we could really hit a point of just collapse. Because we're not equipped to live locally. We're not equipped to keep ourselves fed or clothed locally. We don't have the infrastructure to do that. So it's all very, very, very thin. You look at a country like Cuba, right? So America forced to an embargo on Cuba. And what happened is that Cuba basically stopped any form of productivity or technology advancement. I don't know how it is in Cuba, now. But it could happen anywhere in the Western world, that we just basically stop or go backwards technologically. It's easy to imagine, We do not appreciate everything that we have right now. But I think maybe in our lifetimes, we'll understand that acutely.
You can find Corinna on Substack, on the podcast Heterodox with co-host Nina Paley, and on Twitter.
I think this is the best interview I’ve read on gender issues. Shannon has asked great questions, which drew out really thoughtful, (actually arresting) responses from Corinna. I’m particularly struck by Corinna’s thoughts on how the loss of meaning in our modern work lives, combined with the decline of religion as a source of meaning, is a powerful force buttressing gender ideology. Transition as a search for meaning in contemporary life, where traditional sources have dissipated is a brilliant line of thinking. Corinna - I think you should write a book about this. As someone with a PhD in philosophy, I say you have the chops of a philosopher in spades, you white collar Midwesterner!
For someone who claims not to enjoy fashion…where in the world did Corinna get that badass sequined red blazer bc it’s rock star level cool….y’a just threw it on?! Really liked this interview.
I don’t know what life would be without music. It would be like a bird without a song.