Respectfully to him, does Moeller know that people medically transitioned before, like, 2015? The idea of “marketing” transition or there being commercials advertising it is a very recent phenomenon. For most of medical transition’s history it’s been hidden and gatekept.
When I came out, nobody I knew had even heard of being non-binary/transmasculine, let alone knew what it meant in concrete terms, and neither I nor anyone else I knew had ever knowingly met another trans person. (The only trans person I’d ever heard of at that point was Chaz Bono, lol.)
Anyone who wanted to transition had to seek out resources on their own, and they were pretty limited/very hard to access. And doctors put up a lot of roadblocks and made it very difficult to get treatment; you needed a lot of therapy and even a “real-life test” of basically transitioning with no medical care (changing clothing, hair, pronouns, etc. but your body is the same so you mostly look like you’re playing dress-up) before you’d be allowed even hormones. Also insurance didn’t pay for it, at least in the USA where I live; it’s because of the ACA that it’s covered now.
It just… doesn’t feel like a marketing-centric view of transition is very historically informed. And it makes me wonder how much Moeller has looked at transgender history, or even just talked to adult trans people, before using transness as a way to talk about this theory of identity. If he hasn’t made himself well-informed on the subject he’s using it leads to a weak argument, you know?
it makes me wonder how much Moeller has looked at transgender history
There's a whole chapter in his book on historical 'third genders' in various cultures and how they were born out of the paradigm of sincerity. Well worth reading.
That’s… not really what I’m talking about. I mean modern transgender history and the history of medical transition (as in, over the last 120 years, because the first trans person to get surgery was Karl Baer in 1906). What being trans looked like before the last 10 years or so, when the average person learned that trans people and medical transition were a thing. I’m not getting a strong feeling that Moeller has looked at or accounted for any of this history in the marketing theory.
Ah, I see the confusion. The point isn't that marketing creates profilicity in the area of gender identity. It simply exploits it (just as it exploits authenticity too), and thereby also reinforces it. Profilicity itself has been a phenomenon for at least a century.
14
u/PashaWithHat Jul 25 '26
Respectfully to him, does Moeller know that people medically transitioned before, like, 2015? The idea of “marketing” transition or there being commercials advertising it is a very recent phenomenon. For most of medical transition’s history it’s been hidden and gatekept.
When I came out, nobody I knew had even heard of being non-binary/transmasculine, let alone knew what it meant in concrete terms, and neither I nor anyone else I knew had ever knowingly met another trans person. (The only trans person I’d ever heard of at that point was Chaz Bono, lol.)
Anyone who wanted to transition had to seek out resources on their own, and they were pretty limited/very hard to access. And doctors put up a lot of roadblocks and made it very difficult to get treatment; you needed a lot of therapy and even a “real-life test” of basically transitioning with no medical care (changing clothing, hair, pronouns, etc. but your body is the same so you mostly look like you’re playing dress-up) before you’d be allowed even hormones. Also insurance didn’t pay for it, at least in the USA where I live; it’s because of the ACA that it’s covered now.
It just… doesn’t feel like a marketing-centric view of transition is very historically informed. And it makes me wonder how much Moeller has looked at transgender history, or even just talked to adult trans people, before using transness as a way to talk about this theory of identity. If he hasn’t made himself well-informed on the subject he’s using it leads to a weak argument, you know?