Haltonch

On episodes of "Taskmaster" and interviews following it, quite often you acted like you genuinely weren't enjoying being on the show and regretted agreeing to appear (particularly this interview - transcript/video). How much of this was your grumpy stage persona and how much is genuine? What was your experience of "Taskmaster" really like?

That's fair enough. For what it's worth, I thought that the first series would not have been anywhere near as good without your presence, and I found everything you did on the show brilliant and hilarious.

Not the OP but this is a really good question, and one I was very confused about until last year when I became close friends with a non-binary person. The subject is still one I'm constantly reconsidering my thoughts on but I have some ideas that you might find helpful.

"Transgender people" is kind of a catch-all term for a lot of different people with different needs. Some trans people need hormone replacement therapy, some need gender reassignment surgery and some need to act free of society's gender roles (and e.g. using pronouns they/them may help them). Then there's the oft-conflated areas of drag queens and cross-dressers, who just want to dress up in different clothes to what people expect. And people who are genetically intersex.

Your conception of transgender seems to be a strict model: person is born in one body; has the opposite gender; undergoes surgery to change their genitals. Indeed this is a common misconception. But there are lots of people who identify as trans for very different reasons.

The term transgender is only one of many: transsexual, agender, genderqueer etc. And these all mean different things to different people. I think it's more useful to view "transgender" as a term whose sum of parts relates to the etymology of the term within the historical context of its creation, rather than an actual description of what it refers to. In the same way that feminism also deals with men's issues (and trans issues).

Consider this thought experiment: what would happen if we got rid of any societal concept of gender?

Some trans people's issues are related to how society treats them - they seem to (for example) fit into society's construct of masculinity, but they have a vagina. So the label "trans" might help them today, but what they're experiencing is that their sex doesn't match cultural gender expectations. These people wouldn't need the "trans" label in our thought experiment.

But for other trans people, such as those who have gender dysphoria, the issue is a physical one in both ways, so even in our thought experiment they still need recognition. For instance, a person might experience negative emotions on a daily basis because of a physical hormonal imbalance - they could have a "male body" and a "female brain", so the solution might be to take estrogen hormones, in the same way other mental health problems are treated with pills that affect your hormones.

Then another trans person might be read as female, but want to look "like a man" - for example they might only like the way they look when they have a lot of body hair. Which is this—a biological (or innate) thing or a social thing? Well... both? I'll let you decide.

I think the problem is that most people are so limited in their view of sex and gender - most don't understand the distinction between the terms, and most have almost no awareness of most "types" of trans people. So what seeps through into the public consciousness might seem like a contradiction—gender is socially constructed but trans people need to switch gender—but "trans" is an umbrella term that encompasses a whole range of situations and experiences, and the terms "gender" and "sex" are used to mean a whole host of different things by different people.

I think it's quite right to be skeptical of these things. If you look at something like mindfulness, the problem is that many, many scientific studies have been done, but the majority are very flawed, though maybe it does help with depression. This Wikipedia page could be a good starting point if you want to investigate further. Admittedly I've only looked at this topic very briefly, but it looks to me like meditation is just about has significant scientific evidence for it - it's no homeopathy, but it's not exactly as reliable as Advil.