Frankenstein, Transgenderism and the Pain of Emulation

The next installment of my essay on Dodge City is coming within the next week or two, but in the meantime, I thought I would share my reflections on a topic raised in one of my classes.

This past week we discussed Mary Shelley’ novel Frankenstein in my Western Civilization class, a work usually generates discussion discussion. You never know where such a work will lead them. I sometimes think things like AI, cloning, gene editing, and the like will come into the discussion but they rarely do. Mostly they always come back to being excluded socially, to the suffering of the Creature who is rejected by Victor.

Rarely do students ever bring contemporary political events or issues into the classroom. In my experience, most students at this level (I teach at a community college) have no interest in discussing controversial topics. They are too socially risky. No one wants to be blackballed as having the wrong views so they keep things within the bounds of acceptable opinions. Most of them just want to get their grade and move on (I don’t mean to denigrate them by the way. Most who show up are doing their best).

However, in this particular class, one student of mine, perhaps the brightest in a very small class, brought up the issue of transgenderism, and how the transgender community identifies with the Creature in Frankenstein. She specifically cited Victor Frankenstein’s rejection of his creation as resonating with transgendered individuals, who feel rejected by their parents.

I was very glad for the exchange, for she was quite polite and not combative at all. She was apparently concerned about censorship of books in schools that discuss the topic. I don’t know if she was referring to some place in particular, but I made the point that children shouldn’t be exposed to sexually sensitive material until they are mature enough to handle it. Her response to this is that if kids are not exposed to transgender individuals and their problems, they will grow up to hate them, just as the Creature is hated by everyone in Frankenstein.

As I said, it was a very civil discussion, and I am grateful for it. I say this because I believe the whole issue of transgenderism has been turned into a political weapon, and its spread largely the result of social contagion. There are of course people who genuinely suffer from gender dysphoria, and they should be treated with care and respect, as should all people. But it is far too easy in this era of social media, where everyone is hyper aware of what everyone else looks like, their relative social status beamed into young children’s brains, not to think this is mostly a matter of young adolescent women uncomfortable with their bodies being manipulated for political ends. Still, I am glad that I heard what sounded like a reasonable concern reasonably expressed behind this phenomenon, which I still think does not justify the current craze for wanting to inject children with hormones, subject them to surgery or deny their parents a say in all these things.

The discussion also made me think of the late French thinker, René Girard. Girard was famous for his theory of mimetic rivalry, the idea that we strive to emulate our adversaries and come to take on their habits. This often leads to a spiral of violence, according to Girard’s theory.  One can see this theory almost perfectly incarnated in Frankenstein: Victor tries to emulate God by creating life, and the Creature tries to emulate his creator, but Victor violently rejects him (emotionally, at least). The Creature responds by exercising his power over life by killing off his loved ones one by one. Of course, this mimetic rivalry echoes that of Satan in his envy of God, especially as represented by Milton in Paradise Lost whom the Creature invokes in his discussion with Victor.

Both Victor and his creation are driven by this mimetic rivalry but neither can emulate their creators successfully. For Victor, this is a matter of nature: he is not God and his manipulation of his laws only leads to ruin. But for the Creature, being made in a lab, this cannot be the same problem. He is hideously ugly and this is a large part of his problem, but he was made this way. It was not merely a matter of nature taking its course. And yet, such is the power of human vision, people are in a sense naturally repulsed by his appearance, but there is nothing he can do to change this. Victor has his feelings indulged by everyone but the Creature is deprived at every turn by everyone, and though this is a Romantic idealization, everyone has felt this way at some point in their lives (except for those congenitally happy people who are probably psychopaths anyway).

Human beings naturally learn by emulating the things we see, things we desire, but we also have limits that prevent us from doing this. But I wonder if the current transgender crisis isn’t related to a problem in our society. I am thinking of our crisis of authority. No one seems to trust any authority any more, unless they tell them exactly what they want to hear. It is hard to say this is wrong. So many of the leaders of our institutions, from universities, to churches or religious bodies, politicians, military leaders and the like, simply don’t measure up to the image we have of what those above us in the social order should be. I wonder if this lack of fit between our ideal of authority figures and our actual leaders has caused something of a crisis. Normally, we want to emulate those “above” us in the social order, but what if they turn out to hate us? What if they reject us like Victor? Whom are we supposed to emulate then?

It seems to me that the craze for wanting to be seen as part of a victim group is related to this. If we can no longer identify with the authority figure, the Creator, the Father, we can identify with their victims, those who are the “losers” in a social order that has wrongly rewarded evil and punished the innocent. All of us have been rejected and wounded at some point, and this should make us compassionate toward people who need some sort of affection and affirmation for their wants. The problem of course is that there are natural limits to what and who we can emulate, but in this age when every social convention has been sundered but the social order seems less and less amenable social mobility, it must be irresistible to think altering nature is the solution. Indeed, sometimes, habit and custom are more difficult to change than physical nature.

Still, it is part of the process of maturation—of “growing up” as we called it in the Before Times—to recognize there are some things we cannot alter.  You may admire this actress or that athlete, but you are not going to successfully emulate their physique most likely. Recognizing this can be a depressing experience when you are exposed to their presence nonstop on social media, in advertising. These days, we are all too cognizant of how often what are presented to us as eternal truths turn out to be arbitrary social conventions, and so we have a hard time accepting that such still exist. It is no doubt good to test and see what our real limits are, and we shouldn’t automatically accept what they might be. I would be the last to deny it. Yet it also true that we have to accept our limitations, and learn to live with them at some point. Some part of our lives will always seem ill-fitting to us humans in this world, and making our peace with that fact, however difficult, is an important part of being human itself.