I'm sure this comment will not be popular but whatever. I agree that trans people need to be treated with equality and dignity, and deeply oppose what's going on in some red stares for civil libertarian reasons. This sort of care, like all other care, needs to be a private matter between people and their doctors. I think Bostock got the legal question right, and that as people we owe it to others to do our best to be polite and accomodating, as best as we can, within reason.
But here's the part that's going to piss people off and where I disagree with Matt's initial framing. It is the trans rights activists who are the bullies and who have played a big role in creating the opening for the right wing insanity and panic. Note I distinguish activists and groups from individual trans people who I assume generally just want to be left alone to live their lives.
The bullying includes treating all parents as suspected abusers of their children (including in blue district public schools), woke 'gotcha' games with language, and trying to use bizarro interpretations of civil rights laws to force strangers into validating increasingly metaphysical assertions about the nature of gender and sex. The most bullied are of course women who have the temerity to stand up for their hard earned rights, or just raise concerns about whether self-id standards aren't ripe for abuse, especially when they result in predatory men being given access to womens' spaces.
So the right wing, as usual, is wrong and always looking for an opening to relitigate issues they lost. But defeating them also requires being adults about some of the thornier issues, and also realizing when it is the activists we nominally agree with who are the illiberal assholes. My belief is that the right would have struggled to mobilize on this issue, but for the nuttier aspects of it suddenly appearing in public schools over the last few years and yet here we are. Nothing is worse than failing to realize the stupid result of stupid, unserious ideas taken to their natural conclusion, which is exactly what that Jamie Reed story will be if substantiated.
It looks like this is the most popular current comment on SB. So let me chime in and say that many, if not most of us live in liberal bubbles where allyship has allowed very specific groups (radical feminists, Black nationalists, trans activists) to be bullies. However, in most parts of the US, I don’t think these groups would be bullies? So does that make them bullies or victims? MY is probably asking the right question here, which is that it depends on the particular incentives.
I work in K-12 education outside of a liberal bubble in a red state and I’d say that dignity right now is probably more of a crucial concern than overreaching gender affirming care.
I cannot like this comment enough. Because I think this upteenth topic where having a disproportionate number of journalists, pundits, commentators living in blue cities (and specifically in NYC and DC) warps this issue. Living in Brooklyn means you are much more likely to be confronted with extreme lefties rather than extreme righties, including on transgender issues.
I brought this up with all the CRT stuff. How many articles has NyTimes run about Dalton. Meanwhile go try starting an LBGTQ club in a religious private school outside a blue city and see what happens.
I thought Matt's point was that everyone deserved to be treated with dignity and respect. How come Brooklyn liberals asking for dignity and respect from other people on the left is somehow out of line? Newsflash, people care about the things they see and are confronted with on a daily basis, so yeah, people on slow boring are more likely to deal with extreme lefties. But that doesn't make bullying okay when it's the extreme lefties who are doing it!
I don’t think anyone is saying it’s out of line, I think people are saying that identifying trans activists as “the real bullies” may be based on a distorted view of the discourse. Unfortunately, like most issues, this one has room for bullies on both sides.
I am tired of pretending this is like every other issue. I have advocated for progressive causes for 20+ years. I have conversations with Brooklyn liberals every day and have been involved in many local political and advocacy groups. This is the only issue where I personally have been attacked for suggesting there might be some nuance. This is the only issue where I've lost friends for asking milquetoast, normie questions. This is the only issue where I've been accused of driving children to suicide for suggesting we might want to slow down on life-changing surgery.
I understand right-wing people in other places do bad things. I don't have any ability to change that. If I have the opportunity to vote for the dignity of trans people, I will vote for it. But the discourse is uniquely horrible here, so I personally am a little tired of these things being minimized. and yes these are the unique concerns of a Brooklyn liberal, but I am a Brooklyn liberal!
I wish this was the only area where I've been attacked for suggesting nuance, but unfortunately I think it's becoming more and more common on the left thanks to social media. Police reform, for instance, is an area where people get attacked as racists and "copagandists" for suggesting that police may have a role to play in a civil society. It's a growing problem on the left and I certainly agree it should be opposed wherever it comes up.
Ok, let’s slow down here. I used to live in a big, liberal urban area where YIMBYs were continually accused of being racists in the most extreme terms. I went to a very liberal private college in the early ‘10s and women I knew and liked routinely said “ugh let’s kill all men.” This isn’t that different. It’s punching up and down and around due to frustration with the slow pace of change, without acknowledging the incredibly fast pace of change. Yes, I’m also worried about the disproportionate amount of teens I’ve worked with who are FTM or female to non-binary versus MTF, since in a non-misogynistic world, the numbers should be pretty similar. But there is literally one place kids can go in this major urban area for gender affirming care, and there’s literally one school district in the state that has a public policy that affirms kids’ identities without parent consent, and yet Republicans in the state legislature have spent TWO sessions in a row now obsessed with this issue. Bullies!
Completely agree. What’s been lost is the nuance in topics like this. Just because you may believe that young adolescents shouldn’t automatically be put on puberty blockers because they are questioning their gender, is not the same thing as hateful behavior towards the entire community.
I'm not so sure though... Of course, this is going to vary by school, but public education is a strongly left leaning institution nationally, and that often extends into schools within red states having strongly blue staff. I've seen plenty of articles about backlash to critical race theory, trans stuff, etc. being generated by incidents happening within schools in red states - not just stuff people in those states read in the media about blue states.
Of course when we're talking about state level legislation, that picture changes, but within the context of local schools, it's certainly possible for people in red states to experience extreme progressivism.
Like, look, are there small towns and rural areas in America where a solid conservative consensus still holds, and where anti-trans bullying vastly, vastly outweighs pro-trans bullying? Yes! Those absolutely exist! But we aren't in the mid-20th Century any more, and this is no longer the mean, median, or modal American experience.
Most Americans either live in:
1. Solidly blue areas (whether at the city or state level) where most everyone pushes the liberal orthodoxy.
2. Borderline areas with a mix of red/blue, but where the fact that liberals are so overrepresented among middle managers, bureaucrats, and teachers means that the blue dogma punches above its weight for the overall vote mix of the area.
And then third: beyond your local community, where people value expressing themselves is the internet, where the blue dogma reigns due to a combination of the ideological sympathies of tech workers and bureaucrats. And people get their info fed into them by media, where again the blue dogma reigns.
None of this means that it's impossible or even that hard to find areas where the red dogma reigns. It's a minority but not a tiny minority.
But the idea that we should be mostly concerned with the red dogma represents an out-of-date idea of the modal American experience.
I think the thing to keep in mind is something Matt brings up all the time; rural areas have extremely disproportionate political power. When discussing this issue, or gun control or literally any political issue and asking who has the power it’s really important to keep this in mind.
I think that Matt and the Slow Boring commentariat severely overstate this. Rural areas have very mildly disproportionate political power. In 2022, the Republicans won the Congressional popular vote. They have a minority in the Senate and their majority in the House is I believe slimmer than their popular vote margin.
I do think that in many states, gerrymandering has made state legislatures far more lopsided than the state's overall population, and in some important states for this particular issue, that favors Republicans.
But, crucially, that's not really what this subthread is about. What we're talking about is the discourse.
That is, if you express some banal opinion like, "I think we should use people's preferred pronouns but I have some reservations about kids transitioning," how likely are you to:
a. Be told that you're grooming children for sexual predators and are a war criminal (ie, bullying from the Right in the discourse).
b. Be told that you're literally genociding trans people and are a war criminal (ie, bullying from the Left in the discourse).
And I think it's very clear that (b) is more common, while also noting that (a) exists.
Sure but that's just about the only place where red-thought has a major advantage. Weigh that against TV, movies, HR depts, every kind of lawyer, tech, medicine, academia, education and most news. And against the fact that as you go up the salary scale you get progressively more, well, progressive.
"Like, look, are there small towns and rural areas in America where a solid conservative consensus still holds, and where anti-trans bullying vastly, vastly outweighs pro-trans bullying? Yes! Those absolutely exist! But we aren't in the mid-20th Century any more, and this is no longer the mean, median, or modal American experience."
This came up earlier this week in a discussion about the Youth Risk Behavioral Survey.
"Close to 70% of LGBQ+ students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year and more than 50% had poor mental health during the past 30 days. Almost 25% attempted suicide during the past year."
"In the latest government survey, LGBTQ teens in 2021 were at least twice as likely as heterosexual teens to report sexual abuse, online bullying, opioid misuse in the last 30 days, persistent sadness or hopeless, suicidal thoughts"
Why are you assuming that the sadness, hopelessness, or poor mental health is coming from interactions with conservatives? Especially online, why would you expect LGBTQ teens to associate with conservatives? LGBTQ online spaces are famous for developing extremely catty and drama-filled dynamics, including bullying and abuse. Also, many LGBTQ subgroups overindex on participation in sex work, or hypersexualized party cultures; both places where drug abuse and sexual assault are much more common than in the general population.
I think you are overestimating the power of public school teachers.
I say this as a child of a teacher. Parents and school boards have a lot of power. Please school board elections and “Intelligent design”. Forgotten battle of the Bush years with a nice little cameo from discovery institute who gave Chris Rufo his start. You know the guy Ron DeSantis is empowering in FL.
So interesting. I’ve always thought Philly is every bit is a liberal as those enclaves and maybe it is. But maybe it isn’t. I just don’t have much experience getting treated badly by far left wingers in person. Maybe that has to do with my circles of friends and family. I dunno, but I always get confused about a lot of these sentiments, because they are not experience I read here and elsewhere I guess.
Online, different story. And I think thats a huge part of the problem - the loudest, most memorable voices online are invariably the most extreme. And online voices are also subject to manipulation and misrepresentation, trolling, which I think really magnifies our political problems - online discourse needs better culture and etiquette and regulation to limit paid speech misrepresented as legit.
Yea it’s really bad in some places. I live in a 60/40 liberal area and this is a common occurrence. It really started with the back to school issues post covid when some on the far left accused parents who wanted their kids in school full time in the spring of 2021 of wanting people to die from covid. It’s continued on issues like this. Mind you, these are not parents who are anti trans by any means, these are parents who think maybe something should be taught in fifth grade versus third grade because they don’t feel it’s appropriate for third grade. The parents are then accused of being anti trans and then their kids are bullied. Often they end up moving out of the community, move their kids to private school or are terrified to speak out again.
Sure, but a common progressive response to articles like this or Emily Bazelon's NYT piece is to ask "how is this even worth talking about?" (there are plenty of examples in these comments already, just a few hours after publication.) I'd say, since social justice progressivism is the beating heart of the American left, and the whole point of progressivism is to make every single city, town, suburb, and outbuilding a blue bubble, it's reasonable to explore what's happening in all the Biden +20 districts.
But it's also worth talking about because it hits close to home - those of us in progressive bubbles live with it every day. In any number of towns like mine, there has been a sudden, large increase in the number of transgender and gender-fluid kids in the area middle school and high school, heavily concentrated among children assigned female at birth. I'm not personally attached to rigid gender roles, and the vast majority of it involves self-id and social transition, so I'm inclined to let it play out.
But that attitude is not universal, even in my town. So people want to talk about it, and it's not "just asking questions," it's about their families and friends. For years, the 100% predictable public response to these inquiries has been shitty research, at best (like the laughably narrow Fenway health study being touted elsewhere in these comments), but more often illiberal bullying, directed at people trying to be supportive and understanding.
"As thinkers, we are disappointed to see the New York Times follow the lead of far-right hate groups in presenting gender diversity as a new controversy warranting new, punitive legislation. Puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, and gender-affirming surgeries have been standard forms of care for cis and trans people alike for decades."
This is so disingenuous because it uses the existence of medical procedures historically used on adults (e.g., hormone replacement therapy is common in post-menopausal women) as proof that they are perfectly safe for kids and calls anyone who points that out a far-right hatemonger. And people like me end up sounding like Helen Lovejoy by comparison.
I will never blame activists for the lunatic responses that they elicit from the right, but as Matt pointed out, the bar for off-label use of drugs that have been deemed safe for human use by the FDA is very low. Puberty blockers are, in some cases, repurposed cancer drugs that had the side-effect of causing men to develop female secondary sexual characteristics, for example. But the activists pretend that they were a) developed for this purpose b) have been unassailable proven to be safe for kids and c) none of that matters anyway because denying their use is literally killing kids.
Where can we even have a rational conversation about trans-anything anymore? The right-wing smears everyone as a groomer pedophile and the left-wing smears everyone as genocidal bigots. Is there some magical political center where you won't get shouted down for anything short of total allegiance to one side or the other?
There's a simple test of the "medical appropriateness" of wide access to gender-affirming care: given the lack of clinical research on use of hormone blockers for gender-affirming care, go do that study. It would be evaluated by an Institutional Review Board (IRB), the job of which is to ensure that medical research is done ethically. There is no way in hell that a study on kids below 16 would be approved. I seriously doubt it could be done for any non-adult. If it were, it would have very stringent enrollment criteria so that only kids where there is a clear cost/benefit ratio would be treated.
I support the rights of physicians to use drugs off label and am willing to believe that hormone blockers are a wise choice for some children. But anything beyond carefully-considered and limited decisions is hard to justify.
Ideally, the decision should be made between a physician, patient and, when said patient is a minor, their guardian. But then everything unravels; what if the guardian objects on religious grounds? Where do the minor patients rights begin? How old does someone have to be to consent? What are the side-effects, short- and long-term? Oof.
But the national conversation we seem to be having is, on one side, fantasies about schools all but force-feeding kids hormones and, on the other, disingenuous assertions that you can 'press pause' on puberty with no downsides using totally safe drugs. I'm not even sure how one can carefully consider anything around gender-affirming care for kids, given all the FUD in the discourse.
Agreed. In addition, MY is right to highlight how physician practice can differ from best practice. Physicians are humans and get caught up in the zeitgeist. In the early days of fentanyl, I worked with some hospice physicians who were crusading for better pain relief options for patients with incurable cancer. Their work was both well intentioned and medically appropriate. it wasn't just pure marketing that Purdue used to get so many physicians to overprescribe. It was also how a righteous cause spilled over into malign territory.
PS - I'm not sure how much of the hospice community's work for pain relief existed and was exploited by Purdue versus being initiated by Purdue. Regardless, there was a beneficial side to these drugs later overwhelmed by a damaging one.
I like the work of a few of the signers kid that letter, but it’s a totally insane document. It is helpful, however, as a reminder that the NYT is not actually as “progressive” on this issue as people here are accusing it of being?
It is only in the last year that there has been any critical or nuanced coverage of these issues, starting basically with Bazelon’s article.
So while it may be true that they are backing toward the center, it’s important to note that previously, the NYT covered this solely in uncritical, “supportive” ways, though some activists are acting like they went from nothing to Nazi.
This is becoming a pattern. Align with the shouting left at first while an issue is raw. Over time start actually doing journalism and figuring out what makes sense.
This is totally true, in my local residential area I'm entirely sure that confronting bigotry against all varieties of gender nonconforming people is a vastly more pressing issue. In the specific bubbles in which my actual family network exists however, the "Gender Identity" ideology stuff is aggressively encroaching. Recognizing the context in which you are speaking is critical.
Yeah, from my point of view (boring corporate job in a blue part of a purple state) the trans issue just... isn't a big deal. The biggest way it has impacted my life is seeing pronouns in a few email signatures (all of which are she/her or he/him and match what I would expect the person to use based on appearance). I guess I've also noticed the pride flags becoming increasingly complex every June.
The one transgender person I've ever worked with was actually in the military reserves with me, and was just a normal person who was quietly transgender.
I think that, like many stupid issues, the media actively goes out searching for outliers so everyone can get fired up about a school library or drag show somewhere.
I live in a similar place, with a similar experience--my trans friends fit the traditional model--biological men who suffered from gender dysphoria, transitioned as adults, and now live generally good, unremarkable lives.
But I think the issues with young biological women are more national because it appears that social media--especially Tumblr and Tiktok--is a key factor, and social media doesn't neatly follow geography.
I live in a purple district in a purple state with a gerrymandered Republican legislature where said legislature has stacked the board of governors of the university system with people who watch too much Tucker Carlson. They are trying to force rules on the faculty that forbid asking certain kinds of "politically relevant" questions to job applicants, etc.; it won't be long until they try to scrub the pronouns from email signatures. The funny thing is that, prior to their meddling none of this was a big deal and no one knew or cared about each other's political or social views. But now everyone is up in arms against these changes, prompting people who normally stay out of it to do things like put pronouns in their email signatures. In other words, the reactionaries are eliciting reactions and forcing people to chose sides in a debate no one was having.
Similar background - but my blue part is a strongly blue - university town. Near half of the biologic girls in my child's fourth grade class now identify as trans in some way (mostly some from of non-binary, none as boys as far as I know). It just seems implausible to me, especially since it started with one and then cascaded to the rest in terms of friend groups. All the parents are very supportive and I don't think any of them are seeking any sort of medical transitions. Most of the children haven't even changed their style of dress, or names or mannerisms. I am certain there is a trend element to this. But also I am impressed by how non-politicized the local community has been about it. They just sorta affirmed what happening, and some of the girls has now decided they are girls again and at least publicly there haven't been any major issues. It does provide some interesting color on my perceptions of the national debate though.
Yes. Most folks at my school district are definitely Dems, but they’re not obsessed with race and gender or trans issues. They would work in a different district if they were.
“I’d say that dignity right now is probably more of a crucial concern than overreaching gender affirming care.”
You got a lot of likes. But putting these two things in opposition is just bad sense making and is nothing more than a zero sum political argument. We need to be better than this for our kids.
Thing is I don't disagree with you. But I also live in a jurisdiction where the local school district is currently in court fighting to be permitted to socially transition students without parental involvement and lie about it if they deem necessary. So I am not going to defend what is going on in FL or TX or whatever red state but my first responsibility is to my family.
The scope of bullying isn't limited to liberal bubbles, but the even if that were the case, part of the problem MY identifies is that the bullying makes it easier for actual transphobic people to oppose trans rights. It's simply harder to appeal to normies when trans activists look like crazy demagogues and demand that "allies" be intellectual vassals.
And this dynamic is a general one that doesn't only apply to trans activists - in general, extremists are very often a hindrance in actually moving the needle on many issues.
I live in a liberal bubble (I'm a college professor in a college town), I have trans students and trans friends and trans colleagues, I'm a straight white guy. I should be exactly the kind of person who is being bullied if this was really a problem. And yet, even here, this is 100% a Twitter phenomenon. No one is bullying me or telling me how to think or anything of the sort.
Of course, I do call people by the names they introduce themselves with, and use the pronouns they say they go by, but actually everyone does this with almost 100% of the people they encounter so it's not a big "sacrifice" if that's all that avoiding "bullying" requires.
The problems aren’t for straight white men. The problems are for women who are losing their safe spaces, and opportunities is sport, and are being dehumanized (“people who menstruate” etc how is it that all those wokenhealth organizations didn’t stop referring to “men” only to women? Gender inclusivity would have necessitated a symmetrical approach). It’s also harmful for young people, disproportionately lgb who may be unduly pressured to undergo dangerous medical procedures and pressured into discomfort with their sexuality simply for being less stereotypical.
So yes- for you as a straight white male it’s all well and good. But for those who suffer from homophobia and lesbophobia and of course *misogyny* life isn’t so simple. I can’t believe I’m saying this but check your privilege.
This a good point and I'd add President Joe Biden and his Education Secretary Miguel Cardona probably deserve more blame for things parents complained about in a recent NYT article than random trans rights activists calling Jesse Singal a groomer/chaser. Activists who write for a living just aren't as powerful as the President of the United States of America. People lost track of that during the Trump years and this misperception has basically continued with a different crowd under the Biden presidency. It's not very helpful for policy debates if you can't identify which elected office is implementing policy and get mad at people saying stuff online.
There is simply no discounting a bully/ies and their actions because the bully is part of a group that experiences unrelated systemic issues. Bullying is at its very core an interpersonal issue that needs to be addressed interpersonally as an individual failing of the aggressor. Everyone can tell an asshole as the saying goes...
I think that we’ve created so many conversational third rails in our (mostly online) discourse that we’re inhibiting real world conversation between sane friends and neighbors. I’ve definitely seen this in my circle of friends since 2016.
“Some of the science around this (heck, pick an issue here) looks iffy, I wonder which of my friends I can mention it around without being called -ist/-phobe/fascist/etc?”
Yeah. I have no doubt that right-wingers are being assholes to trans people, and I know state legislatures have put forward some pretty bad bills. But I don't talk to many right-wingers and I don't watch Fox news. What I see on a daily basis is people being bullied constantly for asking simple, good-faith questions that are often more milquetoast than the ones Matt asked here.
There are so many issues where we’d be doing better if we could replace the Twitter activists, who many in media and politics have seemed entirely deferential to, with normal people who have skin in the game, a good head on their shoulders and a decent heart.
I’m sorry, but trans activism has been horribly ineffective, with the downside of seeming very effective at first because of said deference.
Well put: "force strangers into validating increasingly metaphysical assertions about the nature of gender and sex."
The "fact" that all persons are born with an ineffable gendered soul and the gender of that soul is only revealed through the self-knowledge of the individual is a metaphysical/spiritual assertion.
Basic freedom of religion in the USA means that individuals should not be forced to state or signal adherence to the creed or participate in the sacrements of a different religion.
I don't state my pronouns because stating my pronouns would be signaling adherence to your religion, a modern variety of Gnosticism that was invented about five minutes ago and contradicts the accumulated wisdom of all historic cultural, religious, philosophical traditions, along with basic biology.
"Strictly enforced gender roles" Like the if you like dolls and flowers you must be a girl? And if you like trucks and sports you must be a boy?
"Usually at the expense of women" - Do you mean the teenage girls presenting at gender clinics for puberty blockers and testosterone, many of whom will end up physically butchered and sterile? What goes on at some of these gender clinics is the 2020s equivalent of the Tuskegee experiments. The difference I guess is that the Tuskegee experiments weren't performed on children, or the mentally ill, or mentally ill children. It only gets worse the deeper you look.
LOL, the assertion that maleness and femaleness in humans and other mammals are in the mind/soul because of a fad that started on the internet is about as logically solid as saying that TidePods are food because of a fad that started on the internet.
With respect to Bio 101: while I have not researched and taught mammalian biology, I did my PhD in a microbiology lab and taught microbiology at the graduate level for many years. I am also willing to make statements under my real name "briross"
I've seen reports of admittedly varying credibility. But if we rely on self-ID with minimal or no guardrails doesn't it make those sorts of incidents inevitable? To me that's the real question, and why it's important to consider what happens if we follow the most radical demands to their natural conclusions.
Nor is it "inevitable." THERE IS NOTHING STOPPING MEN FROM DRESSING AS WOMEN AND ENTERING BATHROOM RIGHT NOW. There is literally no reason to think this is a real issue.
You're where you are because of bias, not because of trans people online being meanies.
Uh, yes, security and business owners can stop that, and can call police to support them, and such people can be filtered out of womens' prisons and shelters. Right up until the law is changed to say they can't.
Please think for two seconds. Trans people aren't the ones advocating for laws to change, it's opponents who are advocating for the law to change. Because bathrooms and other gendered spaces ALREADY operate on a self-ID basis. Trans people have been using the bathroom they identify with for decades. There is currently no epidemic of cis men abusing this system. So this "thorny" issue is people trying to discriminate against trans people to fix a problem that doesn't exist.
It goes far beyond bathrooms and trans activists definitely are advocating for changing the gender id laws, which has already happened eg in Canada and Scotland. Using angry all caps won’t change the facts…
I mean, laws often change in response to emerging problems. “You’re the one trying to change the law!” doesn’t address whether the facts on the ground are changing or could reasonably be expected to change.
For the first time in my life, I live in a state with a Republican-controlled legislature and I am genuinely shocked at how often they pass laws to solve problems that do not exist and then turn around and point at the fact that the problem does not exist as proof that the law worked, hence justification for passing more laws. It's legislation as virtue-signalling. Bathroom bills and these so-called parents' bill of rights laws that are sweeping through red-state legislatures are perfect examples. The pernicious thing is that a lot of people see these laws passed and then think "Oh, I didn't even know that was a problem, good thing they fixed it!"
This may have been true in public bathrooms, but it certainly wasn't true in school, university, YMCA, gym, etc. locker rooms/showers. And if a man went into a women's locker room previously, he would have been assumed to have made an honest mistake, informed of that "mistake" and told to leave; if he refused, he literally would have been arrested.
to paraphrase: "Your ideas are LITERALLY WRONG IN EVERY WAY and are the result of YOU BEING A BAD PERSON [bias]"
Also note InMD originally said "predatory men being given access to womens' spaces" which is a broader concern than "exploiting transition to attack women to any significant degree"
To paraphrase you right back: "I am a crybaby bigot who has no response to the fact that we are complaining about something that isn't real, so I will just complain about bullying."
Milan, I'm curious if you have any thoughts on this exchange from a moderators point of view. Maybe my previous comment was toeing towards the line of the expected civility here, but this comment seems like nothing more than pure name calling and ad hominem.
In any case, I object to the your name-calling. I pointed out that your comment reads as a call to shut down debate and shout down opinions that are different from your own. I think you've reinforced my point rather than countered it.
There was the transgender woman in England who raped two women in a female prison she was being detained in prior to her surgery. I agree this is not a widespread problem by any stretch of the imagination, but I also don't think we can dismiss concerns about it as being driven purely by bias as opposed to a legitimate concern for real (but incredibly rare) outcomes.
ETA: BD Anders pointed out that I think I'm conflating two situations- one in Scotland and another in Illinois involving transgender women in the prison system. The underlying point (this is very rare but seems like a real concern to me) is the same, so I'm leaving my comment in, but wanted to highlight that my factual statement above is inaccurate.
If you're referring to Isla Bryson, and I think you are, your facts are confused. Bryson committed two rapes outside of prison, long before transitioning. She was arrested and came out as trans before trial. She was then transferred, pre-transition, to a women's jail. She did not commit new crimes while in jail and, following public outcry, was transferred back to a men's facility.
I think you're correct- I think I'm conflating Bryson with the lawsuit filed in Illinois by a female inmate who alleges she was assaulted by a transgender woman in her housing unit who still had male genitalia.
Respectfully, rape in prisons is not the same issue as access to bathrooms. No one with a heart thinks anyone who is at risk of raping other inmates should be held in proximity with potential victims. Of course, for some reason only trans people get everyone excited about prison rape even though the incidence of rape in prisons committed by cis prisoners is much, much, much higher and no one seems interested in fixing it.
The question that people were responding to was "Is there any evidence that predatory men are exploiting transition to attack women to any significant degree?" not "what should we do about bathroom access?" so I was addressing that. If you're limiting your comment solely to the issue of self-ID then sure, I don't see any reason to believe that cis-men will pretend to be transwomen so that they can gain access to bathrooms to commit violence against women.
I will throw in a comment just pushing back against all the "these issues exist in other contexts and nobody ever talks about them!" comments I'm seeing. The article was specifically about the need to not ignore thornier/difficult questions in the transgender discussions that are taking place across the country. That's why they're being discussed here. There are all kinds of other issues that are far more prevalent and, if we're being honest, more important than these issues, but the topic here is specific. If you want to try and advocate for specific incarceration reforms to address widespread problems in the prison system then please do so! But I get the feeling that you yourself are likely not spending very much time working on those issues, in which case using it as a way to deflect the discussion here seems like a rhetorical tool to shut down discussions of legitimate (albeit rare) concerns.
Actually, if someone commits a particularly heinous crime, you often see people comment with glee about how they’re likely to be raped over and over in prison. Some people view rape as part of the punishment for particularly horrible crimes. Which is really gross, but people often get really vicious when they’re talking about the appropriate punishment for serious crimes.
Which is a signal that people aren’t actually concerned about prison rape. They are angry about trans people. If preventing rape was a concern, there are like 500 other things that would have more of an impact than the policy about where to put trans women who are convicted of crimes.
Yeah, I think we are ignoring everything we know about human nature if we don’t admit that some bad actors would take advantage of a system that relies fully on self-ID. And to be clear, I don’t mean that trans women are bad actors—I mean that, at the margins, some predatory cis men will cause trouble.
Even acknowledging that, we might still decide that, on the whole, a self-ID system is better than what we have now. But it’s just obviously true that there will be some trade offs, and I find it frustrating when people try to act like that isn’t the case.
This is an area where I feel the concerns about natal males being in women's spaces are overblown, but _also_ that telling natal women "you're transphobic / your concerns are invalid" doesn't help solve anything.
Prison rapes are more prevalent among certain sexes than others, but they are always something to guard against. If you treat the concerns as coming from a valid fear but propose solutions that help _everyone_ have more dignity wouldn't we be better off?
People seemed to be more worried about gay same-sex teachers than they did about opposite gender teachers, which seems ridiculous to me, but I think the vision a lot of them had in their heads of gay people was a sort of pop-culture predatory type. Meeting a bunch of us (because we came out) and showing we're normal people like everyone else does more than calling them homophobes for being nervous. I mean, it _was_ homophobia, but calling everyone out on it can just make them defensive.
Help them not _be_ afraid rather than blaming them for their fear. This is, admittedly, easier said than done - and yes, this is an extra burden on activists - straight people never had to help _me_ not be afraid, only the reverse - but inertia is powerful, and if you want to change things, sometimes you have to shoulder an extra burden.
I think you have to ask some practical questions in these cases. For bathrooms, self-id is probably the only workable norm. Nobody is going to do ID checks and self-policing just means that anyone who doesn't look adequately feminine is interrogated and policed for using the women's bathroom, something that can and does harm lots of cis women. Conversely, making trans women use the men's bathroom invites harassment (and making trans men use the women's actually causes the discomfort the policy is meant to alleviate).
For spaces where there is more scrutiny, like prisons or women's shelters, you can have a more nuanced policy. In general it's disgraceful how unsafe prisons are, but given existing conditions it makes sense that you might exclude a self-identified trans woman from a women's prison if you have some specific basis to think she might pose a threat. (Likewise for a cis woman, for that matter.) For women's shelters the prevailing practice as I understand it is to accept something like self-id even in jurisdictions where they have flexibility to do otherwise, but (unlike a bathroom which is going to be open to all comers) there's no reason they couldn't exclude someone who seemed likely to cause problems or who in practice does cause problems. It's not no guardrails.
So I think actually this is how it’s always been, but because the idea of trans has expanded so much as to include bearded males who do not even attempt to transition, women in particular are suddenly very concerned. It raises the very legitimate question: what is a trans woman?
Administrators not having to do genatalia-checks is an underrated driver of policies like this. I bet there are any number of athletics administrators that aren't entirely comfortable with trans women/girls competing in girls sports. But, if they create a ban, they would all dread the day where some parent demanded "verification" of a boyish-looking girl on the opposing team. Even setting aside the incident going viral, who wants to deal with that? And what do you do with the trans girl's parents demand "verification" of every member of the opposing team?
Same mess if there's a bathroom rule. Imagine being a minimum-wage loss-prevention specialist at Target having to navigate that. Imagine Target corporate trying to purchase insurance for the inevitable lawsuits. They're not being "bullied" into it. They're avoiding an obvious implementation nightmare.
This "verification" issue seems like such a red herring. Kids on sports teams usually have to have a doctor do a physical to be cleared to participate, right? The doctor is almost certainly going to be aware of the child's sex, no genital inspection required.
I'm sure there are all sorts of forms out there, but I'd imagine many/most focus on safety and are stingy about any other kind of information. If it was a mandatory component, start looking for doctors and medical systems to threaten to shut down child athletics programs by refusing to disclose under any circumstance.
With sports you have to worry not just about demands for verification generally but also about intrusive inquiries into non-trans kids who have intersex conditions they may not even know about. I can see why self-id might be a poor fit for elite sports but for workability reasons it makes sense as a default most of the time.
Yes. Sports are not an objective inquiry into, for example, which collection of ten girls are "best" at volleyball in the boundaries of a particular school system. They're for recreation, bond-forming, and character development. Trans girls will struggle to get those things on a boy-dominated team. Changing in a different locker room, limited shared interests, bullying, etc. If she can join a girl's team, I wouldn't expect the benefits she gets to be outweighed by diffuse agita among a handful of her teammates and/or opponents. And, until we see insurance companies caring about potential injuries, I'd ignore those complaints as scaremongering.
There are real costs even to the assertion that violence against women is a significant motivator of transition, and those costs only go up if public policy is based on that view. In my opinion, imposing those costs demands a significant evidence base to justify doing so.
I’m kind of concerned by the double rapist in Scotland (Isla Brayson, previously Adam Graham) who insists on being placed in an all-female prison. You honestly don’t see a problem with that?
These situations may be rare now but judging by how many people, including kids, are now proclaiming their trans status, they may not be in the future.
Do you worry this much about where to house the cis women who've raped women? Or the cis men who've raped men and trans women?
It's not that it's not a problem - it's just that the scale of people's concern about this problem is out of proportion to the scale of the problem itself. And the usual proposed solution - housing trans women with men - just transfers rape risk from cis women to trans women, likely at a much higher rate. I don't think you can justify that from a universal "rape is bad" principle.
So if we put Isla Brayson, who previously raped two cisgender women, in a prison with cisgender men, you think Brayson will rape the men? I somehow doubt that.
I agree there’s concern that Bryson could be raped by cisgender men in that situation, but I think it’s logistically easier to reduce that risk given that it’s a risk to a single individual.
I don’t know all the details of this case but if Brayson has surgically transitioned, then perhaps this isn’t an issue. If he can’t mechanically commit the act, then I might feel differently. But if not, then I honestly think cisgender women in the female-only prison are at some significant risk, in which case the “human dignity” argument requires us to elevate their concerns to a level equal to Brayson’s.
We already restrict the freedoms of convicted rapists in lots of ways. The right to transition may be one more. I don't think that has any relevance to the rights of regular folks.
Rape is a common thing in prisons even though freedom of movement is restricted. If you were a cisgender XX woman, would you feel comfortable sharing a cell with Isla Brayson?
The problem transgender activists face at this point, I think, is that their defense of the rights of transgender people is beginning to be perceived as requiring a diminution of the rights of cisgender people. Honestly, it doesn’t seem to me as though the human dignity of cisgender women in that Scottish prison is being respected. It doesn’t seem to me as though the human dignity of cisgender XX women on Lia Thomas’ swim team is being respected either. I could go on, but I’m probably in enough hot water already.
Nevertheless, I suspect I reflect a majority of public opinion. I’m pretty sure a majority of ordinary Americans don’t want to be nasty or disrespect transgender people, but there’s a sense the crusade has gone a bit too far.
Sorry, but imprisoned women have rights too, and even “regular folks” might end up in prison. But in Canada when you ask the authorities how many men are currently in women’s prisons you get the Orwellian reply “there are no men in womens prisons” and in fact they don’t even know because they don’t actually keep track of the data of their physical males with all the power differential and -forgive me, often functioning penises- imprisoned with women. Even when these are convicted sex offenders. We are victimizing the most vulnerable in the name of progress and it’s sickening. It’s wrong even if the problem is rare although again- once you go full trans in your gender definitions you’d have zero way of knowning if it’s rare or not!
You're putting words in my mouth. I never said it was a significant motivation of transition. But if you leave a loophole it will be exploited by bad actors. Hence the need to approach the matter seriously.
Does anti-trans legislation actually do anything about that though?
I mean, if your fear is that a cis-man is going to go into a women’s restroom and rape women, how does banning trans people from using public bathrooms change that? Is that going to stop someone who already wanted to commit rape from going in?
Don't take this the wrong way but this is where the conversation enters the twilight zone. If the standard is self-ID then there is no way to police who is and is not acting in bad faith, until after the fact.
Now as I said above, I don't support conservative legislative efforts. I think the better way to approach this is similar to the ADA, with reasonable accommodations, but not necessarily being required to simply accept what everyone demands at all times. That way lies a path.
Let’s be blunt. Does a person with a penis have a place in a women’s changing room? Self Id is all well and good but there are also some objective facts people might find objectionable.
I have thoughts but admittedly it isn't an easy question. I think adding unisex options is a good idea where possible. At a point though I think we also have to get to a firmer definition of who is and is not trans than what we have currently.
Before this become a national discussion - how were these issues addressed? Not many places had bouncers in front of restrooms checking in your pants. People largely do the right thing, and if there is some creeper they call out for help or report it (or for an unfortunate number are violated in some way). How the post-trans-acceptance world different? The events aren't that common, and to the extent they occur there would probably be similar reactions.
Shouldn’t we prevent significant degrees of attacks against vulnerable women, such as women in prisons or shelters? Attacks on these women are a significant problem already—why give any man the legal right to access protected women’s spaces?
I’m all for increasing safety in prison environments but I find it interesting that you see so much talk about how women who were sentenced to prison need to be protected from trans women, but most of the people making that complaint have very very very little to say about prison reform or criminal justice reform in any other context.
People only seem to care about female inmates when they might be housed with a trans person.
I think this is an unfair argument, especially on this forum. It’s possible to be concerned about criminal justice reform and prison reform and at the same time be concerned about this particular scenario.
Sure, but it is extremely extremely rare for people to be legitimately and genuinely concerned about both.
Trans people’s placement in prisons is almost never brought up as part of a broader policy about protecting women who are in prison. It’s brought up in the context of trans issues.
I don't see how you could even gather the evidence for that observation. The topic came up today in the context of trans / cis-women, so a handful of people weighted in on it. The broader topic of women inmate's rights doesn't often come up, but if it did, they might weigh in with a concerned opinion as well. You couldn't possibly know that they wouldn't.
FWIW I have written condemnations of prison rape on the Internet, including my substack, that never mention trans inmates, but also think we can't do pure self ID on the issue of placement of trans inmates due to the sexual assault threat. So we do exist.
Do you have any evidence that it’s extremely rare? Because I know many people who are genuinely concrete about both. That’s anecdotal, obviously, but it seems like you’re relying on anecdotes, too.
Classic whataboutism. Today’s post is about transgender issues so that’s what’s being discussed. Besides the argument here is either correct or not - so reply to that. Do you agree or disagree that this is a bad and dangerous policy? Don’t hide behind other problems.
I don't understand why there's this huge concern about transgender rapists in women's prisons but not a similar concern about cisgender lesbian rapists in women's prisons.
Do you understand why there would be more concern about cis male rapists in women's prisons versus cis lesbian rapists? So long as prisoners can merely self-identify as transgender to be placed in women's prisons (several of these prisoners only assert a trans identity after entering prisons) the exact same concerns apply.
I’m concerned about all rape. But to answer the spirit of your question, I think people are more often expressing concern about self ID because it represents a policy change, and it’s reasonable to ask whether that would make conditions with regard to sexual violence better or worse.
I don’t see the issue in general with trans women inmates being put in with cisgender women inmates but it depends on a case by case basis, especially based on the person’s criminal history. Sexual offenders and particularly violent offenders need to be handled with care and may need special placement.
I mean it is also problematic if someone who is convicted of raping men is given easy access to male inmates.
A huge amount of rapes in women's prisons are committed by cis-male guards. Do you want them to be banned from employment in prisons? It would probably prevent far more rapes than these fantasy scenarios of male rapists claiming to be women in bad faith.
This “fantasy scenario” just took down the Scottish first minister.
In any case, you should at this point understand status quo bias. If you’re talking about making a major change, that’s going to evince a larger reaction from people that the status quo, so deflecting to “why don’t you care equally about *this other thing*” is truly missing the point.
But since you brought it up, yeah, that’s also bad! What else do you want to hear? Are you suggesting we should change the policy around guards in order to decrease rapes, so we can then also change the policy of where male sex offenders are housed, which will increase rape? That way the amount of rape stays the same? If you’re going to make bad faith accusations, I can too.
It’s certainly been the case in prisons. See also the implosion of the debate in Scotland (first minister just resigned, not officially but clearly in fallout from debacle)
How many sexual assaults constitute a "signficant degree"? Can you please give us a number? Then maybe you could tell the first x-1 victims that their assaults were not "significant"
It seems to me that if you truly have gender dysphoria you would not be agitating to have the right to parade your unaltered genitalia around locker rooms or try to bully biological women into not having a problem with it.
So I guess it depends on what you mean by attack.
The problem is not with people with dysphoria, who genuinely present as women -- they have always been accepted in women’s spaces, because we understood their need to have a safe space -- it’s with those who believe that simply stating they re women is sufficient. Sorry, it’s not.
(And if trans men without bottom surgery went into gay male spaces, disrobed and demanded that they be desired as men, well, I really don’t think there would be this cultural pushback against them as transphobic. People would very quickly see how ridiculous and yes, offensive it was.)
People are pointing out what I think is the crux of the issue, which is that geography matters in terms of which set of bullies one will be in closest proximity to, and therefore be most aware of (as an aside, as a geography professor I’m always happy when geography enters the conversation!). It’s less productive, I think, to determine “who started it” because that’s a) impossible, and b) inevitably drives us right where the bullies want us, which is a politics of retribution and grievance.
The cool thing about SB and the vast majority of its commenters is that I think we are sick of grievance and retribution being presented as enlightened bases for political engagement. This is going to sound kind of utopian or otherwise naive, but I think that the more we can collectively say “no” to the bullies in more venues, the better. We need to look for opportunities to stick up for the people who are willing to be brave and articulate what I’m going to call off-the-cuff a politics of “compassionate skepticism” (that’s a terrible name, please offer better ones).
I’ve said this before, but I really really like that people here are, by and large, kind and interested in actually discussing rather than screaming at each other. And even beyond that, independent thinkers in a genuine sense: not the kind of bargain basement sanctimony-masquerading-as “intellectual bravery” peddled by the usual suspects, but the kind that’s willing to accept that most issues of social or political significance are legitimately complex, and that tribalism distorts. So again, thanks all.
Are the "gotcha" games still much of an issue? I think the trans community has gotten a big Overton benefit from the nonbinary community. Struggles with they/them grammar (and difficulties comprehending nonbinary orientation in the first place) make deadnaming and misgendering prohibitions much more appealing by comparison.
Thank you, this is a clearly stated parceling out of the issue. I'm a progressive adult woman and worry about this for AFAB people younger than me. I would love to see more progressive commentators engaging with the following reality: adolescence as a woman is in many ways terrible and frightening. There is a huge change in how other people, including adults, see you and treat you and many of those changes are frankly for the worse and they stay that way forever. I can easily imagine that many girls I knew as a teenager, maybe myself as well, would have taken what must seem in some ways like a simple out if it had been available at the time. To be clear, the majority of girls I'm thinking of are now stable adult women; one transitioned as an adult. Having noticeable breasts as an awkward teenager, for example, is really just miserable. But my breastfeeding relationship with my child was one of the most fulfilling experiences I've ever had, in a way that I absolutely could not have imagined as a teenager. The idea of making an irreversible choice when I was 15 or 16 that would have taken that away is heartbreaking.
The unmistakable physical reality here is that transitioning is not a simple out, and it's not clear that hormone blockers are either. Moreover I wish the discourse around this was more nuanced around the fact that feeling alienation from femininity, or even dysphoria around femininity, is not the same thing as feeling comfortable in masculinity. I would be very interested to know what percentage of AFAB teenagers seeking gender-related care are choosing male pronouns versus "they/them". People should absolutely have the dignity to identify however they want. And, there has to be a way to answer discomfort with female puberty and living as a woman in society other than "you can run from this if you want".
Great comment. Structurally, it's interesting that AFAB is used without comment. I had to google it. Never heard of it before. The terminology proliferation on this issue has been extraordinary.
afab is either orwellian or theistic. who exactly does the assigning at birth? doesn’t that term posit an intelligence to do the assigning? isn’t “born female” or “biological female” more elegant?
I always assumed it was meant to refer to the medical professional making the call at birth for medical and government records based on looking at the genitals of the newborn.
Yes, I don't agree with the terminology, but that's absolutely how it's being used, AFAICT. (Wes Yang -- who I will stress is not without his faults -- has posted some scans from kids books and school materials where the framing is that doctors "guess" the baby's gender and "sometimes they get it wrong.")
The annoying thing about it is that it undermines the very distinction of sex and gender that-I thought -is at the very basis of the definition of gender dysphoria.
There are plenty of progressive commentators who have engaged on this issue. You probably won't like what they have to say, though--they would say you are projecting your own pubertal struggles on trans boys and casting them as "confused girls running away from scary puberty," when in truth you do not know what is going on in their heads. At its core, this is denial that there can be an internal transgender experience different than a cisgender one, which is why people get mad.
While the OP is arguably casting her own experience on trans boys, (although it seems to be a very common experience) it seems that the opposite is clearly true as well. A lot of trans people refuse to consider the possibility of what the OP wrote because they look at their own experience and think "well it worked for me."
Perhaps the answer is that both experiences happen and, when an adolescent comes out as trans, we should neither reject their claim out of hand, nor assume that they have fully thought the issue through.
Yeah as below I'll gladly own that my experiences impact my views here -- ultimately everyone, cis and trans, has a personal experience of gender and gender identity which is one of the reasons this issue touches a lot of nerves. I agree with your concluding statement on this but would add "at the outset, we should neither..." because at some point you do have to decide on an action.
It really is a question for me of what constitutes responsible and ethical parenthood around this question, or more broadly what constitutes responsible and ethical actions of adults vis-a-vis children when it comes to gender identity.
I agree, and come at this from a very similar place. I have a 7 yo girl. Right now, I have no reason to think she's trans, but it really does seem like your kid can come out as trans after displaying no signs (whether this is ROGD or unobservent parents is an open question in my book).
I am concerned that as she gets a bit older, she will decide/realize/reveal she is trans, and the world (including my wife, with whom i disagree a lot on this issue) will conspire to prevent us from actually exploring the question. If it turns out that she is trans, great, I will have no problem with that, but I don't want her to be discouraged or prevented from really considering whether she is or if there is something else going on. If she is, I also want to make sure that any medical transition she goes therough is properly vetted (like any other medical treatment) and I am concerned this is not happening because anyone questioning its efficacy is tarred as transphobic.
I obviously was never an adolescent girl, so i don't quite share your experience, but I was an adolescent, and I remember adopting a lot of "identities" while trying to figure out who I was. Maybe there is a distinction between trying out being goth or a punk or a skater and deciding you are trans, but I'm not sure that is always true, especially for an adolescent in a world where being trans or NB is increasingly seen as "cool."
People often object to anyone who is not trans, and does not have a loved one who is trans from venturing into this space, asking "what business isn't of yours?" I think that objection is flawed on several grounds, but, so long as it is possible that my daughter may come out as trans as she gets older, it very much seems to be my business, in the same way that I care about social security despite not yet being retired.
Yes, thank you, I relate to this a lot. To build on what you're saying, I want to be clear as to why my initial comment focused on what it was like for me and many other women I know to be teenage girls and my subsequent comments have been around the role of parents. The reason is that the claim that (it seems to me) is being made is that the only responsible action of parents (specifically) and adults (broadly) when an adolescent says "I feel uncomfortable in my body and I think the answer to that is medical intervention" is to support rapid access to that intervention. Whereas I spent a lot of time feeling uncomfortable in my body as a teenager and medical intervention would have been absolutely the wrong answer and I cannot say for certain that I and others I knew with similar experiences wouldn't have asked for medical intervention if the discourse around gender and body issues at the time was the way that it is now. And that leads me to think that this issue is nuanced and that "rapid access to permanent medical intervention" is not necessarily the only responsible parenting action -- which again to be clear does not mean that "access to medical intervention" is never the right action or that you shouldn't end up there in most cases, but that's very different than getting there rapidly, in all cases.
So, yes, I am definitely looking at this (like many other issues) through the lens of my personal experience. I think that's a pretty common way to look at issues generally, for almost everyone, and one of the challenges of civic engagement is when to apply lessons from your own life versus recognizing the limitations of your own points of view. Frankly if this entire debate concerned adults and the rights and behaviors of adults, my stance would be limited to the concerns on dignity and right of self-determination that MY starts with. And to be clear, where I fall on that is that adults should have full rights of dignity and self-determination and the freedom to determine how they move through society and how they present, up to the point where it starts infringing on the rights of others, which I don't think really occurs w/r/t trans adults in the general case.
But I am also a parent and as parent I have to make decisions on behalf of my child ALL THE TIME, including medical decisions, including difficult and fraught decisions. This is a normal, appropriate part of parenting. And I just do not think it is workable to have the consensus be "because you, the parent, are cis, your personal understanding of this issue is irrelevant to the decision you must make".
My main concern in looking at this discourse is that I would want to feel that I could trust medical advice I was getting from a doctor if I were to be in this situation as a parent and I would want to feel that the standard of care was rigorous and well-supported. To be clear, I do not support laws prohibiting gender-affirming care, I think those laws are wrong and bad. I think gender affirming care should be widely available but with an appropriate standard of care. Maybe a single two-hour meeting prior to a hormone prescription is just anecdotal and not actually the normal standard of care? But that to me would feel like a very limited amount of medical guidance for a very serious medical decision, even if it is the right decision!
The good news is that standard practices are more rigorous than a single appointment followed by a prescription. I would not want to too seriously judge cases where they seem to go very fast, because they may have judged that a child is at serious risk without immediate intervention and decided to make an exception. This is an area where care absolutely has to be done on a case by case basis. I agree best practices are to require a long period of insistence and persistence of the gender incongruence before prescribing hormones, and that's the standard we see in the vast majority of cases. It is important to remember, though, that kids might often have been struggling with something for years before coming out to their parents, so there can be a grey area when the practitioner is weighing how long the kids have been telling their parents they want treatment against how long the kid says they have felt this way.
I think it's also important to conceptualize gender affirming care is a long, drawn out process. Getting the first prescription does not lock anyone in. Puberty blockers buy time and can be discontinued--I think there's agreement kids should not be on them for years and years, but 6-12 months to make sure the gender noncongruence is persistent is still standard. Hormone therapy takes months and months and years and years to work, and the effects are gradual. So the person receiving the treatment very much has quite a lot of time to figure out if this is what they really want and if it is helping them before big permanent effects set in.
This is why regret rates among those who have medically transitioned are so low! When you're on medicine that is gradually causing hair or breasts to grow on your chest, you will probably figure out in a hurry if that's actually something you want.
"I agree best practices are to require a long period of insistence and persistence of the gender incongruence before prescribing hormones, and that's the standard we see in the vast majority of cases. It is important to remember, though, that kids might often have been struggling with something for years before coming out to their parents, so there can be a grey area when the practitioner is weighing how long the kids have been telling their parents they want treatment against how long the kid says they have felt this way."
This is not what the WPATH guidelines require and it does not fit with the large increase in AFAB transitioners many of whom showed no gender non-conformity before puberty. As a parent of a young trans man I can tell you that kids can find scripts online and know what to tell Doctors to get on hormones in no time. I think it's easy to just assume that parents are clueless and in denial, but as parents we know that we love our kids and really don't care about their gender expression. It is a response of love to be skeptical about putting your teen on medications that will result in infertility and shorten their expected life span to resolve an issue that popped up overnight after a long Tumblr bath and a whole host of other psychological issues (eating disorder, self-harm, anxiety and depression) all of which point to a deep discomfort with puberty rather than gender. We are not hateful bigots and we are not going to accept that there's nothing to see here. I think that if you truly want to preserve medical transition for youth as an intervention you have to demonstrate some curiosity about what is happening in this moment to all these girls who are coming out as trans in puberty. And as the parent of a trans man I find it interesting that the prison debate never touches upon trans men. I for sure do not want my child incarcerated with cis men because he would be a target, and as a 5'2" person he would pose little threat to women inmates. I agree that trans women are a tough case and I would not want a rule that said all trans women go in men prisons but I also don't want a rule that says that biological sex is irrelevant to where you would imprison someone.
Showing gender nonconformity before puberty is not part of the guidelines and hasn't been for years. It's accepted now those ideas were based on stereotypes and did not capture trans people's experiences. It makes perfect sense that distress and realization of incongruity related to gender identity would appear with the onset of puberty, especially among those raised as girls pre-puberty who these days face less gendered policing than those raised as boys do.
Trans people talk to each other and share strategies for accessing care because care is hard to access! And of course, talking to other trans people can help a trans child figure out their own feelings. These aren't signs of a social contagion of confused girls. The numbers seeking care are still very, very small compared to our best guesses of the proportion of the overall population who are transgender.
I really appreciate this reply! I think this leaves me with both descriptive (ie, what is the state of affairs in reality) and normative (ie, what should the state of affairs ideally by) questions:
On a descriptive level, my concern is that what you're describing here does not match e.g. the Reuters reporting MY linked and the reported experiences of other parents. I think there is a very real question of whether that's actually quite rare and the preponderance of reporting is fear-mongering. If so I would expect more replies from clinics along the lines of "we actually are very careful about this and here's what that looks like" rather than replies along the lines of "yeah we move quickly sometimes and that is actually correct when we do it" but I think on some level that gets into the normative question. That said I would welcome a really sober and well-reported look into the status quo approach at specialized clinics, which maybe you feel that the Reuters report does not meet.
On the normative level, I also see a real tension between what you describe and what I've seen advocates argue should be the case. Is this a fair paraphrase of your views?: "Gender affirming care for children and adolescents should be available to children who express dysphoria. This care should be a months- or years-long process and should be undertaken after counseling and with careful consideration, active monitoring by medical staff with the involvement of parents or guardians, and openness to the idea of discontinuation if it turns out not to be the right fit." If not, how would you characterize your stance of what should be the case?
This comment helpfully illustrates a frustrating problem in the "discourse": Nobody will actually defend some of the more aggressive treatment practices that have been reported. But we really don't know how common aggressive treatment practices are because American health care is extremely decentralized and trans activists have successfully stigmatized the whole question in academic circles.
So people have engaged this point, but they’ve dismissed it as baseless projection? I think you’re right that OP would not find that a satisfying response.
I don't think I called it "baseless" -- we don't know anyone else's internal world, and so it's very natural to think in this manner.
But it's pretty important for cis people to understand that trans people do have a very different internal experience. It's not "same experience, but confused" or "same experience, but mentally ill" or "same experience, but led astray." It's different.
I grant that trans people have a different experience, but it doesn't follow that anyone who seeks this kind of care is trans. Some detransitioners have written at length about how their feelings of alienation, combined with social media trends, led them to think transitioning was the answer to their problems only to find that it wasn't. https://open.substack.com/pub/lacroicsz/p/by-any-other-name?r=7ednr&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I think "baseless" is a fair gloss on your comments. "It's natural to think in this manner" doesn't change the fact that you're saying the whole basis for ariabatic's comment is her own thoughts, rather than anything more grounded.
I would hope this goes without saying, but you should take the writings of a politically active detransitioner where, in that very essay, she describes going down the rabbit hole of transphobic communities and developing a belief in the pseudoscientific "rapid onset gender dysphoria," with a grain of salt when they go on to say that their transition matched perfectly with this narrative of "confused girls on tumblr."
I think it says a lot that she doesn't actually lay out why she thought she had gender dysphoria as a teen or what the gender dysphoria she references talking to her friends about was.
Comparing this comment with the one I was responding to, it seems like you are not being totally consistent about the importance of listening to people's internal experiences.
"...we are now in a new era of medicalizing teen girls’ discomfort with patriarchy while downplaying what appears to be a widespread youth mental health crisis."
Thanks Matt for this observation. I'm the mom of a born female child who wanted to transition at 12, and I feel like I've been fighting the fervor on the left about this for almost 10 years now. I said no to all interventions, now my child is 21, and I still don't think surgical intervention is the answer to a very complicated set of problematic social norms. My kid is smart and planning to be a civil rights lawyer, and we go at it about feminism and left illiberalism in a pretty healthy way, but youth are dramatic and impetuous and not particularly driven by reason. I think this trend will stabilize, but not before many young women have jumped on the medical intervention bandwagon.
Oh my god, that sounds so difficult. Bravo to you for holding the line on medicalization while still maintaining a good relationship. I hope your daughter becomes comfortable in her female body - not because I dislike trans people, but because it’s the obviously preferable medical and psychological outcome.
this could be improved by replacing “patriarchy” with “gendered expectations.”. The liberal young women who are socially transitioning are not living under patriarchy.
It might be in there somewhere, but I don't think it was the only reason. I think MY, like FdB wants to make it clear to everyone, that his problem isn't with trans people, it's with how certain activists approach this issue. Some of this is ass covering (although it won't work, Hobbs and Strangio et al will happily skip to the part where he isn't accepting the party line), but I think some of it is reminding his readers that refusing the accept the party line is not the same as, and does not justify, actual transphobia.
Ass covering is an acceptable price to pay for the difference in the quality of the comments between SB and Hanania’s substack. Hanania’s writing is roughly as good, but it’s muscular, uncompromising tone attracts some fellows who aren’t so nice.
I think it's hard to talk about the trans issue without acknowledging that trans activists have been amongst the worst participants in the culture wars, and I think MattY should at least acknowledge that in his scolding. Do normie NYT liberals concerned about their children deserve to be treated with dignity as well? Does JK Rowling deserve any dignity for raising fairly minor concerns shared by wide swathes of the population? I don't think labeling anyone who steps out of line a transphobe and accusing them of literally causing trans people to commit suicide is a good way to treat people!
"Does JK Rowling deserve any dignity for raising fairly minor concerns shared by wide swathes of the population?"
Natalie Wynn, a popular transwoman video creator on YouTube, made a video about Rowling a few years ago extending empathy to her for the hate mob that was after her and seriously considering the criticisms Rowling expressed to have, while still making the point that her views and the people she was palling around with were hateful and- as a billionaire with major cultural reach- doing major harm to the trans community, and asked that Rowling extend the same empathy to them.
Yes Natalie Wynn is great! Unfortunately Natalie Wynn is far outside the mainstream of her community and has been attacked herself for doing things like this
That raises the question though, IS she outside of the mainstream of her community (again, she IS one of the most popular trans creators) or is there a vocal minority of angry assholes in the trans community that Twitter amplifies the voices of?
My concern isn't based off twitter, but from real-life conversations within progressive circles, amongst friends, colleagues, advocacy groups, etc. This is a uniquely toxic issue, and that's not a thing the internet made me believe, it's an actual fact.
If progressives wish to commit to elevating a politics of dignify over one of cruelty, they desperately need to police their own ranks.
They can make no real claim to this when they tolerate and elevate a great many people who derive enjoyment from hipster-eque feelings of superiority over ordinary people who don’t share every jot and tittle of their “high-minded ideals.”
The conservatives and plainly and obviously even worse at this, but they make no pretensions to caring.
Actually conservatives are not plainly and obviously worse at this; progressives are so sure of their moral superiority, not only do they broke no dissent, they are very mean. And, I hate to say it, really enjoy being mean.
Um. If you’re interacting with normie conservatives, sure, just as most normie liberals are sane.
The very online contingent of the nat-rightists are vastly, vastly worse than their progressive counterparts, literally made of hatred, spite, and cruelty. Hurting the people they don’t like is their *entire* reason for existence, and be damned to actually doing anything for the people they purport to give a damn about.
Sincere question - where do you find or interact with them?
I interact with liberals fairly frequently. Online, that's mostly here. But professionally I'm pretty sure most of my white-collar coworkers are liberal as are most of my neighbors. The HR legal departments that sometimes impact me are also staffed with liberals.
But I rarely interact with conservatives apart from a small number of individuals. I couldn't form a broad opinion on whether conservatives are "mean". I mostly hear about mean conservatives from liberals, in fact, and not first hand. Fwiw, and it might not be worth much, on this site when I encounter an A-hole they are usually on the far-left.
Comparing the meanness of liberals vs conservatives is tricky anyway, in the same way that I would have a hard time telling you which of Mexicans or Brits are more mean. So I'm very curious where you get so much exposure to broad swaths of cons?
My family are normie conservatives, as are the vast majority of my family friends and many of my professional and industry contacts. They’re virtually all, to a person, decent folks who have a different conception of their own and the national interest but with whom one can discuss these issues, find some points of alignment, move on, and have a cook-out and enjoy a bourbon.
My own friends of my own generation are mostly normie liberals fading into normie progressives for whom the same is true.
But I also follow Hanania and a number of other less insightful right-wing types to keep a finger on the pulse, and a lot of those people are batshit insane.
You need to get out more. This is a left of center site, and the right wingers here tend to be of the "graduate degree with unpopular opinions about race and society type" instead of the Tucker Carlson "they will not replace us" types. There are plenty of those out there who think Marjorie Taylor Greene is a squishy mealy-mouthed moderate. Look up how right-wingers talk about Ukraine and Russia and you will get a sense.
This doesn't really help me find a comparison group to the liberals I interact with or prominent liberals in general.
Maybe more importantly, when I do "get out more" I encounter normie, non-political or semi-engaged voters of either party who aren't really mean at all. I suspect one encounters the meanies by "staying in more" and hanging out on FB or Twitter or Cable News.
"Nat-right" is "nationalist right," but I've never seen any attempt at defining the term by someone using it and, to me at least, it mostly just seems to be operating like a synonym for "alt-right."
Yeah, I don't at all doubt that there are nasty far-right people out there who get off on harassing people. I just don't know how many there are or how prominent or influential they are.
Roughly as prominent and as loud as their counterparts on the left, albeit less amplified by the contours of the media trumpet and their location within it.
My theory right now is that politics is basically a team sport, and we're all better off when the vast majority of folks are weekend warriors who turn up to the championship and otherwise relax with beer and BBQ at home. Extremely high engagement doesn't elevate the discourse between folks like those here or at the National Review who give a damn about policy and the role of governance, it degrades it to what we see on Twitter.
This sounds like the mirror image of the experience the few conservatives I knew in LA had. I can't even fathom what makes people act like that, but I think the knowledge that one is in the (local) majority emboldens A-holes.
This is also why I feel like "who is meaner" is a mostly pointless question. There's mean people everywhere. If a jerk grows up in rural Kansas, they likely become a Red jerk. If they grow up in LA, a blue jerk. If for some reason they develop a the less dominant political view of their area, they keep it to themselves.
It's all just human nature, and political tribal affiliation doesn't override it.
I really enjoyed the part about dignity and cruelty in the original article. I see a lot of cruelty online irrespective of the notional politics of the site.
A generalized column on the right’s recurring spasms of performative assholery would have been entirely defensible, but that’s not what Bouie wrote. Instead, Bouie offered a column that, under the cloak of progressive piety, isn’t even remotely concerned with the extent to which gender dysphoria, super-charged by toxic forms of social media, has become the new anorexia. Bouie’s bromides will doubtless inspire more of the NYT’s readership to treat Rowling’s very mainstream remarks on these issues as if they were extreme, to become less analytical about systemic misogyny and its effects, to treat pseudo-scientific claims about biological sex without any skepticism at all. However, I do appreciate a columnist’s need to lead with sincere applause for the part of his audience that he is about to truly piss off. But the part that will be pissed off--the ones who are convinced that sexual identity is both innate and yet weirdly non-biological--have thus far proven insatiable and vicious. They won’t be fooled and will offer no kudos for the very reasonable observations this Slow Boring offered.
Just one minor note here but worth tossing in: as a Comment Reader™, I've long noticed that on some of the edges of trans issues (and to a lesser extent on identity politics questions in general), the NYT readership is pretty suspicious of the hardcore claims. In particular, I think the 'new anorexia' and gender identity/sex stereotypes gets a pretty agreeable reception. The comments on the Rowling piece today are broadly positive, especially when you look at the top rated ones.
Speculation, but could reflect an age split in NYT commenters.
In addition to raising commonly acknowledged questions about what is the proper age of maturity when people should have full autonomy to do what they please with their own body, the transgender/dysphoria debate also raises less commonly acknowledged fundamental questions about the nature of human consciousness and identity.
Does individual human consciousness and identity have an essence that exists apart from, and possibly in contradiction too, the physiological body a person is born with?
Ordinarily, it's more traditional or religious people who say yes, human consciousness, aka the soul, does have an existence and identity separate from the biological body, such that there could, for example, in theory be a male body inhabited by a woman's soul. And it's more secular, materialistic people who say that no, body and mind are one, and there is no such thing as a separate soul or identity apart from the natural body.
The gender dysphoria debate today scrambles these normal fault lines.
This is where I constantly come back to on this. The "Gender Identity" formulation itself is deeply flawed.
I'm extremely supportive of efforts to destigmatize gender non-conforming behavior and expression. I'm also in favor of promoting effective, compassionate treatment of gender dysphoria.
The "Gender Identity" concept is in conflict with both of these goals. It is a fundamentalizing of gendered expressions based in cultural roles and stereotypes, in the service of denying the psychologically disordered nature of GD.
A byproduct of the current trans cultural freakout, strengthening the notion that there are "male behaviors/traits" and "female behaviors/traits" beyond what's between your legs, makes me deeply sad.
A little girl who plays with trucks isn't less of a girl. A boy who plays with dolls isn't less of a boy. This was the progressive and maybe-approaching-mainstream view in the 1990s and 2000s.
It's not deeply flawed, actually. It's a pretty good theoretical explanation for both trans people's experiences and cis people's reflexive disgust at the idea of becoming the opposite sex. It's a sound explanation for the case of David Reimer, a boy who was assigned female after a surgical accident and whose parents then attempted to raise and socialize him as a girl, which did not succeed.
And it's really not hard to guess at the mechanism. If you accept that sexuality can be biologically innate, it should not be hard to conceptualize a similar innate gender-y thing that develops in our brains and usually aligns with our sex-at-birth but sometimes doesn't (just as humans are usually heterosexual but sometimes aren't).
I agree that if such a thing existed it would have some explanatory power for the experience of some individuals. Problem is there's no evidence it exists. At the very most generous, it's like a black hole, observable only by it's influence on the matter around it. There isn't even a coherent concept of what it could be. What exactly type of innate characteristic would manifest as an immutable need to conform one's superficial anatomy and gender expression to a particular set of culturally defined expectations?
Given that there are in fact, myriad reasons for individuals to experience social discomfort or distress about their bodies and their ability to perform to externally imposed expectations, it is utterly unnecessary and unhelpful to wishcast the existence of a quasi-metaphysical, unobservable gender construct to explain the very real distress of the fractional subset of trans identifying people who suffer from truly persistent, unconfounded gender dysphoria.
In the real world, people talking about what they experience is evidence. This is how the entirety of psychology and psychiatry works. This is how treatment of pain works and how diagnosis and treatment of fatigue syndromes works. It's literally how court evidence works!
"Well we can never know FOR SURE" is not some brilliant excuse that wins the argument here. It's not something the experts never thought about. It's just casting about for a reason to ignore people who are saying things about their experiences that you don't want to believe.
Literally nothing I'm saying ignores or questions anyone's subjective experience. What I'm interrogating are explanations. Fundamentally the entire concept of gender dysphoria is about the distress of one's subjective experience being contradicted by observable reality, so the question is, "Where's the contradiction?" If the contention is that the flaw is in our observations of reality then you typically need an evidentiary basis for that claim. "Gender Identity" is such a hypothetical claim about reality.
Gender dysphoria as I am posing it is distress caused by a mismatch of gender identity (real, biological phenomenon) and biological sex (real, biological phenomenon). Calling gender dysphoria or gender identity "not reality based" is assuming your desired conclusion.
There are plenty of real things that we have no direct evidence for. It is not particularly shocking that we have to rely on indirect evidence to support the existence of an innate neurological or psychological gender identity -- the brain is incredibly complex, neonatal development is incredibly complex, and ethics constrain our ability to conduct experiments.
But there is plenty of evidence. Speaking of unethical experiments, you might be interested in the case of David Reimer -- a boy who lost his penis in a surgical accident as an infant and was then raised as a girl. Somehow, he knew he was supposed to be a boy. He managed to peer through the facade created by his parents and doctors at "reality" -- which is exactly what you'd expect if there was an innate aspect to gender identity.
People feel and experience many things that are not reality based. Phantom pains in a missing limb, for example.
How does a teen or really any person have the context to state that the feel like another gender? You can say I perceive myself as this gender, but there is no context for actually experiencing the context of a woman if you're man. You can dress like another gender and experience how society treats you (maybe), but that isn't the fear of getting your period in gym class or date rape leading to pregnancy or hormonal swings of a healthy cycle. I'm not saying this is the essence of being woman, but how would I as a teenage boy have any sense of what it actually means to be a women?
Maybe the request is "I want society to treat me like a women". Then the question for society is when it accepts that request (pronouns) and when it rejects it with good reason (sports, women's shelters?).
You can't really reduce gender to any set of experiences or biological functions. It's a complex thing. Anything you name that is "core" to the experience, I can find (non-transgender) exceptions.
The answer to the rest of what you're discussing here can kind of only be answered by explaining the transgender experience and gender dysphoria. In general, though, the way someone grows to identify with the opposite sex is by recognizing they dislike the various physical/societal facets of being the gender matching their biological sex and/or they envy the facets of the opposite sex, and realizing that other people of their biological sex do not feel the same way. There is usually a lot of doubt in this process!
What facets? Well, it varies case by case and can be almost anything. If you're interested, here's some light reading: https://genderdysphoria.fyi/
That's not actually true: physiological differences that correlate with prenatal hormone exposure can often be observed in trans people. There's also the fact that in sets of twins where one twin is trans, the other twin is also trans much more often than would be predicted by chance - even in twins separated at birth.
I would fully expect a higher level of identification with the idea of transness in individuals whose biology is towards the less gender conforming ends of the relevant bell curves, which, in my understanding, is what those sorts of evidence typically show.
I think that biology is what "gender identity" actually refers to.
Wrapping it up in one term, "identity", isn't always helpful. It's a simplification, like the Bohr model of the atom, that can be useful for explaining it to people who are new to the topic and have no other frame of reference. But once they start asking probing questions that test the boundaries of that simplified model, it's time to move on to a more complex one that can answer those questions.
I've never had a voice in the back of my head whispering "Psst, don't believe the mirror! You're a girl!" And I can't speak for everyone, but judging from what I've read in comment sections, most people don't have a voice like that either.
What they have instead are experiences in which their gender becomes salient in some way and provokes an emotional reaction -- a reaction which they may or may not consciously connect to their gender at the time, depending on exactly what happened and how much insight they have into themselves.
Wendy linked to genderdysphoria.fyi above, a site that has a good (and long) list of ways in which GD can manifest. Interestingly, different people tend to experience different combinations of them: there are a bunch of things that *can* provoke the sort of reaction that implies they'd be more comfortable as the opposite sex, but none of them are 100% guaranteed to resonate with any particular trans person. They're just all correlated.
Kinda like how there are a bunch of observable physiological differences that *can* occur in people with some sort of gender non-conformity, but none of them are 100% guaranteed. Suspiciously like that, in fact.
So, here's a less simplified model. It may or may not be The Truth, but it lines up with my experience and research better than the singular "gender identity" model while explaining all the same things:
Many parts of the body develop differently in the presence vs. absence of testosterone before birth.
They all develop at different times during gestation, which normally doesn't matter, because the prenatal hormonal environment (and the body's response to those hormones) is usually consistent across the relevant time and space: either everything develops "the female way", or everything develops "the male way".
But sometimes it's inconsistent, and different parts develop in different directions.
Some of those parts happen to be in the brain, and the function they normally serve is to influence our psychology in ways that nudge us toward sex-specific behaviors, making us visible, attractive, and attracted to possible mates.
Because human behavior is complex, the way they exert that influence is through emotional cues and rewards that encourage us to learn sex-specific behaviors from other humans, and seek out positive feedback to confirm that we've gotten them right.
Because this is all just our species' particular version of something deep down that evolved a long, long time ago, something that's present in some form in any species with complex sex-specific behaviors... there isn't much we can do about it. Once it develops a certain way, we're stuck with it.
And because this is all happening at a low level, we aren't really conscious of what's happening, and if we try to explain our reaction, what comes to mind may actually be a story we write on the spot based on the things we *are* consciously aware of (just like trying to explain any other emotional reaction!). If seeing a beard in the mirror makes me feel a pang of disappointment, I may explain it as "this goatee looks dumb on me, maybe I should try a new style, but I don't really know what else would look good" when my brain is actually trying to say "that is NOT what I expect to see on an attractive woman's face".
So, "gender identity" is a concept representing what we get when we take stock of all of these emotional signals that we can consciously connect to gender, and try to decide whether they line up more with "the male way" or "the female way" of development. The explosion of gender identities happens because sometimes the signals are conflicting or unclear, and it's hard to make a call either way, but people still want to call it something. And gender identity can change over time as we get in new situations and experience new signals, or as we recognize the meaning of signals we've already experienced.
(This might get me tarred as a transmedicalist, I guess, but I'm throwing caution to the wind today!)
So this is just my experience, n = 1, but I'm a cis person and I do not feel "reflexive disgust " at becoming a different sex.
Suppose I wake up tomorrow in a man's body, but with the same mind as I have right now. (For the sake of argument, let's say my husband is bisexual, because if he wanted to divorce me now that I'm a man that would be traumatic).
I imagine that my thoughts would be:
"What the [expletive] happened?!?!"
"I guess I'll have to learn to pee standing up. And to shave my face."
"Hey, I can lift heavy things more easily now! Neat!"
And that would be it. I would live my life as I do now, working my job, loving my husband and son, reading my books. It would not be some kind of tragedy or unbearable burden.
Again, n = 1, and I am not trying to deny what trans people go through. Just wanted to point out that not everyone has an innate sense of "gender identity " completely divorced from their body. As someone on another blog described it, some people are "cis by default. "
I'll take this another step and say that where Cis people do construct powerful, psychological "gender identities" it is almost universally, extremely unhealthy and negative. Everyone knows some toxic, performatively hyper-masculine douchebag who is a truly miserable human being due to his terrible conception of gender. THAT dude has a "Gender Identity".
I’m really confused to hear David Reiner used as evidence of gender identity. The point is that he was biologically male, and despite some hormonal intervention and being raised as a girl, he knew something was wrong.
But…he was, in fact, male.
His case suggests that some aspects of what we call gender may indeed be biological, and that we cannot simply make males female by raising them as such.
This seems to directly contradict the idea of gender identity.
In this thread we're talking about the concept of innate gender identity, which is posited to be separate from (but usually in alignment with) biological sex. If that theory is true, than a cis person forcibly and unknowingly transitioned (like David) should face similar distress to what transgender people call gender dysphoria.
Raising David as a girl, despite having modified his genitalia and giving him hormones, did not work. He always knew something was wrong, and he "transitioned" to living as male as soon as he could. Assuming there is such a thing as innate gender identity separate from biological sex, David's case is exactly what you would expect would happen if you forcibly transitioned a cis person.
Now you could argue that no, there's no separate gender identity, David was just male and that's why he's unhappy. But then you need an alternate explanation for why many trans people describe living as their original gender in very similar terms to the way David experienced being a girl, and how when they medically transition they can become happy.
Two questions: what is the essence of gender apart from sex?
If there is an innate biological element, why is there a race you confirm secondary sexual characteristics with gender?
A person born female will never experience being a biological father. I would argue that this is in many ways defining of masculinity (while not present in every man's experience). The context for gender roles is often historically ground in biology and sex. I get that some people to not fit cleanly into gender concepts, but I'd argue that gender is a cultural/social cloud emanating from biological function of sexuality and associate biological variance due to sex, not a distinct characteristic or dimension.
I think if you knew more trans people irl you might not think that being trans (which sort of requires buying to the "Gender Identity" concept as you say) is fundamentalizing gendered stereotypes. I know trans women who have very traditionally masculine coded jobs or hobbies and trans men with feminine coded jobs and hobbies. But we still know that those trans women are women who happen to like working on their motorcycles or those trans men are men who happen to enjoy fiber arts because belief in the "Gender Identity" concept is belief that gender is not merely a set of stereotypes but that it's part of who you are and how you relate to the world around you.
So I fully do appreciate that this IS complicated. It would be obviously false of me to suggest that every trans person was driven by asperations towards some cultural formulation of the platonic ideal of masculinity/femininity. Clearly the whole "passing" concept is a fraught one. What I do think is essential to transness is the formation of an individual construct of gender, however that might manifest, that the individual has a powerful, compulsive drive to conform to. The thing that I contest is the idea that that construct is an innate and immutable "Gender Identity" characteristic comparable to a biological one. Gender is not an innate thing. Social feedback mechanisms are essential to it's nature.
It has nothing to do with materialism versus dualism. Gender identity is a real psychological phenomenon that (like other psychological phenomena) has something to do with the brain. It's not shocking or mysterious or needing of a supernatural explanation that there are people who experience a mismatch between their psychological gender identity and their other sex characteristics.
The mismatch you describe is not part of mind-body dualism, but the strident contention by certain individuals that this makes people with that condition "really" a man or woman, notwithstanding their objectively verifiable biological sex, is absolutely that sort of supernatural dualism -- it's privileging a purely self-reported psychological state over physical reality.
If we're materialists, then a psychological state is a physical reality too. Which physical reality we pick to determine someone's "real" gender is a question about what gender is (or what gender ought to be), and it doesn't turn on whether there is a gendered "soul."
Edit: For example, we might think that the important question is about gender's social function (there are these social categories "man" and "woman" that influence names, pronouns, what bathroom to use, etc.) and the functionally appropriate gender designation for a trans person corresponds to their psychological gender. Not a hint of dualism in that story.
People with profound psychosis can believe they are angels or demons. It does not make them one. Subjective belief may or may not correspond with reality, and it is subjective belief that is wrong when it does not correspond with reality.
Indeed, I believe in some societies, gender is based mostly on social roles. But in western society, there's been a general trend away from that, which is why a lot of the discourse around this feels regressive or appealing to some supernatural quantity.
It's not about "social roles" in the sense of, who does the housework and who earns income. People can and do have a psychological sense of gender inconsistent with sex stereotypes. But even in the West we still use gendered pronouns, we still have a whole scheme for what people get named based upon their gender, we still sort people by gender in all sorts of contexts, most obviously bathrooms. Some of this might be ingrained in our social cognition (I don't particularly like this thought but it does seem very pervasive across cultures and resistant to change even in liberal communities). And very little of it has to do with a given person's "biology"--gendered pronouns for example have no intrinsic relationship to chromosomes. So it makes sense to conform it to people's psychological sense of themselves.
> So it makes sense to conform it to people's psychological sense of themselves.
Sure, I think this comports with Matt's call to treat people with dignity, generally speaking (outside the edge cases he brought up). But I believe the discussion in this thread is more fundamentally about the basis for it and if there even is an objective, physical measure.
But also, not a hint in that story of modifying someone's objective, healthy body to conform it to a subjective perception of self that is based on culturally contingent gender categories and roles.
You're right, that's not a feature of that story. To explain why medical transition makes sense you need to add that people's psychological sense of gender, when it contrasts with their "natal sex"/"sex assigned at birth," is often accompanied by dysphoria about their physical sex characteristics.
And at that point, you are simply making an empirical claim about what is the most efficacious way to treat the distress this patient is experiencing here, now, today, as result of the alienation or estrangement they are experiencing from their own body, due to the cultural milieu they are living in -- therapy to modify their cognition, or to modify their body? That's a claim that needs to be supported by good, solid, methodologically sound evidence.
I think this is right, but the perspective is in some tension with the more metaphysical claims made about gender and gender identity. As a therapeutic matter, transition seems to be a good treatment for dysphoria. Part of transition is that people treat you as if you were your preferred gender. But you can accept that without believing anything at all about the metaphysics of gender.
I think you’re right to note that while transition is important for some people, the much bigger, more valuable project is to continue arguing against binary gender norms and expectations in general. Transition basically (and realistically) accepts and revolves around the idea that binary social gender is a thing. It would be great if some of the cultural energy could be dumped into spitting on gender reveal parties, princess toys and all the bullshit that demands people act in a certain way because of their count of X chromosomes.
Thank you! I agree. I’m in my 50s and have spent my life pushing back against what I can and can’t do/like/be due to my chromosome count. Why are these people trying to put us back in boxes?
I’m genuinely not sure I see the boxes thing. Like I’m a man whose interests, career and personality all code super duper feminine and I feel none of the internal angst that trans people I know talk about. Like all my social media feeds sell me women’s ads and just never even a little. A lot of shit from cis-straight men but never the queer community.
I mean I have all kinds of neuroticism but none of it is along that dimension. It seems to me that trans people are trying to break the box entirely not code me as one of them.
Getting people to reject "the gender binary" is going to be SIGNIFICANTLY harder than getting people to act humanely to transitioners. It's one thing to ask people to be nice to a small minority of people experiencing an abnormal state of being, it's quite another to ask them to discard notions that feel baked into biology, is a key component of several languages, and is the founding aspect of several religions via the Adam and Eve story.
This is crotchety old guy talk, but 15 years ago things were looking quite promising on this frontthough - big strides had been taken in agreeing that qualities like being nurturing, taking part in rough sports, being finicky about personal grooming & appearance, joining the military, being gentle etc were not bound up in gender as people had thought they were in decades past. It just feels like we've stalled since then.
I think there's the basic fact that most people like having genders, they like their own gender, they like gender dynamics, they like raising children to be a particular gender, etc.
I think we know of no genderless human society past or present, which counts as some evidence that there is something innately biological about our urge to have genders, even though we've managed to cut through a lot of the socially constructed bullshit that we built around them.
"they like raising their children to be a particular gender"
Anecdote time!
When my son was born, I got the idea that I would not enforce gender norms on him. I bought him "gender neutral" toys, such as stuffed animals and puzzles. Crucially, I never bought him any toy cars/trucks/trains. My husband went along with it.
One day, when our son was about a year old, we visited my husband's cousin, who had a son about the same age. The little boy had some toy trucks and trains.
My son's eyes lit up ike you wouldn't believe, and he immediately fell in love with the trucks and trains. After that, I said to myself: "What am I trying to prove?" And I started buying him trucks and trains, which he loves.
Tl;dr: I didn't set out to raise my son to be a given gender; I followed his interests, which, yes, turned out to conform to gender stereotypes. If he wanted princess dolls, I would have bought him princess dolls.
“As is the case with sex differences in children’s toy preferences, only male monkeys showed a significant preference for one toy type over the other, preferring wheeled over plush toys. Unlike male monkeys and like girls, female monkeys did not show any reliable preference for either toy type.”
Where do you see this? Like I’m that guy and the only place I’ve ever experienced this is from straight Het men in the Macho asshat mold who insists I must have something wrong with me to mostly prefer women
and being a house husband.
Amongst queer and kinky people I’ve always been treated like a pretty normal bisexual man that has very feminine interests. No one has ever been like oh no you’re really trans.
I’m speaking just about general culture. Gay/queer/trans people tend to be on the side of the angels on this issue, from my perspective. More generally I find Hollywood pretty good on this stuff nowadays too, the real issue is that a lot of social media seems to be into hyper-gendered content.
My thoughts on this are a lot like my thoughts on religion. Social expectations of it have harmed many people. But there are also many people for whom it is an important part of their self-actualization, so abolition would be very harmful too.
I wish gender would be thought of more like height. There are obvious differences between tall and short and that's OK. And some kids/people are so far off the height they want/should be that medical intervention should be available. Height has not been abolished. People are free to lust after short/tall people. But in general it's not f*king relevant to most human interactions.
(In some happy, healthy places we are starting to creep this way with sexual preferences, especially amongst the young, so I do not despair of getting there with gender identity)
I would like a reduction in the social expectations of it so people feel more free to be who they are, and reducing the salience of it in our lives doesn't require abolition.
Do you think reduction in the social expectations of it is compatible with some people being interested in conversion, and heavily embracing both the private practice and public presentation of their chosen religion/gender? I think it probably depends a lot on the details of the form that public presentation takes (and some people, even with the zeal of a convert, will still harshly reject some traditional parts of their chosen religion/gender).
I think so. I envision gender as a Venn diagram with 2 circles (although of course way more than 2 "real" dimensions).
Reducing the social expectations is about increasing the overlap of the circles - I think there are both biological _and_ social components to where the "centers" of the circles are, but I'd love to seem the areas of both be a lot bigger.
But you can make the circles a lot bigger and still have areas where only one circle touches. If you've got dysphoria and feel that you belong in that portion of the _other_ circle that doesn't touch yours, then transition may be right for you.
So... I would say reducing the social expectations might be a pressure against the prevalence of transition. (One worry about that is that as transition becomes rarer, it could lose support, which would be bad for the people who need to transition - familiarity can help with acceptance)
Something to add to this: to the extent that young people are being rushed into gender treatments (and I'm certainly nowhere near expert enough to know whether they are or not), that is a distinctively American story.
The big increase in the number of children and teens coming out as trans has resulted in the opening of a lot more clinics in the USA. But in the UK, it's resulted in ever-increasing waiting times at the (NHS) clinics there already were, so, far from people being rushed into treatment, they are instead facing a waiting list that is currently about five years.
For adults, this has resulted in lots of grey-market use of hormones (hormones can be legally prescribed by any doctor, not just by a specialist; normal practise for any drug that is normally prescribed by a specialist is for the specialist to make the initial prescription and then your GP makes the monthly repeat prescriptions and monitors your condition; but there's no rule against a GP just prescribing hormones straight away and trans people tell each other about which GPs are prepared to do this and then get themselves transferred to a GP that will). For people under-18, there is some grey market use of puberty blockers as well, but grey-market GPs that will prescribe to minors are much rarer. In many more cases, they have simply had to undergo puberty while on the waiting list.
It appears that the Tavistock clinic in London tried to reduce the waiting list by processing patients without doing a full assessment, which is why there's been a huge scandal about cases where they have made bad mistakes. That's a problem. But it's a different problem with different causes from the American problem.
I'm not asking people not to pay attention to this: but the UK and US situations are very different and we shouldn't import concerns (in either direction) across the Atlantic, nor should we assume that the lessons we learn in the US can be applied in the UK or vice versa.
Abigail Thorn of Philosophy Tube did a video essay documenting her attempts at getting trans healthcare through the NHS. From GPs who were obligated to refer her to a specialist clinic but instead arbitrarily decided to make her wait for months and revisit multiple times, to GPs refusing to cooperate with NHS guidelines, to a general passing-of-the-buck that lets trans people fall through the cracks, it truly is an absolute clusterfuck.
Transsexualism and homosexuality are different things. Many gay people do not approve of adding in the TQ to LGB. Some transgender people can believe some very odd things about ‘genital preferences’. Some parents push to have their gay or lesbian children transition because they are homophobes.
I think your statements here are accurate, but as trans rights are overwhelmingly "marketed" in both the US and the UK AFAICT (can't speak to Finland), as a mere extension of the gay civil rights struggle, I think FrigidWind's point about relative homophobia is still relevant.
I wouldn't say that the UK is necessarily more cautious. The UK health system is not well-adapted to unexpected large increases in any particular treatment, and responds to that by growing waiting lists until political pressure forces resources to be redeployed.
And, under Conservative governments they are not responsive to that sort of political pressure in relation to trans healthcare.
We've had issues in the past where specific forms of cancer treatment have built up huge waiting lists until political pressure forced redeployment of resources. Another one I remember is hip replacements. Because these aren't culture war issues, they get fixed eventually when year-long waits for treatment get onto the news. But, with the current UK media, who is broadcasting the five-year wait for trans healthcare?
Thank you for articulating my concerns so clearly. I was in medical school for 2001-2005 so I sat through the lectures where someone in a suit told us that concerns about the addictiveness of opioids was all old wives tales and we were bad doctors if we did not take our patients pain seriously and prescribe as much opioids as they asked for - do you want your patients to suffer? When I read some articles by pro transition activists, i hear the same phrases and arguments. And the same type of shoddy studies that don’t actually prove anything when you read the actual study. If there is one thing we’ve learned in the past 20 years is that for medical decisions you always need to consider both benefits and harms. I know a young person who transitioned quickly with great support and went on to suicide attempts and depression. If doctors had taken time to treat him as a young girl who had just watched her father collapse and bleed out in front of her from a ruptured aneurysm rather than rushing to “affirm his gender identity” I think he may have had a better outcome even if it meant delaying transition for a few years.
This is a great comment. A friend of mine in the medical field compared the current trend to bariatric surgery in the 90s. They were so excited about the intervention that they performed it on many bad candidates, with predictably bad outcomes.
I agree that details matter and that providers of transition care to trans kids shouldn't be immune from questioning or criticism. The problem I think is that the discourse occurs in a context of cultural anxiety about transness (and, to a lesser extent, queerness more broadly) that leads to distortions.
So: it's true that trans id has rapidly increased. But the increase in trans id corresponds with increased looseness in what trans id means. It doesn't mean that a person needs or seeks medical transition. We don't have totally comprehensive numbers for the number of kids getting medical transitions but the numbers we have suggest that it's very low--it's increased a lot in the recent past, but from a very low base. This is the problem with anecdotes about "four trans kids on my block," which I think is a big driver of the anxiety: four kids exploring alternate gender identities does not equate to four kids going on puberty blockers, let alone four kids obtaining gender confirmation surgery.
Looking at it this way I think helps contextualize the debate about "assessments." It's true that many US clinics are less conservative that the Dutch clinic ("de Vries and her colleagues"). And if the assumption is that there are lots of kids who are interested in this treatment who are poor candidates, then this looks bad. But if the assumption is that the number of kids getting this treatment is probably much fewer than the number who might benefit (which I think is plausible, given the numbers), then more extensive gatekeeping might be exactly the wrong proposal. (Similarly, screening based on mood disorders would run the risk of harming precisely the people whose dysphoria is worst.)
I think it is possible to cover these issues in a fair way (I thought Emily Bazelon's article, while not without flaws, did a good job) but a lot of the coverage doesn't give appropriate context and reflects people's anxieties back at them. (If we're worried about teenage girls facing the psychological effects of patriarchal beauty standards--and we should be--then it seems like there should be relatively more coverage of teenagers getting cosmetic surgery to "improve" their appearance, which is much more common.) Someone yesterday said that the NYT's error in covering this was similar to its error in covering the Hillary emails scandal and while I think the magnitude is different (it won't elect Donald Trump) the qualitative point is right; it's not that there's no issue, and it's not that the articles are lies, but it is that the tone and nature of the coverage distorts the substantive stakes.
Well, Bazelon’s article is the very first example given, by the recent open letter to the NYT (https://nytletter.com/), of a piece suffering from “anti-trans bias”. Context is important, but I don’t think the NYT should shy away from true facts because presenting them would “reflect people’s anxieties back at them.” It’s true that normies and Fox News viewers are hearing way too much about the dangers of trans medicine. That doesn’t mean the left should lie to itself as a counterbalance. And if it does, the NYT certainly shouldn’t help.
"But the increase in trans id corresponds with increased looseness in what trans id means. It doesn't mean that a person needs or seeks medical transition."
This is one reason why I, even as a person that fully supports trans people, find the nonbinary identity being lumped in with FtM and MtF trans people unhelpful at the moment. To the average person who is still trying to wrap their head around transitioning, seeing a bunch of kids identifying as trans but only going halfway, in a way that comes off as faddish and noncommittal, does undermine the legitimate trans kids wanting to be taken seriously. My guess is that, in the same way there are more bisexuals than there are gay/lesbian people, and the huge rise in LGB identification is significantly driven by a huge increase in self-identified bisexuality, there's a huge amount of nonbinary kids inflating the numbers on how many trans kids there are, as opposed to the numbers of kids seeking transition-related care.
"Similarly, screening based on mood disorders would run the risk of harming precisely the people whose dysphoria is worst"
Yeah, this was another point that stood out to me in that whistleblower article. She said that every teenage patient that came through had some kind of other mental disorder and 1) well, yeah, dysphoria would do that to someone and 2) show me a teenager that DOESN'T have (and I quote) "depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity [or autism]" these days and I'll show you a unicorn.
There's a lot of posts upthread about trans people having a unique subjective experience, but in fact you are right that enbies are very different than binary trans people. Trans men are different than trans women. And- and this is one of the only areas where we have very solid science- trans women who are gender dysphoric very early are extremely different from those who become dysphoric around adolescence.
This all speaks to the fact that there are a whole bunch of different mental conditions under "the trans umbrella", and while all of these people deserve equal rights and equal dignity, the issue of say "how to deal with a gynephilic trans woman sex offender with late onset dysphoria who wants to go to a women's prison?" is a totally different issue from "how to deal with an autistic 12 year old assigned female who is starting to say she might be nonbinary?". We should stop treating this as if it is all the same thing just because there's a political coalition to serve.
Yes, I have known many young woman, including my sister, who have said they "might be trans" or identified as nonbinary and eventually changed their minds. None of them were confident enough in it to actually want hormones. I definitely think part of the reason why this topic gets so much attention is because people know of instances like my sister in real life and are concerned about the idea of them getting easy access to hormones with little to no assessment. But the low rate of detransitioners does suggest that teenagers who want hormones are probably quite different from the "four trans kids on the block" and much more likely to be satisfied with their new gender identity.
This is a fair comment, but I would caution that we actually have NO IDEA what the detransition rate is. Nobody is systematically tracking this. The few surveys that exist are of doctors who only report the detransitioners who actually go back and tell the doctor about their detransition - which most detransitioners do not.
The comments from teachers on the “school transitioning” article and on Michelle Goldberg’s column in response were enlightening about this - essentially saying kids are more fluid and some ask to be called different things on different days in a way that’s more like a nickname than a medical procedure. I found that helpful perspective.
This is more-or-less where I'm at. I very much doubt that random people on the Internet have all the answers to the proper medical care for a kid who's questioning their gender. As you point out, for the large majority, the answer is "nothing medically invasive." However, people have let their discomfort around the whole issue turn things into a moral panic, making good faith efforts to
The other issue is the new rigid gender stereotypes. With the recent passing of Leslie Jordan they had clips of his one man show. He talked about growing up in Tennessee in the 50s and said something like, “When I was 5 I knew I was gay and everyone else did too…and that was a problem.” And he battled all this life with being an effeminate gay man.
We seem to be saying you can’t be an effeminate gay kid, boys only act a certain way. If you’re acting differently you must actually be a girl. On the other end you can’t just be a butch lesbian kid - girls only act a certain way. You must actually be a guy.
Who is saying this? I hear a lot of people say that other people are saying this but I've never heard anyone say it. Trans activists in particular are usually very explicit about the difference between gender identity and conformity or lack of conformity to sex stereotypes. You can be an effeminate cis man, or for that matter an effeminate trans man. They're different things and they don't necessarily coincide.
All one needs to do is answer the question: how do we distinguish the signs of a trans kid from a kid who will grow up to be gay/lesbian? They’re the same signs, and the signs themselves are very obviously gender non conforming behavior or interests.
Ten years ago, if a little boy liked playing with girls and wearing princess dresses, everybody knew he likely would grow up to be gay. Today, a great many people believe it’s a sign he is transgender and the best way to “help” him is to begin medicalizing his brain and body at the onset of puberty.
I was a little boy that liked playing with girls and princess dresses and whatever and I remember spending sleepless nights wondering whether I would have been happier if I had been a girl instead. But I couldn't get myself over that hump of actually wanting to be a girl because I was fine with myself as a boy, my internal conception of myself was a boy, I had a problem with what people dictated that I had to be as a boy.
I was a pretty introspective kid, but I worked through that all by myself in the late 90s, before I even knew what gay people were, much less trans people. If a halfway decent therapist was involved, I have to believe that they would be able to tease it out from a less introspective kid.
I too was very GNC as a kid, as a teen, and to some extent even now. I’m 38, so my only exposure to the concept of being trans was Boys Don’t Cry, which hit me so personally I ran to the edge of the theater doorway when Hillary Swank got savagely beaten.
I fantasized about being a boy. Cut my hair very short for a long time. I still have dysphoria. But I’m a physically healthy, sexually functioning bisexual adult now, capable of having deep connection with my partner.
I believe there are people and probably even kids who can access transition care and benefit from it. I’m not convinced from the current science that it’s the only, let alone the best, care available for people who are so deeply uncomfortable with their sexed bodies. And what I do know is that the medical care currently on offer is often a blunt instrument that quite frankly is a little ghoulish, even in the best of cases.
Far be it from me to psychoanalyze someone based on a substack comment, so try not to take this the wrong way, but saying that you (still) feel dysphoria and had strong emotional reactions to a trans narrative, I wonder how much of your discomfort with transition care is motivated by some amount of cognitive dissonance. Maybe there's a feeling like you missed the boat on your opportunity to transition, or maybe you're the gender equivalent of a Kinsey 4 in a heterosexual marriage- maybe you would have been happier if you had transitioned but you're in a life that is comfortable despite having not transitioned. You say you're physically healthy, and you're able to have deep relationships with partners, but you don't say you're emotionally healthy or comfortable with yourself, and that stood out to me. I could be 100% off base, I don't know you, so apologies if I am.
For me, at 30, I'm a cis gay man that feels more comfortable in my gender for having considered the alternatives and reasoned that they weren't the right fit for me, so I feel a lot of empathy for people- especially kids, as it was a conversation I had with myself as a kid- who experienced similar feelings and decided the other road was for them.
I appreciate your hedging and your sensitivity, but that’s the opposite of how I feel. I am so grateful I did not have th opportunity to transition. I absolutely would’ve been the teen that threatens suicide to access that, desperate to believe it would’ve helped ease my pain.
What I’m saying is that with time, with relationships, with life experience, it is clear that transitioning would not have helped me, and instead I would have had a vastly reduced capacity for relationships and sexual connection, which I think is extremely important. Let alone fertility decisions I would’ve had to make then.
So on the contrary, I am deeply disturbed that these kids are being robbed of the opportunity to grow into themselves as whole, healthy human beings.
Are you aware of how often gays and lesbians, when they were kids, expressed sincere desires to be, or beliefs that they were, the opposite sex? These are by and large the same populations.
I don't think it's very common for gay and lesbian kids to identify as the other sex. Wishing they were the other sex is a bit different; I do think a lot of gender nonconforming kids who won't necessarily be trans as adults have the thought, my life would be easier if I were a boy/girl. And in a clinical setting it's good to ask questions to disentangle these issues a bit. I think there is general agreement that not every gender-variant or gender-questioning kid should transition. Many won't want to.
Well, it’s fair to say that you don’t think it’s common, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t. If you look up medical descriptions from the APA or even WPATH, let alone the materials provided to kids for transgender awareness in schools, what you will see is that the definition of trans is so vague as to include tomboys or even just girls who don’t like wearing dresses or boys who don’t like playing sports.
And if that is, almost necessarily, how we explain this to kids because it is such a complex and sophisticated idea that, without simple Barbie and GI Joe references, they won’t understand, we risk teaching kids that their preference for certain toys or articles of clothing is a symptom of their trans-ness.
People seem to believe there’s no way anybody, kids or adults, could mistakenly believe they’re trans. I was one of those people myself. The human mind is a fragile and mysterious thing.
A friend’s kid might remind you of a 12 year old Leslie Jordan. The parents’ and kid’s experience has been the ongoing assumption that he must be transgendered. No one has a problem if the kid said - I’m not transgendered I’m just gay*. The assumption is - he acts in a female inflected way, he has many stereotypically female interests, he has almost exclusively female friends, and now that he’s hit puberty he knows he likes guys - he’s actually a girl.
* Which is how it was eventually handled. If you ask him the phrasing he uses is, “My gender identity is male and I’m gay.” Everyone thinks that’s great. But it was a whole thing.
Statistically, people who are strongly gender variant in their behaviors and interests as kids are usually-though-not-always some variety of LGBT as adults. These things all correlate in complex ways though of course you don't want to equate them in any individual case. (There are effeminate straight men and we support them!)
Are you sure about that? Is there an actual study? How would you even measure it? My claim is an educated guess based on the fact that all lgbt put together are roughly only 5% of the population. It’s such a small minority that I would guess that even among the “gender nonconforming” most would be straight. There would simply be tons of confirmation bias going on in people’s anecdotal perceptions. That being said - I may be wrong. Would be interesting if there is actual data but I doubt it.
There is research but I suppose it does depend on exactly how you define gender nonconforming. (The research I'm thinking of is follow-ups with adults whose gender-variant behavior as kids caused their parents to take them to gender clinics--my recollection of the results is that most are gay or lesbian, some are trans, and some are cis straight.)
That sounds like a bad assumption. If there are really people who are assuming that based on nonconformity to sex stereotypes, I hope others correct them! Sounds like something most sides of this debate can get on board with (everyone except the conservatives, who think male effeminacy is ruining America). It's not what trans activists think and I don't think it's what most practitioners in this space think either. Part of the literature behind the affirming care model is about distinguishing between kids who just don't conform to sex stereotypes (who we know mostly grow up to be "cis," usually gay, adults) and kids who persistently/consistently/insistently identify with the sex other than their "natal sex"/"sex assigned at birth."
There are no new rigid gender stereotypes. What is new is that feminists don’t all think that abolishing gender is the right general response - some people actually care about gender, regardless of any of the particular behaviors that have historically been associated with it.
I think you hit on something interesting regarding gender here. Second wave feminists thought gender was a social construct--the social norms and rules applied to men and women. But I’m not sure that’s entirely correct at this point--gender, even if it is the performative thing like interests and behaviors--is obviously relevant when we talk about stereotypes of gay men and lesbians, and it’s obviously true that there are, broadly and statistically speaking, real trends in the careers of males versus females even in 2023.
So while some feminists think gender is all bullshit, some transgender activists etc believe that having interest in cross-sex associated things is proof they have the brain or soul of that sex.
There truth seems to be in the middle somewhere, in that gender is probably not just a social construct, but also likely does not prove the existence of an opposite sex brain.
Maybe I'm missing a step but it always struck me you can have sex-based broad trends in behavior - and even have social scientists investigate such trends, and consider them in that light, and all that fun stuff - while it still being a bad thing to take that into an expectation for any particular person. "Men trend into engineering" and "there's nothing suspicious or wrong about a woman going into engineering" seem compatible.
In other words, I'm not sure why the word 'gender' needs to enter the conversation to cover this; or maybe the term is pretty loose and seems to be referring to a wider scope ('brain or soul' seems correct) than just recognizing these trends.
Agreed. Somewhere along the line we jumped the tracks from, for example, “some women want to be combat soldiers and those who can physically qualify should be allowed” to “there are no fundamental disparities between the physical capabilities of men and women.”
I am alarmed by how many in my generation and younger (millennial) think it’s wildly inaccurate to state that men, on average, are significantly taller and stronger than women.
I'm not sure how to formulate it for a mailbox question, but I would be curious to get Matt's reaction to what I call "The Exception is the Rule," which seems an overwhelming dynamic in progressive aligned spaces these days -- i.e., you shouldn't just avoid stereotypes, but you must emphasize and defend to death the inverse of the stereotype.
Great question. Recently, on Twitter (of course) I mentioned what I thought was a pretty anodyne observation that males commit 98% of all sex crimes and the vast majority of serious violent crimes, and that part of that has to do with the effects of testosterone on the human body and brain.
Somebody called me dangerously ignorant for spreading such “misinformation.”
I think the broader issue in 2nd wave feminism was how those attributes and accomplishments normally associated with males were universally more highly valued than those associated with females. The social construct was one of value.
Second wave feminists set out to disprove the notion that women were incapable of performing certain activities at the same level as a man, such as being Doctors, lawyers,politicians, and managers of any kind -- this is where their critique of gender stereotypes was focused.
(Ruth Bader Ginsburg could not get a job as a lawyer ... the assumption at the time was that a woman’s mind was somehow incapable of performing the necessary tasks at a level anywhere near that of a man’s and that an interest in anything normally viewed as the domain of males was indicative of some psychological problem.)
They pointed out that across the board that those activities and occupations that males did were more highly valued -- a plumber being more highly paid than a nurse, etc., and that some women were equally capable of being plumbers just as some men were equally capable of being nurses *and should be allowed to do so* without legal and social barriers.
Think about this: in the US and UK women weren’t able to get credit cards and loans and bank accounts without a male cosigner until the 1970s.
And, marital rape was exempt from rape law in the US until the mid 70s. The last martial rape exemption didn’t end until 1993. That is, that a woman COULD NOT be raped by her husband no matter what she said or did or wanted or didn’t want AND no matter what he said or did -- she was legally required to submit, to have sex whenever her husband wanted. She had no legal standing.
2nd wave feminism - feminism of the 70s -- focused on these sorts of issues, not on full throated declarations that gender didn’t exist. They pointed out how males and females were valued differently and yes, did demand that women and their contributions be valued as equals.
The turn came in the late 70s-early 80s when, in response to the demand that women somehow prove they were the equals of men, they dredged history for the novelists, painters, scientists, mathematicians, etc ... which really was beside the original point -- which was that women are human beings, not inferior creatures, and should be both seen and valued as such.
Women were the legally the property of men (viewed by the law to have the status of children) until the 20th century. 1st & 2nd wave feminism were in response to that reality.
I really don’t know what 3rd & 4th wave feminism is ...
I agree with everything you just said, and my apologies for my hasty comment above. It’s just that so many second wave feminists believed that we are blank slates, and without culturally prescribed notions of gender, men and women would be much more equal in interests and capabilities and professions, etc.
“I disagree so strongly with the segment of Slow Boring’s audience that wants me to join them in complaining about elective pronouns”
“Elective pronouns” is a strange phrase, and it reveals the crux of my disagreement with Matt. If pronouns were truly “elective” each person would decide individually which pronoun to use for a particular person. I would likely address an adult who was born male and had completed a transition as she. But if he wanted to play competitive sports, I would insist on saying he with some determination. If a 14 year old with two X chromosomes reported gender dysphoria, I would use she until I was convinced the gender dysphoria wasn’t a phase.
I fully support Matt’s call for dignity. An important aspect of dignity is freedom of thought-- being able to use my mind to develop a coherent system of categories. My identity was forged by 4 billion years of evolutionary history, and sex has been fundamental to our ancestors since before dinosaurs. I’m all for elective pronouns as long as I can keep my voice.
I don’t think anyone is threatening your voice. It’s just an argument about manners and kindness.
If I go to someone’s house and they bake a cake and I try it and it’s not very good I might not tell them it’s bad but simply smile and thank them for the effort of making the cake. Now, I could say “this cake sucks and it’s my right to say that because billions of years of evolution have developed my taste buds and I’m not going to betray that sacred history” but people would think I was being an asshole.
I don’t think it’s that complicated or tied to any grand moral theory, it’s just basic bitch civility.
I think a good example of this is how we treat marriage.
Many faiths, especially Catholicism, believe that divorce is almost always not valid. Let’s say you are divorced and remarried. And you have a Catholic acquaintance who constantly refers to your ex as your spouse, and refuses to call your new spouse your husband/wife. If you are a woman who changed your surname to your new spouse’s name, maybe that acquaintance still calls you by your ex-spouse’s surname.
Is that acquaintance just acknowledging their personal beliefs about marriage? Or are they being an asshole?
I love this analogy. There are many terms Catholics could use to describe people who got divorced and then enter a civil marriage. If they want to be friendly, husband, wife, or spouse. If they want to be coolly civil, partner. If they want to show venom, mistress, slut or concubine.
If a Catholic quietly uses “partner” to keep the peace and avoid a fraught issue, shouldn’t that be ok? It isn’t friendly, but it’s not picking a fight either.
Furthermore, manners also apply to the civilly married divorcee. She shouldn’t try to take communion. She shouldn’t berate Catholics for adhering to their own doctrine. If she calls Catholics bigots for following their ancient doctrine, they have every right to call her a concubine.
Maybe I'm in the minority here but if a person goes around calling people's spouses "partners" because he thinks their marriages are fake, that seems very rude and uncivil to me and I think it would get lots of rightful social pushback. If I were gay married (I likely will be in the next few years) and someone did that to me I would be pretty offended and would happily call them a bigot. Not necessarily for not believing in same-sex marriage, but for doing that? Yeah.
Is it polite to ask why the person uses partner? I don’t think so. That’s clearly inviting a political discussion rather than just respecting a line someone chose to draw.
I just reread Brideshead Revisited, and there’s something to the Catholic doctrine that marriage is til death do you part. It’s a beautiful, sacred idea, and I don’t even believe in god. That being said, my wife and mother have both been divorced and I don’t feel that either of them is going to burn in hell, nor do i feel that I am in a plural marriage.
However, I will passionately the right of catholics to have their categories. they get to feel that my wife is just my mistress. i don’t want to try to force them to say that i am married in the eyes of god. i don’t want to force them to say that my son is legitimate. if they meddle in politics, i’ll try to outvote them, and if America ever becomes a papist theocracy, i’d want to leave. however, outside of politics, catholics can have their categories, i can have my wife, and we can each use language that reflects our values without being assholes. that definitely involves referring to my wife as my partner if they want to.
I don’t think a Catholic person calling the spouse a “partner” is equivalent to misgendering a trans person. I think the equivalent would be either calling them a “roommate“ or “mistress” and still using a woman’s previous surname instead of her new surname that matches her new husband.
Or you could see anti-gay religious conservatives call a gay person’s husband their “roommate” and not acknowledge the marriage.
I think in those situations most people would think that the person was being really rude, not just sticking to their sincere beliefs.
The rather critical failure in your cake analogy is that, in the pronoun case, you are not just expected to be polite to your host, but to keep praising the quality of the cake to third parties when the host is absent and even when everyone knows that the cake was not in fact good.
Ah, you mean, you got a dirty look when you were polite to their face then said n***r n***r n***r behind their back to somebody you thought would approve of this behavior? Yeah, bummer...
My post may have been hyperbolic. But this was how your comment came across. "It's bad enough that I have to be polite to their face but people expect me to be nice after too...." If you actually meant something entirely different, you should explain it.
It’s more than being nice. It’s embracing a system of categories i don’t believe in. I may humor an old person with amnesia to their face, but i’m not going to believe their fantasies. courtesy may involve acts of civility to the gender dysphoric. maybe it sometimes demands silence or circumlocution. mere courtesy never extends to giving up earnest beliefs.
I think Tom’s marriage example is probably better. However, I do think a certain amount of kindness in the immediate and criticism in the off line is normal and okay.
If I have a good friend who I think is doing something weird but I know it is important to them then I would take some time to figure out a way to considerately approach them and discuss the topic.
If I meet a stranger who is doing something I might find weird but is clearly important to them then I would probably go along with it out of politeness. Obviously there are red lines about the amount of “weirdness” I would tolerate but pronouns are not that big a deal to me.
IMO the southern style of being nice to someone and then saying “bless their heart” when the leave the room captures it exactly.
if you really listen, it’s the people who insist that *their* pronouns be respected and immediately adopted (regardless of how they physically present to the world) who are unkind and rude when someone “misgenders” them.
Now, it is rude if someone with gender dysphoria who is transitioning is purposefully misgendered, but that is different from a man in with a beard in a dress who screams transphobia when someone “misgenders” them.
It’s very passive aggressive.
And I hate to say it, but it’s already begun to create a backlash - and it won’t really affect those who are using “gender” in a performative way; they’ll move on to whatever the next SJ trend is -- it will come down on the LGB part of the now insanely long string of letters and the “T” people who have gender dysphoria.
Consider this: a lesbian is called out as transphobic if she says that she is not attracted to trans women who have not had bottom surgery.
As far as I know, gay men who are not attracted to trans men who haven’t had bottom surgery haven’t been similarly targeted (probably because trans men are not insisting that they must).
I have a niece (teenager) who presents very feminine who dates a person who identifies as male, but presents as a cute, slightly androgynous girl that nobody would mistake as male. Neither have male genitalia. They refer to themselves as straight. They are not straight; they are lesbians who find the term abhorrent.
I agree that it’s rude for someone who clearly presents as male or female to chastise someone who “misgenders” them. Or even if they are maybe on the boarder line and you make the wrong assumption. Totally agree there.
Where it flips is when someone is like “hey, I’d be more comfortable if you could call me by these pronouns”. We don’t need to play a weird shell game about this as the protocols for what is rude or polite are usually pretty straightforward.
I don’t want to tie to many other threads to this basic concept because, in the end, I do think this part of the very complicated meta debate is basic.
Why do so many people comment under pseudonyms? Probably because they fear the economic repercussions of speaking freely. If I worked for corporate America or even the government, I would be far more circumspect in what I say.
In a reply to my comment today, Kevin called me an asshole. Does he care about my dignity, or is that acceptable collateral damage in the culture war?
People should just be nicer in general. We can disagree without resorting to name calling but sometimes it happens. We all are a collection of our best, worst and average moments. The reasons a lot of people use pseudonyms is that, unlike a regular conversation that will not be preserved forever through technology, what you write on the internet will be written in stone to a degree. That’s frightening for a lot of reasons. You might worry your opinions could cost you your job but you also might be concerned your privacy might be violated by someone who crawled through your post history and used it to find your home address.
People are complicated and messy. This is something we should embrace by affording each other a little more grace.
Like I've said before, I probably agree with you on a lot of things related to this topic, but your rhetoric is very off putting compared to all the other commenters who hold similar views. So, when you come on here and misgender people...I will point out that you are being an asshole. 4 billion years of evolutionary history compels me to :)
How is the internal identity of a trans person similar to baking a cake? Is the cake the “creation” of the trans persons self identity as put forth to the world?
I think it’s a bad metaphor because in both circumstances I would tell the person in question; “thank you but I do not like cake or other sweets. Please do not try to force me to eat your cake or comment on your production of said cake.”
Are we forcing people to eat cake now like we were forcing them to make cakes a few years ago?
I’m talking about the bounds of civility not law in this particular case.
Sometimes I hear people say “I’m just real!” Or “I tell it like it is!” And usually (though not always) thats code for “I don’t care what would be polite, I am going to do what I want no matter how it makes people feel!”. This to me just makes me think of Cartman from south park being like “whatever, I do what I want!”
Ironically, this is the same attitude of the activists who refuse to accept most Americans are in the middle on these issues and think by constantly giving them the finger, they will change. It’s two sides of the same coin, we could all use a little more emotional sobriety.
Should we force people to be nice? I don’t think you should go to jail for being rude but I think adults should know the self evident value of kindness.
Not all languages have gendered pronouns, so it's a bit of a stretch to say your use of them is "forged in 4 billion years of evolutionary history" and is "fundamental to our ancestors."
Language is essentially arbitrary, works by consensus, and is constantly changing. So it's hard to take it seriously when anyone says they are forced to misgender people because they have decided a particular dictionary definition from a single point in time that they have chosen is "correct." So forgive us when we leap past that nonsense and go right to questioning your underlying motivation.
As I understand it, I am the fruit of 400 million years of sexual reproduction. That is why sex is such a basic category. My concern with language is in accurately and elegantly describing the natural world.
I've worked with some non-binary folks and because everyone takes 30 seconds to display their preferred pronouns in their Slack bio when they first join, the whole question of what to call anyone has never come up, their identity has never come up, and the whole experience of working with them has been totally normal and no different than any other of my colleagues.
"I am a guy but I want to bang guys, not girls" isn't tough to wrap your head around, and that probably contributed to reasonably rapid acceptance.
In contrast, I think I will go to my grave legitimately not grokking the attested distinction between sex and gender. I will continue to try to be polite, but these are new modes of thinking for 99% of people.
If think if you understand "I am innately attracted to women" is divisible from being born male even though there's a strong correlation, you should be able to understand the same might be true of things like "I feel like a man, I like being a man, I have no problems with my male body."
The way I conceive of it is to imagine a psychological element that we evolved in order for our intelligent, sentient minds to so happily adapt to the fact that our bodies are sexed and sexually dimorphic. When that element develops to match sex during early development, as it does in 99% of cases, everything is dandy. But sometimes there are outliers.
There's no evidence kids are being rushed into gender affirming care on any sort of systemic basis, certainly not to the extent that harm is outweighing benefits. Your thumb is on the scale here. People get upset because you are privileging anecdotal evidence that favors one side while disregarding the evidence on the other side.
"This is just the precautionary principle" you might say, but the presumption that doing nothing is superior to taking a risk on still-developing treatment is simply hostile to the notion that the pain brought on to trans people by puberty is serious. That's why we tend to get upset with takes like this--how many trans kids going through the wrong puberty do you think is worth saving one cis child from making a mistake? There's absolutely no evidence that the ratio it's anywhere close to 1:1, so we're stuck with the unhappy inference that trans people's needs are being subordinated.
There are a couple taking points here that just don't hold water, either. Off-label use of drugs is normal and not a scary thing. Traditional FDA-style studies are impossible to perform for gender affirming care -- you can't do a blind study when we know what the effects of the medicine is, because people in the placebo group will quickly realize it and drop out knowing they've denied medicine in order to be an experiment. And this is not even getting into the ethical side of doing these studies for practitioners who already think the evidence is sufficient. You literally mention climate change here--another scientific area plagued by skeptics who criticize the lack of controlled experimental evidence and yet apparently we have a scientific consensus. It should be assumed here, just as it is there, that the experts have reached the modern consensus taking account for the evidentiary difficulties, not ignoring them.
The suggestion that there is some kind of social contagion tricking girls into thinking they are trans isn't supported by evidence, and in fact has been studied: https://fenwayhealth.org/new-study-examines-the-social-contagion-hypothesis-of-transgender-and-gender-diverse-identities/. The number of trans boys seeking gender affirming care is still magnitudes smaller than the estimated rate of gender incongruence in the general population (1-2%). There's plenty of alternate explanations for why demand among that group might rise faster than among trans girls, such as the reduction of stigma easing against trans men more rapidly than against trans women. I was very disappointed to see you not cite any study but instead cite Jamie Reed's op-ed (politically motivated and not credible) and the Economist (which currently has a well established editorial policy on the side of political transphobia).
No one on the trans rights side of this issue has any problem with reasonable procedures to ensure gender affirming care is given to kids with care and reasonable caution. But you have to realize that when you fixate on the absence of experimental evidence that can't exist and cite biased sources and insist on a precautionary principle without accounting for the harm it causes trans kids who are denied care, a lot of people are going to assume you're unpersuadable and worse. I'd love to see you take the questions you raise here to a "trans activist" like Erin Reed and have an open conversation. Hell, I'm in DC if you want to get coffee and talk to a random trans woman in your comments.
-"the presumption that doing nothing is superior to taking a risk on still-developing treatment is simply hostile to the notion that the pain brought on to trans people by puberty is serious"
There should always be a presumption of doing nothing in medicine in the same way that there should be a presumption of innocence in law. If children grew out of their gender dysphoria without having drugs or surgery, shouldn't we prefer that? It's best not to monkey with a child's endocrine system if it can be avoided.
-"No one on the trans rights side of this issue has any problem with reasonable procedures to ensure gender affirming care is given to kids with care and reasonable caution."
And yet there is a massive push to call any such attempts 'conversion therapy'. There sure do appear to be a lot of people who deeply regret having received 'gender affirming' care.
How do you know Jamie Reed is 'politically motivated and not credible'? There seem to be no brakes against medical malpractice in US medicine until law suits start flying.
"How do you know Jamie Reed is 'politically motivated and not credible'? There seem to be no brakes against medical malpractice in US medicine until law suits start flying."
I had some skepticism for the article when it first came out (she writes from a perspective of a case worker, and not as someone actually involved in the actual medical care of the patients) but I stumbled on this article over my lunch break today and read through it-
-and I'm more inclined than before to believe that she does have serious credibility issues.
As for "politically motivated", there was a commenter there who speculated that Jamie Reed's turn against transition care may have coincided with reading "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters" by Abigail Shrier, as the objections that Jamie brings up in her article are arguments that the book hits on repeatedly.
The article you linked to leans excessively on Reed “misgendering” patients. Reed is entitled to her categories and thinking that someone with two X chromosomes is female does not diminish one’s credibility. Also, the linked article basically dismisses a five fold increase in the rate of gender dysphoria cases at a clinic as too small a sample. Until more systematic data is collected, case rates will be the best data we have. A five fold increase is striking, it’s a big enough change that, combined with the salience of trans issues in the discourse, Im pretty convinced there has been an increase in gender dysphoria.
"That's why we tend to get upset with takes like this--how many trans kids going through the wrong puberty do you think is worth saving one cis child from making a mistake? There's absolutely no evidence that the ratio it's anywhere close to 1:1, so we're stuck with the unhappy inference that trans people's needs are being subordinated."
Wow, it better not be anywhere close to 1:1.
If 2% of transitions were harmful, 1/50, and the number needed to treat to prevent one poor mental health outcome was 100 (statin use for primary prevention is 163), for every 1000 people treated you would overall harm 10 more people than you helped.
Statins reduce cholesterol in hope of reducing the risk of some not overwhelmingly likely harms. But gender affirming care is different - the effects it has are pretty direct, so that anyone who is not helped will stop. I would expect number needed to treat is more like 1.1 or maybe 1.5, not 100.
Also I am literally a trans woman who underwent a masculine puberty and suffer mental distress from its irreversible effects (and the huge costs of reversing what can be reverse). It's really stunning that a huge part of this argument is just calling trans people liars or confused.
It's also just an enormous double standard. If you don't believe a trans person undergoing puberty that doesn't match their gender identity actually harms them, what is the harm of cis child accidentally doing to the same thing? Why does it harm cis kids but not trans kids? This doesn't make sense.
(That does not mean there aren't people who it could really have helped - sounds like they could have helped you - only that this is not nearly as well studied as it should be)
It's "apparently weak" evidence and one side and anecdotal and astroturfed evidence on the other side.
That Jesse Singal argument has a lot of holes and has gone through the rounds of debunking if you're interested, but relevant here is he literally notes that the evidence in the study shows the treatment group's mental health held steady while non-treated kids got worse and then complains that isn't good enough, even though it's exactly what you should expect if your hypothesis is further advancement of puberty harms mental health.
In fact here's a Swedish observational study that shows hormone therapy did not change observed mental health care utilization, and gender affirming surgical procedures show a 9% reduction in mental health care usage, especially the longer out from their surgical procedure they are. 40% of participants surgical procedures.
So out of 1,000 people, 400 recieve surgical procedures, about 36 benefit. If 2% of people receiving therapy are harmed, 40 people have been harmed.
It's an 8% reduction *per year.* That's a pretty large effect. "Specifically, the likelihood of being treated for a mood or anxiety disorder was reduced by 8% for each year since last gender-affirming surgery."
Interesting, but does this measure "quality" of mental health care usage?
If I'm visiting a therapist because I've got severe gender dysphoria which is making my life much worse, and after transition I'm visiting one because I'm feeling a bit bad about transphobia I see, then I'm still seeing someone, but I would say my outcome has definitely improved.
Also inertia might cause me to keep seeing a therapist?
Also, for some of the same reasons I commented on the other study - it looks like they compared "dysphoric people who received treatment" vs. "general population"
But no comparison of "dysphoric people who received surgery/hormones vs. just therapy" - so .... you're not removing transphobia as a source of need mental health services, so this _also_ doesn't seem like a good measure of the effect.
What counts here? If someone wants to present as male, and hormones help them present as male, but don't alleviate any other mental or bodily health issue, does that count as a success or not? I think it does, because it represents someone getting what they wanted from a treatment, but you seem to be asking whether something *further* is being helped.
In the case of statins, I think no one actually cares about cholesterol itself - they only care about cholesterol because it is implicated in things they do care about, like heart attacks. But in the case of gender affirmation, the gender affirmation itself is what they care about. (I don't mean the mere act of taking hormones, but I do mean the pretty standard effects of hormones on things like body hair and chest size and the like.)
"What counts here? If someone wants to present as male, and hormones help them present as male, but don't alleviate any other mental or bodily health issue, does that count as a success or not? I think it does, because it represents someone getting what they wanted from a treatment, but you seem to be asking whether something *further* is being helped."
But we don't cover the medical costs to make someone present as male because they want to, it's because of the negative effects of not treating their gender dysphoria maximally. If there was a pill that took away gender dysphoria it would replace gender affirming therapy that wasn't elective. Therefore quality of life and outcomes need to be shown to improve.
I think that the question you're asking here is about whether this should be a covered medical procedure. Which is a separate question from whether it is successful at what it is aiming to do.
Thanks for including a link to a study, but I think the study you linked does not come close to disproving the idea that trans identities among teenage girls may in some instances be the result of social contagion. The study is based entirely on examining data reported by adolescents on a survey in 16 states in 2017, and comparing answers to adolescents that answered the survey in 2019. The first point the study makes is that the total percentage of transgender or gender diverse (TGD) decreased from 2.4% to 1.6%, and that this is incongruent with the rapid onset gender dysphoria hypothesis (ROGD). But how is an unexplained 50%(!) drop in the number of TGD adolescents incongruent with the idea that such an identity may in some cases be the result of social pressures? And doesn't the fact that this study showed a completely unexplained 50% drop in adolescents identifying as TGD from 2017 to 2019 call all of the data into question? How can we draw any conclusions from this?
The second point is that the sex assigned at birth ratio shifted toward more adolescents assigned female at birth, which the study notes appears to support the ROGD hypothesis. However, the study points out that this is the result of a decrease in the number of males openly identifying as TGD, which the study simply asserts is incompatible with the ROGD hypothesis. But the study notes that the percentage of females identifying as TGD also decreased, because, again, the study showed a 50% drop in adolescents identifying as TGD.
The third point notes that the ROGD hypothesis asserts that youth are drawn to come out as TGD to avoid stigma or to become more popular among their peers. Yet the study notes that because rates of bullying victimization and suicidality were higher among TGD youth than there peers, this is incongruent with the notion that some youth identify as TGD to avoid stigma/become more popular. This conclusion does not hold up to scrutiny. A comparison to people identifying as "goths" may help (note that I'm just making an analogy, not saying that being trans is anything like being goth). No doubt, people identifying as goths have a higher rate of bullying victimization than their non-goth peers. Yet this is not evidence that people identify as goths because they are "innately" goth rather than that their goth identity is the result of social pressures. People may identify as goth because it gives them a group to fit in with or because some of their friends start identifying as goth, even if it would not makes them one of the "popular" kids. Also, people who identify as goth are probably people who already are more likely to be bullied, and so the fact that they continue to be bullied after becoming goth is to be expected.
Finally, I'm concerned that you simply dismiss Jamie Reed's op-ed as politically motivated (what motivation?) and not credible (why?). She's a self-described far-left queer woman married to a trans man who has worked to try to help provide care to trans and gender non-conforming youths for years. I agree that we can't just accept everything she says uncritically, but you seem to dismiss her out of hand. What if what she said in her sworn affidavit is mostly true? Would that change any of your views? If not, what would?
Alarmingly, a majority of studies purporting to show how gender affirming care unequivocally helps trans identified youth follows this same path. The proof is just...not in the pudding. If people truly meant what they say when they talk about the vulnerability of trans people and needing quality medical care, those same people should be outraged by the shoddy practice of medicine as it regards trans health care. Instead, we get demands to remove all safeguarding under the guise of bodily autonomy and “kids know who they are.”
I very strongly agree with this comment. To talk about "irreversible medical procedures" without talking about the irreversible effects of going through a puberty incongruent with your gender identity is putting one's thumb on the scale to an immense degree.
I've been reading through your heroic efforts to engage with pretty much the entire comments section here and I wanted to try offer a good-faith push-back from someone who generally agrees with what you've written. I've gained some useful insight reading your comments, but here I think you've engaged in a common conflation that brings out the small-c conservative in a lot of parents.
The off-label use of drugs is normal and not a scary thing *for adults*. But the physiology of children differs in significant and important ways from adults and because drugs have not been developed for this purpose, they are necessarily being repurposed based on observed effects in adults. And there is no immediate solution to that problem because of the problems you mentioned with clinical studies and the resources and incentive structures around drug development. There are material downsides to habituating a developing physiology to exogenous compounds. We recognize extreme examples like fetal alcohol syndrome, but exposure to all kinds of chemicals that are benign for adults cause endocrine problems in children (e.g., fire retardants, plasticizers, food dyes, preservatives, etc.). There is, in other words, risk associated with giving off-label drugs to kids that have to be weighed against the potential benefits; what I cannot gauge (partly because of all the chaff in the discourse) is the magnitude of that risk compared the magnitude of the risks associated with untreated gender dysphoria. That is where the small-c conservatism of parenting manifests for me. I am very uptight about what my kids ingest, writ large.
Personally, I am very, very skeptical of pharmaceutical solutions to problems, especially for kids, and if one of my kids started pushing for puberty blockers, etc. my response would look to an outside observer as transphobic despite my being otherwise supportive and having no objection to anything else non-surgical my kids want to do. But my internal motivation would be no different than if someone tried to put them on anti-depressants or amphetamines (e.g., to treat ADHD). I'm not saying that I couldn't be persuaded (by my own child), but my inherent skepticism of pharmaceuticals would be a significant barrier to my consent.
I don't think it's unreasonable to be concerned in worried about medical intervention, which is why it's important to educate parents on what exactly is happening in the treatment.
For instance, here, we do know what gender affirming care is going to do to children's bodies. Hormone replacement therapy uses hormones bioidentical to what is produced by the body. It's the same hormonal medicine used by cis men and cis women when they need testosterone or estrogen. We know what is going to happen when this medicine is given to kids--it's just puberty. And we know what the safety profile is -- everyone lives most of their life walking with lots of estrogen or testosterone circulating their blood, with attendant effects on things like risk of clotting, cancer risks, and so on.
The thing we don't have is randomized controlled trial evidence that specifically swapping puberties in a gender dypshoric child will improve mental health outcomes, for the reasons I explained above. I think if one talks to a transgender child or older transgender people, and talks to the experts who have made it their profession to wrangle with this uncertainty, it's possible to be reasonably sure. I, of course, am biased by my own experience of having developed crippling depression as a teen, overwhelming thoughts of suicide for years, only to see it all vanish when I transitioned--though I still suffer from the permanent effects of my first puberty. So I understand that I have a certainty that others may never get to.
It's definitely true a parent faced with a kid saying they are trans and wants medicine is in some way being asked to simply trust their kid on guidance for whether the treatment will be in their interest in the long run. I absolutely understand how that's a scary thing. It's absolutely natural to have doubts.
I want to reiterate M C's thanks for engaging with absolutely everyone. In your place I would have said "Oh, fuck all y'all" by now and gone to bed with wine and a mystery novel.
I really appreciated your link and want to add a few more here that may help people seeking actual evidence and research about gender affirming care, medical transition support, and other evidence-based approaches. I find it's helpful to look at the position statements of large medical associations because they cite sources, usually published studies. Moreover, when you look at the guidelines physicians are using, they're supportive of gender affirming care for adolescents BUT also recommend lots of counseling, education, consultation, and careful observation. None of this feels railroaded or forced through but, rather, a careful consideration of the evidence. (The relative agreement across the profession is why I think Matt works so hard to impeach the credibility of doctors by asserting that they're overly eager to make money by performing gender affirming care. Very cynical of him!)
>1) that youth who identify as TGD have access to comprehensive, gender-affirming, and developmentally appropriate health care that is provided in a safe and inclusive clinical space;...
>Variations in gender expression represent normal and expectable dimensions of human development. They are not considered to be pathological. Health promotion for all youth encourages open exploration of all identity issues, including sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or gender expression according to recognized practice guidelines (1, 2). Research consistently demonstrates that gender diverse youth who are supported to live and/or explore the gender role that is consistent with their gender identity have better mental health outcomes than those who are not (3, 4, 5).
> Due to the dynamic nature of puberty development, lack of gender-affirming interventions (i.e. social, psychological, and medical) is not a neutral decision; youth often experience worsening dysphoria and negative impact on mental health as the incongruent and unwanted puberty progresses. Trans-affirming treatment, such as the use of puberty suppression, is associated with the relief of emotional distress, and notable gains in psychosocial and emotional development, in trans and gender diverse youth.
>Transgender and gender diverse adolescents with persistent gender identity (typically of which they’ve been aware for at least 6 months) that does not align with sex recorded at birth who seek treatment, who have capacity to make medical decisions, in whom potential confounding mental health conditions are addressed, and who have been evaluated by trained mental health professionals who have expertise in gender incongruence in children/adolescents. Decisions regarding both puberty blockade and hormone therapy in adolescents should made with the input of the qualified mental health professional, the endocrinologist or clinician with experience in hormone therapy/puberty blockade in children, the child, and the family.
> Standards of Care (SOC) for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People, published by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, is an important resource for health care professionals working with transgender patients (15). [Included below]
World Professional Association for Transgender Health Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People: https://tinyurl.com/4b2emz9d
> We recommend against offering reparative and conversion therapy aimed at trying to change a person’s gender and lived gender expression to become more congruent with the sex assigned at birth.
> We recommend health care professionals assessing transgender and gender diverse adolescents only recommend gender-affirming medical or surgical treatments requested by the patient when: The adolescent meets the diagnostic criteria of gender incongruence as per the ICD-11 in situations where a diagnosis is necessary to access health care. The experience of gender diversity/incongruence is marked and sustained over time. The adolescent demonstrates the emotional and cognitive maturity required to provide informed consent/assent for the treatment...
From what I could tell from the piece, Matt pretty much agrees with the AAP, WPATH, etc. guidelines. He's not accusing doctors of wanting to make money, for publishing those guidelines.
Rather, he's referring to the seemingly not rare prevalence of clinics *not* following these guidelines with regards to counseling, etc. and rushing the procedures through. Wendy's comment claims this is not happening, and that Matt's sources are trash, but didn't really offer convincing evidence to back that up.
Also claims that certain SOP is justified because it's the "norm" in US medicine, but that doesn't really work as a rebuttal to Matt because he's made clear multiple times in the past that he believes there are some serious flaws with the "norm" in US medicine, and that overtreatment in general (not just related to trans issues) is a serious problem.
"There's no evidence kids are being rushed into gender affirming care on any sort of systemic basis"
Could you clarify this sentence? "No evidence" is a slippery phrase [1], so the above sentence could mean something like
"This subject has been extensively researched and a recent meta-analysis published in NEJM found that 97.3% of clinics in the US follow WPATH's guidelines --- including careful consideration of alternatives."
However "no evidence" could also mean "The subject hasn't really been researched, so there's no information to make any conclusion either way." (E.g. https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152 )
If you mean something along the lines of the first sentence, I'd be interested in the citation. That would help clear up the situation in my mind.
However, if you have the second meaning in mind, that's not exactly comforting. "We don't have data so you're wrong to worry about it" isn't a winning take (as that evergreen WHO tweet demonstrates). Would you advocate for collecting more data on the matter --- such as whether clinics are following WPATH's guidelines?
I imagine that it would be difficult to both find funding for and to actually carry out unbiased research because emotions run very high on the subject, so I worry that we may never get the data --- in which case it's arguably an underhand trick to cite the lack of data as a reason to not take action.
I largely agree with Matt's piece (not that it has many firm conclusions to agree with.) But your point about social contagion is good, and I'm now skeptical of that part of the column.
I think what you've written on some other subjects gives a helpful perspective on why people on the left often think this issue is being treated badly, even people like me who have been fans of your work for a very long time. You often point out that this is a very big country, and thus it's easy to continuously find anecdotal evidence of problems (like something bad happening in a school) without that meaningfully reflecting anything about the actual situation. And, as you've pointed out again and again, the coverage of Hillary's emails was not incorrect -- she really did violate some government document retention policies. It's that the coverage volume, which was an editorial choice by journalists and media outlets, failed to reflect the larger truth which was that Donald Trump was not going to be better about document policies or anything else.
It's almost certainly the case that some people are not getting the best medical treatment, some people regret surgery they have, some people are reaching for gender dysphoria as an explanation for their mental health problems, etc. But are the journalistic decisions here giving readers an accurate sense not just of the details but the of broader story?
This is a helpful phrasing of this concern for me. I do think there's been a lot of effort to raise the salience and temperature of this topic (much but not all from the right!). For the record I do think some of the anxiety here is driven by the ever-present alienation between adults and teenagers and difficulty that adults have understanding what's going on with "the youths". I agree with MY that it would be great to focus this more on the broader question of "why are teenagers so sad".
I agree that adult alienation from how "kids these days" are thinking about and acting with regard to sex and gender is a big reason why this is a major topic (and not, for example, the much greater volume of gender-related surgeries like breast reduction for cis teenagers). And the way that trans people challenge our ideas about gender even if the issues don't affect us directly at all means that it's something people will discuss more.
But it's also the case that a huge amount of the discussion of trans issues, even among people on the left, is driven by the existence of a powerful political movement trying to oppress trans people and drive them out of public life.
The problem is the loudest trans activists are just kind of bad people. Their most common argument online in support of the trans zeitgeist, other than calling those who have sincere concerns bigots, is emotional manipulation. “Support this our people will kill themselves.” I am disturbed of reports of parents interacting with doctors who ask them “would you rather have a trans daughter or a dead daughter?” In any other context, this type of reasoning is considered a severe abusive manipulation tactic.
I'm sure this comment will not be popular but whatever. I agree that trans people need to be treated with equality and dignity, and deeply oppose what's going on in some red stares for civil libertarian reasons. This sort of care, like all other care, needs to be a private matter between people and their doctors. I think Bostock got the legal question right, and that as people we owe it to others to do our best to be polite and accomodating, as best as we can, within reason.
But here's the part that's going to piss people off and where I disagree with Matt's initial framing. It is the trans rights activists who are the bullies and who have played a big role in creating the opening for the right wing insanity and panic. Note I distinguish activists and groups from individual trans people who I assume generally just want to be left alone to live their lives.
The bullying includes treating all parents as suspected abusers of their children (including in blue district public schools), woke 'gotcha' games with language, and trying to use bizarro interpretations of civil rights laws to force strangers into validating increasingly metaphysical assertions about the nature of gender and sex. The most bullied are of course women who have the temerity to stand up for their hard earned rights, or just raise concerns about whether self-id standards aren't ripe for abuse, especially when they result in predatory men being given access to womens' spaces.
So the right wing, as usual, is wrong and always looking for an opening to relitigate issues they lost. But defeating them also requires being adults about some of the thornier issues, and also realizing when it is the activists we nominally agree with who are the illiberal assholes. My belief is that the right would have struggled to mobilize on this issue, but for the nuttier aspects of it suddenly appearing in public schools over the last few years and yet here we are. Nothing is worse than failing to realize the stupid result of stupid, unserious ideas taken to their natural conclusion, which is exactly what that Jamie Reed story will be if substantiated.
It looks like this is the most popular current comment on SB. So let me chime in and say that many, if not most of us live in liberal bubbles where allyship has allowed very specific groups (radical feminists, Black nationalists, trans activists) to be bullies. However, in most parts of the US, I don’t think these groups would be bullies? So does that make them bullies or victims? MY is probably asking the right question here, which is that it depends on the particular incentives.
I work in K-12 education outside of a liberal bubble in a red state and I’d say that dignity right now is probably more of a crucial concern than overreaching gender affirming care.
I cannot like this comment enough. Because I think this upteenth topic where having a disproportionate number of journalists, pundits, commentators living in blue cities (and specifically in NYC and DC) warps this issue. Living in Brooklyn means you are much more likely to be confronted with extreme lefties rather than extreme righties, including on transgender issues.
I brought this up with all the CRT stuff. How many articles has NyTimes run about Dalton. Meanwhile go try starting an LBGTQ club in a religious private school outside a blue city and see what happens.
I thought Matt's point was that everyone deserved to be treated with dignity and respect. How come Brooklyn liberals asking for dignity and respect from other people on the left is somehow out of line? Newsflash, people care about the things they see and are confronted with on a daily basis, so yeah, people on slow boring are more likely to deal with extreme lefties. But that doesn't make bullying okay when it's the extreme lefties who are doing it!
I don’t think anyone is saying it’s out of line, I think people are saying that identifying trans activists as “the real bullies” may be based on a distorted view of the discourse. Unfortunately, like most issues, this one has room for bullies on both sides.
I am tired of pretending this is like every other issue. I have advocated for progressive causes for 20+ years. I have conversations with Brooklyn liberals every day and have been involved in many local political and advocacy groups. This is the only issue where I personally have been attacked for suggesting there might be some nuance. This is the only issue where I've lost friends for asking milquetoast, normie questions. This is the only issue where I've been accused of driving children to suicide for suggesting we might want to slow down on life-changing surgery.
I understand right-wing people in other places do bad things. I don't have any ability to change that. If I have the opportunity to vote for the dignity of trans people, I will vote for it. But the discourse is uniquely horrible here, so I personally am a little tired of these things being minimized. and yes these are the unique concerns of a Brooklyn liberal, but I am a Brooklyn liberal!
I wish this was the only area where I've been attacked for suggesting nuance, but unfortunately I think it's becoming more and more common on the left thanks to social media. Police reform, for instance, is an area where people get attacked as racists and "copagandists" for suggesting that police may have a role to play in a civil society. It's a growing problem on the left and I certainly agree it should be opposed wherever it comes up.
Ok, let’s slow down here. I used to live in a big, liberal urban area where YIMBYs were continually accused of being racists in the most extreme terms. I went to a very liberal private college in the early ‘10s and women I knew and liked routinely said “ugh let’s kill all men.” This isn’t that different. It’s punching up and down and around due to frustration with the slow pace of change, without acknowledging the incredibly fast pace of change. Yes, I’m also worried about the disproportionate amount of teens I’ve worked with who are FTM or female to non-binary versus MTF, since in a non-misogynistic world, the numbers should be pretty similar. But there is literally one place kids can go in this major urban area for gender affirming care, and there’s literally one school district in the state that has a public policy that affirms kids’ identities without parent consent, and yet Republicans in the state legislature have spent TWO sessions in a row now obsessed with this issue. Bullies!
Thanks!
Completely agree. What’s been lost is the nuance in topics like this. Just because you may believe that young adolescents shouldn’t automatically be put on puberty blockers because they are questioning their gender, is not the same thing as hateful behavior towards the entire community.
"What’s been lost is the nuisance in topics like this."
You can always use the "edit" function on your comment -- under the three dots -- if you want to change "nuisance" to "nuance".
Yes that would be helpful! Multi tasking at it's finest right there!
I'm not so sure though... Of course, this is going to vary by school, but public education is a strongly left leaning institution nationally, and that often extends into schools within red states having strongly blue staff. I've seen plenty of articles about backlash to critical race theory, trans stuff, etc. being generated by incidents happening within schools in red states - not just stuff people in those states read in the media about blue states.
Of course when we're talking about state level legislation, that picture changes, but within the context of local schools, it's certainly possible for people in red states to experience extreme progressivism.
Yeah, this is important!
Like, look, are there small towns and rural areas in America where a solid conservative consensus still holds, and where anti-trans bullying vastly, vastly outweighs pro-trans bullying? Yes! Those absolutely exist! But we aren't in the mid-20th Century any more, and this is no longer the mean, median, or modal American experience.
Most Americans either live in:
1. Solidly blue areas (whether at the city or state level) where most everyone pushes the liberal orthodoxy.
2. Borderline areas with a mix of red/blue, but where the fact that liberals are so overrepresented among middle managers, bureaucrats, and teachers means that the blue dogma punches above its weight for the overall vote mix of the area.
And then third: beyond your local community, where people value expressing themselves is the internet, where the blue dogma reigns due to a combination of the ideological sympathies of tech workers and bureaucrats. And people get their info fed into them by media, where again the blue dogma reigns.
None of this means that it's impossible or even that hard to find areas where the red dogma reigns. It's a minority but not a tiny minority.
But the idea that we should be mostly concerned with the red dogma represents an out-of-date idea of the modal American experience.
I think the thing to keep in mind is something Matt brings up all the time; rural areas have extremely disproportionate political power. When discussing this issue, or gun control or literally any political issue and asking who has the power it’s really important to keep this in mind.
I think that Matt and the Slow Boring commentariat severely overstate this. Rural areas have very mildly disproportionate political power. In 2022, the Republicans won the Congressional popular vote. They have a minority in the Senate and their majority in the House is I believe slimmer than their popular vote margin.
I do think that in many states, gerrymandering has made state legislatures far more lopsided than the state's overall population, and in some important states for this particular issue, that favors Republicans.
But, crucially, that's not really what this subthread is about. What we're talking about is the discourse.
That is, if you express some banal opinion like, "I think we should use people's preferred pronouns but I have some reservations about kids transitioning," how likely are you to:
a. Be told that you're grooming children for sexual predators and are a war criminal (ie, bullying from the Right in the discourse).
b. Be told that you're literally genociding trans people and are a war criminal (ie, bullying from the Left in the discourse).
And I think it's very clear that (b) is more common, while also noting that (a) exists.
Sure but that's just about the only place where red-thought has a major advantage. Weigh that against TV, movies, HR depts, every kind of lawyer, tech, medicine, academia, education and most news. And against the fact that as you go up the salary scale you get progressively more, well, progressive.
"Like, look, are there small towns and rural areas in America where a solid conservative consensus still holds, and where anti-trans bullying vastly, vastly outweighs pro-trans bullying? Yes! Those absolutely exist! But we aren't in the mid-20th Century any more, and this is no longer the mean, median, or modal American experience."
This came up earlier this week in a discussion about the Youth Risk Behavioral Survey.
"Close to 70% of LGBQ+ students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year and more than 50% had poor mental health during the past 30 days. Almost 25% attempted suicide during the past year."
https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1625288151290748928
"In the latest government survey, LGBTQ teens in 2021 were at least twice as likely as heterosexual teens to report sexual abuse, online bullying, opioid misuse in the last 30 days, persistent sadness or hopeless, suicidal thoughts"
https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1625291741522759681
And this is all before the 2022 wave of anti-LGBT laws.
Why are you assuming that the sadness, hopelessness, or poor mental health is coming from interactions with conservatives? Especially online, why would you expect LGBTQ teens to associate with conservatives? LGBTQ online spaces are famous for developing extremely catty and drama-filled dynamics, including bullying and abuse. Also, many LGBTQ subgroups overindex on participation in sex work, or hypersexualized party cultures; both places where drug abuse and sexual assault are much more common than in the general population.
I think you are overestimating the power of public school teachers.
I say this as a child of a teacher. Parents and school boards have a lot of power. Please school board elections and “Intelligent design”. Forgotten battle of the Bush years with a nice little cameo from discovery institute who gave Chris Rufo his start. You know the guy Ron DeSantis is empowering in FL.
So interesting. I’ve always thought Philly is every bit is a liberal as those enclaves and maybe it is. But maybe it isn’t. I just don’t have much experience getting treated badly by far left wingers in person. Maybe that has to do with my circles of friends and family. I dunno, but I always get confused about a lot of these sentiments, because they are not experience I read here and elsewhere I guess.
Online, different story. And I think thats a huge part of the problem - the loudest, most memorable voices online are invariably the most extreme. And online voices are also subject to manipulation and misrepresentation, trolling, which I think really magnifies our political problems - online discourse needs better culture and etiquette and regulation to limit paid speech misrepresented as legit.
Yea it’s really bad in some places. I live in a 60/40 liberal area and this is a common occurrence. It really started with the back to school issues post covid when some on the far left accused parents who wanted their kids in school full time in the spring of 2021 of wanting people to die from covid. It’s continued on issues like this. Mind you, these are not parents who are anti trans by any means, these are parents who think maybe something should be taught in fifth grade versus third grade because they don’t feel it’s appropriate for third grade. The parents are then accused of being anti trans and then their kids are bullied. Often they end up moving out of the community, move their kids to private school or are terrified to speak out again.
Sure, but a common progressive response to articles like this or Emily Bazelon's NYT piece is to ask "how is this even worth talking about?" (there are plenty of examples in these comments already, just a few hours after publication.) I'd say, since social justice progressivism is the beating heart of the American left, and the whole point of progressivism is to make every single city, town, suburb, and outbuilding a blue bubble, it's reasonable to explore what's happening in all the Biden +20 districts.
But it's also worth talking about because it hits close to home - those of us in progressive bubbles live with it every day. In any number of towns like mine, there has been a sudden, large increase in the number of transgender and gender-fluid kids in the area middle school and high school, heavily concentrated among children assigned female at birth. I'm not personally attached to rigid gender roles, and the vast majority of it involves self-id and social transition, so I'm inclined to let it play out.
But that attitude is not universal, even in my town. So people want to talk about it, and it's not "just asking questions," it's about their families and friends. For years, the 100% predictable public response to these inquiries has been shitty research, at best (like the laughably narrow Fenway health study being touted elsewhere in these comments), but more often illiberal bullying, directed at people trying to be supportive and understanding.
Have you seen this reaction to Bazelon and the NYT: https://nytletter.com
"As thinkers, we are disappointed to see the New York Times follow the lead of far-right hate groups in presenting gender diversity as a new controversy warranting new, punitive legislation. Puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, and gender-affirming surgeries have been standard forms of care for cis and trans people alike for decades."
This is so disingenuous because it uses the existence of medical procedures historically used on adults (e.g., hormone replacement therapy is common in post-menopausal women) as proof that they are perfectly safe for kids and calls anyone who points that out a far-right hatemonger. And people like me end up sounding like Helen Lovejoy by comparison.
I will never blame activists for the lunatic responses that they elicit from the right, but as Matt pointed out, the bar for off-label use of drugs that have been deemed safe for human use by the FDA is very low. Puberty blockers are, in some cases, repurposed cancer drugs that had the side-effect of causing men to develop female secondary sexual characteristics, for example. But the activists pretend that they were a) developed for this purpose b) have been unassailable proven to be safe for kids and c) none of that matters anyway because denying their use is literally killing kids.
Where can we even have a rational conversation about trans-anything anymore? The right-wing smears everyone as a groomer pedophile and the left-wing smears everyone as genocidal bigots. Is there some magical political center where you won't get shouted down for anything short of total allegiance to one side or the other?
There's a simple test of the "medical appropriateness" of wide access to gender-affirming care: given the lack of clinical research on use of hormone blockers for gender-affirming care, go do that study. It would be evaluated by an Institutional Review Board (IRB), the job of which is to ensure that medical research is done ethically. There is no way in hell that a study on kids below 16 would be approved. I seriously doubt it could be done for any non-adult. If it were, it would have very stringent enrollment criteria so that only kids where there is a clear cost/benefit ratio would be treated.
I support the rights of physicians to use drugs off label and am willing to believe that hormone blockers are a wise choice for some children. But anything beyond carefully-considered and limited decisions is hard to justify.
Ideally, the decision should be made between a physician, patient and, when said patient is a minor, their guardian. But then everything unravels; what if the guardian objects on religious grounds? Where do the minor patients rights begin? How old does someone have to be to consent? What are the side-effects, short- and long-term? Oof.
But the national conversation we seem to be having is, on one side, fantasies about schools all but force-feeding kids hormones and, on the other, disingenuous assertions that you can 'press pause' on puberty with no downsides using totally safe drugs. I'm not even sure how one can carefully consider anything around gender-affirming care for kids, given all the FUD in the discourse.
Agreed. In addition, MY is right to highlight how physician practice can differ from best practice. Physicians are humans and get caught up in the zeitgeist. In the early days of fentanyl, I worked with some hospice physicians who were crusading for better pain relief options for patients with incurable cancer. Their work was both well intentioned and medically appropriate. it wasn't just pure marketing that Purdue used to get so many physicians to overprescribe. It was also how a righteous cause spilled over into malign territory.
PS - I'm not sure how much of the hospice community's work for pain relief existed and was exploited by Purdue versus being initiated by Purdue. Regardless, there was a beneficial side to these drugs later overwhelmed by a damaging one.
I like the work of a few of the signers kid that letter, but it’s a totally insane document. It is helpful, however, as a reminder that the NYT is not actually as “progressive” on this issue as people here are accusing it of being?
It is only in the last year that there has been any critical or nuanced coverage of these issues, starting basically with Bazelon’s article.
So while it may be true that they are backing toward the center, it’s important to note that previously, the NYT covered this solely in uncritical, “supportive” ways, though some activists are acting like they went from nothing to Nazi.
This is becoming a pattern. Align with the shouting left at first while an issue is raw. Over time start actually doing journalism and figuring out what makes sense.
Right. Trans people seem to be the pushy and rude ones if you live in a Biden+20 district and barely ever interact with actual conservatives.
The picture is very very different if you live in a Trump district.
Then focus on the trump districts and don’t bully allies in a Biden district. Pretty easy.
This is totally true, in my local residential area I'm entirely sure that confronting bigotry against all varieties of gender nonconforming people is a vastly more pressing issue. In the specific bubbles in which my actual family network exists however, the "Gender Identity" ideology stuff is aggressively encroaching. Recognizing the context in which you are speaking is critical.
Yeah, from my point of view (boring corporate job in a blue part of a purple state) the trans issue just... isn't a big deal. The biggest way it has impacted my life is seeing pronouns in a few email signatures (all of which are she/her or he/him and match what I would expect the person to use based on appearance). I guess I've also noticed the pride flags becoming increasingly complex every June.
The one transgender person I've ever worked with was actually in the military reserves with me, and was just a normal person who was quietly transgender.
I think that, like many stupid issues, the media actively goes out searching for outliers so everyone can get fired up about a school library or drag show somewhere.
I live in a similar place, with a similar experience--my trans friends fit the traditional model--biological men who suffered from gender dysphoria, transitioned as adults, and now live generally good, unremarkable lives.
But I think the issues with young biological women are more national because it appears that social media--especially Tumblr and Tiktok--is a key factor, and social media doesn't neatly follow geography.
I live in a purple district in a purple state with a gerrymandered Republican legislature where said legislature has stacked the board of governors of the university system with people who watch too much Tucker Carlson. They are trying to force rules on the faculty that forbid asking certain kinds of "politically relevant" questions to job applicants, etc.; it won't be long until they try to scrub the pronouns from email signatures. The funny thing is that, prior to their meddling none of this was a big deal and no one knew or cared about each other's political or social views. But now everyone is up in arms against these changes, prompting people who normally stay out of it to do things like put pronouns in their email signatures. In other words, the reactionaries are eliciting reactions and forcing people to chose sides in a debate no one was having.
Similar background - but my blue part is a strongly blue - university town. Near half of the biologic girls in my child's fourth grade class now identify as trans in some way (mostly some from of non-binary, none as boys as far as I know). It just seems implausible to me, especially since it started with one and then cascaded to the rest in terms of friend groups. All the parents are very supportive and I don't think any of them are seeking any sort of medical transitions. Most of the children haven't even changed their style of dress, or names or mannerisms. I am certain there is a trend element to this. But also I am impressed by how non-politicized the local community has been about it. They just sorta affirmed what happening, and some of the girls has now decided they are girls again and at least publicly there haven't been any major issues. It does provide some interesting color on my perceptions of the national debate though.
Yes. Most folks at my school district are definitely Dems, but they’re not obsessed with race and gender or trans issues. They would work in a different district if they were.
“I’d say that dignity right now is probably more of a crucial concern than overreaching gender affirming care.”
You got a lot of likes. But putting these two things in opposition is just bad sense making and is nothing more than a zero sum political argument. We need to be better than this for our kids.
Thing is I don't disagree with you. But I also live in a jurisdiction where the local school district is currently in court fighting to be permitted to socially transition students without parental involvement and lie about it if they deem necessary. So I am not going to defend what is going on in FL or TX or whatever red state but my first responsibility is to my family.
The scope of bullying isn't limited to liberal bubbles, but the even if that were the case, part of the problem MY identifies is that the bullying makes it easier for actual transphobic people to oppose trans rights. It's simply harder to appeal to normies when trans activists look like crazy demagogues and demand that "allies" be intellectual vassals.
And this dynamic is a general one that doesn't only apply to trans activists - in general, extremists are very often a hindrance in actually moving the needle on many issues.
I live in a liberal bubble (I'm a college professor in a college town), I have trans students and trans friends and trans colleagues, I'm a straight white guy. I should be exactly the kind of person who is being bullied if this was really a problem. And yet, even here, this is 100% a Twitter phenomenon. No one is bullying me or telling me how to think or anything of the sort.
Of course, I do call people by the names they introduce themselves with, and use the pronouns they say they go by, but actually everyone does this with almost 100% of the people they encounter so it's not a big "sacrifice" if that's all that avoiding "bullying" requires.
The problems aren’t for straight white men. The problems are for women who are losing their safe spaces, and opportunities is sport, and are being dehumanized (“people who menstruate” etc how is it that all those wokenhealth organizations didn’t stop referring to “men” only to women? Gender inclusivity would have necessitated a symmetrical approach). It’s also harmful for young people, disproportionately lgb who may be unduly pressured to undergo dangerous medical procedures and pressured into discomfort with their sexuality simply for being less stereotypical.
So yes- for you as a straight white male it’s all well and good. But for those who suffer from homophobia and lesbophobia and of course *misogyny* life isn’t so simple. I can’t believe I’m saying this but check your privilege.
This a good point and I'd add President Joe Biden and his Education Secretary Miguel Cardona probably deserve more blame for things parents complained about in a recent NYT article than random trans rights activists calling Jesse Singal a groomer/chaser. Activists who write for a living just aren't as powerful as the President of the United States of America. People lost track of that during the Trump years and this misperception has basically continued with a different crowd under the Biden presidency. It's not very helpful for policy debates if you can't identify which elected office is implementing policy and get mad at people saying stuff online.
There is simply no discounting a bully/ies and their actions because the bully is part of a group that experiences unrelated systemic issues. Bullying is at its very core an interpersonal issue that needs to be addressed interpersonally as an individual failing of the aggressor. Everyone can tell an asshole as the saying goes...
I think that we’ve created so many conversational third rails in our (mostly online) discourse that we’re inhibiting real world conversation between sane friends and neighbors. I’ve definitely seen this in my circle of friends since 2016.
“Some of the science around this (heck, pick an issue here) looks iffy, I wonder which of my friends I can mention it around without being called -ist/-phobe/fascist/etc?”
Yeah. I have no doubt that right-wingers are being assholes to trans people, and I know state legislatures have put forward some pretty bad bills. But I don't talk to many right-wingers and I don't watch Fox news. What I see on a daily basis is people being bullied constantly for asking simple, good-faith questions that are often more milquetoast than the ones Matt asked here.
There are so many issues where we’d be doing better if we could replace the Twitter activists, who many in media and politics have seemed entirely deferential to, with normal people who have skin in the game, a good head on their shoulders and a decent heart.
I’m sorry, but trans activism has been horribly ineffective, with the downside of seeming very effective at first because of said deference.
Well put: "force strangers into validating increasingly metaphysical assertions about the nature of gender and sex."
The "fact" that all persons are born with an ineffable gendered soul and the gender of that soul is only revealed through the self-knowledge of the individual is a metaphysical/spiritual assertion.
Basic freedom of religion in the USA means that individuals should not be forced to state or signal adherence to the creed or participate in the sacrements of a different religion.
I don't state my pronouns because stating my pronouns would be signaling adherence to your religion, a modern variety of Gnosticism that was invented about five minutes ago and contradicts the accumulated wisdom of all historic cultural, religious, philosophical traditions, along with basic biology.
I guess I'm not sure I'd refer to strictly enforced gender roles, usually at the expense of women as "accumulated wisdom".
This strikes me as the sort of incurious, dogmatic rejection that this piece is arguing against.
"Strictly enforced gender roles" Like the if you like dolls and flowers you must be a girl? And if you like trucks and sports you must be a boy?
"Usually at the expense of women" - Do you mean the teenage girls presenting at gender clinics for puberty blockers and testosterone, many of whom will end up physically butchered and sterile? What goes on at some of these gender clinics is the 2020s equivalent of the Tuskegee experiments. The difference I guess is that the Tuskegee experiments weren't performed on children, or the mentally ill, or mentally ill children. It only gets worse the deeper you look.
False.
Also, FYI, it does not appear that you have thought very deeply about socialization.
The assertion that trans identity violates “basic biology” basically means that your biology knowledge never got past the 101 level.
LOL, the assertion that maleness and femaleness in humans and other mammals are in the mind/soul because of a fad that started on the internet is about as logically solid as saying that TidePods are food because of a fad that started on the internet.
With respect to Bio 101: while I have not researched and taught mammalian biology, I did my PhD in a microbiology lab and taught microbiology at the graduate level for many years. I am also willing to make statements under my real name "briross"
Is there any evidence that predatory men are exploiting transition to attack women to any significant degree?
I've seen reports of admittedly varying credibility. But if we rely on self-ID with minimal or no guardrails doesn't it make those sorts of incidents inevitable? To me that's the real question, and why it's important to consider what happens if we follow the most radical demands to their natural conclusions.
Wrong answer. The answer is there is no evidence.
Nor is it "inevitable." THERE IS NOTHING STOPPING MEN FROM DRESSING AS WOMEN AND ENTERING BATHROOM RIGHT NOW. There is literally no reason to think this is a real issue.
You're where you are because of bias, not because of trans people online being meanies.
Uh, yes, security and business owners can stop that, and can call police to support them, and such people can be filtered out of womens' prisons and shelters. Right up until the law is changed to say they can't.
Please think for two seconds. Trans people aren't the ones advocating for laws to change, it's opponents who are advocating for the law to change. Because bathrooms and other gendered spaces ALREADY operate on a self-ID basis. Trans people have been using the bathroom they identify with for decades. There is currently no epidemic of cis men abusing this system. So this "thorny" issue is people trying to discriminate against trans people to fix a problem that doesn't exist.
It goes far beyond bathrooms and trans activists definitely are advocating for changing the gender id laws, which has already happened eg in Canada and Scotland. Using angry all caps won’t change the facts…
I mean, laws often change in response to emerging problems. “You’re the one trying to change the law!” doesn’t address whether the facts on the ground are changing or could reasonably be expected to change.
For the first time in my life, I live in a state with a Republican-controlled legislature and I am genuinely shocked at how often they pass laws to solve problems that do not exist and then turn around and point at the fact that the problem does not exist as proof that the law worked, hence justification for passing more laws. It's legislation as virtue-signalling. Bathroom bills and these so-called parents' bill of rights laws that are sweeping through red-state legislatures are perfect examples. The pernicious thing is that a lot of people see these laws passed and then think "Oh, I didn't even know that was a problem, good thing they fixed it!"
This may have been true in public bathrooms, but it certainly wasn't true in school, university, YMCA, gym, etc. locker rooms/showers. And if a man went into a women's locker room previously, he would have been assumed to have made an honest mistake, informed of that "mistake" and told to leave; if he refused, he literally would have been arrested.
Enter the bully, IN ALL CAPS...
to paraphrase: "Your ideas are LITERALLY WRONG IN EVERY WAY and are the result of YOU BEING A BAD PERSON [bias]"
Also note InMD originally said "predatory men being given access to womens' spaces" which is a broader concern than "exploiting transition to attack women to any significant degree"
To paraphrase you right back: "I am a crybaby bigot who has no response to the fact that we are complaining about something that isn't real, so I will just complain about bullying."
Milan, I'm curious if you have any thoughts on this exchange from a moderators point of view. Maybe my previous comment was toeing towards the line of the expected civility here, but this comment seems like nothing more than pure name calling and ad hominem.
In any case, I object to the your name-calling. I pointed out that your comment reads as a call to shut down debate and shout down opinions that are different from your own. I think you've reinforced my point rather than countered it.
I expect this thread will need to be moderated more than most and this comment is a good example why.
If you’re a bully no one will care what you say next but other bullies and you will have deserved that. Be better or get out of the discourse.
There was the transgender woman in England who raped two women in a female prison she was being detained in prior to her surgery. I agree this is not a widespread problem by any stretch of the imagination, but I also don't think we can dismiss concerns about it as being driven purely by bias as opposed to a legitimate concern for real (but incredibly rare) outcomes.
ETA: BD Anders pointed out that I think I'm conflating two situations- one in Scotland and another in Illinois involving transgender women in the prison system. The underlying point (this is very rare but seems like a real concern to me) is the same, so I'm leaving my comment in, but wanted to highlight that my factual statement above is inaccurate.
If you're referring to Isla Bryson, and I think you are, your facts are confused. Bryson committed two rapes outside of prison, long before transitioning. She was arrested and came out as trans before trial. She was then transferred, pre-transition, to a women's jail. She did not commit new crimes while in jail and, following public outcry, was transferred back to a men's facility.
I think you're correct- I think I'm conflating Bryson with the lawsuit filed in Illinois by a female inmate who alleges she was assaulted by a transgender woman in her housing unit who still had male genitalia.
Respectfully, rape in prisons is not the same issue as access to bathrooms. No one with a heart thinks anyone who is at risk of raping other inmates should be held in proximity with potential victims. Of course, for some reason only trans people get everyone excited about prison rape even though the incidence of rape in prisons committed by cis prisoners is much, much, much higher and no one seems interested in fixing it.
The question that people were responding to was "Is there any evidence that predatory men are exploiting transition to attack women to any significant degree?" not "what should we do about bathroom access?" so I was addressing that. If you're limiting your comment solely to the issue of self-ID then sure, I don't see any reason to believe that cis-men will pretend to be transwomen so that they can gain access to bathrooms to commit violence against women.
I will throw in a comment just pushing back against all the "these issues exist in other contexts and nobody ever talks about them!" comments I'm seeing. The article was specifically about the need to not ignore thornier/difficult questions in the transgender discussions that are taking place across the country. That's why they're being discussed here. There are all kinds of other issues that are far more prevalent and, if we're being honest, more important than these issues, but the topic here is specific. If you want to try and advocate for specific incarceration reforms to address widespread problems in the prison system then please do so! But I get the feeling that you yourself are likely not spending very much time working on those issues, in which case using it as a way to deflect the discussion here seems like a rhetorical tool to shut down discussions of legitimate (albeit rare) concerns.
Actually, if someone commits a particularly heinous crime, you often see people comment with glee about how they’re likely to be raped over and over in prison. Some people view rape as part of the punishment for particularly horrible crimes. Which is really gross, but people often get really vicious when they’re talking about the appropriate punishment for serious crimes.
Which is a signal that people aren’t actually concerned about prison rape. They are angry about trans people. If preventing rape was a concern, there are like 500 other things that would have more of an impact than the policy about where to put trans women who are convicted of crimes.
There’s nothing stopping them from coming in, but self ID keeps us from taking them out.
Yeah, I think we are ignoring everything we know about human nature if we don’t admit that some bad actors would take advantage of a system that relies fully on self-ID. And to be clear, I don’t mean that trans women are bad actors—I mean that, at the margins, some predatory cis men will cause trouble.
Even acknowledging that, we might still decide that, on the whole, a self-ID system is better than what we have now. But it’s just obviously true that there will be some trade offs, and I find it frustrating when people try to act like that isn’t the case.
This is an area where I feel the concerns about natal males being in women's spaces are overblown, but _also_ that telling natal women "you're transphobic / your concerns are invalid" doesn't help solve anything.
Prison rapes are more prevalent among certain sexes than others, but they are always something to guard against. If you treat the concerns as coming from a valid fear but propose solutions that help _everyone_ have more dignity wouldn't we be better off?
People seemed to be more worried about gay same-sex teachers than they did about opposite gender teachers, which seems ridiculous to me, but I think the vision a lot of them had in their heads of gay people was a sort of pop-culture predatory type. Meeting a bunch of us (because we came out) and showing we're normal people like everyone else does more than calling them homophobes for being nervous. I mean, it _was_ homophobia, but calling everyone out on it can just make them defensive.
Help them not _be_ afraid rather than blaming them for their fear. This is, admittedly, easier said than done - and yes, this is an extra burden on activists - straight people never had to help _me_ not be afraid, only the reverse - but inertia is powerful, and if you want to change things, sometimes you have to shoulder an extra burden.
Very wise, very wise
I think you have to ask some practical questions in these cases. For bathrooms, self-id is probably the only workable norm. Nobody is going to do ID checks and self-policing just means that anyone who doesn't look adequately feminine is interrogated and policed for using the women's bathroom, something that can and does harm lots of cis women. Conversely, making trans women use the men's bathroom invites harassment (and making trans men use the women's actually causes the discomfort the policy is meant to alleviate).
For spaces where there is more scrutiny, like prisons or women's shelters, you can have a more nuanced policy. In general it's disgraceful how unsafe prisons are, but given existing conditions it makes sense that you might exclude a self-identified trans woman from a women's prison if you have some specific basis to think she might pose a threat. (Likewise for a cis woman, for that matter.) For women's shelters the prevailing practice as I understand it is to accept something like self-id even in jurisdictions where they have flexibility to do otherwise, but (unlike a bathroom which is going to be open to all comers) there's no reason they couldn't exclude someone who seemed likely to cause problems or who in practice does cause problems. It's not no guardrails.
So I think actually this is how it’s always been, but because the idea of trans has expanded so much as to include bearded males who do not even attempt to transition, women in particular are suddenly very concerned. It raises the very legitimate question: what is a trans woman?
Administrators not having to do genatalia-checks is an underrated driver of policies like this. I bet there are any number of athletics administrators that aren't entirely comfortable with trans women/girls competing in girls sports. But, if they create a ban, they would all dread the day where some parent demanded "verification" of a boyish-looking girl on the opposing team. Even setting aside the incident going viral, who wants to deal with that? And what do you do with the trans girl's parents demand "verification" of every member of the opposing team?
Same mess if there's a bathroom rule. Imagine being a minimum-wage loss-prevention specialist at Target having to navigate that. Imagine Target corporate trying to purchase insurance for the inevitable lawsuits. They're not being "bullied" into it. They're avoiding an obvious implementation nightmare.
This "verification" issue seems like such a red herring. Kids on sports teams usually have to have a doctor do a physical to be cleared to participate, right? The doctor is almost certainly going to be aware of the child's sex, no genital inspection required.
I'm sure there are all sorts of forms out there, but I'd imagine many/most focus on safety and are stingy about any other kind of information. If it was a mandatory component, start looking for doctors and medical systems to threaten to shut down child athletics programs by refusing to disclose under any circumstance.
With sports you have to worry not just about demands for verification generally but also about intrusive inquiries into non-trans kids who have intersex conditions they may not even know about. I can see why self-id might be a poor fit for elite sports but for workability reasons it makes sense as a default most of the time.
Yes. Sports are not an objective inquiry into, for example, which collection of ten girls are "best" at volleyball in the boundaries of a particular school system. They're for recreation, bond-forming, and character development. Trans girls will struggle to get those things on a boy-dominated team. Changing in a different locker room, limited shared interests, bullying, etc. If she can join a girl's team, I wouldn't expect the benefits she gets to be outweighed by diffuse agita among a handful of her teammates and/or opponents. And, until we see insurance companies caring about potential injuries, I'd ignore those complaints as scaremongering.
There are real costs even to the assertion that violence against women is a significant motivator of transition, and those costs only go up if public policy is based on that view. In my opinion, imposing those costs demands a significant evidence base to justify doing so.
I’m kind of concerned by the double rapist in Scotland (Isla Brayson, previously Adam Graham) who insists on being placed in an all-female prison. You honestly don’t see a problem with that?
These situations may be rare now but judging by how many people, including kids, are now proclaiming their trans status, they may not be in the future.
Do you worry this much about where to house the cis women who've raped women? Or the cis men who've raped men and trans women?
It's not that it's not a problem - it's just that the scale of people's concern about this problem is out of proportion to the scale of the problem itself. And the usual proposed solution - housing trans women with men - just transfers rape risk from cis women to trans women, likely at a much higher rate. I don't think you can justify that from a universal "rape is bad" principle.
So if we put Isla Brayson, who previously raped two cisgender women, in a prison with cisgender men, you think Brayson will rape the men? I somehow doubt that.
I agree there’s concern that Bryson could be raped by cisgender men in that situation, but I think it’s logistically easier to reduce that risk given that it’s a risk to a single individual.
I don’t know all the details of this case but if Brayson has surgically transitioned, then perhaps this isn’t an issue. If he can’t mechanically commit the act, then I might feel differently. But if not, then I honestly think cisgender women in the female-only prison are at some significant risk, in which case the “human dignity” argument requires us to elevate their concerns to a level equal to Brayson’s.
We already restrict the freedoms of convicted rapists in lots of ways. The right to transition may be one more. I don't think that has any relevance to the rights of regular folks.
Rape is a common thing in prisons even though freedom of movement is restricted. If you were a cisgender XX woman, would you feel comfortable sharing a cell with Isla Brayson?
The problem transgender activists face at this point, I think, is that their defense of the rights of transgender people is beginning to be perceived as requiring a diminution of the rights of cisgender people. Honestly, it doesn’t seem to me as though the human dignity of cisgender women in that Scottish prison is being respected. It doesn’t seem to me as though the human dignity of cisgender XX women on Lia Thomas’ swim team is being respected either. I could go on, but I’m probably in enough hot water already.
Nevertheless, I suspect I reflect a majority of public opinion. I’m pretty sure a majority of ordinary Americans don’t want to be nasty or disrespect transgender people, but there’s a sense the crusade has gone a bit too far.
Sorry, but imprisoned women have rights too, and even “regular folks” might end up in prison. But in Canada when you ask the authorities how many men are currently in women’s prisons you get the Orwellian reply “there are no men in womens prisons” and in fact they don’t even know because they don’t actually keep track of the data of their physical males with all the power differential and -forgive me, often functioning penises- imprisoned with women. Even when these are convicted sex offenders. We are victimizing the most vulnerable in the name of progress and it’s sickening. It’s wrong even if the problem is rare although again- once you go full trans in your gender definitions you’d have zero way of knowning if it’s rare or not!
You're putting words in my mouth. I never said it was a significant motivation of transition. But if you leave a loophole it will be exploited by bad actors. Hence the need to approach the matter seriously.
Does anti-trans legislation actually do anything about that though?
I mean, if your fear is that a cis-man is going to go into a women’s restroom and rape women, how does banning trans people from using public bathrooms change that? Is that going to stop someone who already wanted to commit rape from going in?
Don't take this the wrong way but this is where the conversation enters the twilight zone. If the standard is self-ID then there is no way to police who is and is not acting in bad faith, until after the fact.
Now as I said above, I don't support conservative legislative efforts. I think the better way to approach this is similar to the ADA, with reasonable accommodations, but not necessarily being required to simply accept what everyone demands at all times. That way lies a path.
How does any policy other than self-ID work for bathrooms? Do you need to swipe your drivers license to open a turnstile?
Let’s be blunt. Does a person with a penis have a place in a women’s changing room? Self Id is all well and good but there are also some objective facts people might find objectionable.
I have thoughts but admittedly it isn't an easy question. I think adding unisex options is a good idea where possible. At a point though I think we also have to get to a firmer definition of who is and is not trans than what we have currently.
Before this become a national discussion - how were these issues addressed? Not many places had bouncers in front of restrooms checking in your pants. People largely do the right thing, and if there is some creeper they call out for help or report it (or for an unfortunate number are violated in some way). How the post-trans-acceptance world different? The events aren't that common, and to the extent they occur there would probably be similar reactions.
Shouldn’t we prevent significant degrees of attacks against vulnerable women, such as women in prisons or shelters? Attacks on these women are a significant problem already—why give any man the legal right to access protected women’s spaces?
I’m all for increasing safety in prison environments but I find it interesting that you see so much talk about how women who were sentenced to prison need to be protected from trans women, but most of the people making that complaint have very very very little to say about prison reform or criminal justice reform in any other context.
People only seem to care about female inmates when they might be housed with a trans person.
I think this is an unfair argument, especially on this forum. It’s possible to be concerned about criminal justice reform and prison reform and at the same time be concerned about this particular scenario.
Sure, but it is extremely extremely rare for people to be legitimately and genuinely concerned about both.
Trans people’s placement in prisons is almost never brought up as part of a broader policy about protecting women who are in prison. It’s brought up in the context of trans issues.
I don't see how you could even gather the evidence for that observation. The topic came up today in the context of trans / cis-women, so a handful of people weighted in on it. The broader topic of women inmate's rights doesn't often come up, but if it did, they might weigh in with a concerned opinion as well. You couldn't possibly know that they wouldn't.
FWIW I have written condemnations of prison rape on the Internet, including my substack, that never mention trans inmates, but also think we can't do pure self ID on the issue of placement of trans inmates due to the sexual assault threat. So we do exist.
Do you have any evidence that it’s extremely rare? Because I know many people who are genuinely concrete about both. That’s anecdotal, obviously, but it seems like you’re relying on anecdotes, too.
Classic whataboutism. Today’s post is about transgender issues so that’s what’s being discussed. Besides the argument here is either correct or not - so reply to that. Do you agree or disagree that this is a bad and dangerous policy? Don’t hide behind other problems.
I don't understand why there's this huge concern about transgender rapists in women's prisons but not a similar concern about cisgender lesbian rapists in women's prisons.
Do you understand why there would be more concern about cis male rapists in women's prisons versus cis lesbian rapists? So long as prisoners can merely self-identify as transgender to be placed in women's prisons (several of these prisoners only assert a trans identity after entering prisons) the exact same concerns apply.
I’m concerned about all rape. But to answer the spirit of your question, I think people are more often expressing concern about self ID because it represents a policy change, and it’s reasonable to ask whether that would make conditions with regard to sexual violence better or worse.
I don’t see the issue in general with trans women inmates being put in with cisgender women inmates but it depends on a case by case basis, especially based on the person’s criminal history. Sexual offenders and particularly violent offenders need to be handled with care and may need special placement.
I mean it is also problematic if someone who is convicted of raping men is given easy access to male inmates.
A huge amount of rapes in women's prisons are committed by cis-male guards. Do you want them to be banned from employment in prisons? It would probably prevent far more rapes than these fantasy scenarios of male rapists claiming to be women in bad faith.
This “fantasy scenario” just took down the Scottish first minister.
In any case, you should at this point understand status quo bias. If you’re talking about making a major change, that’s going to evince a larger reaction from people that the status quo, so deflecting to “why don’t you care equally about *this other thing*” is truly missing the point.
But since you brought it up, yeah, that’s also bad! What else do you want to hear? Are you suggesting we should change the policy around guards in order to decrease rapes, so we can then also change the policy of where male sex offenders are housed, which will increase rape? That way the amount of rape stays the same? If you’re going to make bad faith accusations, I can too.
Maybe do both?
Non sequitur. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
It’s certainly been the case in prisons. See also the implosion of the debate in Scotland (first minister just resigned, not officially but clearly in fallout from debacle)
How many sexual assaults constitute a "signficant degree"? Can you please give us a number? Then maybe you could tell the first x-1 victims that their assaults were not "significant"
It seems to me that if you truly have gender dysphoria you would not be agitating to have the right to parade your unaltered genitalia around locker rooms or try to bully biological women into not having a problem with it.
So I guess it depends on what you mean by attack.
The problem is not with people with dysphoria, who genuinely present as women -- they have always been accepted in women’s spaces, because we understood their need to have a safe space -- it’s with those who believe that simply stating they re women is sufficient. Sorry, it’s not.
(And if trans men without bottom surgery went into gay male spaces, disrobed and demanded that they be desired as men, well, I really don’t think there would be this cultural pushback against them as transphobic. People would very quickly see how ridiculous and yes, offensive it was.)
People are pointing out what I think is the crux of the issue, which is that geography matters in terms of which set of bullies one will be in closest proximity to, and therefore be most aware of (as an aside, as a geography professor I’m always happy when geography enters the conversation!). It’s less productive, I think, to determine “who started it” because that’s a) impossible, and b) inevitably drives us right where the bullies want us, which is a politics of retribution and grievance.
The cool thing about SB and the vast majority of its commenters is that I think we are sick of grievance and retribution being presented as enlightened bases for political engagement. This is going to sound kind of utopian or otherwise naive, but I think that the more we can collectively say “no” to the bullies in more venues, the better. We need to look for opportunities to stick up for the people who are willing to be brave and articulate what I’m going to call off-the-cuff a politics of “compassionate skepticism” (that’s a terrible name, please offer better ones).
I’ve said this before, but I really really like that people here are, by and large, kind and interested in actually discussing rather than screaming at each other. And even beyond that, independent thinkers in a genuine sense: not the kind of bargain basement sanctimony-masquerading-as “intellectual bravery” peddled by the usual suspects, but the kind that’s willing to accept that most issues of social or political significance are legitimately complex, and that tribalism distorts. So again, thanks all.
Me from the future: dude, you spoke way too soon. Some above comments went off the rails and proved me totally wrong!
Are the "gotcha" games still much of an issue? I think the trans community has gotten a big Overton benefit from the nonbinary community. Struggles with they/them grammar (and difficulties comprehending nonbinary orientation in the first place) make deadnaming and misgendering prohibitions much more appealing by comparison.
Yeah I think Matt's tone is way off here.
Thank you, this is a clearly stated parceling out of the issue. I'm a progressive adult woman and worry about this for AFAB people younger than me. I would love to see more progressive commentators engaging with the following reality: adolescence as a woman is in many ways terrible and frightening. There is a huge change in how other people, including adults, see you and treat you and many of those changes are frankly for the worse and they stay that way forever. I can easily imagine that many girls I knew as a teenager, maybe myself as well, would have taken what must seem in some ways like a simple out if it had been available at the time. To be clear, the majority of girls I'm thinking of are now stable adult women; one transitioned as an adult. Having noticeable breasts as an awkward teenager, for example, is really just miserable. But my breastfeeding relationship with my child was one of the most fulfilling experiences I've ever had, in a way that I absolutely could not have imagined as a teenager. The idea of making an irreversible choice when I was 15 or 16 that would have taken that away is heartbreaking.
The unmistakable physical reality here is that transitioning is not a simple out, and it's not clear that hormone blockers are either. Moreover I wish the discourse around this was more nuanced around the fact that feeling alienation from femininity, or even dysphoria around femininity, is not the same thing as feeling comfortable in masculinity. I would be very interested to know what percentage of AFAB teenagers seeking gender-related care are choosing male pronouns versus "they/them". People should absolutely have the dignity to identify however they want. And, there has to be a way to answer discomfort with female puberty and living as a woman in society other than "you can run from this if you want".
Great comment. Structurally, it's interesting that AFAB is used without comment. I had to google it. Never heard of it before. The terminology proliferation on this issue has been extraordinary.
afab is either orwellian or theistic. who exactly does the assigning at birth? doesn’t that term posit an intelligence to do the assigning? isn’t “born female” or “biological female” more elegant?
I always assumed it was meant to refer to the medical professional making the call at birth for medical and government records based on looking at the genitals of the newborn.
Yes, I don't agree with the terminology, but that's absolutely how it's being used, AFAICT. (Wes Yang -- who I will stress is not without his faults -- has posted some scans from kids books and school materials where the framing is that doctors "guess" the baby's gender and "sometimes they get it wrong.")
The annoying thing about it is that it undermines the very distinction of sex and gender that-I thought -is at the very basis of the definition of gender dysphoria.
There are plenty of progressive commentators who have engaged on this issue. You probably won't like what they have to say, though--they would say you are projecting your own pubertal struggles on trans boys and casting them as "confused girls running away from scary puberty," when in truth you do not know what is going on in their heads. At its core, this is denial that there can be an internal transgender experience different than a cisgender one, which is why people get mad.
While the OP is arguably casting her own experience on trans boys, (although it seems to be a very common experience) it seems that the opposite is clearly true as well. A lot of trans people refuse to consider the possibility of what the OP wrote because they look at their own experience and think "well it worked for me."
Perhaps the answer is that both experiences happen and, when an adolescent comes out as trans, we should neither reject their claim out of hand, nor assume that they have fully thought the issue through.
Yeah as below I'll gladly own that my experiences impact my views here -- ultimately everyone, cis and trans, has a personal experience of gender and gender identity which is one of the reasons this issue touches a lot of nerves. I agree with your concluding statement on this but would add "at the outset, we should neither..." because at some point you do have to decide on an action.
It really is a question for me of what constitutes responsible and ethical parenthood around this question, or more broadly what constitutes responsible and ethical actions of adults vis-a-vis children when it comes to gender identity.
I agree, and come at this from a very similar place. I have a 7 yo girl. Right now, I have no reason to think she's trans, but it really does seem like your kid can come out as trans after displaying no signs (whether this is ROGD or unobservent parents is an open question in my book).
I am concerned that as she gets a bit older, she will decide/realize/reveal she is trans, and the world (including my wife, with whom i disagree a lot on this issue) will conspire to prevent us from actually exploring the question. If it turns out that she is trans, great, I will have no problem with that, but I don't want her to be discouraged or prevented from really considering whether she is or if there is something else going on. If she is, I also want to make sure that any medical transition she goes therough is properly vetted (like any other medical treatment) and I am concerned this is not happening because anyone questioning its efficacy is tarred as transphobic.
I obviously was never an adolescent girl, so i don't quite share your experience, but I was an adolescent, and I remember adopting a lot of "identities" while trying to figure out who I was. Maybe there is a distinction between trying out being goth or a punk or a skater and deciding you are trans, but I'm not sure that is always true, especially for an adolescent in a world where being trans or NB is increasingly seen as "cool."
People often object to anyone who is not trans, and does not have a loved one who is trans from venturing into this space, asking "what business isn't of yours?" I think that objection is flawed on several grounds, but, so long as it is possible that my daughter may come out as trans as she gets older, it very much seems to be my business, in the same way that I care about social security despite not yet being retired.
Yes, thank you, I relate to this a lot. To build on what you're saying, I want to be clear as to why my initial comment focused on what it was like for me and many other women I know to be teenage girls and my subsequent comments have been around the role of parents. The reason is that the claim that (it seems to me) is being made is that the only responsible action of parents (specifically) and adults (broadly) when an adolescent says "I feel uncomfortable in my body and I think the answer to that is medical intervention" is to support rapid access to that intervention. Whereas I spent a lot of time feeling uncomfortable in my body as a teenager and medical intervention would have been absolutely the wrong answer and I cannot say for certain that I and others I knew with similar experiences wouldn't have asked for medical intervention if the discourse around gender and body issues at the time was the way that it is now. And that leads me to think that this issue is nuanced and that "rapid access to permanent medical intervention" is not necessarily the only responsible parenting action -- which again to be clear does not mean that "access to medical intervention" is never the right action or that you shouldn't end up there in most cases, but that's very different than getting there rapidly, in all cases.
So, yes, I am definitely looking at this (like many other issues) through the lens of my personal experience. I think that's a pretty common way to look at issues generally, for almost everyone, and one of the challenges of civic engagement is when to apply lessons from your own life versus recognizing the limitations of your own points of view. Frankly if this entire debate concerned adults and the rights and behaviors of adults, my stance would be limited to the concerns on dignity and right of self-determination that MY starts with. And to be clear, where I fall on that is that adults should have full rights of dignity and self-determination and the freedom to determine how they move through society and how they present, up to the point where it starts infringing on the rights of others, which I don't think really occurs w/r/t trans adults in the general case.
But I am also a parent and as parent I have to make decisions on behalf of my child ALL THE TIME, including medical decisions, including difficult and fraught decisions. This is a normal, appropriate part of parenting. And I just do not think it is workable to have the consensus be "because you, the parent, are cis, your personal understanding of this issue is irrelevant to the decision you must make".
My main concern in looking at this discourse is that I would want to feel that I could trust medical advice I was getting from a doctor if I were to be in this situation as a parent and I would want to feel that the standard of care was rigorous and well-supported. To be clear, I do not support laws prohibiting gender-affirming care, I think those laws are wrong and bad. I think gender affirming care should be widely available but with an appropriate standard of care. Maybe a single two-hour meeting prior to a hormone prescription is just anecdotal and not actually the normal standard of care? But that to me would feel like a very limited amount of medical guidance for a very serious medical decision, even if it is the right decision!
The good news is that standard practices are more rigorous than a single appointment followed by a prescription. I would not want to too seriously judge cases where they seem to go very fast, because they may have judged that a child is at serious risk without immediate intervention and decided to make an exception. This is an area where care absolutely has to be done on a case by case basis. I agree best practices are to require a long period of insistence and persistence of the gender incongruence before prescribing hormones, and that's the standard we see in the vast majority of cases. It is important to remember, though, that kids might often have been struggling with something for years before coming out to their parents, so there can be a grey area when the practitioner is weighing how long the kids have been telling their parents they want treatment against how long the kid says they have felt this way.
I think it's also important to conceptualize gender affirming care is a long, drawn out process. Getting the first prescription does not lock anyone in. Puberty blockers buy time and can be discontinued--I think there's agreement kids should not be on them for years and years, but 6-12 months to make sure the gender noncongruence is persistent is still standard. Hormone therapy takes months and months and years and years to work, and the effects are gradual. So the person receiving the treatment very much has quite a lot of time to figure out if this is what they really want and if it is helping them before big permanent effects set in.
This is why regret rates among those who have medically transitioned are so low! When you're on medicine that is gradually causing hair or breasts to grow on your chest, you will probably figure out in a hurry if that's actually something you want.
"I agree best practices are to require a long period of insistence and persistence of the gender incongruence before prescribing hormones, and that's the standard we see in the vast majority of cases. It is important to remember, though, that kids might often have been struggling with something for years before coming out to their parents, so there can be a grey area when the practitioner is weighing how long the kids have been telling their parents they want treatment against how long the kid says they have felt this way."
This is not what the WPATH guidelines require and it does not fit with the large increase in AFAB transitioners many of whom showed no gender non-conformity before puberty. As a parent of a young trans man I can tell you that kids can find scripts online and know what to tell Doctors to get on hormones in no time. I think it's easy to just assume that parents are clueless and in denial, but as parents we know that we love our kids and really don't care about their gender expression. It is a response of love to be skeptical about putting your teen on medications that will result in infertility and shorten their expected life span to resolve an issue that popped up overnight after a long Tumblr bath and a whole host of other psychological issues (eating disorder, self-harm, anxiety and depression) all of which point to a deep discomfort with puberty rather than gender. We are not hateful bigots and we are not going to accept that there's nothing to see here. I think that if you truly want to preserve medical transition for youth as an intervention you have to demonstrate some curiosity about what is happening in this moment to all these girls who are coming out as trans in puberty. And as the parent of a trans man I find it interesting that the prison debate never touches upon trans men. I for sure do not want my child incarcerated with cis men because he would be a target, and as a 5'2" person he would pose little threat to women inmates. I agree that trans women are a tough case and I would not want a rule that said all trans women go in men prisons but I also don't want a rule that says that biological sex is irrelevant to where you would imprison someone.
Showing gender nonconformity before puberty is not part of the guidelines and hasn't been for years. It's accepted now those ideas were based on stereotypes and did not capture trans people's experiences. It makes perfect sense that distress and realization of incongruity related to gender identity would appear with the onset of puberty, especially among those raised as girls pre-puberty who these days face less gendered policing than those raised as boys do.
Trans people talk to each other and share strategies for accessing care because care is hard to access! And of course, talking to other trans people can help a trans child figure out their own feelings. These aren't signs of a social contagion of confused girls. The numbers seeking care are still very, very small compared to our best guesses of the proportion of the overall population who are transgender.
I'm glad you are affirming of your son socially.
I really appreciate this reply! I think this leaves me with both descriptive (ie, what is the state of affairs in reality) and normative (ie, what should the state of affairs ideally by) questions:
On a descriptive level, my concern is that what you're describing here does not match e.g. the Reuters reporting MY linked and the reported experiences of other parents. I think there is a very real question of whether that's actually quite rare and the preponderance of reporting is fear-mongering. If so I would expect more replies from clinics along the lines of "we actually are very careful about this and here's what that looks like" rather than replies along the lines of "yeah we move quickly sometimes and that is actually correct when we do it" but I think on some level that gets into the normative question. That said I would welcome a really sober and well-reported look into the status quo approach at specialized clinics, which maybe you feel that the Reuters report does not meet.
On the normative level, I also see a real tension between what you describe and what I've seen advocates argue should be the case. Is this a fair paraphrase of your views?: "Gender affirming care for children and adolescents should be available to children who express dysphoria. This care should be a months- or years-long process and should be undertaken after counseling and with careful consideration, active monitoring by medical staff with the involvement of parents or guardians, and openness to the idea of discontinuation if it turns out not to be the right fit." If not, how would you characterize your stance of what should be the case?
This comment helpfully illustrates a frustrating problem in the "discourse": Nobody will actually defend some of the more aggressive treatment practices that have been reported. But we really don't know how common aggressive treatment practices are because American health care is extremely decentralized and trans activists have successfully stigmatized the whole question in academic circles.
So people have engaged this point, but they’ve dismissed it as baseless projection? I think you’re right that OP would not find that a satisfying response.
I don't think I called it "baseless" -- we don't know anyone else's internal world, and so it's very natural to think in this manner.
But it's pretty important for cis people to understand that trans people do have a very different internal experience. It's not "same experience, but confused" or "same experience, but mentally ill" or "same experience, but led astray." It's different.
I grant that trans people have a different experience, but it doesn't follow that anyone who seeks this kind of care is trans. Some detransitioners have written at length about how their feelings of alienation, combined with social media trends, led them to think transitioning was the answer to their problems only to find that it wasn't. https://open.substack.com/pub/lacroicsz/p/by-any-other-name?r=7ednr&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I think "baseless" is a fair gloss on your comments. "It's natural to think in this manner" doesn't change the fact that you're saying the whole basis for ariabatic's comment is her own thoughts, rather than anything more grounded.
I would hope this goes without saying, but you should take the writings of a politically active detransitioner where, in that very essay, she describes going down the rabbit hole of transphobic communities and developing a belief in the pseudoscientific "rapid onset gender dysphoria," with a grain of salt when they go on to say that their transition matched perfectly with this narrative of "confused girls on tumblr."
I think it says a lot that she doesn't actually lay out why she thought she had gender dysphoria as a teen or what the gender dysphoria she references talking to her friends about was.
Comparing this comment with the one I was responding to, it seems like you are not being totally consistent about the importance of listening to people's internal experiences.
I would "like" this multiple times if I could.
"...we are now in a new era of medicalizing teen girls’ discomfort with patriarchy while downplaying what appears to be a widespread youth mental health crisis."
finger snaps
Thanks Matt for this observation. I'm the mom of a born female child who wanted to transition at 12, and I feel like I've been fighting the fervor on the left about this for almost 10 years now. I said no to all interventions, now my child is 21, and I still don't think surgical intervention is the answer to a very complicated set of problematic social norms. My kid is smart and planning to be a civil rights lawyer, and we go at it about feminism and left illiberalism in a pretty healthy way, but youth are dramatic and impetuous and not particularly driven by reason. I think this trend will stabilize, but not before many young women have jumped on the medical intervention bandwagon.
Oh my god, that sounds so difficult. Bravo to you for holding the line on medicalization while still maintaining a good relationship. I hope your daughter becomes comfortable in her female body - not because I dislike trans people, but because it’s the obviously preferable medical and psychological outcome.
> because it’s the obviously preferable medical and psychological outcome.
This seems to be a major source of disagreement, unfortunately.
this could be improved by replacing “patriarchy” with “gendered expectations.”. The liberal young women who are socially transitioning are not living under patriarchy.
This should have been the lead.
There are some pretty good reasons why it wasn't (and not just ass covering).
The ass-covering percentage was somewhere in the double-digits, but agreed.
It might be in there somewhere, but I don't think it was the only reason. I think MY, like FdB wants to make it clear to everyone, that his problem isn't with trans people, it's with how certain activists approach this issue. Some of this is ass covering (although it won't work, Hobbs and Strangio et al will happily skip to the part where he isn't accepting the party line), but I think some of it is reminding his readers that refusing the accept the party line is not the same as, and does not justify, actual transphobia.
Ass covering is an acceptable price to pay for the difference in the quality of the comments between SB and Hanania’s substack. Hanania’s writing is roughly as good, but it’s muscular, uncompromising tone attracts some fellows who aren’t so nice.
> raise social media age to 21
> make exception for those that join the military at 18
> millions of teenagers sign up to serve their country so they can tik tok dance.
> America, Great Again!
Brilliant!
I think it's hard to talk about the trans issue without acknowledging that trans activists have been amongst the worst participants in the culture wars, and I think MattY should at least acknowledge that in his scolding. Do normie NYT liberals concerned about their children deserve to be treated with dignity as well? Does JK Rowling deserve any dignity for raising fairly minor concerns shared by wide swathes of the population? I don't think labeling anyone who steps out of line a transphobe and accusing them of literally causing trans people to commit suicide is a good way to treat people!
Honestly, part of me wonders who would have "won" the same-sex marriage culture war if Twitter had been around at the time.
"Does JK Rowling deserve any dignity for raising fairly minor concerns shared by wide swathes of the population?"
Natalie Wynn, a popular transwoman video creator on YouTube, made a video about Rowling a few years ago extending empathy to her for the hate mob that was after her and seriously considering the criticisms Rowling expressed to have, while still making the point that her views and the people she was palling around with were hateful and- as a billionaire with major cultural reach- doing major harm to the trans community, and asked that Rowling extend the same empathy to them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gDKbT_l2us
Yes Natalie Wynn is great! Unfortunately Natalie Wynn is far outside the mainstream of her community and has been attacked herself for doing things like this
That raises the question though, IS she outside of the mainstream of her community (again, she IS one of the most popular trans creators) or is there a vocal minority of angry assholes in the trans community that Twitter amplifies the voices of?
My concern isn't based off twitter, but from real-life conversations within progressive circles, amongst friends, colleagues, advocacy groups, etc. This is a uniquely toxic issue, and that's not a thing the internet made me believe, it's an actual fact.
If progressives wish to commit to elevating a politics of dignify over one of cruelty, they desperately need to police their own ranks.
They can make no real claim to this when they tolerate and elevate a great many people who derive enjoyment from hipster-eque feelings of superiority over ordinary people who don’t share every jot and tittle of their “high-minded ideals.”
The conservatives and plainly and obviously even worse at this, but they make no pretensions to caring.
Actually conservatives are not plainly and obviously worse at this; progressives are so sure of their moral superiority, not only do they broke no dissent, they are very mean. And, I hate to say it, really enjoy being mean.
Um. If you’re interacting with normie conservatives, sure, just as most normie liberals are sane.
The very online contingent of the nat-rightists are vastly, vastly worse than their progressive counterparts, literally made of hatred, spite, and cruelty. Hurting the people they don’t like is their *entire* reason for existence, and be damned to actually doing anything for the people they purport to give a damn about.
Sincere question - where do you find or interact with them?
I interact with liberals fairly frequently. Online, that's mostly here. But professionally I'm pretty sure most of my white-collar coworkers are liberal as are most of my neighbors. The HR legal departments that sometimes impact me are also staffed with liberals.
But I rarely interact with conservatives apart from a small number of individuals. I couldn't form a broad opinion on whether conservatives are "mean". I mostly hear about mean conservatives from liberals, in fact, and not first hand. Fwiw, and it might not be worth much, on this site when I encounter an A-hole they are usually on the far-left.
Comparing the meanness of liberals vs conservatives is tricky anyway, in the same way that I would have a hard time telling you which of Mexicans or Brits are more mean. So I'm very curious where you get so much exposure to broad swaths of cons?
also, what is nat-right?
My family are normie conservatives, as are the vast majority of my family friends and many of my professional and industry contacts. They’re virtually all, to a person, decent folks who have a different conception of their own and the national interest but with whom one can discuss these issues, find some points of alignment, move on, and have a cook-out and enjoy a bourbon.
My own friends of my own generation are mostly normie liberals fading into normie progressives for whom the same is true.
But I also follow Hanania and a number of other less insightful right-wing types to keep a finger on the pulse, and a lot of those people are batshit insane.
You need to get out more. This is a left of center site, and the right wingers here tend to be of the "graduate degree with unpopular opinions about race and society type" instead of the Tucker Carlson "they will not replace us" types. There are plenty of those out there who think Marjorie Taylor Greene is a squishy mealy-mouthed moderate. Look up how right-wingers talk about Ukraine and Russia and you will get a sense.
This doesn't really help me find a comparison group to the liberals I interact with or prominent liberals in general.
Maybe more importantly, when I do "get out more" I encounter normie, non-political or semi-engaged voters of either party who aren't really mean at all. I suspect one encounters the meanies by "staying in more" and hanging out on FB or Twitter or Cable News.
If you want the equivalent of this site, try some right-wing, non-Bulwark style site and you'll get the idea.
"There are plenty of those out there who think Marjorie Taylor Greene is a squishy mealy-mouthed moderate."
Thanks for trying to crush my faith in humanity, James.
Sorry to harsh your vibe, drosophilist.
"Nat-right" is "nationalist right," but I've never seen any attempt at defining the term by someone using it and, to me at least, it mostly just seems to be operating like a synonym for "alt-right."
Thanks.
Yeah, I don't at all doubt that there are nasty far-right people out there who get off on harassing people. I just don't know how many there are or how prominent or influential they are.
Roughly as prominent and as loud as their counterparts on the left, albeit less amplified by the contours of the media trumpet and their location within it.
My theory right now is that politics is basically a team sport, and we're all better off when the vast majority of folks are weekend warriors who turn up to the championship and otherwise relax with beer and BBQ at home. Extremely high engagement doesn't elevate the discourse between folks like those here or at the National Review who give a damn about policy and the role of governance, it degrades it to what we see on Twitter.
This sounds like the mirror image of the experience the few conservatives I knew in LA had. I can't even fathom what makes people act like that, but I think the knowledge that one is in the (local) majority emboldens A-holes.
This is also why I feel like "who is meaner" is a mostly pointless question. There's mean people everywhere. If a jerk grows up in rural Kansas, they likely become a Red jerk. If they grow up in LA, a blue jerk. If for some reason they develop a the less dominant political view of their area, they keep it to themselves.
It's all just human nature, and political tribal affiliation doesn't override it.
Always bears repeating, "You shouldn't derive your political analysis from the demographics of your little corner of the Internet."
Doesn't the same go for your corner of real life?
I really enjoyed the part about dignity and cruelty in the original article. I see a lot of cruelty online irrespective of the notional politics of the site.
As a counter I would just say...
“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj8n4MfhjUc
A generalized column on the right’s recurring spasms of performative assholery would have been entirely defensible, but that’s not what Bouie wrote. Instead, Bouie offered a column that, under the cloak of progressive piety, isn’t even remotely concerned with the extent to which gender dysphoria, super-charged by toxic forms of social media, has become the new anorexia. Bouie’s bromides will doubtless inspire more of the NYT’s readership to treat Rowling’s very mainstream remarks on these issues as if they were extreme, to become less analytical about systemic misogyny and its effects, to treat pseudo-scientific claims about biological sex without any skepticism at all. However, I do appreciate a columnist’s need to lead with sincere applause for the part of his audience that he is about to truly piss off. But the part that will be pissed off--the ones who are convinced that sexual identity is both innate and yet weirdly non-biological--have thus far proven insatiable and vicious. They won’t be fooled and will offer no kudos for the very reasonable observations this Slow Boring offered.
Just one minor note here but worth tossing in: as a Comment Reader™, I've long noticed that on some of the edges of trans issues (and to a lesser extent on identity politics questions in general), the NYT readership is pretty suspicious of the hardcore claims. In particular, I think the 'new anorexia' and gender identity/sex stereotypes gets a pretty agreeable reception. The comments on the Rowling piece today are broadly positive, especially when you look at the top rated ones.
Speculation, but could reflect an age split in NYT commenters.
In addition to raising commonly acknowledged questions about what is the proper age of maturity when people should have full autonomy to do what they please with their own body, the transgender/dysphoria debate also raises less commonly acknowledged fundamental questions about the nature of human consciousness and identity.
Does individual human consciousness and identity have an essence that exists apart from, and possibly in contradiction too, the physiological body a person is born with?
Ordinarily, it's more traditional or religious people who say yes, human consciousness, aka the soul, does have an existence and identity separate from the biological body, such that there could, for example, in theory be a male body inhabited by a woman's soul. And it's more secular, materialistic people who say that no, body and mind are one, and there is no such thing as a separate soul or identity apart from the natural body.
The gender dysphoria debate today scrambles these normal fault lines.
This is where I constantly come back to on this. The "Gender Identity" formulation itself is deeply flawed.
I'm extremely supportive of efforts to destigmatize gender non-conforming behavior and expression. I'm also in favor of promoting effective, compassionate treatment of gender dysphoria.
The "Gender Identity" concept is in conflict with both of these goals. It is a fundamentalizing of gendered expressions based in cultural roles and stereotypes, in the service of denying the psychologically disordered nature of GD.
A byproduct of the current trans cultural freakout, strengthening the notion that there are "male behaviors/traits" and "female behaviors/traits" beyond what's between your legs, makes me deeply sad.
A little girl who plays with trucks isn't less of a girl. A boy who plays with dolls isn't less of a boy. This was the progressive and maybe-approaching-mainstream view in the 1990s and 2000s.
It's not deeply flawed, actually. It's a pretty good theoretical explanation for both trans people's experiences and cis people's reflexive disgust at the idea of becoming the opposite sex. It's a sound explanation for the case of David Reimer, a boy who was assigned female after a surgical accident and whose parents then attempted to raise and socialize him as a girl, which did not succeed.
And it's really not hard to guess at the mechanism. If you accept that sexuality can be biologically innate, it should not be hard to conceptualize a similar innate gender-y thing that develops in our brains and usually aligns with our sex-at-birth but sometimes doesn't (just as humans are usually heterosexual but sometimes aren't).
I agree that if such a thing existed it would have some explanatory power for the experience of some individuals. Problem is there's no evidence it exists. At the very most generous, it's like a black hole, observable only by it's influence on the matter around it. There isn't even a coherent concept of what it could be. What exactly type of innate characteristic would manifest as an immutable need to conform one's superficial anatomy and gender expression to a particular set of culturally defined expectations?
Given that there are in fact, myriad reasons for individuals to experience social discomfort or distress about their bodies and their ability to perform to externally imposed expectations, it is utterly unnecessary and unhelpful to wishcast the existence of a quasi-metaphysical, unobservable gender construct to explain the very real distress of the fractional subset of trans identifying people who suffer from truly persistent, unconfounded gender dysphoria.
In the real world, people talking about what they experience is evidence. This is how the entirety of psychology and psychiatry works. This is how treatment of pain works and how diagnosis and treatment of fatigue syndromes works. It's literally how court evidence works!
"Well we can never know FOR SURE" is not some brilliant excuse that wins the argument here. It's not something the experts never thought about. It's just casting about for a reason to ignore people who are saying things about their experiences that you don't want to believe.
Literally nothing I'm saying ignores or questions anyone's subjective experience. What I'm interrogating are explanations. Fundamentally the entire concept of gender dysphoria is about the distress of one's subjective experience being contradicted by observable reality, so the question is, "Where's the contradiction?" If the contention is that the flaw is in our observations of reality then you typically need an evidentiary basis for that claim. "Gender Identity" is such a hypothetical claim about reality.
Gender dysphoria as I am posing it is distress caused by a mismatch of gender identity (real, biological phenomenon) and biological sex (real, biological phenomenon). Calling gender dysphoria or gender identity "not reality based" is assuming your desired conclusion.
There are plenty of real things that we have no direct evidence for. It is not particularly shocking that we have to rely on indirect evidence to support the existence of an innate neurological or psychological gender identity -- the brain is incredibly complex, neonatal development is incredibly complex, and ethics constrain our ability to conduct experiments.
But there is plenty of evidence. Speaking of unethical experiments, you might be interested in the case of David Reimer -- a boy who lost his penis in a surgical accident as an infant and was then raised as a girl. Somehow, he knew he was supposed to be a boy. He managed to peer through the facade created by his parents and doctors at "reality" -- which is exactly what you'd expect if there was an innate aspect to gender identity.
People feel and experience many things that are not reality based. Phantom pains in a missing limb, for example.
How does a teen or really any person have the context to state that the feel like another gender? You can say I perceive myself as this gender, but there is no context for actually experiencing the context of a woman if you're man. You can dress like another gender and experience how society treats you (maybe), but that isn't the fear of getting your period in gym class or date rape leading to pregnancy or hormonal swings of a healthy cycle. I'm not saying this is the essence of being woman, but how would I as a teenage boy have any sense of what it actually means to be a women?
Maybe the request is "I want society to treat me like a women". Then the question for society is when it accepts that request (pronouns) and when it rejects it with good reason (sports, women's shelters?).
You can't really reduce gender to any set of experiences or biological functions. It's a complex thing. Anything you name that is "core" to the experience, I can find (non-transgender) exceptions.
The answer to the rest of what you're discussing here can kind of only be answered by explaining the transgender experience and gender dysphoria. In general, though, the way someone grows to identify with the opposite sex is by recognizing they dislike the various physical/societal facets of being the gender matching their biological sex and/or they envy the facets of the opposite sex, and realizing that other people of their biological sex do not feel the same way. There is usually a lot of doubt in this process!
What facets? Well, it varies case by case and can be almost anything. If you're interested, here's some light reading: https://genderdysphoria.fyi/
"Problem is there's no evidence it exists."
That's not actually true: physiological differences that correlate with prenatal hormone exposure can often be observed in trans people. There's also the fact that in sets of twins where one twin is trans, the other twin is also trans much more often than would be predicted by chance - even in twins separated at birth.
I would fully expect a higher level of identification with the idea of transness in individuals whose biology is towards the less gender conforming ends of the relevant bell curves, which, in my understanding, is what those sorts of evidence typically show.
I think that biology is what "gender identity" actually refers to.
Wrapping it up in one term, "identity", isn't always helpful. It's a simplification, like the Bohr model of the atom, that can be useful for explaining it to people who are new to the topic and have no other frame of reference. But once they start asking probing questions that test the boundaries of that simplified model, it's time to move on to a more complex one that can answer those questions.
I've never had a voice in the back of my head whispering "Psst, don't believe the mirror! You're a girl!" And I can't speak for everyone, but judging from what I've read in comment sections, most people don't have a voice like that either.
What they have instead are experiences in which their gender becomes salient in some way and provokes an emotional reaction -- a reaction which they may or may not consciously connect to their gender at the time, depending on exactly what happened and how much insight they have into themselves.
Wendy linked to genderdysphoria.fyi above, a site that has a good (and long) list of ways in which GD can manifest. Interestingly, different people tend to experience different combinations of them: there are a bunch of things that *can* provoke the sort of reaction that implies they'd be more comfortable as the opposite sex, but none of them are 100% guaranteed to resonate with any particular trans person. They're just all correlated.
Kinda like how there are a bunch of observable physiological differences that *can* occur in people with some sort of gender non-conformity, but none of them are 100% guaranteed. Suspiciously like that, in fact.
So, here's a less simplified model. It may or may not be The Truth, but it lines up with my experience and research better than the singular "gender identity" model while explaining all the same things:
Many parts of the body develop differently in the presence vs. absence of testosterone before birth.
They all develop at different times during gestation, which normally doesn't matter, because the prenatal hormonal environment (and the body's response to those hormones) is usually consistent across the relevant time and space: either everything develops "the female way", or everything develops "the male way".
But sometimes it's inconsistent, and different parts develop in different directions.
Some of those parts happen to be in the brain, and the function they normally serve is to influence our psychology in ways that nudge us toward sex-specific behaviors, making us visible, attractive, and attracted to possible mates.
Because human behavior is complex, the way they exert that influence is through emotional cues and rewards that encourage us to learn sex-specific behaviors from other humans, and seek out positive feedback to confirm that we've gotten them right.
Because this is all just our species' particular version of something deep down that evolved a long, long time ago, something that's present in some form in any species with complex sex-specific behaviors... there isn't much we can do about it. Once it develops a certain way, we're stuck with it.
And because this is all happening at a low level, we aren't really conscious of what's happening, and if we try to explain our reaction, what comes to mind may actually be a story we write on the spot based on the things we *are* consciously aware of (just like trying to explain any other emotional reaction!). If seeing a beard in the mirror makes me feel a pang of disappointment, I may explain it as "this goatee looks dumb on me, maybe I should try a new style, but I don't really know what else would look good" when my brain is actually trying to say "that is NOT what I expect to see on an attractive woman's face".
So, "gender identity" is a concept representing what we get when we take stock of all of these emotional signals that we can consciously connect to gender, and try to decide whether they line up more with "the male way" or "the female way" of development. The explosion of gender identities happens because sometimes the signals are conflicting or unclear, and it's hard to make a call either way, but people still want to call it something. And gender identity can change over time as we get in new situations and experience new signals, or as we recognize the meaning of signals we've already experienced.
(This might get me tarred as a transmedicalist, I guess, but I'm throwing caution to the wind today!)
So this is just my experience, n = 1, but I'm a cis person and I do not feel "reflexive disgust " at becoming a different sex.
Suppose I wake up tomorrow in a man's body, but with the same mind as I have right now. (For the sake of argument, let's say my husband is bisexual, because if he wanted to divorce me now that I'm a man that would be traumatic).
I imagine that my thoughts would be:
"What the [expletive] happened?!?!"
"I guess I'll have to learn to pee standing up. And to shave my face."
"Hey, I can lift heavy things more easily now! Neat!"
And that would be it. I would live my life as I do now, working my job, loving my husband and son, reading my books. It would not be some kind of tragedy or unbearable burden.
Again, n = 1, and I am not trying to deny what trans people go through. Just wanted to point out that not everyone has an innate sense of "gender identity " completely divorced from their body. As someone on another blog described it, some people are "cis by default. "
I'll take this another step and say that where Cis people do construct powerful, psychological "gender identities" it is almost universally, extremely unhealthy and negative. Everyone knows some toxic, performatively hyper-masculine douchebag who is a truly miserable human being due to his terrible conception of gender. THAT dude has a "Gender Identity".
Let's just say (1) a lot of cis people definitely don't agree, and (2) I used to think the same thing before I realized I was trans. ;)
Another piece of evidence for cisgender people having innate gender identity is the tragic case of David Reimer. https://isna.org/faq/reimer/
I’m really confused to hear David Reiner used as evidence of gender identity. The point is that he was biologically male, and despite some hormonal intervention and being raised as a girl, he knew something was wrong.
But…he was, in fact, male.
His case suggests that some aspects of what we call gender may indeed be biological, and that we cannot simply make males female by raising them as such.
This seems to directly contradict the idea of gender identity.
In this thread we're talking about the concept of innate gender identity, which is posited to be separate from (but usually in alignment with) biological sex. If that theory is true, than a cis person forcibly and unknowingly transitioned (like David) should face similar distress to what transgender people call gender dysphoria.
Raising David as a girl, despite having modified his genitalia and giving him hormones, did not work. He always knew something was wrong, and he "transitioned" to living as male as soon as he could. Assuming there is such a thing as innate gender identity separate from biological sex, David's case is exactly what you would expect would happen if you forcibly transitioned a cis person.
Now you could argue that no, there's no separate gender identity, David was just male and that's why he's unhappy. But then you need an alternate explanation for why many trans people describe living as their original gender in very similar terms to the way David experienced being a girl, and how when they medically transition they can become happy.
Two questions: what is the essence of gender apart from sex?
If there is an innate biological element, why is there a race you confirm secondary sexual characteristics with gender?
A person born female will never experience being a biological father. I would argue that this is in many ways defining of masculinity (while not present in every man's experience). The context for gender roles is often historically ground in biology and sex. I get that some people to not fit cleanly into gender concepts, but I'd argue that gender is a cultural/social cloud emanating from biological function of sexuality and associate biological variance due to sex, not a distinct characteristic or dimension.
I think if you knew more trans people irl you might not think that being trans (which sort of requires buying to the "Gender Identity" concept as you say) is fundamentalizing gendered stereotypes. I know trans women who have very traditionally masculine coded jobs or hobbies and trans men with feminine coded jobs and hobbies. But we still know that those trans women are women who happen to like working on their motorcycles or those trans men are men who happen to enjoy fiber arts because belief in the "Gender Identity" concept is belief that gender is not merely a set of stereotypes but that it's part of who you are and how you relate to the world around you.
So I fully do appreciate that this IS complicated. It would be obviously false of me to suggest that every trans person was driven by asperations towards some cultural formulation of the platonic ideal of masculinity/femininity. Clearly the whole "passing" concept is a fraught one. What I do think is essential to transness is the formation of an individual construct of gender, however that might manifest, that the individual has a powerful, compulsive drive to conform to. The thing that I contest is the idea that that construct is an innate and immutable "Gender Identity" characteristic comparable to a biological one. Gender is not an innate thing. Social feedback mechanisms are essential to it's nature.
It has nothing to do with materialism versus dualism. Gender identity is a real psychological phenomenon that (like other psychological phenomena) has something to do with the brain. It's not shocking or mysterious or needing of a supernatural explanation that there are people who experience a mismatch between their psychological gender identity and their other sex characteristics.
The mismatch you describe is not part of mind-body dualism, but the strident contention by certain individuals that this makes people with that condition "really" a man or woman, notwithstanding their objectively verifiable biological sex, is absolutely that sort of supernatural dualism -- it's privileging a purely self-reported psychological state over physical reality.
If we're materialists, then a psychological state is a physical reality too. Which physical reality we pick to determine someone's "real" gender is a question about what gender is (or what gender ought to be), and it doesn't turn on whether there is a gendered "soul."
Edit: For example, we might think that the important question is about gender's social function (there are these social categories "man" and "woman" that influence names, pronouns, what bathroom to use, etc.) and the functionally appropriate gender designation for a trans person corresponds to their psychological gender. Not a hint of dualism in that story.
People with profound psychosis can believe they are angels or demons. It does not make them one. Subjective belief may or may not correspond with reality, and it is subjective belief that is wrong when it does not correspond with reality.
Trans people are not psychotic or deluded. They understand the physical facts about their bodies. The issue is about the significance of those facts.
Indeed, I believe in some societies, gender is based mostly on social roles. But in western society, there's been a general trend away from that, which is why a lot of the discourse around this feels regressive or appealing to some supernatural quantity.
It's not about "social roles" in the sense of, who does the housework and who earns income. People can and do have a psychological sense of gender inconsistent with sex stereotypes. But even in the West we still use gendered pronouns, we still have a whole scheme for what people get named based upon their gender, we still sort people by gender in all sorts of contexts, most obviously bathrooms. Some of this might be ingrained in our social cognition (I don't particularly like this thought but it does seem very pervasive across cultures and resistant to change even in liberal communities). And very little of it has to do with a given person's "biology"--gendered pronouns for example have no intrinsic relationship to chromosomes. So it makes sense to conform it to people's psychological sense of themselves.
> So it makes sense to conform it to people's psychological sense of themselves.
Sure, I think this comports with Matt's call to treat people with dignity, generally speaking (outside the edge cases he brought up). But I believe the discussion in this thread is more fundamentally about the basis for it and if there even is an objective, physical measure.
But also, not a hint in that story of modifying someone's objective, healthy body to conform it to a subjective perception of self that is based on culturally contingent gender categories and roles.
You're right, that's not a feature of that story. To explain why medical transition makes sense you need to add that people's psychological sense of gender, when it contrasts with their "natal sex"/"sex assigned at birth," is often accompanied by dysphoria about their physical sex characteristics.
And at that point, you are simply making an empirical claim about what is the most efficacious way to treat the distress this patient is experiencing here, now, today, as result of the alienation or estrangement they are experiencing from their own body, due to the cultural milieu they are living in -- therapy to modify their cognition, or to modify their body? That's a claim that needs to be supported by good, solid, methodologically sound evidence.
I think this is right, but the perspective is in some tension with the more metaphysical claims made about gender and gender identity. As a therapeutic matter, transition seems to be a good treatment for dysphoria. Part of transition is that people treat you as if you were your preferred gender. But you can accept that without believing anything at all about the metaphysics of gender.
I think you’re right to note that while transition is important for some people, the much bigger, more valuable project is to continue arguing against binary gender norms and expectations in general. Transition basically (and realistically) accepts and revolves around the idea that binary social gender is a thing. It would be great if some of the cultural energy could be dumped into spitting on gender reveal parties, princess toys and all the bullshit that demands people act in a certain way because of their count of X chromosomes.
Thank you! I agree. I’m in my 50s and have spent my life pushing back against what I can and can’t do/like/be due to my chromosome count. Why are these people trying to put us back in boxes?
I’m genuinely not sure I see the boxes thing. Like I’m a man whose interests, career and personality all code super duper feminine and I feel none of the internal angst that trans people I know talk about. Like all my social media feeds sell me women’s ads and just never even a little. A lot of shit from cis-straight men but never the queer community.
I mean I have all kinds of neuroticism but none of it is along that dimension. It seems to me that trans people are trying to break the box entirely not code me as one of them.
Getting people to reject "the gender binary" is going to be SIGNIFICANTLY harder than getting people to act humanely to transitioners. It's one thing to ask people to be nice to a small minority of people experiencing an abnormal state of being, it's quite another to ask them to discard notions that feel baked into biology, is a key component of several languages, and is the founding aspect of several religions via the Adam and Eve story.
This is crotchety old guy talk, but 15 years ago things were looking quite promising on this frontthough - big strides had been taken in agreeing that qualities like being nurturing, taking part in rough sports, being finicky about personal grooming & appearance, joining the military, being gentle etc were not bound up in gender as people had thought they were in decades past. It just feels like we've stalled since then.
I think there's the basic fact that most people like having genders, they like their own gender, they like gender dynamics, they like raising children to be a particular gender, etc.
I think we know of no genderless human society past or present, which counts as some evidence that there is something innately biological about our urge to have genders, even though we've managed to cut through a lot of the socially constructed bullshit that we built around them.
"they like raising their children to be a particular gender"
Anecdote time!
When my son was born, I got the idea that I would not enforce gender norms on him. I bought him "gender neutral" toys, such as stuffed animals and puzzles. Crucially, I never bought him any toy cars/trucks/trains. My husband went along with it.
One day, when our son was about a year old, we visited my husband's cousin, who had a son about the same age. The little boy had some toy trucks and trains.
My son's eyes lit up ike you wouldn't believe, and he immediately fell in love with the trucks and trains. After that, I said to myself: "What am I trying to prove?" And I started buying him trucks and trains, which he loves.
Tl;dr: I didn't set out to raise my son to be a given gender; I followed his interests, which, yes, turned out to conform to gender stereotypes. If he wanted princess dolls, I would have bought him princess dolls.
“As is the case with sex differences in children’s toy preferences, only male monkeys showed a significant preference for one toy type over the other, preferring wheeled over plush toys. Unlike male monkeys and like girls, female monkeys did not show any reliable preference for either toy type.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/
Where do you see this? Like I’m that guy and the only place I’ve ever experienced this is from straight Het men in the Macho asshat mold who insists I must have something wrong with me to mostly prefer women
and being a house husband.
Amongst queer and kinky people I’ve always been treated like a pretty normal bisexual man that has very feminine interests. No one has ever been like oh no you’re really trans.
I’m speaking just about general culture. Gay/queer/trans people tend to be on the side of the angels on this issue, from my perspective. More generally I find Hollywood pretty good on this stuff nowadays too, the real issue is that a lot of social media seems to be into hyper-gendered content.
My thoughts on this are a lot like my thoughts on religion. Social expectations of it have harmed many people. But there are also many people for whom it is an important part of their self-actualization, so abolition would be very harmful too.
I wish gender would be thought of more like height. There are obvious differences between tall and short and that's OK. And some kids/people are so far off the height they want/should be that medical intervention should be available. Height has not been abolished. People are free to lust after short/tall people. But in general it's not f*king relevant to most human interactions.
(In some happy, healthy places we are starting to creep this way with sexual preferences, especially amongst the young, so I do not despair of getting there with gender identity)
I would like a reduction in the social expectations of it so people feel more free to be who they are, and reducing the salience of it in our lives doesn't require abolition.
Do you think reduction in the social expectations of it is compatible with some people being interested in conversion, and heavily embracing both the private practice and public presentation of their chosen religion/gender? I think it probably depends a lot on the details of the form that public presentation takes (and some people, even with the zeal of a convert, will still harshly reject some traditional parts of their chosen religion/gender).
I think so. I envision gender as a Venn diagram with 2 circles (although of course way more than 2 "real" dimensions).
Reducing the social expectations is about increasing the overlap of the circles - I think there are both biological _and_ social components to where the "centers" of the circles are, but I'd love to seem the areas of both be a lot bigger.
But you can make the circles a lot bigger and still have areas where only one circle touches. If you've got dysphoria and feel that you belong in that portion of the _other_ circle that doesn't touch yours, then transition may be right for you.
So... I would say reducing the social expectations might be a pressure against the prevalence of transition. (One worry about that is that as transition becomes rarer, it could lose support, which would be bad for the people who need to transition - familiarity can help with acceptance)
Something to add to this: to the extent that young people are being rushed into gender treatments (and I'm certainly nowhere near expert enough to know whether they are or not), that is a distinctively American story.
The big increase in the number of children and teens coming out as trans has resulted in the opening of a lot more clinics in the USA. But in the UK, it's resulted in ever-increasing waiting times at the (NHS) clinics there already were, so, far from people being rushed into treatment, they are instead facing a waiting list that is currently about five years.
For adults, this has resulted in lots of grey-market use of hormones (hormones can be legally prescribed by any doctor, not just by a specialist; normal practise for any drug that is normally prescribed by a specialist is for the specialist to make the initial prescription and then your GP makes the monthly repeat prescriptions and monitors your condition; but there's no rule against a GP just prescribing hormones straight away and trans people tell each other about which GPs are prepared to do this and then get themselves transferred to a GP that will). For people under-18, there is some grey market use of puberty blockers as well, but grey-market GPs that will prescribe to minors are much rarer. In many more cases, they have simply had to undergo puberty while on the waiting list.
It appears that the Tavistock clinic in London tried to reduce the waiting list by processing patients without doing a full assessment, which is why there's been a huge scandal about cases where they have made bad mistakes. That's a problem. But it's a different problem with different causes from the American problem.
I'm not asking people not to pay attention to this: but the UK and US situations are very different and we shouldn't import concerns (in either direction) across the Atlantic, nor should we assume that the lessons we learn in the US can be applied in the UK or vice versa.
Abigail Thorn of Philosophy Tube did a video essay documenting her attempts at getting trans healthcare through the NHS. From GPs who were obligated to refer her to a specialist clinic but instead arbitrarily decided to make her wait for months and revisit multiple times, to GPs refusing to cooperate with NHS guidelines, to a general passing-of-the-buck that lets trans people fall through the cracks, it truly is an absolute clusterfuck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1eWIshUzr8
I think a lot of it has to do with the US for-profit medical system.
Absolutely! Which is why the British and American situations and responses are so radically different.
Transsexualism and homosexuality are different things. Many gay people do not approve of adding in the TQ to LGB. Some transgender people can believe some very odd things about ‘genital preferences’. Some parents push to have their gay or lesbian children transition because they are homophobes.
It’s complicated.
I think your statements here are accurate, but as trans rights are overwhelmingly "marketed" in both the US and the UK AFAICT (can't speak to Finland), as a mere extension of the gay civil rights struggle, I think FrigidWind's point about relative homophobia is still relevant.
I wouldn't say that the UK is necessarily more cautious. The UK health system is not well-adapted to unexpected large increases in any particular treatment, and responds to that by growing waiting lists until political pressure forces resources to be redeployed.
And, under Conservative governments they are not responsive to that sort of political pressure in relation to trans healthcare.
We've had issues in the past where specific forms of cancer treatment have built up huge waiting lists until political pressure forced redeployment of resources. Another one I remember is hip replacements. Because these aren't culture war issues, they get fixed eventually when year-long waits for treatment get onto the news. But, with the current UK media, who is broadcasting the five-year wait for trans healthcare?
Trans is a different thing from boys who like boys and girls who like girls.
Thank you for articulating my concerns so clearly. I was in medical school for 2001-2005 so I sat through the lectures where someone in a suit told us that concerns about the addictiveness of opioids was all old wives tales and we were bad doctors if we did not take our patients pain seriously and prescribe as much opioids as they asked for - do you want your patients to suffer? When I read some articles by pro transition activists, i hear the same phrases and arguments. And the same type of shoddy studies that don’t actually prove anything when you read the actual study. If there is one thing we’ve learned in the past 20 years is that for medical decisions you always need to consider both benefits and harms. I know a young person who transitioned quickly with great support and went on to suicide attempts and depression. If doctors had taken time to treat him as a young girl who had just watched her father collapse and bleed out in front of her from a ruptured aneurysm rather than rushing to “affirm his gender identity” I think he may have had a better outcome even if it meant delaying transition for a few years.
This is a great comment. A friend of mine in the medical field compared the current trend to bariatric surgery in the 90s. They were so excited about the intervention that they performed it on many bad candidates, with predictably bad outcomes.
I think the apt analogy is the off label use of antidepressants in children.
I was a victim of that push when the real problem was bullying.
I agree that details matter and that providers of transition care to trans kids shouldn't be immune from questioning or criticism. The problem I think is that the discourse occurs in a context of cultural anxiety about transness (and, to a lesser extent, queerness more broadly) that leads to distortions.
So: it's true that trans id has rapidly increased. But the increase in trans id corresponds with increased looseness in what trans id means. It doesn't mean that a person needs or seeks medical transition. We don't have totally comprehensive numbers for the number of kids getting medical transitions but the numbers we have suggest that it's very low--it's increased a lot in the recent past, but from a very low base. This is the problem with anecdotes about "four trans kids on my block," which I think is a big driver of the anxiety: four kids exploring alternate gender identities does not equate to four kids going on puberty blockers, let alone four kids obtaining gender confirmation surgery.
Looking at it this way I think helps contextualize the debate about "assessments." It's true that many US clinics are less conservative that the Dutch clinic ("de Vries and her colleagues"). And if the assumption is that there are lots of kids who are interested in this treatment who are poor candidates, then this looks bad. But if the assumption is that the number of kids getting this treatment is probably much fewer than the number who might benefit (which I think is plausible, given the numbers), then more extensive gatekeeping might be exactly the wrong proposal. (Similarly, screening based on mood disorders would run the risk of harming precisely the people whose dysphoria is worst.)
I think it is possible to cover these issues in a fair way (I thought Emily Bazelon's article, while not without flaws, did a good job) but a lot of the coverage doesn't give appropriate context and reflects people's anxieties back at them. (If we're worried about teenage girls facing the psychological effects of patriarchal beauty standards--and we should be--then it seems like there should be relatively more coverage of teenagers getting cosmetic surgery to "improve" their appearance, which is much more common.) Someone yesterday said that the NYT's error in covering this was similar to its error in covering the Hillary emails scandal and while I think the magnitude is different (it won't elect Donald Trump) the qualitative point is right; it's not that there's no issue, and it's not that the articles are lies, but it is that the tone and nature of the coverage distorts the substantive stakes.
Well, Bazelon’s article is the very first example given, by the recent open letter to the NYT (https://nytletter.com/), of a piece suffering from “anti-trans bias”. Context is important, but I don’t think the NYT should shy away from true facts because presenting them would “reflect people’s anxieties back at them.” It’s true that normies and Fox News viewers are hearing way too much about the dangers of trans medicine. That doesn’t mean the left should lie to itself as a counterbalance. And if it does, the NYT certainly shouldn’t help.
I wouldn't have signed that letter and the way it described the Bazelon article is 90% of why.
"But the increase in trans id corresponds with increased looseness in what trans id means. It doesn't mean that a person needs or seeks medical transition."
This is one reason why I, even as a person that fully supports trans people, find the nonbinary identity being lumped in with FtM and MtF trans people unhelpful at the moment. To the average person who is still trying to wrap their head around transitioning, seeing a bunch of kids identifying as trans but only going halfway, in a way that comes off as faddish and noncommittal, does undermine the legitimate trans kids wanting to be taken seriously. My guess is that, in the same way there are more bisexuals than there are gay/lesbian people, and the huge rise in LGB identification is significantly driven by a huge increase in self-identified bisexuality, there's a huge amount of nonbinary kids inflating the numbers on how many trans kids there are, as opposed to the numbers of kids seeking transition-related care.
"Similarly, screening based on mood disorders would run the risk of harming precisely the people whose dysphoria is worst"
Yeah, this was another point that stood out to me in that whistleblower article. She said that every teenage patient that came through had some kind of other mental disorder and 1) well, yeah, dysphoria would do that to someone and 2) show me a teenager that DOESN'T have (and I quote) "depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity [or autism]" these days and I'll show you a unicorn.
There's a lot of posts upthread about trans people having a unique subjective experience, but in fact you are right that enbies are very different than binary trans people. Trans men are different than trans women. And- and this is one of the only areas where we have very solid science- trans women who are gender dysphoric very early are extremely different from those who become dysphoric around adolescence.
This all speaks to the fact that there are a whole bunch of different mental conditions under "the trans umbrella", and while all of these people deserve equal rights and equal dignity, the issue of say "how to deal with a gynephilic trans woman sex offender with late onset dysphoria who wants to go to a women's prison?" is a totally different issue from "how to deal with an autistic 12 year old assigned female who is starting to say she might be nonbinary?". We should stop treating this as if it is all the same thing just because there's a political coalition to serve.
Yes, I have known many young woman, including my sister, who have said they "might be trans" or identified as nonbinary and eventually changed their minds. None of them were confident enough in it to actually want hormones. I definitely think part of the reason why this topic gets so much attention is because people know of instances like my sister in real life and are concerned about the idea of them getting easy access to hormones with little to no assessment. But the low rate of detransitioners does suggest that teenagers who want hormones are probably quite different from the "four trans kids on the block" and much more likely to be satisfied with their new gender identity.
This is a fair comment, but I would caution that we actually have NO IDEA what the detransition rate is. Nobody is systematically tracking this. The few surveys that exist are of doctors who only report the detransitioners who actually go back and tell the doctor about their detransition - which most detransitioners do not.
The comments from teachers on the “school transitioning” article and on Michelle Goldberg’s column in response were enlightening about this - essentially saying kids are more fluid and some ask to be called different things on different days in a way that’s more like a nickname than a medical procedure. I found that helpful perspective.
This is more-or-less where I'm at. I very much doubt that random people on the Internet have all the answers to the proper medical care for a kid who's questioning their gender. As you point out, for the large majority, the answer is "nothing medically invasive." However, people have let their discomfort around the whole issue turn things into a moral panic, making good faith efforts to
The other issue is the new rigid gender stereotypes. With the recent passing of Leslie Jordan they had clips of his one man show. He talked about growing up in Tennessee in the 50s and said something like, “When I was 5 I knew I was gay and everyone else did too…and that was a problem.” And he battled all this life with being an effeminate gay man.
We seem to be saying you can’t be an effeminate gay kid, boys only act a certain way. If you’re acting differently you must actually be a girl. On the other end you can’t just be a butch lesbian kid - girls only act a certain way. You must actually be a guy.
Who is saying this? I hear a lot of people say that other people are saying this but I've never heard anyone say it. Trans activists in particular are usually very explicit about the difference between gender identity and conformity or lack of conformity to sex stereotypes. You can be an effeminate cis man, or for that matter an effeminate trans man. They're different things and they don't necessarily coincide.
All one needs to do is answer the question: how do we distinguish the signs of a trans kid from a kid who will grow up to be gay/lesbian? They’re the same signs, and the signs themselves are very obviously gender non conforming behavior or interests.
Ten years ago, if a little boy liked playing with girls and wearing princess dresses, everybody knew he likely would grow up to be gay. Today, a great many people believe it’s a sign he is transgender and the best way to “help” him is to begin medicalizing his brain and body at the onset of puberty.
I was a little boy that liked playing with girls and princess dresses and whatever and I remember spending sleepless nights wondering whether I would have been happier if I had been a girl instead. But I couldn't get myself over that hump of actually wanting to be a girl because I was fine with myself as a boy, my internal conception of myself was a boy, I had a problem with what people dictated that I had to be as a boy.
I was a pretty introspective kid, but I worked through that all by myself in the late 90s, before I even knew what gay people were, much less trans people. If a halfway decent therapist was involved, I have to believe that they would be able to tease it out from a less introspective kid.
I too was very GNC as a kid, as a teen, and to some extent even now. I’m 38, so my only exposure to the concept of being trans was Boys Don’t Cry, which hit me so personally I ran to the edge of the theater doorway when Hillary Swank got savagely beaten.
I fantasized about being a boy. Cut my hair very short for a long time. I still have dysphoria. But I’m a physically healthy, sexually functioning bisexual adult now, capable of having deep connection with my partner.
I believe there are people and probably even kids who can access transition care and benefit from it. I’m not convinced from the current science that it’s the only, let alone the best, care available for people who are so deeply uncomfortable with their sexed bodies. And what I do know is that the medical care currently on offer is often a blunt instrument that quite frankly is a little ghoulish, even in the best of cases.
Far be it from me to psychoanalyze someone based on a substack comment, so try not to take this the wrong way, but saying that you (still) feel dysphoria and had strong emotional reactions to a trans narrative, I wonder how much of your discomfort with transition care is motivated by some amount of cognitive dissonance. Maybe there's a feeling like you missed the boat on your opportunity to transition, or maybe you're the gender equivalent of a Kinsey 4 in a heterosexual marriage- maybe you would have been happier if you had transitioned but you're in a life that is comfortable despite having not transitioned. You say you're physically healthy, and you're able to have deep relationships with partners, but you don't say you're emotionally healthy or comfortable with yourself, and that stood out to me. I could be 100% off base, I don't know you, so apologies if I am.
For me, at 30, I'm a cis gay man that feels more comfortable in my gender for having considered the alternatives and reasoned that they weren't the right fit for me, so I feel a lot of empathy for people- especially kids, as it was a conversation I had with myself as a kid- who experienced similar feelings and decided the other road was for them.
I appreciate your hedging and your sensitivity, but that’s the opposite of how I feel. I am so grateful I did not have th opportunity to transition. I absolutely would’ve been the teen that threatens suicide to access that, desperate to believe it would’ve helped ease my pain.
What I’m saying is that with time, with relationships, with life experience, it is clear that transitioning would not have helped me, and instead I would have had a vastly reduced capacity for relationships and sexual connection, which I think is extremely important. Let alone fertility decisions I would’ve had to make then.
So on the contrary, I am deeply disturbed that these kids are being robbed of the opportunity to grow into themselves as whole, healthy human beings.
One thing we can do is listen to what they tell us instead of reading "signs" based on their behavior.
Are you aware of how often gays and lesbians, when they were kids, expressed sincere desires to be, or beliefs that they were, the opposite sex? These are by and large the same populations.
I don't think it's very common for gay and lesbian kids to identify as the other sex. Wishing they were the other sex is a bit different; I do think a lot of gender nonconforming kids who won't necessarily be trans as adults have the thought, my life would be easier if I were a boy/girl. And in a clinical setting it's good to ask questions to disentangle these issues a bit. I think there is general agreement that not every gender-variant or gender-questioning kid should transition. Many won't want to.
Well, it’s fair to say that you don’t think it’s common, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t. If you look up medical descriptions from the APA or even WPATH, let alone the materials provided to kids for transgender awareness in schools, what you will see is that the definition of trans is so vague as to include tomboys or even just girls who don’t like wearing dresses or boys who don’t like playing sports.
And if that is, almost necessarily, how we explain this to kids because it is such a complex and sophisticated idea that, without simple Barbie and GI Joe references, they won’t understand, we risk teaching kids that their preference for certain toys or articles of clothing is a symptom of their trans-ness.
People seem to believe there’s no way anybody, kids or adults, could mistakenly believe they’re trans. I was one of those people myself. The human mind is a fragile and mysterious thing.
A friend’s kid might remind you of a 12 year old Leslie Jordan. The parents’ and kid’s experience has been the ongoing assumption that he must be transgendered. No one has a problem if the kid said - I’m not transgendered I’m just gay*. The assumption is - he acts in a female inflected way, he has many stereotypically female interests, he has almost exclusively female friends, and now that he’s hit puberty he knows he likes guys - he’s actually a girl.
* Which is how it was eventually handled. If you ask him the phrasing he uses is, “My gender identity is male and I’m gay.” Everyone thinks that’s great. But it was a whole thing.
It’s also wrong to assume he’s gay! Could be -and statistically probably most likely to be - a cisgender straight male!
Statistically, people who are strongly gender variant in their behaviors and interests as kids are usually-though-not-always some variety of LGBT as adults. These things all correlate in complex ways though of course you don't want to equate them in any individual case. (There are effeminate straight men and we support them!)
Are you sure about that? Is there an actual study? How would you even measure it? My claim is an educated guess based on the fact that all lgbt put together are roughly only 5% of the population. It’s such a small minority that I would guess that even among the “gender nonconforming” most would be straight. There would simply be tons of confirmation bias going on in people’s anecdotal perceptions. That being said - I may be wrong. Would be interesting if there is actual data but I doubt it.
There is research but I suppose it does depend on exactly how you define gender nonconforming. (The research I'm thinking of is follow-ups with adults whose gender-variant behavior as kids caused their parents to take them to gender clinics--my recollection of the results is that most are gay or lesbian, some are trans, and some are cis straight.)
That sounds like a bad assumption. If there are really people who are assuming that based on nonconformity to sex stereotypes, I hope others correct them! Sounds like something most sides of this debate can get on board with (everyone except the conservatives, who think male effeminacy is ruining America). It's not what trans activists think and I don't think it's what most practitioners in this space think either. Part of the literature behind the affirming care model is about distinguishing between kids who just don't conform to sex stereotypes (who we know mostly grow up to be "cis," usually gay, adults) and kids who persistently/consistently/insistently identify with the sex other than their "natal sex"/"sex assigned at birth."
There are no new rigid gender stereotypes. What is new is that feminists don’t all think that abolishing gender is the right general response - some people actually care about gender, regardless of any of the particular behaviors that have historically been associated with it.
I think you hit on something interesting regarding gender here. Second wave feminists thought gender was a social construct--the social norms and rules applied to men and women. But I’m not sure that’s entirely correct at this point--gender, even if it is the performative thing like interests and behaviors--is obviously relevant when we talk about stereotypes of gay men and lesbians, and it’s obviously true that there are, broadly and statistically speaking, real trends in the careers of males versus females even in 2023.
So while some feminists think gender is all bullshit, some transgender activists etc believe that having interest in cross-sex associated things is proof they have the brain or soul of that sex.
There truth seems to be in the middle somewhere, in that gender is probably not just a social construct, but also likely does not prove the existence of an opposite sex brain.
Maybe I'm missing a step but it always struck me you can have sex-based broad trends in behavior - and even have social scientists investigate such trends, and consider them in that light, and all that fun stuff - while it still being a bad thing to take that into an expectation for any particular person. "Men trend into engineering" and "there's nothing suspicious or wrong about a woman going into engineering" seem compatible.
In other words, I'm not sure why the word 'gender' needs to enter the conversation to cover this; or maybe the term is pretty loose and seems to be referring to a wider scope ('brain or soul' seems correct) than just recognizing these trends.
Agreed. Somewhere along the line we jumped the tracks from, for example, “some women want to be combat soldiers and those who can physically qualify should be allowed” to “there are no fundamental disparities between the physical capabilities of men and women.”
I am alarmed by how many in my generation and younger (millennial) think it’s wildly inaccurate to state that men, on average, are significantly taller and stronger than women.
I'm not sure how to formulate it for a mailbox question, but I would be curious to get Matt's reaction to what I call "The Exception is the Rule," which seems an overwhelming dynamic in progressive aligned spaces these days -- i.e., you shouldn't just avoid stereotypes, but you must emphasize and defend to death the inverse of the stereotype.
Great question. Recently, on Twitter (of course) I mentioned what I thought was a pretty anodyne observation that males commit 98% of all sex crimes and the vast majority of serious violent crimes, and that part of that has to do with the effects of testosterone on the human body and brain.
Somebody called me dangerously ignorant for spreading such “misinformation.”
Hi Jean
I think the broader issue in 2nd wave feminism was how those attributes and accomplishments normally associated with males were universally more highly valued than those associated with females. The social construct was one of value.
Second wave feminists set out to disprove the notion that women were incapable of performing certain activities at the same level as a man, such as being Doctors, lawyers,politicians, and managers of any kind -- this is where their critique of gender stereotypes was focused.
(Ruth Bader Ginsburg could not get a job as a lawyer ... the assumption at the time was that a woman’s mind was somehow incapable of performing the necessary tasks at a level anywhere near that of a man’s and that an interest in anything normally viewed as the domain of males was indicative of some psychological problem.)
They pointed out that across the board that those activities and occupations that males did were more highly valued -- a plumber being more highly paid than a nurse, etc., and that some women were equally capable of being plumbers just as some men were equally capable of being nurses *and should be allowed to do so* without legal and social barriers.
Think about this: in the US and UK women weren’t able to get credit cards and loans and bank accounts without a male cosigner until the 1970s.
And, marital rape was exempt from rape law in the US until the mid 70s. The last martial rape exemption didn’t end until 1993. That is, that a woman COULD NOT be raped by her husband no matter what she said or did or wanted or didn’t want AND no matter what he said or did -- she was legally required to submit, to have sex whenever her husband wanted. She had no legal standing.
2nd wave feminism - feminism of the 70s -- focused on these sorts of issues, not on full throated declarations that gender didn’t exist. They pointed out how males and females were valued differently and yes, did demand that women and their contributions be valued as equals.
The turn came in the late 70s-early 80s when, in response to the demand that women somehow prove they were the equals of men, they dredged history for the novelists, painters, scientists, mathematicians, etc ... which really was beside the original point -- which was that women are human beings, not inferior creatures, and should be both seen and valued as such.
Women were the legally the property of men (viewed by the law to have the status of children) until the 20th century. 1st & 2nd wave feminism were in response to that reality.
I really don’t know what 3rd & 4th wave feminism is ...
I agree with everything you just said, and my apologies for my hasty comment above. It’s just that so many second wave feminists believed that we are blank slates, and without culturally prescribed notions of gender, men and women would be much more equal in interests and capabilities and professions, etc.
“I disagree so strongly with the segment of Slow Boring’s audience that wants me to join them in complaining about elective pronouns”
“Elective pronouns” is a strange phrase, and it reveals the crux of my disagreement with Matt. If pronouns were truly “elective” each person would decide individually which pronoun to use for a particular person. I would likely address an adult who was born male and had completed a transition as she. But if he wanted to play competitive sports, I would insist on saying he with some determination. If a 14 year old with two X chromosomes reported gender dysphoria, I would use she until I was convinced the gender dysphoria wasn’t a phase.
I fully support Matt’s call for dignity. An important aspect of dignity is freedom of thought-- being able to use my mind to develop a coherent system of categories. My identity was forged by 4 billion years of evolutionary history, and sex has been fundamental to our ancestors since before dinosaurs. I’m all for elective pronouns as long as I can keep my voice.
I don’t think anyone is threatening your voice. It’s just an argument about manners and kindness.
If I go to someone’s house and they bake a cake and I try it and it’s not very good I might not tell them it’s bad but simply smile and thank them for the effort of making the cake. Now, I could say “this cake sucks and it’s my right to say that because billions of years of evolution have developed my taste buds and I’m not going to betray that sacred history” but people would think I was being an asshole.
I don’t think it’s that complicated or tied to any grand moral theory, it’s just basic bitch civility.
I think a good example of this is how we treat marriage.
Many faiths, especially Catholicism, believe that divorce is almost always not valid. Let’s say you are divorced and remarried. And you have a Catholic acquaintance who constantly refers to your ex as your spouse, and refuses to call your new spouse your husband/wife. If you are a woman who changed your surname to your new spouse’s name, maybe that acquaintance still calls you by your ex-spouse’s surname.
Is that acquaintance just acknowledging their personal beliefs about marriage? Or are they being an asshole?
I love this analogy. There are many terms Catholics could use to describe people who got divorced and then enter a civil marriage. If they want to be friendly, husband, wife, or spouse. If they want to be coolly civil, partner. If they want to show venom, mistress, slut or concubine.
If a Catholic quietly uses “partner” to keep the peace and avoid a fraught issue, shouldn’t that be ok? It isn’t friendly, but it’s not picking a fight either.
Furthermore, manners also apply to the civilly married divorcee. She shouldn’t try to take communion. She shouldn’t berate Catholics for adhering to their own doctrine. If she calls Catholics bigots for following their ancient doctrine, they have every right to call her a concubine.
Maybe I'm in the minority here but if a person goes around calling people's spouses "partners" because he thinks their marriages are fake, that seems very rude and uncivil to me and I think it would get lots of rightful social pushback. If I were gay married (I likely will be in the next few years) and someone did that to me I would be pretty offended and would happily call them a bigot. Not necessarily for not believing in same-sex marriage, but for doing that? Yeah.
I think most people would also get really mad if the person elaborated on it.
“Why do you keep calling my husband my partner?”
“Because he isn’t your husband. You are still married to ___. You are cheating on him.”
Most people after hearing that would be really pissed off. Probably more pissed off than most trans people get about being misgendered!
Is it polite to ask why the person uses partner? I don’t think so. That’s clearly inviting a political discussion rather than just respecting a line someone chose to draw.
I just reread Brideshead Revisited, and there’s something to the Catholic doctrine that marriage is til death do you part. It’s a beautiful, sacred idea, and I don’t even believe in god. That being said, my wife and mother have both been divorced and I don’t feel that either of them is going to burn in hell, nor do i feel that I am in a plural marriage.
However, I will passionately the right of catholics to have their categories. they get to feel that my wife is just my mistress. i don’t want to try to force them to say that i am married in the eyes of god. i don’t want to force them to say that my son is legitimate. if they meddle in politics, i’ll try to outvote them, and if America ever becomes a papist theocracy, i’d want to leave. however, outside of politics, catholics can have their categories, i can have my wife, and we can each use language that reflects our values without being assholes. that definitely involves referring to my wife as my partner if they want to.
If you happily call someone a bigot then you shouldn’t ever use the word bigot again.
I don’t think a Catholic person calling the spouse a “partner” is equivalent to misgendering a trans person. I think the equivalent would be either calling them a “roommate“ or “mistress” and still using a woman’s previous surname instead of her new surname that matches her new husband.
Or you could see anti-gay religious conservatives call a gay person’s husband their “roommate” and not acknowledge the marriage.
I think in those situations most people would think that the person was being really rude, not just sticking to their sincere beliefs.
The rather critical failure in your cake analogy is that, in the pronoun case, you are not just expected to be polite to your host, but to keep praising the quality of the cake to third parties when the host is absent and even when everyone knows that the cake was not in fact good.
Ah, you mean, you got a dirty look when you were polite to their face then said n***r n***r n***r behind their back to somebody you thought would approve of this behavior? Yeah, bummer...
This reply really should be framed in a gallery as an exemplar of the level of bad faith certain people are operating at.
My post may have been hyperbolic. But this was how your comment came across. "It's bad enough that I have to be polite to their face but people expect me to be nice after too...." If you actually meant something entirely different, you should explain it.
It’s more than being nice. It’s embracing a system of categories i don’t believe in. I may humor an old person with amnesia to their face, but i’m not going to believe their fantasies. courtesy may involve acts of civility to the gender dysphoric. maybe it sometimes demands silence or circumlocution. mere courtesy never extends to giving up earnest beliefs.
I think Tom’s marriage example is probably better. However, I do think a certain amount of kindness in the immediate and criticism in the off line is normal and okay.
If I have a good friend who I think is doing something weird but I know it is important to them then I would take some time to figure out a way to considerately approach them and discuss the topic.
If I meet a stranger who is doing something I might find weird but is clearly important to them then I would probably go along with it out of politeness. Obviously there are red lines about the amount of “weirdness” I would tolerate but pronouns are not that big a deal to me.
IMO the southern style of being nice to someone and then saying “bless their heart” when the leave the room captures it exactly.
Bo -
if you really listen, it’s the people who insist that *their* pronouns be respected and immediately adopted (regardless of how they physically present to the world) who are unkind and rude when someone “misgenders” them.
Now, it is rude if someone with gender dysphoria who is transitioning is purposefully misgendered, but that is different from a man in with a beard in a dress who screams transphobia when someone “misgenders” them.
It’s very passive aggressive.
And I hate to say it, but it’s already begun to create a backlash - and it won’t really affect those who are using “gender” in a performative way; they’ll move on to whatever the next SJ trend is -- it will come down on the LGB part of the now insanely long string of letters and the “T” people who have gender dysphoria.
Consider this: a lesbian is called out as transphobic if she says that she is not attracted to trans women who have not had bottom surgery.
As far as I know, gay men who are not attracted to trans men who haven’t had bottom surgery haven’t been similarly targeted (probably because trans men are not insisting that they must).
I have a niece (teenager) who presents very feminine who dates a person who identifies as male, but presents as a cute, slightly androgynous girl that nobody would mistake as male. Neither have male genitalia. They refer to themselves as straight. They are not straight; they are lesbians who find the term abhorrent.
My question is why?
I agree that it’s rude for someone who clearly presents as male or female to chastise someone who “misgenders” them. Or even if they are maybe on the boarder line and you make the wrong assumption. Totally agree there.
Where it flips is when someone is like “hey, I’d be more comfortable if you could call me by these pronouns”. We don’t need to play a weird shell game about this as the protocols for what is rude or polite are usually pretty straightforward.
I don’t want to tie to many other threads to this basic concept because, in the end, I do think this part of the very complicated meta debate is basic.
Because they're trying out identities, and they're testing the limits of the current cultural zeitgeist.
Why do so many people comment under pseudonyms? Probably because they fear the economic repercussions of speaking freely. If I worked for corporate America or even the government, I would be far more circumspect in what I say.
In a reply to my comment today, Kevin called me an asshole. Does he care about my dignity, or is that acceptable collateral damage in the culture war?
People should just be nicer in general. We can disagree without resorting to name calling but sometimes it happens. We all are a collection of our best, worst and average moments. The reasons a lot of people use pseudonyms is that, unlike a regular conversation that will not be preserved forever through technology, what you write on the internet will be written in stone to a degree. That’s frightening for a lot of reasons. You might worry your opinions could cost you your job but you also might be concerned your privacy might be violated by someone who crawled through your post history and used it to find your home address.
People are complicated and messy. This is something we should embrace by affording each other a little more grace.
"Don't be an asshole" remains dramatically underrated as a good principle of life.
agree. and yet “don’t be an asshole” is roughly as enigmatic as “respect dignity.”
It all comes back to the Golden Rule: "do unto others as you would have done unto you".
Like I've said before, I probably agree with you on a lot of things related to this topic, but your rhetoric is very off putting compared to all the other commenters who hold similar views. So, when you come on here and misgender people...I will point out that you are being an asshole. 4 billion years of evolutionary history compels me to :)
How is the internal identity of a trans person similar to baking a cake? Is the cake the “creation” of the trans persons self identity as put forth to the world?
I think it’s a bad metaphor because in both circumstances I would tell the person in question; “thank you but I do not like cake or other sweets. Please do not try to force me to eat your cake or comment on your production of said cake.”
Are we forcing people to eat cake now like we were forcing them to make cakes a few years ago?
I’m talking about the bounds of civility not law in this particular case.
Sometimes I hear people say “I’m just real!” Or “I tell it like it is!” And usually (though not always) thats code for “I don’t care what would be polite, I am going to do what I want no matter how it makes people feel!”. This to me just makes me think of Cartman from south park being like “whatever, I do what I want!”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IpF9O0R873I
Ironically, this is the same attitude of the activists who refuse to accept most Americans are in the middle on these issues and think by constantly giving them the finger, they will change. It’s two sides of the same coin, we could all use a little more emotional sobriety.
Should we force people to be nice? I don’t think you should go to jail for being rude but I think adults should know the self evident value of kindness.
Not all languages have gendered pronouns, so it's a bit of a stretch to say your use of them is "forged in 4 billion years of evolutionary history" and is "fundamental to our ancestors."
Language is essentially arbitrary, works by consensus, and is constantly changing. So it's hard to take it seriously when anyone says they are forced to misgender people because they have decided a particular dictionary definition from a single point in time that they have chosen is "correct." So forgive us when we leap past that nonsense and go right to questioning your underlying motivation.
As I understand it, I am the fruit of 400 million years of sexual reproduction. That is why sex is such a basic category. My concern with language is in accurately and elegantly describing the natural world.
As long as I get to keep my voice and say that I think you are a huge asshole in all of these threads and that you really enjoy misgendering people.
I've worked with some non-binary folks and because everyone takes 30 seconds to display their preferred pronouns in their Slack bio when they first join, the whole question of what to call anyone has never come up, their identity has never come up, and the whole experience of working with them has been totally normal and no different than any other of my colleagues.
"I am a guy but I want to bang guys, not girls" isn't tough to wrap your head around, and that probably contributed to reasonably rapid acceptance.
In contrast, I think I will go to my grave legitimately not grokking the attested distinction between sex and gender. I will continue to try to be polite, but these are new modes of thinking for 99% of people.
If think if you understand "I am innately attracted to women" is divisible from being born male even though there's a strong correlation, you should be able to understand the same might be true of things like "I feel like a man, I like being a man, I have no problems with my male body."
The way I conceive of it is to imagine a psychological element that we evolved in order for our intelligent, sentient minds to so happily adapt to the fact that our bodies are sexed and sexually dimorphic. When that element develops to match sex during early development, as it does in 99% of cases, everything is dandy. But sometimes there are outliers.
Explaining to me what I should be able to understand does not encourage me to stick my neck out for someone else's cause.
Her explanation may not have worked for you, but she at least tried to explain it rather than writing you off.
There's no evidence kids are being rushed into gender affirming care on any sort of systemic basis, certainly not to the extent that harm is outweighing benefits. Your thumb is on the scale here. People get upset because you are privileging anecdotal evidence that favors one side while disregarding the evidence on the other side.
"This is just the precautionary principle" you might say, but the presumption that doing nothing is superior to taking a risk on still-developing treatment is simply hostile to the notion that the pain brought on to trans people by puberty is serious. That's why we tend to get upset with takes like this--how many trans kids going through the wrong puberty do you think is worth saving one cis child from making a mistake? There's absolutely no evidence that the ratio it's anywhere close to 1:1, so we're stuck with the unhappy inference that trans people's needs are being subordinated.
There are a couple taking points here that just don't hold water, either. Off-label use of drugs is normal and not a scary thing. Traditional FDA-style studies are impossible to perform for gender affirming care -- you can't do a blind study when we know what the effects of the medicine is, because people in the placebo group will quickly realize it and drop out knowing they've denied medicine in order to be an experiment. And this is not even getting into the ethical side of doing these studies for practitioners who already think the evidence is sufficient. You literally mention climate change here--another scientific area plagued by skeptics who criticize the lack of controlled experimental evidence and yet apparently we have a scientific consensus. It should be assumed here, just as it is there, that the experts have reached the modern consensus taking account for the evidentiary difficulties, not ignoring them.
The suggestion that there is some kind of social contagion tricking girls into thinking they are trans isn't supported by evidence, and in fact has been studied: https://fenwayhealth.org/new-study-examines-the-social-contagion-hypothesis-of-transgender-and-gender-diverse-identities/. The number of trans boys seeking gender affirming care is still magnitudes smaller than the estimated rate of gender incongruence in the general population (1-2%). There's plenty of alternate explanations for why demand among that group might rise faster than among trans girls, such as the reduction of stigma easing against trans men more rapidly than against trans women. I was very disappointed to see you not cite any study but instead cite Jamie Reed's op-ed (politically motivated and not credible) and the Economist (which currently has a well established editorial policy on the side of political transphobia).
No one on the trans rights side of this issue has any problem with reasonable procedures to ensure gender affirming care is given to kids with care and reasonable caution. But you have to realize that when you fixate on the absence of experimental evidence that can't exist and cite biased sources and insist on a precautionary principle without accounting for the harm it causes trans kids who are denied care, a lot of people are going to assume you're unpersuadable and worse. I'd love to see you take the questions you raise here to a "trans activist" like Erin Reed and have an open conversation. Hell, I'm in DC if you want to get coffee and talk to a random trans woman in your comments.
-"the presumption that doing nothing is superior to taking a risk on still-developing treatment is simply hostile to the notion that the pain brought on to trans people by puberty is serious"
There should always be a presumption of doing nothing in medicine in the same way that there should be a presumption of innocence in law. If children grew out of their gender dysphoria without having drugs or surgery, shouldn't we prefer that? It's best not to monkey with a child's endocrine system if it can be avoided.
-"No one on the trans rights side of this issue has any problem with reasonable procedures to ensure gender affirming care is given to kids with care and reasonable caution."
And yet there is a massive push to call any such attempts 'conversion therapy'. There sure do appear to be a lot of people who deeply regret having received 'gender affirming' care.
How do you know Jamie Reed is 'politically motivated and not credible'? There seem to be no brakes against medical malpractice in US medicine until law suits start flying.
"How do you know Jamie Reed is 'politically motivated and not credible'? There seem to be no brakes against medical malpractice in US medicine until law suits start flying."
I had some skepticism for the article when it first came out (she writes from a perspective of a case worker, and not as someone actually involved in the actual medical care of the patients) but I stumbled on this article over my lunch break today and read through it-
https://erininthemorn.substack.com/p/missouri-anti-trans-whistleblower
-and I'm more inclined than before to believe that she does have serious credibility issues.
As for "politically motivated", there was a commenter there who speculated that Jamie Reed's turn against transition care may have coincided with reading "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters" by Abigail Shrier, as the objections that Jamie brings up in her article are arguments that the book hits on repeatedly.
What is it about reading Shrier’s book that would make Reed’s clinical observations suspect, let alone irrelevant?
The article you linked to leans excessively on Reed “misgendering” patients. Reed is entitled to her categories and thinking that someone with two X chromosomes is female does not diminish one’s credibility. Also, the linked article basically dismisses a five fold increase in the rate of gender dysphoria cases at a clinic as too small a sample. Until more systematic data is collected, case rates will be the best data we have. A five fold increase is striking, it’s a big enough change that, combined with the salience of trans issues in the discourse, Im pretty convinced there has been an increase in gender dysphoria.
"That's why we tend to get upset with takes like this--how many trans kids going through the wrong puberty do you think is worth saving one cis child from making a mistake? There's absolutely no evidence that the ratio it's anywhere close to 1:1, so we're stuck with the unhappy inference that trans people's needs are being subordinated."
Wow, it better not be anywhere close to 1:1.
If 2% of transitions were harmful, 1/50, and the number needed to treat to prevent one poor mental health outcome was 100 (statin use for primary prevention is 163), for every 1000 people treated you would overall harm 10 more people than you helped.
Statins reduce cholesterol in hope of reducing the risk of some not overwhelmingly likely harms. But gender affirming care is different - the effects it has are pretty direct, so that anyone who is not helped will stop. I would expect number needed to treat is more like 1.1 or maybe 1.5, not 100.
I think you're making a huge assumption that gender affirmation affects future mental health outcomes.
No, he's looking at the evidence.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2789423
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0261039
Also I am literally a trans woman who underwent a masculine puberty and suffer mental distress from its irreversible effects (and the huge costs of reversing what can be reverse). It's really stunning that a huge part of this argument is just calling trans people liars or confused.
It's also just an enormous double standard. If you don't believe a trans person undergoing puberty that doesn't match their gender identity actually harms them, what is the harm of cis child accidentally doing to the same thing? Why does it harm cis kids but not trans kids? This doesn't make sense.
The evidence appears to be pretty weak. Most studies don't compare against a cohort who got mental health care but _not_ any hormones etc.
Or they show weak effects.
For instance, for that first study:
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/researchers-found-puberty-blockers
(That does not mean there aren't people who it could really have helped - sounds like they could have helped you - only that this is not nearly as well studied as it should be)
It's "apparently weak" evidence and one side and anecdotal and astroturfed evidence on the other side.
That Jesse Singal argument has a lot of holes and has gone through the rounds of debunking if you're interested, but relevant here is he literally notes that the evidence in the study shows the treatment group's mental health held steady while non-treated kids got worse and then complains that isn't good enough, even though it's exactly what you should expect if your hypothesis is further advancement of puberty harms mental health.
https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2019.19010080
In fact here's a Swedish observational study that shows hormone therapy did not change observed mental health care utilization, and gender affirming surgical procedures show a 9% reduction in mental health care usage, especially the longer out from their surgical procedure they are. 40% of participants surgical procedures.
So out of 1,000 people, 400 recieve surgical procedures, about 36 benefit. If 2% of people receiving therapy are harmed, 40 people have been harmed.
Only if your criteria for success is "this person never uses mental health services again in their life" which makes absolutely no sense.
It's an 8% reduction *per year.* That's a pretty large effect. "Specifically, the likelihood of being treated for a mood or anxiety disorder was reduced by 8% for each year since last gender-affirming surgery."
But the odds ratio given in the paper is 0.92.
Interesting, but does this measure "quality" of mental health care usage?
If I'm visiting a therapist because I've got severe gender dysphoria which is making my life much worse, and after transition I'm visiting one because I'm feeling a bit bad about transphobia I see, then I'm still seeing someone, but I would say my outcome has definitely improved.
Also inertia might cause me to keep seeing a therapist?
Also, for some of the same reasons I commented on the other study - it looks like they compared "dysphoric people who received treatment" vs. "general population"
But no comparison of "dysphoric people who received surgery/hormones vs. just therapy" - so .... you're not removing transphobia as a source of need mental health services, so this _also_ doesn't seem like a good measure of the effect.
What counts here? If someone wants to present as male, and hormones help them present as male, but don't alleviate any other mental or bodily health issue, does that count as a success or not? I think it does, because it represents someone getting what they wanted from a treatment, but you seem to be asking whether something *further* is being helped.
In the case of statins, I think no one actually cares about cholesterol itself - they only care about cholesterol because it is implicated in things they do care about, like heart attacks. But in the case of gender affirmation, the gender affirmation itself is what they care about. (I don't mean the mere act of taking hormones, but I do mean the pretty standard effects of hormones on things like body hair and chest size and the like.)
"What counts here? If someone wants to present as male, and hormones help them present as male, but don't alleviate any other mental or bodily health issue, does that count as a success or not? I think it does, because it represents someone getting what they wanted from a treatment, but you seem to be asking whether something *further* is being helped."
But we don't cover the medical costs to make someone present as male because they want to, it's because of the negative effects of not treating their gender dysphoria maximally. If there was a pill that took away gender dysphoria it would replace gender affirming therapy that wasn't elective. Therefore quality of life and outcomes need to be shown to improve.
I think that the question you're asking here is about whether this should be a covered medical procedure. Which is a separate question from whether it is successful at what it is aiming to do.
Thanks for including a link to a study, but I think the study you linked does not come close to disproving the idea that trans identities among teenage girls may in some instances be the result of social contagion. The study is based entirely on examining data reported by adolescents on a survey in 16 states in 2017, and comparing answers to adolescents that answered the survey in 2019. The first point the study makes is that the total percentage of transgender or gender diverse (TGD) decreased from 2.4% to 1.6%, and that this is incongruent with the rapid onset gender dysphoria hypothesis (ROGD). But how is an unexplained 50%(!) drop in the number of TGD adolescents incongruent with the idea that such an identity may in some cases be the result of social pressures? And doesn't the fact that this study showed a completely unexplained 50% drop in adolescents identifying as TGD from 2017 to 2019 call all of the data into question? How can we draw any conclusions from this?
The second point is that the sex assigned at birth ratio shifted toward more adolescents assigned female at birth, which the study notes appears to support the ROGD hypothesis. However, the study points out that this is the result of a decrease in the number of males openly identifying as TGD, which the study simply asserts is incompatible with the ROGD hypothesis. But the study notes that the percentage of females identifying as TGD also decreased, because, again, the study showed a 50% drop in adolescents identifying as TGD.
The third point notes that the ROGD hypothesis asserts that youth are drawn to come out as TGD to avoid stigma or to become more popular among their peers. Yet the study notes that because rates of bullying victimization and suicidality were higher among TGD youth than there peers, this is incongruent with the notion that some youth identify as TGD to avoid stigma/become more popular. This conclusion does not hold up to scrutiny. A comparison to people identifying as "goths" may help (note that I'm just making an analogy, not saying that being trans is anything like being goth). No doubt, people identifying as goths have a higher rate of bullying victimization than their non-goth peers. Yet this is not evidence that people identify as goths because they are "innately" goth rather than that their goth identity is the result of social pressures. People may identify as goth because it gives them a group to fit in with or because some of their friends start identifying as goth, even if it would not makes them one of the "popular" kids. Also, people who identify as goth are probably people who already are more likely to be bullied, and so the fact that they continue to be bullied after becoming goth is to be expected.
Finally, I'm concerned that you simply dismiss Jamie Reed's op-ed as politically motivated (what motivation?) and not credible (why?). She's a self-described far-left queer woman married to a trans man who has worked to try to help provide care to trans and gender non-conforming youths for years. I agree that we can't just accept everything she says uncritically, but you seem to dismiss her out of hand. What if what she said in her sworn affidavit is mostly true? Would that change any of your views? If not, what would?
Alarmingly, a majority of studies purporting to show how gender affirming care unequivocally helps trans identified youth follows this same path. The proof is just...not in the pudding. If people truly meant what they say when they talk about the vulnerability of trans people and needing quality medical care, those same people should be outraged by the shoddy practice of medicine as it regards trans health care. Instead, we get demands to remove all safeguarding under the guise of bodily autonomy and “kids know who they are.”
I very strongly agree with this comment. To talk about "irreversible medical procedures" without talking about the irreversible effects of going through a puberty incongruent with your gender identity is putting one's thumb on the scale to an immense degree.
There are some potential problems related to that study. https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/the-new-study-on-rapid-onset-gender
I've been reading through your heroic efforts to engage with pretty much the entire comments section here and I wanted to try offer a good-faith push-back from someone who generally agrees with what you've written. I've gained some useful insight reading your comments, but here I think you've engaged in a common conflation that brings out the small-c conservative in a lot of parents.
The off-label use of drugs is normal and not a scary thing *for adults*. But the physiology of children differs in significant and important ways from adults and because drugs have not been developed for this purpose, they are necessarily being repurposed based on observed effects in adults. And there is no immediate solution to that problem because of the problems you mentioned with clinical studies and the resources and incentive structures around drug development. There are material downsides to habituating a developing physiology to exogenous compounds. We recognize extreme examples like fetal alcohol syndrome, but exposure to all kinds of chemicals that are benign for adults cause endocrine problems in children (e.g., fire retardants, plasticizers, food dyes, preservatives, etc.). There is, in other words, risk associated with giving off-label drugs to kids that have to be weighed against the potential benefits; what I cannot gauge (partly because of all the chaff in the discourse) is the magnitude of that risk compared the magnitude of the risks associated with untreated gender dysphoria. That is where the small-c conservatism of parenting manifests for me. I am very uptight about what my kids ingest, writ large.
Personally, I am very, very skeptical of pharmaceutical solutions to problems, especially for kids, and if one of my kids started pushing for puberty blockers, etc. my response would look to an outside observer as transphobic despite my being otherwise supportive and having no objection to anything else non-surgical my kids want to do. But my internal motivation would be no different than if someone tried to put them on anti-depressants or amphetamines (e.g., to treat ADHD). I'm not saying that I couldn't be persuaded (by my own child), but my inherent skepticism of pharmaceuticals would be a significant barrier to my consent.
I don't think it's unreasonable to be concerned in worried about medical intervention, which is why it's important to educate parents on what exactly is happening in the treatment.
For instance, here, we do know what gender affirming care is going to do to children's bodies. Hormone replacement therapy uses hormones bioidentical to what is produced by the body. It's the same hormonal medicine used by cis men and cis women when they need testosterone or estrogen. We know what is going to happen when this medicine is given to kids--it's just puberty. And we know what the safety profile is -- everyone lives most of their life walking with lots of estrogen or testosterone circulating their blood, with attendant effects on things like risk of clotting, cancer risks, and so on.
The thing we don't have is randomized controlled trial evidence that specifically swapping puberties in a gender dypshoric child will improve mental health outcomes, for the reasons I explained above. I think if one talks to a transgender child or older transgender people, and talks to the experts who have made it their profession to wrangle with this uncertainty, it's possible to be reasonably sure. I, of course, am biased by my own experience of having developed crippling depression as a teen, overwhelming thoughts of suicide for years, only to see it all vanish when I transitioned--though I still suffer from the permanent effects of my first puberty. So I understand that I have a certainty that others may never get to.
It's definitely true a parent faced with a kid saying they are trans and wants medicine is in some way being asked to simply trust their kid on guidance for whether the treatment will be in their interest in the long run. I absolutely understand how that's a scary thing. It's absolutely natural to have doubts.
I want to reiterate M C's thanks for engaging with absolutely everyone. In your place I would have said "Oh, fuck all y'all" by now and gone to bed with wine and a mystery novel.
I really appreciated your link and want to add a few more here that may help people seeking actual evidence and research about gender affirming care, medical transition support, and other evidence-based approaches. I find it's helpful to look at the position statements of large medical associations because they cite sources, usually published studies. Moreover, when you look at the guidelines physicians are using, they're supportive of gender affirming care for adolescents BUT also recommend lots of counseling, education, consultation, and careful observation. None of this feels railroaded or forced through but, rather, a careful consideration of the evidence. (The relative agreement across the profession is why I think Matt works so hard to impeach the credibility of doctors by asserting that they're overly eager to make money by performing gender affirming care. Very cynical of him!)
American Academy of Pediatrics: https://tinyurl.com/2djkj6f3
>In particular, the AAP recommends the following:
>1) that youth who identify as TGD have access to comprehensive, gender-affirming, and developmentally appropriate health care that is provided in a safe and inclusive clinical space;...
American Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry: https://tinyurl.com/2p8vjptc
>Variations in gender expression represent normal and expectable dimensions of human development. They are not considered to be pathological. Health promotion for all youth encourages open exploration of all identity issues, including sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or gender expression according to recognized practice guidelines (1, 2). Research consistently demonstrates that gender diverse youth who are supported to live and/or explore the gender role that is consistent with their gender identity have better mental health outcomes than those who are not (3, 4, 5).
American Psychiatric Association: https://tinyurl.com/ava3kn8d
> Due to the dynamic nature of puberty development, lack of gender-affirming interventions (i.e. social, psychological, and medical) is not a neutral decision; youth often experience worsening dysphoria and negative impact on mental health as the incongruent and unwanted puberty progresses. Trans-affirming treatment, such as the use of puberty suppression, is associated with the relief of emotional distress, and notable gains in psychosocial and emotional development, in trans and gender diverse youth.
American Academy of Clinical Endocrinologists: https://tinyurl.com/6yreeuhu
>Transgender and gender diverse adolescents with persistent gender identity (typically of which they’ve been aware for at least 6 months) that does not align with sex recorded at birth who seek treatment, who have capacity to make medical decisions, in whom potential confounding mental health conditions are addressed, and who have been evaluated by trained mental health professionals who have expertise in gender incongruence in children/adolescents. Decisions regarding both puberty blockade and hormone therapy in adolescents should made with the input of the qualified mental health professional, the endocrinologist or clinician with experience in hormone therapy/puberty blockade in children, the child, and the family.
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists: https://tinyurl.com/3cpw4wjw
> Standards of Care (SOC) for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People, published by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, is an important resource for health care professionals working with transgender patients (15). [Included below]
World Professional Association for Transgender Health Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People: https://tinyurl.com/4b2emz9d
> We recommend against offering reparative and conversion therapy aimed at trying to change a person’s gender and lived gender expression to become more congruent with the sex assigned at birth.
> We recommend health care professionals assessing transgender and gender diverse adolescents only recommend gender-affirming medical or surgical treatments requested by the patient when: The adolescent meets the diagnostic criteria of gender incongruence as per the ICD-11 in situations where a diagnosis is necessary to access health care. The experience of gender diversity/incongruence is marked and sustained over time. The adolescent demonstrates the emotional and cognitive maturity required to provide informed consent/assent for the treatment...
From what I could tell from the piece, Matt pretty much agrees with the AAP, WPATH, etc. guidelines. He's not accusing doctors of wanting to make money, for publishing those guidelines.
Rather, he's referring to the seemingly not rare prevalence of clinics *not* following these guidelines with regards to counseling, etc. and rushing the procedures through. Wendy's comment claims this is not happening, and that Matt's sources are trash, but didn't really offer convincing evidence to back that up.
Also claims that certain SOP is justified because it's the "norm" in US medicine, but that doesn't really work as a rebuttal to Matt because he's made clear multiple times in the past that he believes there are some serious flaws with the "norm" in US medicine, and that overtreatment in general (not just related to trans issues) is a serious problem.
"There's no evidence kids are being rushed into gender affirming care on any sort of systemic basis"
Could you clarify this sentence? "No evidence" is a slippery phrase [1], so the above sentence could mean something like
"This subject has been extensively researched and a recent meta-analysis published in NEJM found that 97.3% of clinics in the US follow WPATH's guidelines --- including careful consideration of alternatives."
However "no evidence" could also mean "The subject hasn't really been researched, so there's no information to make any conclusion either way." (E.g. https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152 )
If you mean something along the lines of the first sentence, I'd be interested in the citation. That would help clear up the situation in my mind.
However, if you have the second meaning in mind, that's not exactly comforting. "We don't have data so you're wrong to worry about it" isn't a winning take (as that evergreen WHO tweet demonstrates). Would you advocate for collecting more data on the matter --- such as whether clinics are following WPATH's guidelines?
I imagine that it would be difficult to both find funding for and to actually carry out unbiased research because emotions run very high on the subject, so I worry that we may never get the data --- in which case it's arguably an underhand trick to cite the lack of data as a reason to not take action.
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag
I largely agree with Matt's piece (not that it has many firm conclusions to agree with.) But your point about social contagion is good, and I'm now skeptical of that part of the column.
I think what you've written on some other subjects gives a helpful perspective on why people on the left often think this issue is being treated badly, even people like me who have been fans of your work for a very long time. You often point out that this is a very big country, and thus it's easy to continuously find anecdotal evidence of problems (like something bad happening in a school) without that meaningfully reflecting anything about the actual situation. And, as you've pointed out again and again, the coverage of Hillary's emails was not incorrect -- she really did violate some government document retention policies. It's that the coverage volume, which was an editorial choice by journalists and media outlets, failed to reflect the larger truth which was that Donald Trump was not going to be better about document policies or anything else.
It's almost certainly the case that some people are not getting the best medical treatment, some people regret surgery they have, some people are reaching for gender dysphoria as an explanation for their mental health problems, etc. But are the journalistic decisions here giving readers an accurate sense not just of the details but the of broader story?
This is a helpful phrasing of this concern for me. I do think there's been a lot of effort to raise the salience and temperature of this topic (much but not all from the right!). For the record I do think some of the anxiety here is driven by the ever-present alienation between adults and teenagers and difficulty that adults have understanding what's going on with "the youths". I agree with MY that it would be great to focus this more on the broader question of "why are teenagers so sad".
I agree that adult alienation from how "kids these days" are thinking about and acting with regard to sex and gender is a big reason why this is a major topic (and not, for example, the much greater volume of gender-related surgeries like breast reduction for cis teenagers). And the way that trans people challenge our ideas about gender even if the issues don't affect us directly at all means that it's something people will discuss more.
But it's also the case that a huge amount of the discussion of trans issues, even among people on the left, is driven by the existence of a powerful political movement trying to oppress trans people and drive them out of public life.
The problem is the loudest trans activists are just kind of bad people. Their most common argument online in support of the trans zeitgeist, other than calling those who have sincere concerns bigots, is emotional manipulation. “Support this our people will kill themselves.” I am disturbed of reports of parents interacting with doctors who ask them “would you rather have a trans daughter or a dead daughter?” In any other context, this type of reasoning is considered a severe abusive manipulation tactic.