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.
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".
"...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."
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
"...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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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?
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.