My interview with Corinna Cohn—a writer, self-described disenchanted transsexual, co-host of the Heterodorx podcast, and lately a busy advocate for common-sense approaches to curb an ongoing medical scandal—is up at Genspect:
Eliza Mondegreen: As an American, it’s hard not to despair at the political polarization around gender. I have no idea how we get from where we are to the serious dialogue we need to have about how to protect children and vulnerable adults from what many of us see as a medical scandal. How would you characterize the state of the gender debate in the US today?
Corinna Cohn: There’s an axis of powers in the US who have successfully framed the topic of medicalizing gender identity around a set of ideas designed to polarize the debate. Terms like “trans kids” and “gender affirming care” did not exist in the public discourse even ten years ago, but you can trace how a small group of organizations and individuals, with the complicity of a guileless media, have managed to dictate how the topic of medical regulation for minors is reported to the general public. Most Americans, upon learning what is specifically happening to children, understand that this is not “life-saving care,” but unfortunately, the actual facts have been suppressed.
However, I believe that the truth will out. Not cosmic truth, but actual data about the efficacy of these procedures as they’re applied to children. It’s inevitable, and my guess is that we’re going to find a lack of evidence that these procedures are safe or effective.
EM: For a self-confessed homebody, you’ve spent much of the last year on the road, meeting with legislators, attending protests, and testifying in statehouses across the United States to advocate for a more cautious approach to gender-questioning youth. What led you to take this step?
CC: I feel that I must share my experiences, ambivalent though I may be about them, to help inform other people about the risks and sacrifices of this pathway through the world. There is a lot of misinformation leading families to agree to perform medical sex changes on their children, and unfortunately there are too many policymakers out there who are informed only by activist messaging. As one of very few people in the world who has been through this from a young age and into middle age, I have a duty to help inform other people.
EM: Tell me about your life on the road. What have you learned? Who listens to you and why? Who doesn’t want to listen to what you have to say? In your experience, what messages cross political divides? What are the major barriers to shared understanding?
CC: When I’m traveling to talk about the medicalization of gender identity, it’s important for me to talk to people who are on the other side and try to find some common ground. A few months ago, when I was in Austin, I asked to sit with a group of clergy members who had shown up to oppose SB 14, which regulated sex changes for children. I listened to their points and they engaged with mine. One area we all agreed is that minors should not be having surgeries, but we disagreed about hormones. I was able to learn that this group was passionate about defending what they thought were “trans rights,” but that they were woefully ignorant about the state of the medicine. For instance, despite several of them having adult children who identified as transgender, nobody among the group had ever heard of WPATH (the World Professional Association for Transgender Health).
From my conversation with the clergy, I came to understand that there are two worldviews that can never meet up. My position is that there is no data supporting the practice of medicalizing children, and given the risks to both physical and mental health, that the procedures should be heavily regulated. The position of the clergy is that children are seeking authenticity of identity, and that any barriers to medicalization are tantamount to oppression. These views can never be reconciled, but I hope that when the data casts more light on the issue, we can all be led by evidence.
I'm baffled by the perspective that cosmetic surgery plays a part in achieving authenticity. The idea that one's sense of how one ought to look is "authentic" seems infinitely exploitable by the multibillion dollar cosmetic surgery industry. If that's the case, how are we to tell what's authentic versus what's imposed by the industry? Perhaps the whole idea that authenticity is achieved by changing yourself comes from the beauty industry and more generally, capitalism.
Personally, I'm skeptical that evidence is going to fix this. In your last post, you said that the AAP is back-tracking on their position on "affirmative" care, and one has to assume that the AAP is doing that because the evidence on its effectiveness is not there. But In the last week I've been thinking about the selfish, hysterical behavior of trans activists, and I'm afraid that any new evidence will be buried under their hysteria. Hysteria shouldn't work as a tactic, but in truth, it does work. "I'm acting hysterical because you are trying to take my right to be my 'authentic self' away from me." Let's not forget that when children decide they are transgender, they go to their parents having been prepped by trans activists on social media not to take "no" for an answer. And therein is the problem: The so-called child victims of gender dysphoria are the ones demanding these things. That they have been brain-washed and pressured on social media by trans activists (and by their own teachers!!!) isn't apparent, either to their parents or to the public at large. We all understand that children do not have the maturity to give informed consent (which is why they can't get tattoos), and yet we are all conditioned to give children what they want. I mean, there probably isn't a parent in any Western country who denies sweets to their children because sweets aren't nutritious.
I think the best tactic is to convey the experience that trans parents have with their kids -- the horror of having a kid who wants to have her breasts cut off, or his penis cut off. But even there, you have liberal parents who are thrilled to have trans kids.
The activists have been very clever in painting gender dysphoria as being an existential torture which requires immediate emergency medical care. That is very hard to fight. If you couple that with the fact that we all know our kids are looking at porn on the internet, which means they are already grown up, then the impulse is to just trust that the kid knows what is best for him or her.
Eliza, did Cohn actually say anything about being disenchanted with her own transition to being a woman? (I assume she is MTF.)