Don't think about it

A couple of weeks ago, after years of being fairly terfy on Facebook, I posted Janice Turner’s article: What went wrong at the Tavistock clinic for trans teenagers?

And I wrote for the first time publicly under my own name why I had become interested in this issue—and why my concerns led me to leave my job:

Until quite recently, we understood something a hell of a lot like gender dysphoria to be a normal stage of development for two groups of children and young people: kids who were going to grow up to be gay and adolescent girls. Now we tell them that their discomfort and distress means they were born in the wrong body but there are puberty blockers (as the article points out: the same drugs we use to chemically castrate sex offenders, which stunt brain development alongside everything else that adolescence brings) and hormones and surgeries for that.

This issue is why I quit my job and went back to school so I'd have more time for research and writing. We're living through something right now that we will look back on with very different eyes and -- I suspect -- real horror at the medical experiment we've been running on kids, many of whom would simply grow up to be lesbian or gay or simply grown to accept their bodies. We'll have done it with the best of intentions -- such good intentions that the clinicians discussed in this article felt a responsibility to shut down anyone who raises questions or expresses doubts -- but that won't lessen the damage. Progressives who championed the eugenics movement thought they were doing good, too. They envisioned a future free from preventable suffering -- what could be more beautiful and just? But what progressives said and what eugenics policies *did* diverged in ways that caused enormous harm. That's what's happening now, too.

When this issue first caught my attention, I thought I must be missing something. I took the injunction to educate myself seriously. I didn't want to find what I did. I wanted to be wrong. Who wants to find themselves on the outside of a narrative that's captured the public imagination? Who wants to be tarred as hateful for their questions and doubts that come from no such place? But we need to be able to talk about this issue so that we can understand what's going on and figure out what to do next.

And nobody responded. The thing is, I've got a lot of extremely woke friends and colleagues, being a thirty-something ex-Californian, ex-nonprofit staffer. A few friends who share the same concerns liked the post. But I've had people scold and unfollow me for much less.

Sometimes it feels like the more damning the evidence, the quieter the reaction. Looking away is easier. If you must believe something or else, then you can't afford to pay attention—even negative attention, even the attention it takes to refute or condemn—to anyone who trails questions and doubts in their wake.

Of the 90-some conversations I've had with colleagues, friends, and strangers about gender stuff over the past three years, only two have gone badly. But there were three conversations that didn't go anywhere at all. Nothing ever came of them.

One was a close colleague of mine, a brilliant woman usually full of questions, who has a sharp nose for bullshit. We talked about gender several times. The subject kept coming up at work, mostly due to the kinds of internal turmoil Ryan Grim wrote about for The Intercept.

But every time I brought it up, it was as though we had never talked about it before and she had never thought about it ever and she continued not thinking about it.

Unlike the two friends where the conversation went badly, she didn't denounce me. Our relationship as colleagues didn't change in the slightest. She neither agreed nor disagreed with me because she didn't think about it.

Meanwhile, internal pressures mounted. She added pronouns to her email signature and her Zoom handle. She started to call herself 'cis’ and introduce her perspectives by diminishing the value of her contributions: “Speaking as a cis woman…”). When I asked her what she thought about these developments, she said she hadn't thought about them.

And she wouldn't.

She was a white woman in a field where 'Karen' gets thrown around all the time to talk about professional women with experience, who mean well, and who believe (reasonably! fairly!) they still have something to contribute to the field where they've spent their working lives. That comes into it, surely. Naturally, she wanted to stay in the field she had chosen out of interest and passion. Naturally, she still had things she wanted to say and do. Naturally, she still has so much to contribute! Thus, there were things she couldn't afford to think about.

She saw me struggle with expectations I refused to meet. She said I was making my life harder than it needed to be by not just going along. What’s the big deal? As though we’d never talked about it. As though I’d never said why it mattered to me, whether or not she agreed with me. That advice was the only thing of any substance she ever said to me about the gender stuff: it’s not worth it. Strange to be schooled by mentors who have your best interests at heart in disciplines and strategies it would be irresponsible to master, like the ability to know only convenient things.

Irresponsible—but advantageous. Above a certain level in the nonprofit hierarchy, the women tended to be just like these three I came to know so well: ardent lifelong supporters of the moment's most urgent, late-breaking cause.

My guess is that she felt she had no choice about being a 'Karen.' To stay in that field, she even had to accept these disparagements as just, deserved. But she could avoid 'TERF.' All she had to do was not think about what she was being asked to support.

And in fact she was encouraged to do exactly that—not think about it—at every turn. After all, as a 'cis' woman, she wouldn't understand, anyway. All she needed to do was put her support behind the most marginalized, which is what she'd seen herself doing her entire career.

But this time, those good intentions were hacked.