I’ve got covid so please forgive any unusually sloppy thinking or typing (can’t blame sloppy thinking or typing that’s within my normal range on a virus).
Breathtakingly dishonest article in Vox that challenges the reader to “stop worrying about what happens if we let kids transition. Worry about what happens if we don’t.” Shifting the burden of proof is what you do when you don’t have the evidence you’d need to make a real argument for radical interventions on children.
What follows isn’t journalism but pure propaganda.
“This is not experimental care. This is care that’s been around, in a very formal fashion, for over 50 years,” says Michelle Forcier, a professor at Brown University’s medical school and co-editor of Pediatric Gender Identity. “We know that there are studies that demonstrate efficacy and safety.”
This is not experimental care because experiments track outcomes. But countries like Sweden and Finland are pulling back because the risks and unknowns are so great, and the benefits are dubious.
“We know that there are studies…” is a statement of belief. No citations necessary—and none provided.
Also Michelle Forcier:
The recent hyperfocus on trans youth is largely a media invention, says Jules Gill-Peterson, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University. “Trans people and trans youth were never really objects of the media [until recently]. I really don’t think most people ever encountered the idea that they shared the world with trans youth until the last 10 years.”
Accepting the existence of “trans” children is a question of sophistication. The most sophisticated simply believe. No evidence required.
“When we make the assumption that trans kids just showed up in 2015, the least generous version of that is that there were no trans children, period, before that. That’s empirically untrue and easily [disprovable],” says Gill-Peterson. “The more sophisticated version of that assumption is, ‘Of course, there were trans kids, but they didn’t medically transition. That didn’t start until really recently.’ That’s also flat-out untrue. Trans youth have been transitioning as long as there has been medical transition.”
Read some Ian Hacking, I beg you:
I have long been interested in classifications of people, in how they affect the people classified, and how the affects on the people in turn change the classifications. We think of many kinds of people as objects of scientific inquiry. Sometimes to control them, as prostitutes, sometimes to help them, as potential suicides. Sometimes to organise and help, but at the same time keep ourselves safe, as the poor or the homeless. Sometimes to change them for their own good and the good of the public, as the obese. Sometimes just to admire, to understand, to encourage and perhaps even to emulate, as (sometimes) geniuses. We think of these kinds of people as definite classes defined by definite properties. As we get to know more about these properties, we will be able to control, help, change, or emulate them better. But it’s not quite like that. They are moving targets because our investigations interact with them, and change them. And since they are changed, they are not quite the same kind of people as before. The target has moved. I call this the ‘looping effect’. Sometimes, our sciences create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not exist before. I call this ‘making up people’.
In a 2000 Atlantic article, A New Way to be Mad, Carl Elliott applies Hacking’s ideas to gender identity:
Clinicians and patients alike often suggest that apotemnophilia is like gender-identity disorder, and that amputation is like sex-reassignment surgery. Let us suppose they are right. Fifty years ago the suggestion that tens of thousands of people would someday want their genitals surgically altered so that they could change their sex would have been ludicrous. But it has happened. The question is why. One answer would have it that this is an ancient condition, that there have always been people who fall outside the traditional sex classifications, but that only during the past forty years or so have we developed the surgical and endocrinological tools to fix the problem.
But it is possible to imagine another story: that our cultural and historical conditions have not just revealed transsexuals but created them. That is, once "transsexual" and "gender-identity disorder" and "sex-reassignment surgery" became common linguistic currency, more people began conceptualizing and interpreting their experience in these terms. They began to make sense of their lives in a way that hadn't been available to them before, and to some degree they actually became the kinds of people described by these terms.
Now do “trans kids.” Without the concept of transgender identity, without pharmaceutical and surgical techniques to reshape the body, we just have kids, not “trans” kids. There is no long history of “trans” children. Trans people have not always been with us, even if people who didn’t conform to sex-role stereotypes or people who wished they had been born the opposite sex have always been with us. There’s a difference and it matters. There’s something bone-chilling about the propaganda campaign to insist that “trans and nonbinary” people have always existed, as I’ve written about before:
I’ve been thinking lately about what drove me away from serious study of literature as a student: my professors dragged literature into the present and tortured it with interrogations, putting 21st-century words and concepts in the mouths of long-dead authors, as though they had nothing of their own to say to us.
I've always read to enter other worlds and slip sideways out of my own, not to subjugate and tyrannize these other worlds by the dictates of the present. Even if it's impossible to ever understand the past on its own terms, it's surely possible to move closer to understanding. The denial of that possibility filled me with despair. Those narrow readings of the past through the preoccupations of the present gave me a suffocating feeling: no hope, no air, no way out.
And now I get that same feeling when I see women like Joan of Arc dug up and transed, when I read ads for hormone regimens that celebrate generations of “trans ancestors.” What are we saying when we talk about “trans ancestors”? In what sense can such people be said to have existed?
There have always been women who responded to the constraints on their sex by living as men. Women who wanted to marry other women. Women who wanted to practice medicine. Women who, for whatever reason, didn't fit the mold of their times. (When I was a kid, we still looked up to these women as heroines, rather than insisting their nonconformity was just a sign they’d really been men all along…)
And that, right there, contains the forbidden acknowledgement: that social context shapes personal decisions, including the decision — in our own times — to transition. An uncomfortable topic in the age of innate gender identity, in whose holy name we righteously sterilize teenagers.
When we tamper with the past, subjugate it, sanitize it, apply software updates to it,re removing possibilities in the here and now: the possibility of stepping outside of our own time and its prejudices and fixations for a moment to see our problems differently.
When we interact only with a heavily revised and ideologically compliant past, we risk forgetting that we have our own blindspots and that it's unlikely we've arrived at a state of such perfect enlightenment that we will never look back on what we do now with different eyes. It lets us talk about being on the right side of history while we enact a very old story on the bodies of girls and women and gender-nonconforming youth.
But this is all academic to Vox. It’s politically convenient—essential to the broader project of entrenching gender identity in our laws and societies—that “trans” kids exist and have always existed, thus they exist and have always existed. No need to visit the archives or try even half-heartedly to inhabit the past as it actually played out.
The risk of not allowing trans kids to begin living as themselves compounds the longer they are alive. In 2001, Anne Vitale, a California psychotherapist who has specialized in gender-nonconforming patients since 1984, published a groundbreaking paper in the journal Gender and Psychoanalysis surveying trans women at all stages of life who did not transition as young people. The picture she painted of these women in middle and old age is deeply sad. “This anxiety, if left untreated, is manifested in … confusion and rebellion in childhood, false hopes and disappointment in adolescence, hesitant compliance in early adulthood, feelings of self-induced entrapment in middle age, and if still untreated, depression and resignation in old age,” she writes.
This is straight from Big Pharma’s ADD/ADHD and bipolar disorder playbooks: intervene (pharmaceutically, of course) as early as possible—even when ‘signs’ of the disorder are uncertain—or pay the price later in suicide, substance abuse, broken relationships, etc. This is how we ended up with two-year-olds taking heavy antipsychotics in the 1990s.
This is a full-blown campaign against the uncustomized/untampered-with human endocrine system:
“It’s hard to do this as an adult. I’ve had patients that have had 60 years of gender hormones affecting their body.”
“Puberty blockers are reversible, but the puberty that transgender kids would go through without them isn’t. Puberty writes itself into your bones. Without blockers and, at an appropriate age, hormones, it forces transgender girls, who are girls like any other, to grow facial hair and broad, angular features, and forces transgender boys to grow breasts and wide hips. Its effects can only be reversed by very expensive and difficult-to-access surgeries in adulthood, and even then only partially.”
“[T]hey forced me through a puberty that I didn’t consent to.”
This was also one of the major themes of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health conference I went to in September (and about which I have a lot more to say…). You can see Planned Parenthood get in on the ‘choose your puberty’ action here:
“The center-left media and the right-wing media are having the exact same conversation about trans people [right now], which is: Are there too many? What number of trans people is the right number? That’s a really strange question to be focused on,” says Ari Drennen, the LGBTQ program director for Media Matters for America.
Another strawmxn. Nobody is asking: Are there too many trans people? (With the dark implication that we should consider getting rid of some…) Rather, researchers, clinicians, parents, etc., are asking: what’s going on here? Or, as Wesley Yang put it, people reasonably doubt that this is “a sudden discovery that the population of girls who are really boys increased 4000 percent.” There’s a lot going on here that is worth understanding—and worth understanding before we send kids down a medical pathway.
“We don’t listen to children. We treat children as manifestly inferior to adults. We give them less rights,” says Gill-Peterson. “We make them economically and politically dependent on adults. We put them in dangerous and vulnerable situations all the time. They have no control or participation in authoring the world they live in, the schools they go to, the doctor’s offices they visit, the adults they’re left alone with. And then we say they’re incapable of knowing anything. Therefore, they have no ability to hold adults to account. That’s a very disturbing way to treat a group of people.”
This person has either never met a child or needs a hard-drive check.
This is one of the most important articles you have written. I always knew that kids were being influenced, but you show us exactly how it is happening. There is simply no possibility that tens of thousands of kids were naturally trans and have now figured out that they can do something about it (i.e., transition). Rather, we are influencing them to THINK they are trans when they are not. Kids are extremely impressionable. All you have to do to influence them is to say, "Maybe you are trans", and they will take it from there. What saddens me is that there are so many kids who can't love themselves as they are. Thank you.
They never address this conundrum. If there have always been this many "trans kids," (assuming arguendo that's a real thing), and they just didn't feel comfortable expressing who they were or didn't have the words, why haven't we seen massive amounts of suicides since those kids were not being socially and medically transitioned until now? According to their constant refrain, the suicide rate is through the roof (at least 41%) if trans kids are not immediately socially and medically transitioned. So where are these huge numbers of suicides up until now, and how much has the suicide rate among young people plummeted since we began offering these treatments?