Kids and gender: It's not complicated

There's no excuse for threats and acts of violence against ‘gender-affirming’ medical providers. And we should not confuse targeted harassment campaigns with scrutiny of what organizations like the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and their membership are doing, even if these organizations desperately want to shut us up.

This letter paints exposés on child medical transition as "disinformation," even when those exposés archive and share medical systems' own promotional materials, even when they quote medical providers at length in their own words.

So it’s a funny definition of 'disinformation' at work here to refer to information that's true but is presented to unreceptive (read: insufficiently indoctrinated) audiences.

This is what WPATH means when it condemns journalists for taking things "out of context"—even when journalists include video documentation of the entire session they're reporting on. The proper "context" was "everybody who hears this is supposed to agree with us."

These organizations are equivocal evangelists for the cause of transitioning children: all in behind the scenes, more cautious in public view.

Their gospel is a hard one to accept, so they spread the good word selectively. Some ears are not and will never be ready to hear it. They don't trust ordinary people to interpret their revelations in the proper light, to see rightly. (It turns out they're correct not to trust ordinary people to see rightly: tell a normal person what these organizations propose and they balk! They haven’t been socialized out of the horror one naturally feels when confronted with such things.)

These organizations remind me of cults like Scientology, which doesn't give up its secrets too early: first, the seeker must be sufficiently indoctrinated. Only then can they be trusted to swallow doctrine whole, no matter how wacky the doctrine.

Perhaps part of it is that most medical professionals who push this ideology on their patients today would have kept their distance 15 or 20 years ago. Except for the youngest cohort of medical professionals who have been bottle-fed such ideas, most had to learn it―to struggle with it, probably, in order to suppress the part of themselves that once knew better. Perhaps that's why they don't trust ordinary people, don't trust scrutiny, and cry foul when their own words are shared too widely. Even if they really love Big Brother now, they know that most people don't have any interest in learning to love Big Brother recreationally and that sufficient social pressure doesn't exist yet outside of particular fields and institutions.

Meanwhile, these organizations count on the general public’s incredulity as insulation. This is a huge part of how this spreading scandal goes unchecked: accurate reporting—what medical providers actually believe, what they actually do and to whom and on what basis, who's on board—sounds like slander. The truth here is so obscene that to speak it is automatically discrediting.

It’s more comfortable—even for those who know just enough to be uncomfortable with the whole push to transition kids—to say that it’s complicated, to insist on nuance that doesn’t exist.

But it’s not complicated. There is no child whose personality, likes, dislikes, even whose distress warrants sterilization. Sex is not a spectrum. Gender is not so very hard to understand. Children are being indoctrinated to believe it’s possible to be born in the wrong body, then subjected to pharmaceutical and surgical interventions under the guise of medicine to ‘correct’ this invented defect. But no child is born in the wrong body. Every child—every person—has a sex and a personality and some relationship to sex-role stereotypes, whether this relationship is central or marginal to the way they live their lives. Some people call the combination of personality and relationship to sex-role stereotypes ‘gender.’ The aspects of ‘gender’ that are so very hard to understand are not the important parts and they are only ‘hard to understand’ if you are already well down the road to being indoctrinated yourself.