My latest for UnHerd, on the absolutely bizarre column by Lydia Polgreen that says, basically, all decisions are irreversible because time moves in only one direction, death is also a kind of “transition,” what does it mean to know who you are anyway, we should all wear our genders more lightly but also kids should have hormones and surgeries, and quitting the swim team is like transition because I have massive, massive cognitive dissonance after attending the Genspect conference and will say anything to lower the pitch:
“[L]iberals and progressives who fret about the rapidly changing gender landscape,” according to author Lydia Polgreen, are too worked up about the possibility that children and adolescents may later regret the decision to transition. Rather than address their actual concerns, however, Polgreen gives readers a rambling tour of misdirections: gender is like race, somehow, and also like an arranged marriage. Further, life is full of “transitions” that are like “little deaths,” all leading up to the biggest “transition” of all: the big sleep.
Some teenagers get nose jobs and boob jobs, so why should gender transition surgery be viewed as any different? “Cosmetic procedures can produce regret, sometimes famously so,” the author writes. Never mind that few of youth gender transitions’ critics champion cosmetic surgery for teens. The point is, “gender-affirming” care has not been billed to regulators, consumers, and the public as cosmetic, but held up as life-saving procedures, covered under many public and private health insurance plans, and carried out in the name of medicine as a treatment for distress. The stakes matter.
But what is a life without regret? This is a talking point that started circulating relatively recently, in response to mounting evidence of regret and detransition, and concerns that social influence may be driving the explosion in gender-distressed youth — the way just about everybody acknowledges that social influence drives the recent surge in TikTok tics or multiple personalities. So what if it’s a social contagion? “What is gender if not contagious?” Polgreen asks.
The comments on the NYT op-ed are worth reading (and endlessly more sensible than the author’s braindump). Here’s one of the best:
If you compare "gender affirming care" to rhinoplasty than you are admitting that "gender affirming care" is a superficial, cosmetic surgery. I would be fine with that. Stop calling it life-saving. Stop covering it with insurance. Stop telling parents who don't want to go along with it that they're abusive. I have never heard a parent be called abusive for NOT allowing their teen daughter to get breast augmentation. I have not seen campaigns coming out of the HHS saying that kids should learn about rhinoplasty in school and parents should pursue it if their children are insecure about their noses. If you want me think of "sex changes for kids" as being on par with you quitting the swim team, then you need to dial back the "life-saving care" rhetoric by about 1,000 %. Then, maybe, something in this Op-Ed would make sense.
A few weeks ago, Lisa Selin Davis posted on Twitter that the NYT was doing a series on regret and calling for submissions. She was encouraging detransitioners to write and submit something and offering to help edit it.
I really hope this this op-ed is not part of that regret series and that the NYT chose this mess, written by someone who is not experiencing regret as a detransitioner, to speak *for* detransitioners, not just taking the mic from them, but telling them how they should feel and wagging her finger at them with all the tortured word salad morality in that piece.
Would Polgreen tolerate an op-ed about any of the specifics of her personal life or identity, written by a person who hasn't experienced them, lecturing her how she should feel about them?
I haven’t read the Op-Ed yet, I let my NYT subscription lapse last year. However, I went to the comments as you recommended. One really resonated with me, although, I am against all youth gender medicine and most adult gender medicine:
“I both agree and disagree with the premise. I grew up in the 1990s in an era of CK One and grunge and third wave feminism when my generation very much rejected that gender should be a defining feature of ones life. I still embrace that. Part of my discomfort as a "fretting liberal" who isn't super psyched about kids medically transitioning is because I resist gender identity being elevated to a defining feature of existence. I resist the assumption that if kids feel female then they MUST acquire stereoypical physical features of females like breasts and reduced body hair through hormone therapy or they wont live satisfying lives. This seems absurd and retrograde. I live in a female body that is not stereotypically feminine. I don't need to get a boob job, lip fillers and shave my pits to live my cis female sexuality. I don't fret about medical transition because I'm worried kids will "regret" it. I fret about it because the dialogue around it runs contra to the body positivity and self-acceptance that I thought we were trying to achieve in a fairer and more compassionate society.”