Response to an ex-friend
Response to an ex-friend, who responded to my concerns about trans activism with not a single question or clarification but "transwomen are women" and an offer to continue our friendship only under the conditions that I submit to reeducation, which she offered to oversee:
What would it take for you to say: This movement isn’t what I thought it was, this isn’t what I thought I was supporting? Or even: This one thing has gone too far and is causing harm to the cause itself or the people it purports to serve or is harming something else I care about? Please think about it.
I started out with questions and doubts that I pushed beneath the surface. I told myself—I can't tell you how many times—that I just didn't understand and didn't need to, that maybe I wasn't even capable of understanding as a "cis" person, but that was OK, it was supposed to make me uncomfortable and that I just needed to accept that other people knew what they were doing, that they weren't doing harm, and it was my job to trust and support them. But evidence of harms piled up all around me and I couldn't keep looking away. Every time I asked a question, no matter how carefully and even obsequiously I worded it—even to the point where my use of approved jargon obscured what I needed to communicate—I got punished and didn't get an answer. “Educate yourself” is a charge I took seriously. So I went digging. I read carefully and with great interest the accounts of trans people; research of leading "gender care" providers; standards of care; adverse drug event reports; the history of psychiatry especially where it intersects with sex, gender, gender-nonconformity, and sexuality; and on and on. I didn't find the reassurances I was looking for. The more I understood, the more questions and doubts I had. I discovered that this movement wasn’t what I had thought I was supporting.
It's curious that, while I have a lot of questions for you, you don't seem to have any questions for me. ("What do you mean when you say we're sterilizing gay kids?" might be an obvious question for an LGBTQ ally to ask. Even just questions like "How do you know this? Where did you find this? Who says?” so that you could look for yourself and see where I might be wrong.) It's clear that not all cases of gender dysphoria are resolved or best treated by transition. Whatever else that tells us, it raises serious questions for affirmation-only as the standard of care. The standard of care needs to take a wider range of factors, potential explanations, and treatment approaches into account. It's beyond dispute thatthere are serious implications for women's rights, speech, political representation, healthcare, and so on, without being prescriptive about how to address these implications. These issues are not resolved by repeating mantras. No one has ever explained why supporting trans rights requires denying sex and undermining women's sex-based rights, which are rooted in women's reproductive capabilities and vulnerabilities that transwomen do not share. For me, this really does come down to whether female people should be able to name, organize, and be protected as a sex class or not. Because there is no reason that I can see that women should be redefined as a mixed-sex class based on gender identity that privileges the identity claims of male people over the lived experiences of female people. You haven't given any. No one has. I'm starting to think there's not a good answer to that question and that that's why asking it invites censure.
If gender is fluid and can change over time, why do we carry out untested and often irreversible medical procedures on kids at younger and younger ages? What are the limits of self-id? Could you or I identify as transwomen and so claim recognition and resources reserved for transwomen? If not, why not? If being a woman is simply a matter of identifying as a woman, why would being a transwoman not be a matter of identifying as a transwoman? Perhaps you'll say that word is taken, it already refers to a group of distinct human beings who need it—but in that case, why are the terms "women" and "female" under assault? We need these words, too. Perhaps you'll think it's offensive to suggest that we know what it's like to be a transwoman—of course, we don't! But no more do transwomen know what it's like to live as a woman/female. Perhaps you'll say it's not a matter of unfairly excluding me from identifying as a transwoman—I simply don't meet the objective criteria to call myself such. Same point. If women ceded feminism to transwomen and reorganized as a female liberation movement to advance the sex-based rights of females, just no longer calling ourselves women and girls, would that be acceptable to you or problematic? Why?
Let’s be clear about the cause of the split between us: my rejection of an ideology that you embrace, and that you want to protect trans rights by redefining sex and I want to protect trans rights separately from sex. I think that recognizing and protecting the human rights of trans people on the basis of transgender status is an urgent, just, and compassionate thing to do. In other words: “Transwomen are transwomen [male people who identify and desire to live as women], transmen are transmen [female people who identify and desire to live as men], and that’s OK.” This also has the virtue of being true and so easily accommodated by a liberal democratic society. No one has to become an ideologue. No one has to pretend. "Transwomen are women" is something else entirely—not about tolerance or acceptance but the submission of reality and perception to ideology. Look at what happens when activists try to enshrine a fiction like that in the law. It undermines liberal truth-seeking institutions, hollows out women’s sex-based rights, fractures the left by demanding conformity with a quasi-religious ideology that has nothing to do with the left-materialist politics that we need to save our planet and redress inequalities by race and place, and courts a political backlash from the right that I don’t even want to think about. None of this is necessary to protect the rights of trans people. Is the redefinition of “women” from a sex class to a mixed-sex class that prioritizes the claims of male people over the realities of female people a right? No. Is it necessary to redefine “women” to protect the rights of trans people? No. Is it a right to compel belief in gender identity—rather than respecting people’s freedom to believe or disbelieve? No. So why has this movement taken this particular shape? Why is this movement such an effective instrument of division within the Left and destruction of women’s rights and such a poor vehicle for delivering actual services and protections that trans people need? In that sense, it reminds me of anti-choice protestors who support the death penalty and cheer cuts to social welfare. Actions always say more than slogans. The "pro-life" movement is less about the “sanctity of life” than it is about controlling women, though individual members may be ardent in their beliefs.
I admit I'm confused by "you're smarter than this" with regards to my rejection of a faith-based proposition. In fact, your whole letter strikes me as utterly surreal in its indifference to the gap between doctrine and practice. It's tempting to think that what we're doing is synonymous with what we say we're doing. I am telling you I see an enormous gap between the two in this case, an observation which you haven't countered in any way. The narrative does not fit the facts. Strangely, you don't seem curious about whether there might be any issue at all. I care about what I might be getting right and wrong, and if I'm wrong about something, I want to know (your fervent injunctions to "believe harder" notwithstanding: I want to know the facts, what we do, not what we say or believe). That's why I've spent the last several years researching this issue from every angle I can think of, trying to keep an open mind even as my concerns piled up.
What I've found has really shaken me, violates my core values and commitments (to liberalism, tolerance, nonviolence, solidarity across difference, the pursuit of knowledge, freedom of speech and belief, language as a means to communicate and not obscure, women's rights, protections for children, and so on), and I cannot go along with it anymore. I can't support this. It's not from lack of understanding that I reject it but because I have sought to understand it in all its implications.
How can you support this? How can you look at the collateral damage this movement is causing and call it just? I won't close my eyes and let other people tell me what I'm seeing. I can't judge by anyone's judgment but my own. If you want to look away and tell yourself it's not your place to ask questions, so be it. But don't expect me to confuse allyship and zealotry like that. I reject—totally—the demand that you must subscribe to someone else's belief system in order to care about them, that if you disbelieve you do not care and your motivations, you as a person, are suspect. If you have questions, you're suspect because it suggests you don't believe. A believer doesn't question—just accepts the wafer and the wine as the body and blood. Can I care about a religious person without practicing their religion? Yes. Can I care about a trans person without believing in gender identity? Yes. To do or want to do the right thing here, is it necessary to be a believer? Your letter suggests that it is—that the only possible answer to the questions I raised is faithful submission to doctrine (“transwomen are women”) and the suspension of doubt. But I think these problems go on existing no matter what we believe about them. Besides, I gave up organized religion long ago and have no plans to take it up under a new guise.
This really is a question of what standard we use to judge what we’re doing, a religious standard or a secular one. If I believe in life after death—an eternity spent either in heaven or hell—I will look at a range of religious practices that make promises about salvation in a very different way than someone who does not believe. I will see hairshirts not as an old-fashioned form of self-harm or an infection risk but as a form of penance that moves the wearer closer to God. Martyrdom, too, will undergo a transformation in my eyes. What is my suffering in this life—even to the point of death—compared to a promise of an eternity in heaven? It’s a blink of an eye against infinity. But if I don’t believe, these practices may seem futile, harmful, even barbaric to me.
With gender “medicine,” too, a believer and non-believer will look at the same risks and potential rewards and weigh them very differently. If I believe in gender ideology, I will say: whatever gender identity someone expresses right now is who they really are and if we don’t affirm that identity through medical and social practices, we are denying that person’s true self, even basic safeguarding risks slowing down a person’s progress to self-realization, exploratory therapy looks like conversion therapy—within that framework, these are clear moral wrongs. But if I don’t believe in gender ideology, I will look at the same patient and same slate of treatment options and see a very different picture. I will see claims about gender identity not as unmediated testimony of someone’s “true self” but as the product of a confluence of social, psychological, and biographical factors, a self-understanding that may or may not be permanent, that may or may not be healthy to reinforce. I will use secular frameworks to understand what’s going on. I’ll look at the evidence for affirmative approaches and find it lacking. A huge study that claimed hormone therapy and gender-corrective surgeries improved mental health and reduced suicide risk among people suffering from gender dysphoria was just retracted; a year after its publication, the authors agreed that their findings were contradicted by their own evidence: that time on hormones and access to surgery do not improve mental health and that suicide risk increased after surgery. This is a theme in gender dysphoria research—the higher quality and longer term the study, the worse the outcomes for transition appear (ask for citations if you want to look for yourself). I see so-called “affirmative” approaches as one of many approaches to address a person’s distress—perhaps the right option for some but not the right option for everybody. I will look at affirmation and say, this isn’t evidence-based; why does suicide risk go up?; why are we giving drugs that we use to chemically castrate sex offenders to prepubescent children?; why are we pretending puberty is a disease to be prevented, rather than a complex process of cognitive, physical, and social development and that we don’t know what happens when we defer it? and why would we push a single treatment model when there are clearly patients—many of them children—being harmed by affirmation? Within a religious framework, seen through a believer’s eyes, your approach is the just and compassionate one, no question. But if you look at what we’re doing through a secular lens, the morality of what we’re doing will look very different and you will see why the practices you support horrify me. Is a religious framework an appropriate approach to this form of distress? What happens when a religious framework deploys the tools of modern medicine and the language and authority—though not the practice—of science?
Someday, you’ll pull a loose thread and the story you’ve been telling yourself will unravel. You’ll be left—as I am—without the consolation of appearances and inspiring words, but only the ugly reality of what we’re doing. It will amaze you what you—believing—were willing to overlook. In the meantime, forgive me for my doubts. I don’t have recourse to an infallible creed. I can’t weave a flowing garment out of so many pulled threads.
Please take seriously your responsibility to understand what you support. Please think about where you draw the line and what would cause you to withdraw your support from this movement. Please think about how you’d know if you’d drawn the line in the wrong place. Don't outsource your judgment to others who have their own motivations and blind spots. Don't make a virtue of handing off responsibility in that way. And don't deceive yourself. You can't discharge responsibility that easily—you can only pretend to.
If you want to have a real dialogue where we can each ask questions and explore what’s going on here, I'm around. But if what you have in mind is just more of the proselytizing that's in this letter, then we both have better things to do with our time, and I must decline your offer to assist in my reeducation.
Eliza