Here’s part two, about the Genspect conference in Killarney last week!
The reality is that many people have been harmed by gender: detransitioners who paid heavily for the impossible promises of transition, ‘disenchanted transsexuals,’ parents who lost contact with well-loved children, dissidents (“TERFs”) who sacrificed careers and shredded their social networks. And none of these people, with their very human needs and their very human pains, were reducible to some identification or diagnosis or slur: no label could encompass who they are or what they have gone through or what any of them will become.
That’s the bigger picture.
The bigger picture means putting gender back in context. Gender identity is not an endocrine condition or a birth defect or a revelation of some essential truth surpassing all understanding, but is rather a deeply human problem, a fresh expression of timeless needs for meaning and explanation and belonging. At Genspect, gender is not cut off from everything else that’s going on in a person’s life. A person is not just a patient in an exam room with a packet full of lab tests and a list of embodiment goals, but a person embedded in families, peer networks, and communities. What matters is not just this moment in time and no others, past or future: the history of the individual, the history of the field matter, and the future matters, too, with all its uncertainties.
A panel of detransitioned young people spoke about their lives, the context in which they came to identify as transgender, about the process of falling for what Stella O’Malley called “perhaps the most bewitching line in the world: that you can be a different person.” They talked about their interactions with a medical system that ultimately harmed them when they needed help instead, and how the stories they told themselves about transition fell apart. They talked about what real help might have looked like. “I realized that I didn’t have to live up to those expectations [of womanhood],” one young woman said, “and someone should have told me that when I was 14.”
Corinna Cohn said, “There’s a point where you realize you’ve been dreaming and that that dream isn’t something you can ever attain.”
We talked about shame and medical responsibility and the broken chain of trust and religion and the law and and the power of metaphor—and the dangers of it, too.
Young people have always suffered from delusional thinking, indulged in fantasy, lacked perspective, etc. However, reality eventually came and set them on the right path (in most instances). Nowadays, not only is reality ignored by mainstream America (and other parts of the world, but Europe, country by country, is waking up and slowing down - Finland, Norway, Sweden, France and now the UK), but young people are pushed and shoved in the direction of their fantasies, and told that anything short of indulging completely in their fantasies will either cause them to kill themselves, or, at best, will force them to lead a miserable, pointless life. Anyone who tries to get in the way of their fantasies - warning of the dangers of the pretense of believing they are the opposite sex, warning of the medical challenges of such choices, and urging them to, if at all possible, accept their healthy bodies and appreciate the benefits of living within those bodies (but not necessarily conforming to any stereotypes associated therewith) - is sloughed off as a bigoted fool. Parents in particular who try and protect their children are considered the worst offenders, and many of these young people, who naturally are separating from their parents as they grow up, now have complete disdain for those who love them the most. This entire situation is untenable, and will eventually come to an end. In the meantime, how many young people will be harmed? How many women will be harmed? How many families will be torn apart? Genspect is doing a very important job - and it is well appreciated by parents like me!!
I appreciate the emphasis on lost humanity. Sexism/gender ideology is indeed dehumanizing. Sometimes I think gender ideology is the weirdest reaction to sexism I've ever seen -- males are identifying into the misogynistic ideal of what a woman is and females are identifying out of it. It seems like a reaction to sexism without the acknowledgement that sexism exists. I guess it's the same with "sex work is work" and other examples in which women's oppression is repackaged and sold back to them as "liberating/powerful" or "self-expression" or "kindness". This is just the latest attempt to convince us our oppression doesn't exist, that the conditions of our oppression are natural and our opposition to it is unnatural, and we need to be focused on more important things like how we're going to cater men.