[Nota bene, October 8, 2023: This is a crazy-busy week for me—so please wish me luck!—and so I’m opening up this paid-only post to everybody for today’s update…]
I’m looking at the country I called home for most of my life—the United States—and wondering: who are the ‘persuadables’? Who needs to be poked and prodded to act on what they know? Who needs encouragement to inform themselves about the subjects they’ve been avoiding and then act on the things they didn’t want to know?
I need to vent about the Professional Grown-Ups.
There are a lot of Professional Grown-Ups—editors-in-chief, deans and college presidents, heads of public agencies, executive directors, CEOs—out there who really hoped they could sit this one out without getting involved in what’s become a culture war. That’s understandable. Culture wars are torturous affairs and messengers get shot all the time. Believe me, I get why our side has a recruiting problem.
The thing is, in service of the decision to Sit This One Out, it’s clear that many Professional Grown-Ups have actively avoided knowledge. I realize I’m not coming across as all that sympathetic to their plight. But convince me that their ignorance is innocent at this point, when all the information anybody needs has been in the public domain for years and when so many people —people who are not so well-placed, not so credentialed, people with much less power to exercise over sectors and institutions that have slid into utter (and utterly obvious) madness—have taken it upon themselves to figure out what must now be broken (gently, diplomatically) to the Professional Grown-Ups. Most of these Professional Grown-Ups have advanced degrees. Many of them have research assistants and interns. Tell me they couldn’t have worked this out on their own five years ago if they’d had the slightest internal motivation to do so. Think about the thousands of ordinary people out there who didn’t need a sensitively-worded invitation to do the right thing.
So, the message for the Professional Grown-Ups is: We’ve got bad news. You don’t get to sit this one out. You have a responsibility to bring sanity back into your institutions. And you’re abdicating that responsibility every minute you stay conveniently uninformed and uncomfortably silent.
This is a message the intended audience has tried to tune out for years. It’s tempting to soften the blow and say: look, we know this issue is really complicated. There are no easy answers here. It’s tempting to offer middle ground that doesn’t exist, in the hopes of convincing a handful of cowards to budge a few inches.
But the Professional Grown-Ups who’ve tried to sit this one out having been telling themselves that “it’s really complicated” and “there are no easy answers” for years. That’s what they want to hear because “it’s really complicated” and “there are no easy answers” sound an awful lot like “boy was I ever right to stay out of this!”
But it’s not complicated. There are easy answers here, like: We need to stop sterilizing gender-confused kids yesterday, no matter why we’re telling ourselves we’re doing it.
I realize a shaming approach will only attract kinksters but seriously. There’s been enough pretending already. Do we really have to act like the Professional Grown-Ups didn’t have a responsibility to be on the case years ago? How many pseudo-Rip van Winkles—finally stirring from convenient 20-year snoozes—are we now supposed to humor?
I understand the desire to build golden bridges but I worry about any message that will need revising in the near future. Especially when it comes to defining the nature of the problem we face. Do we need to prune a few errant branches from an otherwise healthy tree or do we need to yank this thing up by the roots? It doesn’t make any sense to say—for the sake of soothed feelings and saved faces—that we just need to break out the pruning shears when we’ll need to turn around, in six months or a year or 10, whenever the ‘persuadables’ are finally ready to hear it, and announce that the whole thing must go.
Again, I think the only bridge we can offer is a recognition of good intentions gone wrong.
Some bearers of bad news insert footholds and guardrails. They don’t want the hearer to descend too fast—or turn around, or stop up their ears. So they offer concessions. The Dutch protocol is a favorite concession. A critical article will nod to the Dutch, as though to reassure the reader: there’s a right way to do this and there’s a right group of people to do it to. Others insist that some children are no doubt trans and no doubt helped by early interventions—even though many more are harmed. This is a way of offering people—clinicians, activists, parents—who have caused harm a ‘golden bridge.’ You were traveling in the right direction but you went too far. Here’s a way back.
But any strategic fictions we reinforce will need to be dismantled. This direction of travel was always wrong, every step of the way.
I think the only golden bridge we can offer is this: Perhaps your intentions were good.
As far as consolations go, it's thin. Good intentions, terrible—foreseeable—consequences. Perhaps it’s no consolation at all. But that’s where we are.
Or, in the case of the Professional Grown-Ups, perhaps the only bridge we can offer is “you hoped this would blow over but it hasn’t.”
It takes courage to admit we've been wrong or that we've been avoiding something. I'd say this is more the exception than the rule. I think the vast majority of people live in a near constant state of avoidance, actively dodging inconvenient and uncomfortable truths. When you grow up in an abusive or neglectful home, harm is so constant and inescapable that you escape it in your mind through avoidance. Growing up in an oppressive society is not so different. Harm and suffering are so constant that avoidance can feel like survival or safety. We might even tell ourselves the harm isn't happening or if it is, the people being harmed don't matter. I think Judith Herman said it best in Trauma and Recovery,
"It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering."
Megan McArdle’s idea of the Oedipus Trap is interesting: when good intentions lead to harm, people have a difficult time ever acknowledging they were wrong. We discuss lobotomies as a case in which a harmful medical treatment for mental illness was eventually ended when that harm was finally acknowledged. But the most active promoter and practitioner of lobotomies never did acknowledge its harm. When he died he was trying to gather evidence of of its efficacy, convinced he had done the right thing.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4k2nzooJVkSer0sbNqtir6