Putting this together, I realized why I’ve felt so busy this year… there’s a lot more where all of this came from (check the archives, if you’re curious) but these are some of my favorite pieces and conversations from the first half of 2023.
This is also just to say thank you for reading and writing to me—and thank you to those of you who are paid subscribers, who’ve made it possible for me to spend more time than I would otherwise be able to writing here!
Wishing you a lovely New Year—
Eliza
January
When I think about the possibility of being doxxed—or when I think about reconnecting the identity I’ve built online with my real name, populating all those fields I’ve left blank—I don’t think about the hate mail.
I think about K.
I’ve got just enough of a profile to attract speculation. Someone compiled all the graduate programs I could possibly belong to. It’s a short list. Sometimes strange messages appear in my DMs, like the one a few weeks ago that said simply: “she’s doxxed,” accompanied by a grimacing skeleton emoji. Then nothing.
So it’s only a matter of time. I may or may not be the one to choose the timing. Either I will say the wrong thing or I will say the right thing and this partial anonymity I’ve carved out will collapse.
And that means that someday, somehow, K will find out.
I ended up on the wrong end of a baying mob…
This is what ‘no debate’ looks like:
There was supposed to be a talk on campus about sex vs. gender identity on Tuesday. I was naïve: I thought it would happen. Activists shut it down.
I arrived early, before most of the protesters. At 12:30, the counterprotest seemed to me a rather sad little event. A few activists scattered flyers and slung slogans, their voices tight and nervous. “Like it or not, McGill University is actively contributing to the genocide of trans people across the world…” one flyer read, not at all portentously.
Another sneered:
“Dear cis ‘feminists’ at the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism and Law Faculty… when the LGB Alliance is done ‘carefully debating’ trans rights, abortion is next. TRANS LEGAL PROTECTIONS ARE NOT UP FOR DEBATE. TERFS are NOT welcome at McGill.”
I read that there’s “no conflict” between “trans rights” and the rights of any other group. In other words, you know you’ve got a TERF on your hands if they claim there’s a conflict:
“As anti-trans violence becomes increasingly prevalent across the world, and legal gender recognition is threatened in the UK, in the US, and here in Quebec itself, every extra minute of airtime given to an anti-trans activist may result in further rollback. Every such minute will contribute to the premature deaths of trans people worldwide. Now is the time to say ‘no’ to this continued, systemic elimination of trans voices and lives.”
But just as I was stuffing the flyers into my backpack, feeling a little pity for the poor turnout, a surge of protesters arrived and the energy turned menacing all at once.
After a menacing run-in with an ‘ex-Neo-Nazi’ (uh huh, sure), I wanted to write about them:
Extremism-fluid: The Neo-Nazi-to-trans pipeline:
The other day, I was talking to a friend about people—men in particular—going from neo-Nazis to transgender activists and he quipped: "What is the pipeline? The neo-Nazi becomes tired of being unpopular but still wants to be in a hate group?"
It’s a thing I’ve observed online and in real life. So what might be going on here?
Let’s ask some people who’ve traveled down that pipeline themselves...
February
Those of us who uncovered this medical scandal by ourselves—not by reading books and newspapers but by piecing together journal articles and decoding euphemisms and finding first one person with a story and then another and another and another—descended into hell one rung at a time.
I descended for years.
… Now we're at a point where whole societies that have sleepwalked into this madness must be made to see it for what it is.
But it’s hard to be the bearer of bad news: what to say? How to say it? How to say anything at all and be heard, when no one wants to hear it?
For people who have not paid attention—and those who have not understood what it is they’ve supported—the descent will be precipitous: the ground beneath their feet will simply disappear.
Resilience or terror? On phobia indoctrination in online trans communities:
This is what you get when a subculture makes victimization and threats of violence (directed at the self or against others) central to the group's identity. Mythologize suicide and martyrdom and you will create suicides and martyrs.
Patient autonomy or medical responsibility?
Of the patients researchers actually managed to follow up with, more than one in four (27%) said they regretted that gender transition had rendered them infertile. A further 11% said they weren’t sure how they felt about the loss of their fertility. Fifty-six percent of patients said that they now wanted children, with many expressing that their desires had changed since they themselves were children; 21% of patients said they were simply too young to understand the consequences when they embarked on medical transition as preteens or young teenagers.
And now, years later, surrounded by evidence of regret and harm, the Dutch clinicians joked that they’re “not really interested in prediction.” One researcher said “I can predict how I’ll feel in one minute—still nervous!—but I cannot predict how I will feel tomorrow.” The audience laughed.
But it’s not funny. This is an adult in a conference room joking that she has no idea how she’ll feel tomorrow—after all, anything could happen between now and then!—to gloss over evidence that distressed children and teens can’t consent to sign away the rest of their lives.
At a conference that so often devolved into sheer insanity—like endorsing ‘gender-affirming care’ for eunuchs and people who claim multiple personalities—this particular WPATH session was restrained and reasonable-sounding. That’s why it was so chilling.
All around the world, gender clinicians look to the Dutch. And the Dutch have no idea what they’re doing and they never did and they never will. Circumstances outside of their control are forcing them to talk about regret and detransition and all they can come up with is: “Respecting someone’s autonomy also includes that the person has the right to make a decision which they may later regret.”
If these clinicians were talking about regretted tattoos, I’d agree. But they’re talking about irreversible interventions with lifelong consequences that they carried out on minors under the banner of medicine.
Of course, such clinicians would rather talk about patient autonomy than medical responsibility. Of course, they refuse to translate “some patients changed their minds later/experienced multiple attenuations of their gender” (autonomy framework) into “we harmed patients” (medical responsibility framework).
Seeking refuge in idiosyncratic sexual identities (and yaoi):
The concept of “gay trans guys” is difficult to make sense of unless you understand the online ecosystem in which young people form their transgender identities and grapple with sexual orientation and attraction. Based on other conversations in these communities, my sense is that some of what’s going on here is age-old discomfort with the unequal sexual and reproductive burden on women and girls, but early exposure to hardcore pornography—and thus porn-addled depictions of heterosexual relationships as inherently exploitative, degrading, and even violent—also seems to contribute. Exposure to porn in many cases precedes actual experiences of sexual intimacy. Idiosyncratic sexual identities may appear to offer an exemption from dynamics young people—female or male—want no part in, letting young people who adopt these identities say: That’s not who I am. That’s not what I want. Don’t treat me like that. Don’t see me that way. Don’t make me the woman (or man) in that kind of relationship.
This might also explain some of what’s going on with highly feminine transmen or “transmascs,” who may be looking for a way to say ‘I want to express femininity but don’t sexualize me.’ A recent post on r/ftm—titled ”Male gender identity + female gender expression”–captures this dynamic, with members connecting FTM medical interventions like double mastectomies with renewed opportunities to express femininity in self-presentation (e.g., “I cannot wait until the day when I am confident enough in my masculinity to wear fishnets and eyeliner again lol” or “Can’t wait to wear dresses again after top surgery”).
March
April
My interview with newthoughtcrime:
Q: One of the (many) things I've found so useful about Lifton's work is that it provides a way to talk about coercive dynamics in online trans communities without getting stuck on the question of "is it technically a cult or not?" But it's still an interesting question and I'm curious how you think about the question of whether trans communities can be meaningfully understood as a cult or cult-like?
A: On one hand, I understand that a lot of people feel hesitant to use the word “cult” to describe anything other than a group of people who live on a compound, practise a religion, and are controlled by a singular leader. On the other hand, I think that cults have evolved alongside technology and societal norms. In particular, I think there’s a tendency to doubt that cults can recruit people primarily online, or even that interaction with a cult could be entirely online but still have a severe impact on a person’s wellbeing. But our current understanding of manipulative extremist groups shows that they often use the Internet to target vulnerable people in a way that would not be possible if limited to in-person encounters, as evidenced by the incel movement, QAnon, ISIS, and so on.
I think another reason people are reluctant to use the word “cult” is that the trans community essentially isn’t “bad enough.” I think some people are uncomfortable with the idea that a formerly trans-identified person would claim to be a cult survivor, and thus compare themselves to people who escaped horrific, violent cults like the People’s Temple or Children of God. But in my view, the reality is that you don’t have to be in the worst cult to have been in a cult. And even then, I have to question whether the trans community can really be considered so harmless, when people are being indoctrinated as children and leaving with fewer body parts than they started with.
There's been a push—within progressive circles in particular—to listen and demonstrate empathy while scrupulously withholding judgment, with the result that conversations about how our society should be sometimes sound more like a beginner psychotherapy session: "I understand why you feel that way."
Like so many questionable things, I think this comes from a good place. But civic life is supposed to be a process for working out what's true and false and what to do based on what we know. And that means challenging and correcting erroneous or irrational claims, not reinforcing them.
Attempts to prioritize empathy over reality backfire. Sometimes people overreact. Sometimes somebody sincerely feels like the world is coming to an end when it isn't. The right thing to do when an individual or a movement loses all sense of proportion isn’t to nod along politely. Seriously, how did 'reassurance' come to sound like this?
A: "I’m terrified that there's a campaign to eradicate trans people."
B: "Yes, you are definitely NOT crazy, therefore your assessment is totally valid."
When I think about the sense of constriction that wrapped itself around my life over the last seven years, it started with one person I loved and the fragile falsities they desperately needed to be true.
At first, it seemed like any other delicate situation among friends: the bad boyfriend she just can't let go of, the drinking problem he can't admit. When a subject hasn’t ripened, you avoid it, politely, diplomatically. Attempts to force such a conversation will fail. So you wait.
Then I went to Ireland for Genspect and EPATH…
But the mood of the conference was strange—uneven—like a family holiday after something has gone badly wrong, where nothing that needs to be said will be said. The pieces of the conference refused to fit together. There’s a genocide underway but social acceptance is greater than ever before. We’re under attack by a global movement that seeks our annihilation but more optimistic than ever before about the future of the work we do. The evidence is troubling but gender-affirming care effective. Everything is hunky dory, except for all the things that aren’t. Don’t worry. Worry. Was I the only one who left confused about how I was meant to feel?
So many questions aren’t asked, so many presentations end with no questions from the audience at all. Instead, there’s an awkward pause where inquiry and debate should be. It’s as though the questions that should be asked cease to exist. Patients expressed satisfaction six months after undergoing a double mastectomy. But why had patients sought such surgeries? How will patients feel in five years, or 10? Is this medicine or customer service provided under a limited warranty: customer satisfaction guaranteed—for six months?
I want to say there was no human curiosity at EPATH. But that’s not quite true. What there is is more insidious in that it’s harder to see: for every normal human need and impulse, ‘gender-affirming care’ provides a surrogate.
In place of free-ranging curiosity about what drives patients to seek such drastic interventions, there is a bounded curiosity about how patients identify and what novel “treatment wishes” patients will express in the future.
In the place of self-reflection, clinicians meditate on their “positionality” and “privilege.” One researcher spent nine minutes of a 20-minute presentation pontificating on the impossibility of neutrality.
In place of scientific inquiry, we find ‘multiple ways of knowing.’ A session titled “Transgender adolescents and bone mineral density: Strengthening knowledge from multiple perspectives” enabled researchers to downplay the only measurement of bone density that really matters. Nonetheless, this was one of the few sessions where an attendee dared to ask a hard question: “Is there a threshold of worry [when it comes to bone density of adolescents undergoing puberty suppression]?” After an uncomfortable pause, a British clinician said: “I guess I’d worry more the lower they go,” before bursting into nervous laughter. “In the end, we need the data on fractures to know [how low is too low] and we won’t have that for a while.” Besides, as another clinician helpfully pointed out, “pediatric osteoporosis is also a problem beyond trans health” and no one knows the extent of the effects of (experimental) puberty suppression versus other factors on pediatric osteopenia and osteoporosis.
I also spoke about my research at Genspect:
But the exam room isn’t the only place where it’s hard to talk about doubt. Doubts are also taboo in online trans communities. And taboos must be handled with great care.
Doubting other people’s gender self-identity is strictly forbidden. Questioning the concept of gender identity won’t fly either. But you’re allowed to express reservations about your own identity and decision to transition as long as you couch these doubts in the right terms.
In online trans communities, you’ll hear the most serious doubts expressed: Am I really trans? Should I do this? Could this be related to sexual abuse I experienced? What if I’m just a lesbian? What if getting help for other issues makes my dysphoria go away? What if I’m wrong? Is transition actually helping? Is my life better or worse since I came out as trans or started transitioning? What if I regret it and end up detransitioning? These conversations make it clear just how fragile transgender identity can be.
There are also many ways to talk about doubt.
I’m struggling with internalized transphobia
I need to get over my imposter syndrome
I need to stop having these Intrusive thoughts
I’m having a hard time accepting myself as trans
I feel like I’m pretending
I feel like I’m deceiving people
I’ve got brainworms
I think I’m in denial
I’ve got all this “TERF rhetoric” stuck in my head
I need to unlearn my internalized cissexism
I’ve got trans OCD
I feel like a fraud
Most of these are variations on three basic themes: internalized transphobia (“I can’t accept myself as trans because I haven’t overcome a lifetime of socialization into anti-transgender attitudes and beliefs”), imposter syndrome (“I feel like I’m faking it”), and intrusive thoughts (“I have disordered cognitions that pathological undermine my sense of self”).
May
The triumph of incongruence over dysphoria:
When I first noticed the shift from gender dysphoria to gender incongruence seemed to me to be primarily about normalizing an ever-widening range of body modifications. (And don’t get me wrong: that’s still a big part of it!)
But watching the discouraging data about patient mental health outcomes—data that researchers and clinicians refuse to translate into evidence that transition works or doesn't work—roll in, it occurs to me that incongruence triumphed over dysphoria for other reasons.*
Incongruence's infinite flexibility is attractive, of course. But incongruence has other advantages. Incongruence makes no promises that transition will improve mental health, whereas treatments for gender dysphoria really ought to improve patients' quality of life overall.
June
Aaron Terrell, Benjamin Boyce, and I talked about going undercover at trans conferences…
Three years ago, Katherine’s world turned upside-down when her teenage daughter—we’ll call her Lauren—came out as transgender in a Google Doc. She knew that her daughter—and her daughter’s friends—had been trying on new identities and struggling to adjust to the changes puberty brings. Just a few months earlier, Lauren had come out as gay—an announcement her parents took lightly, given Lauren’s year-long crush on a boy in her class. “I knew sexual orientation can take awhile to figure out,” Katherine said. But trans came out of nowhere.
The Google Doc declaration had Katherine confused and concerned. “My kid is a writer, so I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of pages of her writing over the years. It was obviously not written by her. And it was so hard to follow. At one point, she said she was a gay boy and then, at the end, said she was nonbinary.” When Katherine and her husband tried to talk to their daughter, Lauren broke down: “She was hysterical and crying. She was so sure we were going to kick her out.” The time Lauren had spent immersed in online trans communities had convinced her that her family would reject her and that she would end up on the street. These communities “made her believe we were the enemy.” Her parents did everything they could to reassure Lauren and help her feel safe and loved.
Katherine paused. “We made a critical error at that point.” Katherine and her husband took Lauren to see the pediatrician who they had known and trusted for years. “It didn’t occur to me to talk to the doctor ahead of time. In every other case where we’ve had some fear, she’d calmly say, ‘this is what the science says.’ So I had no reservations about telling her this. I expected her to be logical. I expected her to ask more questions that would get to the root of my daughter’s concerns.”
But that’s not what happened.
I traveled to Finland for another gender conference in June, right around the summer solstice. Before the conference started, I spent two days in Tallinn, Estonia. On the way home from the conference, I caught COVID and ran a fever for the next 10 days.
I continue to be impressed, Eliza, by the depth of your understanding of this topic, and especially your understanding of all the myriad nuances.
I've been thinking lately about the effect transgenderism has had on our culture, especially how the liberals (of which I am one) have picked up on the ideology and adopted it without question. It astonishes me even more that all of those medical organizations have adopted the ideology. One gets the feeling that the officials at the organizations went through a process that was something like this: "We don't understand this issue, so we'll just accept what the trans people are saying because they know better than the rest of us -- and besides, they are so pitiful that we owe it to them to do that." But such a position would have resulted in luke-warm acceptance at best, not the cultish devotion we are seeing. For years I saw liberals as responsible, intelligent, compassionate people. It seems, however, that they crave the cult mind-state just as conservatives do. The cult mind-state is a little like cocaine, a soothing addiction that somehow lifts adult responsibilities from people's shoulders.
I also think that liberals as a group may be a little humiliated by the whole racial thing: For decades they fancied themselves to be free of racial prejudice, but then it turned out that they were almost as bigoted as the conservatives. When trans people came along, I think that some of them told themselves that "this time" they would get it right. This theory, however, may be bunk, as I suspect most liberals haven't confronted their racism.
The entire specter of a tiny minority of trans people shaming all of the world's liberals into adopting their bad ideas is still a phenomenon that puzzles me no end. Trans people are like fishermen with the most fantastically delicious bait on their hooks. But because it doesn't appeal to ME, I don't understand why it appeals to anyone.
Talking about cults, I'm coming to see Taylor Swift as a cult figure. Maybe that's it: I don't understand the cults of the world because I am basically a loner.
Dear Eliza, I can't tell you how much I've appreciated your investigations into this subject over the year. Your compassionate, intelligent and inquisitive approach stood out among the various sources I followed to try to get my head around it. A big part of that, I think, is your lurking in the right places online, analysing what you found there, and your courage to sit with the assemblage of elders in their weird communions and report back to the outside world. Your reporting on the struggles of young women and girls, and of parents, has been deeply moving, and your assessment of the science enlightening. I feel confident that all these efforts will have changed many minds (despite how hard it seems sometimes to change a single mind) and contributed significantly to the change we've seen in the tenor of the debate over recent months. You illustrate for me that to be on the right side of history we should avoid the desire to be on the right side of history, and just try to be on the right side of the particular judgement before us at any given time. Thank you.