July
I talked to the wonderful Lisa Marchiano and Benjamin Boyce about growing up female, folktales, and much more:
GLAAD pushes Big Tech to censor trans ‘disinformation’:
There’s also an interesting definition of “disinformation” at work here. “Disinformation”, in this case, refers to information that is accurate but which may lead readers to the “wrong” conclusions. In other words, information that leads readers to question the “safety and necessity” of “gender-affirming healthcare” for youth, such as clear descriptions of what that neat little euphemism actually entails — specifically, experimental suppression of normal human development and double mastectomies for troubled 14-year-olds.
Thus, Twitter accounts that share unedited promotional videos from children’s gender clinics describing the hormonal and surgical interventions they provide to underage patients become purveyors of “inflammatory disinformation falsely asserting that this healthcare is dangerous”.
This inconsistency is most evident in the contradictory statements issued by defenders of pharmaceutical and surgical interventions for gender-questioning youth. On the one hand, activists celebrate “top surgery” for “transmasculine boys”, or “TGNB AYA DFAB” (transgender and gender non-binary adolescents and young adults designated female at birth). But on the other hand, breast amputations for adolescent females with psychiatric comorbidities is plain “disinformation”.
Never mind that these are two ways of describing the same surgical interventions on the same patient population. But the first is ideologically compliant (the reader may or may not understand what “top surgery” for TGNB AYA DFABs means, but they’re likely to conclude it’s safe and necessary), while the second formulation risks leading readers to the “wrong” conclusions.
GLAAD is more honest about its mission than it is about the controversy over “gender-affirming healthcare” for minors. The organisation describes itself as “changing the culture”, as well as “tackling issues to shape the narrative and provoke dialogue that leads to cultural change”. Sometimes, though, “shaping the narrative” means intervening to remove inconvenient facts from the picture.
I wrote about my long-time and at this point long-lost home, Madison, WI in 77 square miles surrounded by reality:
I remember the city cross-dresser. This wasn’t a question of identity so much as behavior. I first saw him at the opera—The Barber of Seville, I think—sitting in the nosebleed seats in his sparkly platform heels and frilly dress, the hem of which he dragged back and forth over his bony kneecaps. He wore the kind of dresses a five-year-old picks out: all taffeta and tulle and impracticality. Between the too-short dress and the too-high heels, he could barely walk. He moved with the exaggerated delicacy of an invalid, like someone made of blown glass. He fretted over his appearance, constantly: running his fingers through the lank ringlets of his platinum wig, reapplying his lipstick, fussing with the glittering purse he carried, which he opened and closed and opened and closed. He never showed any interest in the opera itself. I could tell that wasn’t why he was there, the way you can tell whether a person is looking through a window or lost in his own reflection.
I felt pity for him. I wondered what compelled him to drag this sorry performance into the public eye. That kind of spectacle would be better left at home. (Now I know better: there's no spectacle without spectators.) Just to look at him made me feel indecent, as though I myself had transgressed some boundary I ought to have respected. For years and years, I saw him at the opera and ballet. I never saw him talk to anyone. He looked like the loneliest person in the world, set apart from the rest of us in some way that could never be bridged.
Then there was the grad student in my social circle who went through an obvious, extended, and very public nervous breakdown that everybody treated like the revelation of a deep personal truth.
In this sacred moment of self-discovery, Adam radiated an aura of empowerment. With every fiber of his being, he embraced his truth, liberated from the shackles of societal expectations. He emerged as a beacon of authenticity, a testament to the fluidity and diversity inherent in God's creation.
Thus, Adam and Eve, united in their transformative revelations, traversed the Edenic paradise as living embodiments of divine affirmation. With hearts emboldened, they embraced the freedom to explore their authentic selves, transcending the narrow confines of gender norms.
The Almighty, in His infinite compassion, looked upon them with celestial benevolence. He recognized the sacred journey of self-discovery they had embarked upon and showered them with His eternal grace. In their newfound understanding and acceptance, He found delight, for they had unraveled the depths of their souls and embraced their divine nature.
Let this tale of divine revelation in Eden serve as a testament to the ever-unfolding tapestry of gender identity. May we, as beneficiaries of this story, celebrate the sacred journeys of self-discovery, honoring the inherent beauty and diversity woven into the fabric of God's creation.
Adam and Eve eat from the forbidden tree but because the forbidden knowledge they gain is that they’re really transgender, God is thrilled!
Now do it again with more bombast
My friend Leslie and I talked about idioms of distress:
And then I wrote about how hard it is to leave a cult:
What keeps such a young person—with all her questions and doubts—in the fold?
The explicit encouragement to treat an ideological problem as a mental health problem. According to the trans community, the problem is her obsessive/intrusive thoughts, not the fact that the ideology doesn’t make sense and can’t stand up to scrutiny.
The way her questions and doubts have been pathologized by the trans community from the very beginning. Questions and doubts are a sign of internalized transphobia, which hurts you and hurts *other trans people* and which you have a responsibility to manage (quash).
The belief that TERFs are hateful—and that TERFs hate her, personally (“I hate how they hate me despite never having met me”). In other words: phobia indoctrination works.
The terror of being cast out of a community that may be one of very few places she has ever felt she belonged. She knows she'll be unpersoned if she leaves because she's seen it happen to others. Maybe she's participated in that unpersoning herself.
The ability to manage cognitive dissonance socially, by seeking reassurance from a group of people who all share the same problem (the problem being: ‘this doesn’t make sense but I’m totally committed to it’). Proselytizing ('if I can convince newcomers to believe this, there must be something to it') and consorting only with other believers ('everybody believes this, so there must not be a problem') relieve dissonance.
The redefinition of key concepts, like self-acceptance. Trying to reason from the facsimiles and surrogates you are offered won’t get you anywhere. Or, as @purplcabbage put it: “when words are a map and you have been using the wrong map for years, it's hard to recognize the actual terrain.”
The suspicion of being spoken to in clear language, after years of experiencing mystical manipulation. She feels like she must be missing something because it makes sense. Building on that…
The belief that TERFs use ‘dogwhistles’ and don’t say what we really mean. So she may agree with everything a TERF writes or says, but still fear she’s being duped because she don’t grasp the TERF’s insidious ‘secret meanings.’ The conviction that these ‘secret meanings’ exist means that she cannot evaluate the arguments for herself. She must turn back to the manipulative group for guidance. The manipulative group tells her she's being deceived. She's trapped.
August
I wrote about what happens to parents when kids come out as trans for Fairer Disputations:
The first time I listened to a parent tell the story of how her child came out as transgender, it seemed like a strange tale of a private misadventure, plagued with the kind of disproportion most commonly found in fairy tales. But then I heard another such tale. And another. And another. The stories started to sound less like warped fairy tales fed through a game of telephone and more like an epidemic: the first case you encounter is mysterious, and the symptoms make no sense. The next case is eerily similar. Keep looking, and a pattern emerges.
Or perhaps my first metaphor was the right one: one day, the Pied Piper came through town and all the children disappeared.
I’ve come to realize that when one person transitions, everyone in their life gets recast as supporting characters. They are judged along a single axis: how affirming are you of your loved one’s new identity? How quickly do you reform your speech and rewrite your memories?
The change of script is most dramatic for parents, who can do nothing right. They stand accused of missing the most basic facts about who their child really is: a boy, not a girl, or a girl, not a boy. If the revelation comes as a surprise—if parents find out after a child has already come out at school, for example—then the child must not have trusted her parents enough to share this information earlier. Whatever a parent knows about his or her child cannot touch the essential truth of the child’s new transgender identity. While children gain a new language to describe their experiences, parents lose language. They’re not sure what they can say anymore, so they guard their tongues, dissemble.
Unwitting parents will step on landmines left and right, because their children’s expectations have been imported from a very different world. Online, if you change your username or your avatar, you reinvent yourself as someone new. But at home, you have a name that you have worn all your life. You have loved ones who look at you and do not see what you want them to see. You want them to celebrate, but instead they look at you and worry. Online, you can mute, block, report. The offending account vanishes, a tidy absence soon smoothed over and forgotten. Offline, severing connections means broken hearts and empty chairs at the kitchen table.
Parents who stumble over pronouns and new names, ask for time to adjust, hesitate to consent to hormonal and surgical interventions, or express their reservations and doubts may find themselves cast out of their children’s lives entirely. As soon as I started writing about gender, I started hearing from parents. Every parent I’ve spoken to fears losing their child—to suicide, estrangement, or mutual incomprehension.
Steven and I talked about transition, detransition, and “the idea of being someone else”:
EM: You’ve talked about how this belief system felt like a virus running in your brain and the community reinforced people’s identities and squelched doubts. So I’m curious, how did you start to come out of this belief system?
SAR: That’s something I’ve thought about a lot. I don’t have an answer—I have theories. For the last few years that I identified as trans, I spent a lot of time trying to ‘solve’ the ideology. It became an obsession for me for a while. I was reading about the ideology of gender—and also about anarchism, because I was friends with a bunch of queer anarchists. I was trying to sort out in my head how all the things I believed could possibly be true at once, and I wasn’t able to solve that. I kept hitting a point where it all just didn’t make sense anymore.
Then there was the physiological side of things. I was put on antidepressants at 13 and was on one medication after another from age 13 to 23, when I decided I didn’t want to take these medications forever. I wanted to see if I could do without that. My psychiatrist wasn’t very cooperative, and warned me that it was bad for people to go off medications in winter, so why not wait till summer? I didn’t want to wait, so I ended up just stopping antidepressants cold turkey. I started feeling like myself again, which I hadn’t in a long time. I felt more of a connection to my body and I thought, Oh, I remember feeling this way. I had sort of found the feeling I had been trying to find with the transition. That thing I had been looking for was there again. So I think being medicated at a young age played a role.
Between the mental and physiological changes, at some point, I sort of snapped. The immediate feeling I had wasn’t I made a horrible mistake transitioning, I’m actually a man. Instead, it felt like I made a choice. I said to myself, I don’t think transitioning is ever going to make me happy, it’s not going to make me more genuine or more me. Transitioning is just a thing I did and I can either choose to live as a transwoman or I can detransition and live as a man. If both of those are valid options, I’d rather live as a man.
After I made that choice, I moved out of the ideology. My thinking changed. More and more, I began to realize it was a messed up situation, a messed up thing I’ve done to my body. Now I’m here and I’ve been writing about this because I don’t think anybody should be doing it to themselves. I definitely don’t think it’s medical care. But that was a long process. There was no one moment.
A day in the life of r/FTM subreddit:
Hera asked if I would write about the “ordinary” happenings on the subreddits I monitor, adding “I don’t know what that would be, or if it even exists but that’s the point.” And I aim to please—at least, you know, when I feel like it—so what follows is an overview of a few days on r/FTM, the largest subreddit for trans-identified females
One of the things that always stands out to me is how distinctly, stereotypically, over-the-top feminine the interaction style is: no shower thought too small or silly to share, every accomplishment—no matter how trivial—celebrated, every slight lamented, and they bond over things like… hating your breasts, hating your period, cute boys (with ‘gender envy’ neatly replacing celebrity crushes), sharing selfies, and swapping fashion tips on how to minimize your hips.
In my experience, gender-critical spaces are full of unconventional women—women who are, ironically, far more unconventional than the women you find in FTM/transmasc communities on Reddit.
I’m not trying to be unempathetic. There’s always a reason why someone is drawn to the idea that they might be transgender and that reason is usually rooted in self-rejection and a painful sense of difference. Once that distress has attached itself to trans, however, absurdities sprout in every direction.
I slipped sideways into the Harry Potter fandom when I was 11 or 12 years old, during the long wait for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire to come out. The first piece of fan fiction I ever read was—in retrospect—dreadful: bold red text dribbled line by insipid line down a lavender page. But at the time it was revelatory. Before that, fantasy had seemed to me a lonely pastime, one that became increasingly shameful to me as my classmates aged out of make-believe and said goodbye to their imaginary friends.
But I still needed those things. I was stuck between childhood and adolescence. I lived in my head because I didn’t know how to live anywhere else. The online universe that grew up around Harry Potter was made by and for fans like me.
Soon after I read that first Harry Potter fanfic, I started writing my own. Because the Internet is forever, those stories still exist, even though my little website domain lapsed 15 years ago.
The writing is better than I expected. Taut. I was better at endings—neat, pithy. I didn’t know then what I know now: that nothing ends. The metaphors surprise me. From where did I draw such elegant similes? But the main thing that strikes me about the tens of thousands of words I wrote is how virginal they are. I didn’t dare write about sex. But I’d never been kissed either. I had no idea what I was talking about. It shows.
Yet I had a fanatical following. That’s hard to understand until you remember how long the gaps between the books were and how little Potter fans wanted to resurface. The world of the books was more vivid than real life. Anyone able to strike a match and illuminate that world for a few more moments attracted intense loyalties.
Letter to a trans-identified young adult (behind a paywall for reasons that I will explain behind the paywall)…
I started writing a column for UnHerd!
September
October
I was a good person ‘till I wasn’t: Falling out on the Left
For years, I got away with expressing polite but wide-ranging skepticism about the new roster of ‘progressive’ orthodoxies. I avoided a few known landmines but I didn’t falsify my beliefs, just softened them a bit. I asked questions I should not have asked, questions that strongly suggested I still knew things I ought to have
forgottenovercome.Yet I didn’t fall out with anyone during that time. Instead, I was repeatedly “called in.”
I was never called in for my serious crimes, only for misdemeanors. But I was definitely a repeat offender. Once I made the mistake of laughing too hard at a joke about Trump’s small hands. Laughing at jokes about men with small hands having small penises and therefore being less manly apparently offends women who identify as men who have small hands and no penises. This all seemed rather byzantine to me but I digress. I made the mistake of looking forward to spending Thanksgiving with my family (pernicious settler-colonialism in action!). I suggested we drop the land acknowledgement from a presentation that was running over time (the substance got sacrificed instead). I said I didn’t have any inner feeling that made me a woman and that I was just female (and that that didn’t make me agender). I criticized Islam (and I’d do it again!). I questioned the claim that valuing the “written word” was a manifestation of white supremacy (I even did it in writing). I said things like “OK, but we can agree everybody who has ever gotten pregnant is female, right?” (Wrong.) In other words: I was your standard liberal c. 2010. But it was 2015.
Meghan Daum, Sarah Haider, and I went down the gender rabbithole on A Special Place in Hell:
I had some fun at the expense of a very dumb-sounding play:
The Age observes that the play’s “interview format allowed Piper Scott to write a conversation where an anti-trans character has their views challenged in a way that doesn’t normally happen”— perhaps because trans activists have a pesky habit of pulling out of debates at the last minute.
“They don’t say what they really mean,” Scott says of gender critics like Rowling. “And if they were just on stage for an hour, they’re never going to let the mask slip, they’re never going to drop that charade, and tell you what they really believe [or] where their beliefs ultimately end up.”
This statement reflects a deeply held belief: that gender critics cannot be trusted to communicate their beliefs clearly, relying on dogwhistles instead. So Rowling’s own carefully chosen words and considered arguments can never be counted as testimony of what she actually believes. Instead, conduits and translators and other mind-readers are required. Activists like Scott have spent the last three-and-a-half years accusing JK Rowling of rampant transphobia — even of having blood on her hands — then disappearing when asked to provide the receipts.
So it’s terribly convenient to pin “Rowling” down like Scott has done and put words in her mouth. Melbourne Fringe promises that the “conversation” will be “often illuminating, sometimes infuriating, and always candid.”
No doubt it will be illuminating. Candid? Not so much.
November
I went to USPATH and cleaned up at bingo…
Conversation with my friends Benjamin and Jamie:
“T is the key that opens the gate holding back the flood”: When transition isn’t helping:
There are those clashing statements again: “I feel better than I ever have in my whole life” and “Dysphoria is destroying me, even as I medically transition.” Both of these statements cannot be true (if your life was already at rock bottom before transition, there would be nothing for dysphoria to ‘destroy’). Since the first statement goes unsupported by any evidence whereas the second statement is followed up by an avalanche of painful specifics, I’m going to go with statement two: “Dysphoria is destroying me.” The poster expresses extreme self-disgust and self-doubt. She recognizes on some level that what she wants out of transition is “wholly unattainable.” She’s tired of “forcing [herself] to look in the mirror and tell [herself] this is what a real man looks like.”
“I feel better than I ever have in my whole life” is the frame members of online trans communities put around the most serious and wracking doubts. After a while, it starts to sound an awful lot like “He’s the love of my life but I wish I’d never met him.”
I originally intended to write a series of profiles of the friends I lost to the strange new belief system that stalks our times, just like Czeslaw Milosz documented the way his peers—Alpha the Moralist, Beta the Disappointed Lover, Gamma the Slave of History, Delta the Troubadour—caved in to Stalinism in The Captive Mind. Milosz saw some of his most brilliant friends and colleagues drawn like moths to a flame: “We must not treat this desire for self-immolation lightly.”
Then I realized the people I knew best, whose words and actions so confounded me, didn’t lend themselves to such portraits. They were not intellectuals, much less poets. And I was no Milosz either.
Still, what happened to certain friends of mine interests me. We traveled together through young adulthood and then abruptly parted ways. In another time, we might have stayed friends into old age, or drifted gently from the center of one another’s lives to the periphery.
How is it that so many bonds that did not seem fragile broke?
December
One of my favorite pieces I wrote for UnHerd this year, on Lydia Polgreen’s bizarre case for youth gender transition:
“[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.
Because few young people who embarked on transition as children have spoken up, the author first dismisses their experiences as rare and overhyped (“a handful of such people have appeared over and over again in news stories across the world”) before writing them off altogether a few paragraphs later (“when the media fixates on the hypothetical regret of children who do transition…”).
Besides, maybe deciding to transition as a child is like quitting the swim team: “so what are we saying, really, when we worry that a child will regret this particular decision, the decision to transition? And how is it different, really, from the decision I made to quit competitive swimming?”
Of course, a child who quits competitive swimming merely forecloses a competitive swimming career. One needn’t give up the ocean or the pool whereas children who undergo puberty suppression, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries foreclose more than one possible future. Fertility, sexual pleasure, the possibility of growing up and becoming comfortable in one’s own intact body, to name a few.
Finally, my big piece about the World/European/US Professional Association for Transgender Health conferences went up: The secret life of gender clinicians:
At these conferences, the big questions confronting transgender health care hardly feature. Instead, these conferences serve a different purpose: to shore up the faithful and cultivate a revolutionary vanguard within medicine. To this end, the proceedings revolve around a strange set of parables: that of the good gender clinician and the bad gender clinician.
In this world, being a good gender clinician means deferring to patients’ self-understandings and having the humility to serve even what one does not understand. The mark of a good gender clinician is her credulity in the face of brave new manifestations of gender.
“People outside this room get hung up on questions like ‘How can we make sure people are really trans and are not going to regret their transition later?’” one gender clinician in Denver mused. “I’m interested in giving the very best possible care to trans young people, the care that they need and deserve… it’s easy to roll down this pathway of ‘how do you know if somebody’s going to change their mind?’ or ‘how do you know if somebody’s really trans or not?’ and that’s not the conversation I’m really participating in.”
It’s difficult to imagine clinicians practising in other areas of medicine not asking such basic questions, especially when the basis for treatment is so murky. But a good gender clinician, looking at a patient, does not see what non-believers like you or I might see. A good clinician falls under the sway of the same fantasy as the patient and conspires with her to bring her transgender self into existence. Under this framework, there is no “really trans” or not. There is only what the patient says and the readiness of the clinician to put herself at the service of the patient’s vision.
A bad gender clinician, by contrast, feels an “entitlement to know” why a patient feels the way she does or why she seeks a particular intervention. She clings to a traditional conception of her role as a “gatekeeper” who evaluates and prescribes. She thinks she can “discern a ‘true’ gender identity beyond what is articulated by the patient”. She may believe she can “identify the ‘root cause’ of a transgender identity”, which is seen as pathologising. She may try to leave the door open to desistance — the most common outcome before gender clinicians started interfering with normal development by deploying puberty-blocking drugs — in which case she is guilty of “valuing cis lives over trans lives”.
A bad gender clinician is easily “intimidated” by complicated patients, while a good gender clinician knows how to secure consent even in the trickiest cases. Mental health difficulties become “mental health differences”. Severe autism or thinking you have multiple personalities living inside your head become empowering forms of “neurodiversity”. When it comes to assessment, “careful” and “comprehensive” have become dirty words: “The answer always seems to be more assessment and more time. That’s gatekeeping.”
I ran out of superlatives for your writing a long time ago, so I wont risk embarrassing you (again) with my gushing praise.
I'll just say this: it is an absolute pleasure to read your work every week, and a privilege to see your career blossoming.
I wish you the very best for 2024.
The crossdresser you didn't notice in Madison, Wisconsin back then was my now ex-husband. That's because he didn't go to the opera. He went to gay bars. Told me he was at work.
Here's info on the Finnish study from the journal, European Psychiatry, 66 (1):1-20, in which the data on 3665 patients who had "treatments" (hormones and/or sex trait modification surgeries) from 1973-2019. They compared over 29k age-and-origin-matched controls on the data of whether and how often these patients had inpatient psychiatric treatment (meaning serious mental breakdowns) to the "dysphoria-diagnosed" patients and found a very distinctly higher level of this higher level of psychiatric treatment, indicating the "affirmative care" in this accepting and liberal society did not cure the distress. The researchers noted that the natal sex of patients is obscured because of "self ID" and they were thwarted in learning whether adolescent and young adult women are more represented in the psychiatric treatment for serious breakdowns after "affirmation."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxJhFbqL_KU&t=23s