To an old friend

Given that such a letter might be of value for others in my situation who've lost friends over the issue of gender identity, I'm sharing it here. If it's useful to you, use it.

Dear X,

I admit I’m still amazed that our long friendship broke up over the issue of gender identity and the alleged harmfulness of my views, which, for the sake of clarity, I’ll summarize here:

- All trans people should be able to live free from discrimination, harassment, and violence, and should be treated with the respect that every person deserves. We need to find a way to protect transgender status and/or visible gender nonconformity, which would be the likely basis for discrimination, in addition to protections for sex, sexual orientation, etc., instead of overwriting protections that are based on sex (e.g., which is what the Equality Act and gender self-identification policies do).

- In settings where sex matters, it’s inappropriate to treat male people as though they were female people, regardless of how those male people identify. I don’t think making distinctions on the basis of sex in settings where sex matters can fairly be called discrimination against trans people—these are separate axes of oppression and marginalization. Human beings cannot change sex. Whenever sex is relevant, we need to recognize that it is sex, not gender identity, that must be taken into account to protect women’s rights, fairness in sports, safety and privacy (not from trans people in particular but from all male people), etc. I am troubled by the policing of women’s language. Women need to be able to speak clearly about sex if we’re ever going to address sex-based inequities in our society and gender identity is a hobble skirt of language that makes it impossible even to keep females together as a coherent sex class: we get broken up into body parts and functions and services. I don’t think women’s movements have any obligation to prioritize or cater to transgender issues: trans activists have the issue well-covered and have made tremendous progress, much of it at the expense of women’s hard-won sex-based rights. Women still need a movement that recognizes and advocates for women and girls on the basis of sex. Gender identity makes a muddle of sex. The rights of women and girls around the world rely on clarity about how and when and where sex matters.

- There’s a lot more going on with the wave of children and young people—especially young females—identifying as transgender than trans activists and many medical providers are able or willing to admit, and that the affirmative-care model is failing vulnerable young people. It’s impossible to talk to detransitioners and not see how they were failed by activists, medical providers, and well-meaning allies. I’m shocked that we’ve thrown the basics of child development out the window when it comes to this issue, including what we know gender dysphoria and how it’s common among same-sex attracted kids, the overwhelming majority of whom grow out of it as they move through adolescence and embrace their sexual orientation. That means that intervening medically to block puberty, with unknown effects on cognitive development and long-term health, blocks the very process that would lead to self-acceptance for the vast majority of such children. There are dozens of other issues tangled up here—e.g., check out Focus on the Family and the many conservative religious parents of ‘trans’ kids who clearly view transition as a cure for homosexuality and gender-nonconformity, especially when it comes to little boys who would likely just grow up to be feminine gay men if they were free to be themselves, rather than growing up to be medicalized-for-life ‘heterosexual’ transwomen. Having a transgender child is more acceptable to these parents, who are often quite open about their hostility to their child potentially growing up gay/lesbian/bisexual. Take Kai Shappley, whose mother talks on the record (to the approving ACLU!) about beating her child for showing ‘effeminate’ behaviors as a toddler:

“I remember even thinking — before Kai was three — that I think this kid might be gay! And I thought that, that could not happen. And that would not happen. We started praying for our family. Prayers turned into Googling conversion therapy and how can we implement these techniques at home to make Kai not be like this… [But] no matter how much punishment this kid got, you couldn’t beat it out… You couldn’t pray it out, I couldn’t cast it out.”

You could say her prayers were answered, couldn’t you? She doesn’t have a gay kid anymore.

Tell me, honestly, is it hateful or harmful to be alarmed by this? To wonder why the ACLU would celebrate a mother like this? Or to wonder what’s going on when you see that the vast majority of natal females seeking transition are exclusively same-sex attracted?

Take two Dutch studies, published in 2011 and 2013, which found that 95.7-100% of females whose gender dysphoria persisted from childhood into adolescence “reported feeling exclusively, and as long as they could remember, sexually attracted to individuals of the same natal sex, although none of the persisters considered themselves ‘homosexual’ or ‘lesbian,’ but (because of their cross-gender identity) ‘heterosexual.’” One research subject observed:

“I always fell in love with girls, I never felt attracted to boys. A number of children concluded that I had to be a lesbian, I thought about this but I never experienced it this way. I was aware of having a female body but in my feelings I was a boy, so I was not a lesbian but a heterosexual, just like the other boys.”

Again, as recently as 2007, medical providers understood cross-sex identification in childhood and adolescence to be a normal stage of homosexual development, resolving in the majority of cases as the child moved through adolescence and became comfortable with his or her sexual development and sexual orientation. Long before the concept of gender identity took root in the LGBT community, the idea of being ‘born in the wrong body’ resonated with many young gays and lesbians—not to mention medical providers, who have long viewed gays and lesbians as ‘inverts’ in need of psychological or surgical ‘correction.’ (Including, by the way, the men who pioneered sexual-reassignment surgery...)

The overrepresentation of same-sex attracted youth among youth seeking transition is often overlooked, downplayed, or denied by researchers and leading affirmative-care providers. Clinicians who rate the “gender presentation” of “transgender” preschool children on a scale from stereotypical girl (fitted, sparkly, frilly) to stereotypical boy (baggy, sporty) inevitably sweep up children whose rejection of gender stereotypes is rooted in their same-sex orientation.

Take “Fanny,” one of those short-haired girls in boys’ clothing whose journey Diane Ehrensaft traces from her “assigned female gender and transition [italics mine] first to lesbian and then to transgender”:

“In the process of exploring their sexual identity, usually in adolescence or young adulthood, they discover, often through their romantic or sexual liaisons, that it is not actually their sexuality but their gender that is in question. We see this particularly in young females who have always been “masculine” in presentation and find a welcome reception in the lesbian community as “butch females” only to discover that they are actually butch males. As one teenager [Fanny] I worked with explained to me, ‘I really thought I was a girl who liked girls, but every time I was making out with my girlfriend I realized that in my head I was not a girl making out with her, but a boy. And then I realized that my head was sending me a message — I am a boy who likes girls.’ Five years later, this teen, now a young adult, has gone through a full transition from female to male, including hormones, and top and bottom surgery.”

Ehrensaft even coined a term for children and adolescents like Fanny, one that carefully overwrites the connection between homosexual development and gender dysphoria. “Prototransgender youth,” Ehrensaft writes, use same-sex “sexual identity as a stepping-stone toward their transgender true gender self."

And I know I sent you this quote before, but it's worth reiterating. Remember those clinicians who resigned from the National Health Service’s Gender Identity Development Services who expressed their fear of being involved in an “atrocity,” specifically citing the number of young lesbians presenting for ‘gender reassignment’?: 

‘“It is converting people into heterosexuals,” one of the clinicians said. “We had so many families who would talk about not wanting their daughters to be lesbian.” Young people “repeatedly” confided their own “disgust” that they may be gay, according to the clinician... So many potentially gay children were being sent down the pathway to change gender, two of the clinicians said there was a dark joke among staff that “there would be no gay people left”... “For some families, it was easier to say, this is a medical problem, ‘here’s my child, please fix them!’ than dealing with a young, gay kid,” the third female clinician said…"

 Or as one young lesbian put it, looking back on her decision to transition: 

“Transition was my way out of being a lesbian; I could be straight and escape the shame. It wasn’t until 10 years of living as a trans man that I realized that my shame still controlled me and the promises of transition were a lie. I now have several health issues due to testosterone, such as a disordered endocrine system and sleep apnea. I wasted 10 years attempting the impossible and none of my MH [mental health] or health care team cared that my MH [mental health] was getting worse and worse, or that I was so dysfunctional I ended up homeless, because I passed really well. Only through detransition have I finally embraced being a lesbian.”

When we last communicated, you didn’t seem interested in conversation and wouldn’t answer any of my questions or address any of my concerns. It sounded like the only way to go on as ‘friends’—if you could even call it that—was for me to reform my errant thinking, under your supervision. But the problems and questions and concerns I raised don’t go away when you embrace a doctrine like the one gender identity offers: you just lose the ability to see and name and talk about these issues. In the long run, that won’t serve anybody well: not women, not trans people, not gender-nonconforming kids.

Your friendship meant a lot to me for a long time, so I don’t want to part in silence. Honestly, I didn’t want to lose you as a friend, but I hope you can see that I couldn’t submit to what you required of me in exchange for continuing our friendship. It wouldn’t have been a friendship past that point anyway, and I would never have demanded it of you. I couldn’t disagree more strenuously with your stance on this issue and I question your approach to what you appear to view as challenges to your belief system about gender. I’ve had conversations about this issue with something like 70 friends, colleagues, and total strangers over the past three years. Everybody else has expressed their own serious concerns and reservations: you’re the only one whose response was to cover your ears. Make of that what you will. Perhaps you’re the one true ally.

But I also think it’s possible to disagree on this issue in good faith and that the stakes are not at all what you imply (seeking clarity and open discussion is hate? Am I really ‘doing harm’ by not believing transwomen are women in every sense and for every purpose while still believing all trans people deserve respect and protections under the law? But I digress...). We both want to do the right thing here on a complicated issue that suffers for being so blindly and blindingly politicized. We disagree about what the right thing is and—more basically—how we’d go about figuring out what the right thing to do is. The question I’d leave you with is: what would it take for you to say: There might be a problem here? This movement may not be what it seems. Please think about it.

Eliza

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