The question of how history will remember that time we chemically castrated a bunch of gender-confused kids and claimed women could have penises comes up a lot…
My answer? I don’t know. It could go either way. Medical scandals tend to sink quietly into the murky depths, rather than blow up. Remember the big public reckoning over lobotomies? Yeah, me neither.
In medicine, the chain of trust got gender-hacked. Understanding exactly how this happened would help prevent future harm. But the medical profession itself isn’t incentivized to introspect, much less to do their accounting in public. Based on previous scandals, my guess is that leaders in the field will stitch the patient up and leave the tumor inside. That’s what happened after the Satanic Panic split psychiatry. Plenty of fanatics even got to keep their careers, like Diane Ehrensaft, who shifted from hyping Satanic ritual abuse to intercepting gender messages from pre-verbal infants. Medical professional associations like the American Academy of Pediatrics will rediscover everything they used to know about child and adolescent development. It’ll just be a decade too late for kids transitioned under their guidance.
Outside of the medical field, near-total elite buy-in on gender identity makes a reckoning less likely. This scandal hasn’t unfolded in the dark with the lights off. But it may well end that way. Opinion ‘leaders’ in the academy, media, and entertainment sectors tend to know how to pivot at just the right moment. So when ‘PROTECT TRANS KIDS’ meant ‘put them on puberty blockers, pronto!’ that’s what opinion leaders meant when they said it (over and over and over again). When that slogan shifts to mean something else—like, ‘hey! not so fast! what about brain development? isn’t this a little risky?’—that’s what these people will claim they meant all along. Some of us will recall events rather differently—but those of us who hang onto such inconvenient memories will be the wrong kind of people, remembering for the wrong reasons.
And if supporters can’t reframe the debate to ensure they were always in the right, then they’ll tell everybody they were wronged. They had the best of intentions. Their good faith was abused. They had no idea what was going on. How could anybody have known? Never mind the lengths supporters took to avoid inconvenient knowledge and shut down debate. Never mind that supporters stuck their fingers in their ears and trilled “TERFTERFTERF” every time someone urged them to take a closer look at what they were promoting.
We’ll be counted among the “prematurely anti-fascists.” Oops, you opposed the thing everybody’s against now but you did it too soon—and also for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way.
I’d love to be wrong. But I’m not optimistic.
You may be right that few medical and other leaders will be held accountable for all the harm that their leadership has caused; however, history eventually will judge this correctly as the scandal it is, just as it judges lobotomies that way, even if no one got fired for doing them. We can look at the opioid epidemic and see that it didn't take too long for moral clarity to reassert itself. In that case, those punished most were the drug companies. Perhaps that will happen again with the companies churning out puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children.
Never underestimate the human capacity for denial.