People are always surprised when I tell them that the effects of testosterone are irreversible. But I've been most successful in starting, as you did, with, "Isn't is sexist to tell gender non-conforming girls that they must really be boys?"
I think the left needs more voices like yours, clearly pointing out that gender ideology is NOT a progressive continuation of the idea that strict gender roles and gender stereotyping are regressive- instead, it’s directly in contradiction to those ideas. My sense is that the type of people you describe (sounds like my social circle!) see the evolution of progressive ideas in the realm of “gender” as following a smooth curve from “Free to Be You and Me” to “Protect Trans Kids” without realizing that “Protect Trans Kids”, when it means both reifying the category “trans kid” and supporting affirmation-only and a medicalized pathway, is actually a slogan directly in opposition to the idea that kids should be free to be themselves whether they are female or male.
This contradiction needs to be repeatedly pointed out by people that progressives trust. I don’t see any other way out of this mess in the US.
We need to parse out gender non-conformity from medicalization. A distant relative recently felt compelled to tell my sister to tell me that I should be happy my teenage daughter wants to transition. She said this for the sole reason that my daughter came to a party with “male” clothes and short hair. As it is, she is right about my daughter’s intentions, but she made that leap based solely on appearance. (And the funny part with my daughter is that her “non-conforming” behavior followed her trans-identity, not the other way around.)!! Also, this distant relative told a story of her husband’s cousin, who transitioned as an adult and is so very happy. Part of that story was how the cousin was previously ridiculed by the family for wearing a tux to a wedding - but now the cousin is happy. Why did the cousin have to medicalize and take on a new “male identity” to be accepted for wearing a tux? Why not just accept gender non-conformity w/o the need to re-label people and medically alter their appearance? And why not be extremely cautious about medical interventions on young, healthy bodies? Would any of these people be happy for young people to medically interfere with their healthy bodies under any other circumstances? These are two salient points. Accept non-conformity and be extremely wary of medical interventions!!
I would love anyone on the left to look seriously at how regressive the majority of what is being espoused as “proof” of a person’s gender identity is. When you’re saying a persons interests in more or less feminine/masculine things are a justification for them being in the wrong body and needing medical intervention, you’re the one creating a rigid gender binary with inescapable stereotypes.
I would also like to see some of the misogyny and homophobia that is bubbling under the surface of most of the trans activist dialogue to be challenged.
I think that the most important thing about this”issue” is that it is one of authoritarianism. People have been fired for” misgendering “ someone. Unlike the former gay movement ( “former, because it has changed) the trans ideology demands conformity with their beliefs, which go against all truth! We all know that men cannot be women. Denying biology won’t make biology disappear, just as denying that the earth is round won’t make it flat!
The main thing to understand about this ideology is the denial of science ,of truth and the bullying of the rest of society.
I was expelled from a socialist organization over this stuff. During my last foray into an online space with that crew, I think I got most traction with the angle that the trans stuff is actually right wing. Possible iterations for a liberal or left crowd:
-it embraces regressive gender stereotypes
-it embraces the most reactionary stereotypes of what a man and a woman are allowed to be
-it uses progressive language to physically impose regressive stereotypes on gender non-conforming kids
-it uses progressive language to obscure that it's actually embracing the most regressive gender stereotypes
-it rolls back the clock on all the progress the feminist and gay rights movements have made letting people be who they are
Hmm, after writing those down, i think i like the ones that say "it uses progressive language" bc it suggests progressive rhetoric doesn't mean progressive policy, and that there's some manipulation of well-intentioned people (aka our audience) going on.
For me, the key point is that if someone (especially a teenage girl) didn’t like their body in any other way, we would encourage them to love and accept themselves as they are, but for some reason if they don’t like themselves in this one specific way people believe it means they were born in the wrong body and need to become someone else. And thinking about who benefits from convincing teenagers of this?
Based on personal experiences with conversations I’ve had with liberal friends (and I’ve always identified as liberal although I don’t know what I am anymore since I don’t seem to fit anywhere), these are the points that have landed with the same “aha” you are describing:
1) That there is a large body of research showing most gender dysphoric children - even the most insistent and consistent - outgrow their dysphoria in puberty, and that it’s the process of puberty itself that allows them to sort it out. A very liberal friend of mine genuinely believed that childhood dysphoria always equaled a trans adult and she said she’d never read that most kids outgrew it. I showed her the research and she said it definitely affected her thinking on this issue.
2) that there is not any careful evaluation or assessment in all this and that there is no model for telling a child “no” no matter how glaringly obvious it is that the child should not be transitioned. This is the biggest misconception I see in liberals who don’t hold extreme beliefs. They genuinely believe that if a child (or even an adult) is being transitioned, it’s because there has been very careful assessment done and the child has been determined “truly transgender” and the children who are going through a phase or experimenting or are truly psychologically unwell would never actually be transitioned (therefore it’s harmless to go along with make and pronoun changes for those children). What we need to show is that there’s NOT good assessment or differential diagnosis happening. However, this is harder to do than you’d think because it generally requires the person to personally know a child who is being pushed into transition who obviously should not. When a liberal friend sees that (or obvious social contagion) firsthand, then I see them admitting their doubts. Stories like the details of patients at Tavistock or the St Louis pediatric gender clinic don’t seem to have the same impact because they are too distant and too depersonalized or too easily brushed aside as “transphobic reporting” to have much effect.
You didn’t ask this question, but I’ll add what has NOT worked in conversations that you think would.
1) I’ve never had a liberal friend moved by trying to discuss detransitioners. I don’t think it’s a lack of compassion. I think it’s that they have already been convinced they are vanishingly rats and they also don’t have any mental concept of what kind of problems they face, so it’s not a good entry point. (This is of course really terrible for detransitioners)
2) I’ve never had any liberal friend moved by the sports or prisons issue. It doesn’t work as a point of engagement because they usually have already decided it’s either not an issue or a complication within a bigger issue they can live with.
3) similar to the sports/prison issue: I’ve never had any friend shift their thinking by talking about the spike among teen girls. I have found that almost every liberal person I’ve talked to agrees there’s a social contagion among teen girls and that it’s concerning. But it doesn’t seem to move them to speak up about their concerns, change their voting, or put any pressure at all on elected officials or what’s being taught in schools. I think they assume whatever the issue is with those girls will get worked out on its own or it’s something that’s not their problem, something separate from the “real” trans issues and the “real” trans kids they’re protecting.
Transition has never cured gender dysphoria it’s a open secret in Transgender communities. There’s a lot of open secrets within the transgender community regarding the surgeries. Talk about the Heaven’s Gate cult show them clips of Marci bowers talking about how none of her adolescent patients gain any sexual function
This is exactly the question I keep coming back to in my own mind- how can we have accepted that bodies can be wrong? Bodies just are... and minds are so often wrong! Lisa, this is the absolute heart of the whole thing, I think. And asking them to consider what it means to send that message to your daughter is perfect. I have tried this, but my lefty friends believe I no longer have a daughter because she says she is my son. Luckily I have a few friends who are in the confused center with me and understand my concerns. Thank you once again for helping me feel way less alone!
The real question you are asking here is, “How can we get people to think?” That’s a tough one.
When I first became aware of the issue, I (naively) imagined that this could be done through reductio ad absurdum. If the ideology leads us to perform experimental medical treatments on children, then isn’t there something wrong with the ideology? Or if it leads us to put rapists in women’s prisons? Or if it leads us to let men, who have an obvious biological advantage, to compete in women’s sports?
Clearly, this doesn’t work. Reductio ad absurdum only works with people who are predisposed to think. So the question is, “Why are people unwilling to think?”
Part of it is tribalism. This is what my side “thinks,” so this is what I think. (After a difficult conversation with a feminist friend of mine, who really was refusing to see the contradictions, she admitted to me that her problem was that she lived in Portland. A brief moment of unintentional honesty!)
Another part is the (bizarrely) persistent belief in the integrity of the media. In my experience as a political researcher, if you try to tell people something that is scandalous, people have a response -- though it is usually unspoken -- that in effect says, if what you are telling me is true, it would be reported. In the case of your friends, by, say, the NY Times, which is almost definitionally assumed to be a source of authoritative information (if The NY Times would turn on a dime on this issue, a lot of minds would quickly change, but not because they are thinking).
A third part is the sheer horror of it. People don’t really want to have to think about living in a society that is, in effect, mutilating its children, or simply letting men rape women in prison. This is a powerful disincentive to thinking.
So, back to the question. How do we get people to think? I don’t think it involves hammering one essential point. If I were in denial about something (speaking from bitter experience here), it wouldn’t work for me.
What has worked to get me to think were the very few teachers I had who used the Socratic method. So rather than hammering points, we have to ask the right questions, not with force but humility.
Leor Sapir recently commented in Benjamin Boyce’s podcast that in twenty minutes or so he could get a group of liberals to see that there was a problem with child transition. But they all persisted to believe that there really was such a thing as a trans child.
But what does that mean, really? I think that’s at the heart of of all the contradictions that lead to the reductio ad absurdums that should make people think, but don’t. I think it’s just a belief, a quasi-religious belief. But we are not going to get anywhere by asserting that.
So we need to ask, sincerely, with genuine curiosity. What do you mean when you say a child is born in the wrong body? What do you mean when you say a child is trans?
The Left does not admit that main stream (left leaning) media follows the totalitarian guidelines of a webpage for reporting called "The Trans Journalists Association Style Guide" which has no sources or persons with journalistic expertise named as the origin of this document. Men like my crossdressing ex-husband, who constantly falsely claims to be 'mother' to our two sons and constantly claims he's been the target of "micro-aggressions," (but is an executive in his tech firm for 20 years now) are the ones who wrote up instructions not to report on detransitioners ("there are so few") and not to report on botched surgeries (or deaths, such as in the Dutch Ferring Pharma funded studies (De Vries, et al, 2014) and not to ever discuss the ex-wives and children's mental anguish and grief. Also, never, ever report on crimes by female-identifying men, "because trans are overrepresented in the prison population." It is a cult, it must be exposed as a cult, and the links to pornography and prostitution, I'm finding out from former "escorts" are heavily woven into this world, as is the use of cocaine backstage at drag shows.
That the trans ideology is most harmful to gay people (and mostly to lesbians). So many people on the left believe that trans is the natural progression of the gay rights movement that many of us really believe in and fought for. Trans and gay are not only NOT the same-trans ideology is in fact very homophobic and harming an entire generation of gay kids.
May 31, 2023·edited May 31, 2023Liked by Unyielding Bicyclist
I think the best thing we can do is depoliticize the language we use to talk about the issues.
I recently stopped attending a parent support group, which I had attended for years, over the trans issue. The support group is for parents whose teens and young adult children have a variety of serious problems (mental illness, addiction, etc.). I had started going because our son stopped talking to us during high school, while still living with us, and we were trying to figure out how we, as parents, could fix ourselves so that he would want to talk to us. After a couple years of this, our son announced that he was transgender, and I brought that information to the support group. Almost immediately, one of my favorite group members, a man around 70 who is a good progressive, sent the entire group an article by Jack Turban saying that ROGD was a fiction, that every medical association agrees that "gender affirming care saves lives," etc. It was a punch in the gut. It was as though my child was dying of cancer and this man was sending around articles claiming that cancer didn't exist. I explained to the facilitator why I didn't feel comfortable attending the group anymore, and she shared that info with the group member. He emailed me and confided that as a child he had gone through a period of wanting to wear girls' clothes at home. His parents allowed him to do this and eventually the stage passed and he grew into a heterosexual man who is now a happy grandfather. Given his background, he feels sympathy toward effeminate boys, and that translates into wanting to "be kind." I wrote and discarded several responses about how fortunate he was to have grown up in the "free to be" era, how nowadays well-meaning counselors would have set him on the path to medicalization and he would never have become a father or grandfather. I finally opted to send him the PITT article "True Believers," written by a very progressive, and lesbian, woman who affirmed her two sons only to realize later it was a mistake. Although I've been a Liberal my entire life, I think my position on this issue has already damanged my Liberal cred in his mind and it was better to send him something written by someone even farther to the Left.
I believe what prevents this man from being able to look at this issue in a non-polarized way, even though he is in a unique position to do so, is all the wording the mainstream media uses to talk about it (BAD: "bans," "targeting trans people," "anti-LGBTQ" versus GOOD: "medically necessary, scientifically proven, life-saving, gender-affirming health care"). Anything we can do to use more accurate, less charged language will help. I use the terms "pediatric transition" and "trans-identified men," for example.
A possible ray of light: The mainstream news outlets are reporting on homosexuality being criminalized in Uganda. Biden is calling it a "tragic violation of universal human rights." The articles state that homosexuality is illegal in 30 of 54 countries. This could be a great starting point to discuss laws banning homosexuality in contrast with indifference toward, or even encouragement of, transition in some African countries (where transition is truly "gay conversion therapy"). We need to show how the "T" is often opposed to the "LGB." Not surprisingly, the authors of these articles refer to the bans on homosexuality as "anti-LGBTQ." We need to challenge that sloppiness at every opportunity.
This post fired me up - and everyone's comments elicit a "YESSSSSS!" from me! Yesterday I had a meeting with an executive director of a large, deeply impactful community organization. He is very liberal, extremely intelligent, and loves thinking and leading outside the box. I told him in 5 minutes what is going on with the gender stuff and my stance (critical, obviously) on it. He was shocked, especially when I told him about how harmful puberty blockers etc are to a person's long-term sexual health & fertility, among other things. He had had no idea. I truly think the main issue is that the majority of smart, well-meaning people HAVE NO IDEA about everything that you, Lisa, and your brilliant, courageous peers write and talk about on this subject. Most people think it's a fringe issue, that you're either an ally or a bigot, and they have not been curious enough to step outside their NY Times/Washington Post newsfeed. Also, if they are "privileged" they probably have friends and/or family members who now identify somewhere on the LGBTQ (especially TQ) spectrum, so they don't dare consider information that would make them feel like they aren't being supportive.
So, I think what the "allies" need to understand is 1) they are being manipulated as the information they are receiving is not scientific and it's causing kids harm; 2) in a nutshell why Sweden and UK have abruptly changed their policies due to having data; 3) this is yet another area that social media has had a deep impact on our youth's mental health and on our culture.
My meeting yesterday with the CEO also included the founder of another huge national organization. The founder, who is extremely liberal, and a deeply religious Christian, on another topic (I didn't talk to him about the gender stuff - his organization helps underserved youth), said, "In the 70s, we were already seeing the destruction of the connections with the extended family, as well as the deconstruction of religion and faith. I predicted that we would next see the destruction of the nuclear family. In the US, leaders only think in terms of 2, 4 or 5 year plans. I always think long-term. Unfortunately, I was right. In a conversation with Hillary Clinton, I told her, you're right - it takes a village to raise a child, but the village is being destroyed." As he was talking, I was struck by his wisdom and how the gender thing isn't a fringe issue - it has extremely wide, long-range ramifications. If others could only see this, and not be so focused on extreme attempts to stop it, I think more people on the Left will see based on common sense, what this is all about.
The kids making these decisions, or allowing their parents to make the decisions for them, do not have fully developed brains. They are probably 10 years from full development in the part of their brain that allows them to consider consequences, to prioritize considerations, even think into the future. What is the typical “time horizon” of a 15-year-old in terms of future thinking? Now subtract three years for any sort of Neuro divergence that affects executive functioning. If 15-year-old is making decisions with the brain development and time horizon of a 12-year-old. They can maybe see a week into the future and plan for a week into the future.
There is a reason why you cannot rent a car until you’re 25. Why your rates on car insurance go down at the age of 25. Those numbers are all looked at by actuaries and the numbers don’t lie. The numbers reflect the brain development that happens around age 25.
But letting kids make decisions about the rest of their lives with this brain development is ok?!
People are always surprised when I tell them that the effects of testosterone are irreversible. But I've been most successful in starting, as you did, with, "Isn't is sexist to tell gender non-conforming girls that they must really be boys?"
I think the left needs more voices like yours, clearly pointing out that gender ideology is NOT a progressive continuation of the idea that strict gender roles and gender stereotyping are regressive- instead, it’s directly in contradiction to those ideas. My sense is that the type of people you describe (sounds like my social circle!) see the evolution of progressive ideas in the realm of “gender” as following a smooth curve from “Free to Be You and Me” to “Protect Trans Kids” without realizing that “Protect Trans Kids”, when it means both reifying the category “trans kid” and supporting affirmation-only and a medicalized pathway, is actually a slogan directly in opposition to the idea that kids should be free to be themselves whether they are female or male.
This contradiction needs to be repeatedly pointed out by people that progressives trust. I don’t see any other way out of this mess in the US.
I hope that makes sense, it’s early!
We need to parse out gender non-conformity from medicalization. A distant relative recently felt compelled to tell my sister to tell me that I should be happy my teenage daughter wants to transition. She said this for the sole reason that my daughter came to a party with “male” clothes and short hair. As it is, she is right about my daughter’s intentions, but she made that leap based solely on appearance. (And the funny part with my daughter is that her “non-conforming” behavior followed her trans-identity, not the other way around.)!! Also, this distant relative told a story of her husband’s cousin, who transitioned as an adult and is so very happy. Part of that story was how the cousin was previously ridiculed by the family for wearing a tux to a wedding - but now the cousin is happy. Why did the cousin have to medicalize and take on a new “male identity” to be accepted for wearing a tux? Why not just accept gender non-conformity w/o the need to re-label people and medically alter their appearance? And why not be extremely cautious about medical interventions on young, healthy bodies? Would any of these people be happy for young people to medically interfere with their healthy bodies under any other circumstances? These are two salient points. Accept non-conformity and be extremely wary of medical interventions!!
I would love anyone on the left to look seriously at how regressive the majority of what is being espoused as “proof” of a person’s gender identity is. When you’re saying a persons interests in more or less feminine/masculine things are a justification for them being in the wrong body and needing medical intervention, you’re the one creating a rigid gender binary with inescapable stereotypes.
I would also like to see some of the misogyny and homophobia that is bubbling under the surface of most of the trans activist dialogue to be challenged.
I think that the most important thing about this”issue” is that it is one of authoritarianism. People have been fired for” misgendering “ someone. Unlike the former gay movement ( “former, because it has changed) the trans ideology demands conformity with their beliefs, which go against all truth! We all know that men cannot be women. Denying biology won’t make biology disappear, just as denying that the earth is round won’t make it flat!
The main thing to understand about this ideology is the denial of science ,of truth and the bullying of the rest of society.
I was expelled from a socialist organization over this stuff. During my last foray into an online space with that crew, I think I got most traction with the angle that the trans stuff is actually right wing. Possible iterations for a liberal or left crowd:
-it embraces regressive gender stereotypes
-it embraces the most reactionary stereotypes of what a man and a woman are allowed to be
-it uses progressive language to physically impose regressive stereotypes on gender non-conforming kids
-it uses progressive language to obscure that it's actually embracing the most regressive gender stereotypes
-it rolls back the clock on all the progress the feminist and gay rights movements have made letting people be who they are
Hmm, after writing those down, i think i like the ones that say "it uses progressive language" bc it suggests progressive rhetoric doesn't mean progressive policy, and that there's some manipulation of well-intentioned people (aka our audience) going on.
For me, the key point is that if someone (especially a teenage girl) didn’t like their body in any other way, we would encourage them to love and accept themselves as they are, but for some reason if they don’t like themselves in this one specific way people believe it means they were born in the wrong body and need to become someone else. And thinking about who benefits from convincing teenagers of this?
Based on personal experiences with conversations I’ve had with liberal friends (and I’ve always identified as liberal although I don’t know what I am anymore since I don’t seem to fit anywhere), these are the points that have landed with the same “aha” you are describing:
1) That there is a large body of research showing most gender dysphoric children - even the most insistent and consistent - outgrow their dysphoria in puberty, and that it’s the process of puberty itself that allows them to sort it out. A very liberal friend of mine genuinely believed that childhood dysphoria always equaled a trans adult and she said she’d never read that most kids outgrew it. I showed her the research and she said it definitely affected her thinking on this issue.
2) that there is not any careful evaluation or assessment in all this and that there is no model for telling a child “no” no matter how glaringly obvious it is that the child should not be transitioned. This is the biggest misconception I see in liberals who don’t hold extreme beliefs. They genuinely believe that if a child (or even an adult) is being transitioned, it’s because there has been very careful assessment done and the child has been determined “truly transgender” and the children who are going through a phase or experimenting or are truly psychologically unwell would never actually be transitioned (therefore it’s harmless to go along with make and pronoun changes for those children). What we need to show is that there’s NOT good assessment or differential diagnosis happening. However, this is harder to do than you’d think because it generally requires the person to personally know a child who is being pushed into transition who obviously should not. When a liberal friend sees that (or obvious social contagion) firsthand, then I see them admitting their doubts. Stories like the details of patients at Tavistock or the St Louis pediatric gender clinic don’t seem to have the same impact because they are too distant and too depersonalized or too easily brushed aside as “transphobic reporting” to have much effect.
You didn’t ask this question, but I’ll add what has NOT worked in conversations that you think would.
1) I’ve never had a liberal friend moved by trying to discuss detransitioners. I don’t think it’s a lack of compassion. I think it’s that they have already been convinced they are vanishingly rats and they also don’t have any mental concept of what kind of problems they face, so it’s not a good entry point. (This is of course really terrible for detransitioners)
2) I’ve never had any liberal friend moved by the sports or prisons issue. It doesn’t work as a point of engagement because they usually have already decided it’s either not an issue or a complication within a bigger issue they can live with.
3) similar to the sports/prison issue: I’ve never had any friend shift their thinking by talking about the spike among teen girls. I have found that almost every liberal person I’ve talked to agrees there’s a social contagion among teen girls and that it’s concerning. But it doesn’t seem to move them to speak up about their concerns, change their voting, or put any pressure at all on elected officials or what’s being taught in schools. I think they assume whatever the issue is with those girls will get worked out on its own or it’s something that’s not their problem, something separate from the “real” trans issues and the “real” trans kids they’re protecting.
Transition has never cured gender dysphoria it’s a open secret in Transgender communities. There’s a lot of open secrets within the transgender community regarding the surgeries. Talk about the Heaven’s Gate cult show them clips of Marci bowers talking about how none of her adolescent patients gain any sexual function
This is exactly the question I keep coming back to in my own mind- how can we have accepted that bodies can be wrong? Bodies just are... and minds are so often wrong! Lisa, this is the absolute heart of the whole thing, I think. And asking them to consider what it means to send that message to your daughter is perfect. I have tried this, but my lefty friends believe I no longer have a daughter because she says she is my son. Luckily I have a few friends who are in the confused center with me and understand my concerns. Thank you once again for helping me feel way less alone!
The real question you are asking here is, “How can we get people to think?” That’s a tough one.
When I first became aware of the issue, I (naively) imagined that this could be done through reductio ad absurdum. If the ideology leads us to perform experimental medical treatments on children, then isn’t there something wrong with the ideology? Or if it leads us to put rapists in women’s prisons? Or if it leads us to let men, who have an obvious biological advantage, to compete in women’s sports?
Clearly, this doesn’t work. Reductio ad absurdum only works with people who are predisposed to think. So the question is, “Why are people unwilling to think?”
Part of it is tribalism. This is what my side “thinks,” so this is what I think. (After a difficult conversation with a feminist friend of mine, who really was refusing to see the contradictions, she admitted to me that her problem was that she lived in Portland. A brief moment of unintentional honesty!)
Another part is the (bizarrely) persistent belief in the integrity of the media. In my experience as a political researcher, if you try to tell people something that is scandalous, people have a response -- though it is usually unspoken -- that in effect says, if what you are telling me is true, it would be reported. In the case of your friends, by, say, the NY Times, which is almost definitionally assumed to be a source of authoritative information (if The NY Times would turn on a dime on this issue, a lot of minds would quickly change, but not because they are thinking).
A third part is the sheer horror of it. People don’t really want to have to think about living in a society that is, in effect, mutilating its children, or simply letting men rape women in prison. This is a powerful disincentive to thinking.
So, back to the question. How do we get people to think? I don’t think it involves hammering one essential point. If I were in denial about something (speaking from bitter experience here), it wouldn’t work for me.
What has worked to get me to think were the very few teachers I had who used the Socratic method. So rather than hammering points, we have to ask the right questions, not with force but humility.
Leor Sapir recently commented in Benjamin Boyce’s podcast that in twenty minutes or so he could get a group of liberals to see that there was a problem with child transition. But they all persisted to believe that there really was such a thing as a trans child.
But what does that mean, really? I think that’s at the heart of of all the contradictions that lead to the reductio ad absurdums that should make people think, but don’t. I think it’s just a belief, a quasi-religious belief. But we are not going to get anywhere by asserting that.
So we need to ask, sincerely, with genuine curiosity. What do you mean when you say a child is born in the wrong body? What do you mean when you say a child is trans?
And take it from there.
The Left does not admit that main stream (left leaning) media follows the totalitarian guidelines of a webpage for reporting called "The Trans Journalists Association Style Guide" which has no sources or persons with journalistic expertise named as the origin of this document. Men like my crossdressing ex-husband, who constantly falsely claims to be 'mother' to our two sons and constantly claims he's been the target of "micro-aggressions," (but is an executive in his tech firm for 20 years now) are the ones who wrote up instructions not to report on detransitioners ("there are so few") and not to report on botched surgeries (or deaths, such as in the Dutch Ferring Pharma funded studies (De Vries, et al, 2014) and not to ever discuss the ex-wives and children's mental anguish and grief. Also, never, ever report on crimes by female-identifying men, "because trans are overrepresented in the prison population." It is a cult, it must be exposed as a cult, and the links to pornography and prostitution, I'm finding out from former "escorts" are heavily woven into this world, as is the use of cocaine backstage at drag shows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB_Htt42Xeo&t=49s
That the trans ideology is most harmful to gay people (and mostly to lesbians). So many people on the left believe that trans is the natural progression of the gay rights movement that many of us really believe in and fought for. Trans and gay are not only NOT the same-trans ideology is in fact very homophobic and harming an entire generation of gay kids.
I think the best thing we can do is depoliticize the language we use to talk about the issues.
I recently stopped attending a parent support group, which I had attended for years, over the trans issue. The support group is for parents whose teens and young adult children have a variety of serious problems (mental illness, addiction, etc.). I had started going because our son stopped talking to us during high school, while still living with us, and we were trying to figure out how we, as parents, could fix ourselves so that he would want to talk to us. After a couple years of this, our son announced that he was transgender, and I brought that information to the support group. Almost immediately, one of my favorite group members, a man around 70 who is a good progressive, sent the entire group an article by Jack Turban saying that ROGD was a fiction, that every medical association agrees that "gender affirming care saves lives," etc. It was a punch in the gut. It was as though my child was dying of cancer and this man was sending around articles claiming that cancer didn't exist. I explained to the facilitator why I didn't feel comfortable attending the group anymore, and she shared that info with the group member. He emailed me and confided that as a child he had gone through a period of wanting to wear girls' clothes at home. His parents allowed him to do this and eventually the stage passed and he grew into a heterosexual man who is now a happy grandfather. Given his background, he feels sympathy toward effeminate boys, and that translates into wanting to "be kind." I wrote and discarded several responses about how fortunate he was to have grown up in the "free to be" era, how nowadays well-meaning counselors would have set him on the path to medicalization and he would never have become a father or grandfather. I finally opted to send him the PITT article "True Believers," written by a very progressive, and lesbian, woman who affirmed her two sons only to realize later it was a mistake. Although I've been a Liberal my entire life, I think my position on this issue has already damanged my Liberal cred in his mind and it was better to send him something written by someone even farther to the Left.
I believe what prevents this man from being able to look at this issue in a non-polarized way, even though he is in a unique position to do so, is all the wording the mainstream media uses to talk about it (BAD: "bans," "targeting trans people," "anti-LGBTQ" versus GOOD: "medically necessary, scientifically proven, life-saving, gender-affirming health care"). Anything we can do to use more accurate, less charged language will help. I use the terms "pediatric transition" and "trans-identified men," for example.
A possible ray of light: The mainstream news outlets are reporting on homosexuality being criminalized in Uganda. Biden is calling it a "tragic violation of universal human rights." The articles state that homosexuality is illegal in 30 of 54 countries. This could be a great starting point to discuss laws banning homosexuality in contrast with indifference toward, or even encouragement of, transition in some African countries (where transition is truly "gay conversion therapy"). We need to show how the "T" is often opposed to the "LGB." Not surprisingly, the authors of these articles refer to the bans on homosexuality as "anti-LGBTQ." We need to challenge that sloppiness at every opportunity.
This post fired me up - and everyone's comments elicit a "YESSSSSS!" from me! Yesterday I had a meeting with an executive director of a large, deeply impactful community organization. He is very liberal, extremely intelligent, and loves thinking and leading outside the box. I told him in 5 minutes what is going on with the gender stuff and my stance (critical, obviously) on it. He was shocked, especially when I told him about how harmful puberty blockers etc are to a person's long-term sexual health & fertility, among other things. He had had no idea. I truly think the main issue is that the majority of smart, well-meaning people HAVE NO IDEA about everything that you, Lisa, and your brilliant, courageous peers write and talk about on this subject. Most people think it's a fringe issue, that you're either an ally or a bigot, and they have not been curious enough to step outside their NY Times/Washington Post newsfeed. Also, if they are "privileged" they probably have friends and/or family members who now identify somewhere on the LGBTQ (especially TQ) spectrum, so they don't dare consider information that would make them feel like they aren't being supportive.
So, I think what the "allies" need to understand is 1) they are being manipulated as the information they are receiving is not scientific and it's causing kids harm; 2) in a nutshell why Sweden and UK have abruptly changed their policies due to having data; 3) this is yet another area that social media has had a deep impact on our youth's mental health and on our culture.
My meeting yesterday with the CEO also included the founder of another huge national organization. The founder, who is extremely liberal, and a deeply religious Christian, on another topic (I didn't talk to him about the gender stuff - his organization helps underserved youth), said, "In the 70s, we were already seeing the destruction of the connections with the extended family, as well as the deconstruction of religion and faith. I predicted that we would next see the destruction of the nuclear family. In the US, leaders only think in terms of 2, 4 or 5 year plans. I always think long-term. Unfortunately, I was right. In a conversation with Hillary Clinton, I told her, you're right - it takes a village to raise a child, but the village is being destroyed." As he was talking, I was struck by his wisdom and how the gender thing isn't a fringe issue - it has extremely wide, long-range ramifications. If others could only see this, and not be so focused on extreme attempts to stop it, I think more people on the Left will see based on common sense, what this is all about.
The kids making these decisions, or allowing their parents to make the decisions for them, do not have fully developed brains. They are probably 10 years from full development in the part of their brain that allows them to consider consequences, to prioritize considerations, even think into the future. What is the typical “time horizon” of a 15-year-old in terms of future thinking? Now subtract three years for any sort of Neuro divergence that affects executive functioning. If 15-year-old is making decisions with the brain development and time horizon of a 12-year-old. They can maybe see a week into the future and plan for a week into the future.
There is a reason why you cannot rent a car until you’re 25. Why your rates on car insurance go down at the age of 25. Those numbers are all looked at by actuaries and the numbers don’t lie. The numbers reflect the brain development that happens around age 25.
But letting kids make decisions about the rest of their lives with this brain development is ok?!