Bazelon and the NYT's led us to the river, let us see the water, but didn't quite let us drink. I took great comfort in reading the rational comments from the readers.
Thank you, Colin, for publishing this, and thank you, Lisa, for writing it. I have to admit, the one before last paragraph got me completely choked up. “It brought up enough issues for them to ask more and better questions, to wonder, to worry. It allowed for curiosity, something verboten in this political climate. Their reactions tempered my disappointment.”
This is exactly how I feel about the article. It didn’t go where I wanted it to go, but it put a crack in the veneer and I, too, had a couple of unexpected people reach out to me, almost in a whisper to say “can you tell me more?” For that, I am grateful. We must just keep delicately chipping away.
At least Bazelon pointed out that the scientific issues are not simple, well-defined, and fully decided. That's a step in the right direction. I'm hoping that sometime soon practitioners will remember the principle of "First, do no harm," and realize that children are incapable of adequately making the self-diagnoses for which they've been given responsibility, under the "affirmation" model of treatment.
“a gay man with deep shame over his sexuality.” A powerful and important factor. Perhaps these issues should be explored psychologically before being explored chemically.
It’s a signal moment, however cautious Bazelon was. What it may also do is reveal to ordinary people who haven’t so far been steeped in this issue how vicious the hardcore activism is. It is beginning to feel very different from 12 months ago.
This strikes me as a flawed discussion too. A "false positive?" The tenderly bending-over to try to accommodate some level of genuine transness seems to me ridiculous. There are people whose mental distress can be alleviated by time, by careful ethical therapy; and people whose mental disorder is so profound that they can find relief only in extreme measures.
Perhaps ancient societies invented initiation rituals, some involving infliction of considerable pain and tasks of dangerous endurance, as part of the transition from puberty to adulthood, because they recognized that such a tumultuous stage of development needed to be managed somehow, and though they had no knowledge of sex hormones and endorphines etc. etc. etc., they discovered methods that worked.
Now we have tattooing and piercings and other mutilations divorced from formal ritual meaning, but the urgent need to find relief through pain and body-altering remains as part of a strange affliction of our particular mammalian species.
I think we need to drop all idiotic labels. "Identifying as cis?" "Genuinely transgender?" This is not solving a serious problem of society; it's playing games with semantics.
But one cannot be “genuinely trans.” It is simply not possible to ever know what it is like to be something that you can never actually be. Certainly there is a degree of mental distress, and like other fixations they can be on the unattainable - from women waisting their lives away chasing celebrity men who will never know they are alive while telling themselves one day their disturbed fantasy will come true, to men thinking they can live as actual women.
I don’t care what adults do, so long as reality and sex based spaces are respected, but it’s a false saying to claim someone is “transgender.” When you take a trans Atlantic flight, you actually cross the Atlantic Ocean. When a child transfers to a different school, they actually attend a different school. When you transfer money at a bank, it actually changes accounts. Puberty is a transition from being a human child to a human adult. No one has ever become a different gender. No man has become a woman, and no woman has ever become a man. So I can see why someone would say there is no such thing as a human who is “genuinely transgender.” I doubt anyone disagrees that some humans have serious mental illnesses and odd fixations including those around genitals, social norms, and sexuality. Personally that ability to become fixated appears to be very malleable in human children, which begs the question as to why the hell our society is encouraging, with a special month no less (we all know “pride month” has nothing to do with being gay these days - even baby clothing Carters was sending out “pride emails” for gender fluid toddlers 🤦♀️) a type of confusion that leads to a lifetime of pain and suffering for those children unfortunate enough, for whatever reason, to buy a well funded activists and pharma driven lie? Maybe we should stop “celebrating” dangerous big pharma subscription plans and return to reminding kids you only get the body you are born in, treat it well, and break the stereotypes.
I tend to agree with Sasha Ayad who says that she has come to see "trans" as more of a verb than a noun. It's not really something that you can be, but for some (I agree, very very small percentage) it may be that the acts that an individual does to present as the opposite sex are for some reason necessary for his or her social functioning and mental health. I think that framing is rather helpful.
I, too, thank you for publishing this piece, Colin. Thanks to Lisa for writing it. I'm finding this whole issue very disconcerting. It is now so wrapped up in politics, egos, activism, money (e.g., physicians and clinics), and academic jargon that it's going to continue, ad infinitum. We've seen this happen in many other biological/psychological controversies (some of which I've written about). We can trade interpretations of data and statistics, we can bicker over the nuances of psychological categories, and we can argue over the meanings of words forever. In the meantime, something very wrong is happening, I think. When slick websites unabashedly advertise procedures such as gender nullification, and that's deemed to be an acceptable solution to a psychological issue, it feels as if we've regressed to an era in which trepanning and lobotomies were thought to be reasonable medical procedures. This is dire.
It is difficult to confront the fanatics of gender ideology because most people find thinking about such matters as "bottom surgery" deeply distressing. It's brutal to do, a kind of 21st-century torture, and especially hard to contemplate as something done to a young and suffering person. This is one reason that its advocates have prevailed thus far in so many ways.
The advocacy of a "gendered soul" is an odd thing to find on the post-modernist left, I think, because so many people in this group don't really believe in a soul at all. They have, after all, been t college.
There’s some really junky articles on my Apple News feed today, courtesy of CNN and USA Today. That’s the problem too. When TRAs see articles that they don’t like in one news outlet, they go in hard on the others.
To be more specific, these articles drum up the usual junk: trans kids know how they feel and it’s real; they need “gender affirming” care or they will kill themselves; sex is not binary, etc.
Bazelon chickened out. It's not like she didn't have the information available to her. She was just too afraid to tell any more of the truth than she did. One of the trans-related scandals few seem to be addressing is the "conversion ban" that affects the ability of therapists to even treat the complicated and suffering children who present with the affliction of gender.
It is difficult to confront the fanatics of gender ideology because most people find thinking about such matters as "bottom surgery" deeply distressing. It's brutal to do, a kind of 21st-century torture, and especially hard to contemplate as something done to a young and suffering person. This is one reason that its advocates have prevailed thus far in so many ways.
The advocacy of a "gendered soul" is an odd thing to find on the post-modernist left, I think, because so many people in this group don't really believe in a soul at all. They have, after all, been t college.
What person with actual children doesn’t realize they are ALL stupid and short sighted?
My 10yo daughter is going into 6th grade this fall. Despite being the youngest student in her grade, she is a top athlete, a school ambassador, and a straight A student at an ACSI exemplary credited private school (there are only 18 in the US) that doesn’t play “everybody gets a trophy.” Her IQ is in the top 2%, her Lexie over 1,300 (college freshman), she reads and comprehends at a pace in the top 0.01% and has already read over 750 actual books. She is mature, kind, fun, focused, hardworking. By all accounts a smart kid.
BUT.........like all kids, she’s still does stupider crap than really dumb adults. She broke her ankle and a growth cap in May. Luckily it didn’t displace, but it’s still broken, and could. While she’s already 5’1” tall, even the growth caps in her feat are open. She spent the last 2 weeks trying to con my husband (her dad) and I into letting her go to the trampoline park, despite the fact she KNOWS it could result in displacement (ie in 1 leg being an inch shorter than the other if she displaces the break). I finally looked at her yesterday and said “I love you, and you are smart kid, but this is why I say kids are stupid. No adult would unnecessarily risk a lifetime of 1 leg shorter than the other because they couldn’t wait another 4 weeks to play at a trampoline park. The answer is still no. One day you’ll thank me.”
I’m sorry, but anyone claiming kids can know what they want or their “true self” is a moron. I don’t know any adults, myself included, that know their “true self.” What the heck does that even mean????
I spent the first 9 years of my life convinced I should have been a boy. I said as much frequently. I was called one by strangers weekly (sorry mom, that was a bowl cut not a pixie cut). All I ever wore were Umbro’s and t-shirts. I would have eaten this gender crap up, and my parents couldn’t have stopped me in today’s legal environment. Why did I think I should have been a boy? I like wrestling and sports and mud but despise Barbie, pink, and tea parties. I also wanted to pee standing up, though I got pretty good at squatting which was super handy when I worked as an outdoor guide summers during undergrad.
I didn’t have any idea what being a man or woman even meant. I couldn’t comprehend if intimate sexual relationships. I had no idea if I wanted kids, I wanted a pet Chimp. All I knew was that boys were more fun to play with and liked mud as much as me. Puberty was terrifying, but by the end I was a size 0 with big boobs, strong muscles, a body I love, and a realization I actually really really liked boys, but had zero interest in being one. Born in the 1980’s the response I always got from adults as a kid, particularly my parents, in the conservative south, was “you’re a kid, just be you, if you feel that way at 25 we’ll talk, go play.”
The only thing that has changed since the 80’s/ 90’s is the narrative and this regressive intersectional and relativism crap seeking to put unique individual humans into oversimplified boxes and effectively punish them ruthlessly if they step out of bounds. Today you can’t have a Black conservative without an outright onslaught of overtly racist slurs from every corner of the msm, a fabulous boy without encouraging him to be a eunuch, or a strong girl frustrated with her body without almost demanding to mutilate her genitals and sterilize her. It’s a level of regression I genuinely didn’t think was possible to witness in a society in a single lifetime when I got out of grad school less than 20 years ago. I just turned 40.
Bazelon and the NYT's led us to the river, let us see the water, but didn't quite let us drink. I took great comfort in reading the rational comments from the readers.
Thank you, Colin, for publishing this, and thank you, Lisa, for writing it. I have to admit, the one before last paragraph got me completely choked up. “It brought up enough issues for them to ask more and better questions, to wonder, to worry. It allowed for curiosity, something verboten in this political climate. Their reactions tempered my disappointment.”
This is exactly how I feel about the article. It didn’t go where I wanted it to go, but it put a crack in the veneer and I, too, had a couple of unexpected people reach out to me, almost in a whisper to say “can you tell me more?” For that, I am grateful. We must just keep delicately chipping away.
Great article, Lisa!
At least Bazelon pointed out that the scientific issues are not simple, well-defined, and fully decided. That's a step in the right direction. I'm hoping that sometime soon practitioners will remember the principle of "First, do no harm," and realize that children are incapable of adequately making the self-diagnoses for which they've been given responsibility, under the "affirmation" model of treatment.
I’m hearing that Washpo and Reuters are taking a closer look and I hope to God that it’s true.
“a gay man with deep shame over his sexuality.” A powerful and important factor. Perhaps these issues should be explored psychologically before being explored chemically.
It’s a signal moment, however cautious Bazelon was. What it may also do is reveal to ordinary people who haven’t so far been steeped in this issue how vicious the hardcore activism is. It is beginning to feel very different from 12 months ago.
The activism is also extraordinarily dishonest. Once you see that, it can't be unseen - especially the way activism is warping the science.
This strikes me as a flawed discussion too. A "false positive?" The tenderly bending-over to try to accommodate some level of genuine transness seems to me ridiculous. There are people whose mental distress can be alleviated by time, by careful ethical therapy; and people whose mental disorder is so profound that they can find relief only in extreme measures.
Like these people: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/
Perhaps ancient societies invented initiation rituals, some involving infliction of considerable pain and tasks of dangerous endurance, as part of the transition from puberty to adulthood, because they recognized that such a tumultuous stage of development needed to be managed somehow, and though they had no knowledge of sex hormones and endorphines etc. etc. etc., they discovered methods that worked.
Now we have tattooing and piercings and other mutilations divorced from formal ritual meaning, but the urgent need to find relief through pain and body-altering remains as part of a strange affliction of our particular mammalian species.
I think we need to drop all idiotic labels. "Identifying as cis?" "Genuinely transgender?" This is not solving a serious problem of society; it's playing games with semantics.
But what does "genuinely trans" mean? It would seem, to me, that refers to people so profoundly ill they cannot endure anything but a simulated life.
But one cannot be “genuinely trans.” It is simply not possible to ever know what it is like to be something that you can never actually be. Certainly there is a degree of mental distress, and like other fixations they can be on the unattainable - from women waisting their lives away chasing celebrity men who will never know they are alive while telling themselves one day their disturbed fantasy will come true, to men thinking they can live as actual women.
I don’t care what adults do, so long as reality and sex based spaces are respected, but it’s a false saying to claim someone is “transgender.” When you take a trans Atlantic flight, you actually cross the Atlantic Ocean. When a child transfers to a different school, they actually attend a different school. When you transfer money at a bank, it actually changes accounts. Puberty is a transition from being a human child to a human adult. No one has ever become a different gender. No man has become a woman, and no woman has ever become a man. So I can see why someone would say there is no such thing as a human who is “genuinely transgender.” I doubt anyone disagrees that some humans have serious mental illnesses and odd fixations including those around genitals, social norms, and sexuality. Personally that ability to become fixated appears to be very malleable in human children, which begs the question as to why the hell our society is encouraging, with a special month no less (we all know “pride month” has nothing to do with being gay these days - even baby clothing Carters was sending out “pride emails” for gender fluid toddlers 🤦♀️) a type of confusion that leads to a lifetime of pain and suffering for those children unfortunate enough, for whatever reason, to buy a well funded activists and pharma driven lie? Maybe we should stop “celebrating” dangerous big pharma subscription plans and return to reminding kids you only get the body you are born in, treat it well, and break the stereotypes.
I tend to agree with Sasha Ayad who says that she has come to see "trans" as more of a verb than a noun. It's not really something that you can be, but for some (I agree, very very small percentage) it may be that the acts that an individual does to present as the opposite sex are for some reason necessary for his or her social functioning and mental health. I think that framing is rather helpful.
FR Prete
10 min ago
I, too, thank you for publishing this piece, Colin. Thanks to Lisa for writing it. I'm finding this whole issue very disconcerting. It is now so wrapped up in politics, egos, activism, money (e.g., physicians and clinics), and academic jargon that it's going to continue, ad infinitum. We've seen this happen in many other biological/psychological controversies (some of which I've written about). We can trade interpretations of data and statistics, we can bicker over the nuances of psychological categories, and we can argue over the meanings of words forever. In the meantime, something very wrong is happening, I think. When slick websites unabashedly advertise procedures such as gender nullification, and that's deemed to be an acceptable solution to a psychological issue, it feels as if we've regressed to an era in which trepanning and lobotomies were thought to be reasonable medical procedures. This is dire.
It is difficult to confront the fanatics of gender ideology because most people find thinking about such matters as "bottom surgery" deeply distressing. It's brutal to do, a kind of 21st-century torture, and especially hard to contemplate as something done to a young and suffering person. This is one reason that its advocates have prevailed thus far in so many ways.
The advocacy of a "gendered soul" is an odd thing to find on the post-modernist left, I think, because so many people in this group don't really believe in a soul at all. They have, after all, been t college.
There’s some really junky articles on my Apple News feed today, courtesy of CNN and USA Today. That’s the problem too. When TRAs see articles that they don’t like in one news outlet, they go in hard on the others.
To be more specific, these articles drum up the usual junk: trans kids know how they feel and it’s real; they need “gender affirming” care or they will kill themselves; sex is not binary, etc.
I thought Reuters had been sponsoring this ideology internationally for years now....
What do you mean by sponsoring?
Actually Thompson Reuters funds an international NGO that is all-in advocating for trans stuff.
Reuters itself may or may not share those views.
Article Here:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-document-that-reveals-the-remarkable-tactics-of-trans-lobbyists
Actual advocacy document on how to get 'trans rights' legislation passed out of view of the public:
https://www.iglyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/IGLYO_v3-1.pdf
Bazelon chickened out. It's not like she didn't have the information available to her. She was just too afraid to tell any more of the truth than she did. One of the trans-related scandals few seem to be addressing is the "conversion ban" that affects the ability of therapists to even treat the complicated and suffering children who present with the affliction of gender.
It is difficult to confront the fanatics of gender ideology because most people find thinking about such matters as "bottom surgery" deeply distressing. It's brutal to do, a kind of 21st-century torture, and especially hard to contemplate as something done to a young and suffering person. This is one reason that its advocates have prevailed thus far in so many ways.
The advocacy of a "gendered soul" is an odd thing to find on the post-modernist left, I think, because so many people in this group don't really believe in a soul at all. They have, after all, been t college.
What person with actual children doesn’t realize they are ALL stupid and short sighted?
My 10yo daughter is going into 6th grade this fall. Despite being the youngest student in her grade, she is a top athlete, a school ambassador, and a straight A student at an ACSI exemplary credited private school (there are only 18 in the US) that doesn’t play “everybody gets a trophy.” Her IQ is in the top 2%, her Lexie over 1,300 (college freshman), she reads and comprehends at a pace in the top 0.01% and has already read over 750 actual books. She is mature, kind, fun, focused, hardworking. By all accounts a smart kid.
BUT.........like all kids, she’s still does stupider crap than really dumb adults. She broke her ankle and a growth cap in May. Luckily it didn’t displace, but it’s still broken, and could. While she’s already 5’1” tall, even the growth caps in her feat are open. She spent the last 2 weeks trying to con my husband (her dad) and I into letting her go to the trampoline park, despite the fact she KNOWS it could result in displacement (ie in 1 leg being an inch shorter than the other if she displaces the break). I finally looked at her yesterday and said “I love you, and you are smart kid, but this is why I say kids are stupid. No adult would unnecessarily risk a lifetime of 1 leg shorter than the other because they couldn’t wait another 4 weeks to play at a trampoline park. The answer is still no. One day you’ll thank me.”
I’m sorry, but anyone claiming kids can know what they want or their “true self” is a moron. I don’t know any adults, myself included, that know their “true self.” What the heck does that even mean????
I spent the first 9 years of my life convinced I should have been a boy. I said as much frequently. I was called one by strangers weekly (sorry mom, that was a bowl cut not a pixie cut). All I ever wore were Umbro’s and t-shirts. I would have eaten this gender crap up, and my parents couldn’t have stopped me in today’s legal environment. Why did I think I should have been a boy? I like wrestling and sports and mud but despise Barbie, pink, and tea parties. I also wanted to pee standing up, though I got pretty good at squatting which was super handy when I worked as an outdoor guide summers during undergrad.
I didn’t have any idea what being a man or woman even meant. I couldn’t comprehend if intimate sexual relationships. I had no idea if I wanted kids, I wanted a pet Chimp. All I knew was that boys were more fun to play with and liked mud as much as me. Puberty was terrifying, but by the end I was a size 0 with big boobs, strong muscles, a body I love, and a realization I actually really really liked boys, but had zero interest in being one. Born in the 1980’s the response I always got from adults as a kid, particularly my parents, in the conservative south, was “you’re a kid, just be you, if you feel that way at 25 we’ll talk, go play.”
The only thing that has changed since the 80’s/ 90’s is the narrative and this regressive intersectional and relativism crap seeking to put unique individual humans into oversimplified boxes and effectively punish them ruthlessly if they step out of bounds. Today you can’t have a Black conservative without an outright onslaught of overtly racist slurs from every corner of the msm, a fabulous boy without encouraging him to be a eunuch, or a strong girl frustrated with her body without almost demanding to mutilate her genitals and sterilize her. It’s a level of regression I genuinely didn’t think was possible to witness in a society in a single lifetime when I got out of grad school less than 20 years ago. I just turned 40.