People are backing themselves into the position that every single request for gender transition must lead to quick social and medical transition.
Watching a huge portion of the self-respecting Left polarize on childhood transgender issues is something else. People are backing themselves into the position that every single request for gender transition must lead to quick social and medical transition — that all the conventions of medicine, all the rules governing child-serving social institutions, and the law must facilitate these “transitions” lest we deny transgender people their dignity.
The New York Times letter in which contributors denounce the Times for publishing anything sympathetic to de-transitioners or skeptics is full of utterly crazy assumptions and outright lies.
Puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, and gender-affirming surgeries have been standard forms of care for cis and trans people alike for decades.
This is just not true. Use of puberty blockers for “gender-affirming care” is still entirely off-label usage of drugs meant to halt excesses in puberty. Use of hormone replacement in children is not well studied at all. “Gender-affirming surgeries” have a history of being adopted to suit the faddish gender ideology of the time and then rejected upon examination of the actual medical results — whether it’s Johns Hopkins University or the medical system in Sweden.
It’s also perfectly legitimate for journalists to question “standard forms of surgery” or even the medical consensus on any given issue. Doing so brought an end to eugenic sterilizations and lobotomies for the mentally ill or “anxious.”
The ideological defense of this is littered with euphemisms. If you disagree with the bizarre anthropology of transgenderism, you are “denying the existence” of trans people. This is as stupid as saying that one who doesn’t assent to the doctrines of the Watch Tower Society denies the existence of Jehovah’s Witnesses, a religious group notoriously persecuted by the Third Reich. The talking points used to discourage critical inquiry are eerily reminiscent of the satanic preschool panic: “Trust the children.”
I have no doubt that some adults and teens make a “trans identity” suit themselves, that they would resent more a society that forced them to live in their “assigned gender” than whatever inconveniences they have taken on to live inside their chosen identity. But I also have no doubt that the phenomenon has a variety of causes, including not only the despair that drives autistic children and the social contagion infecting teenage girls, but also the sexual kinks driving Type A male autogynephiles’ trans identity.
The ideology used to rope these various phenomena together amounts to a series of anthropological contentions and Gnostic beliefs that are preposterous. Nothing in the natural world suggests that mammals are routinely born into the “wrong sex.” Nothing about the phenomenon of inter-sex individuals suggests that the sexual dimorphism of the species is some dubious patriarchal conspiracy.
And of course the most wicked aspect of this is the unsubtle encouragement of suicidal ideation as the proper form of revenge on the non-affirming person or society. It is a disgusting inversion of anything that could be admired in liberationist progressive ideology. Colonial subjects and the enslaved are typically held in these ideologies to be necessarily their own liberators. In the ideology of Frantz Fanon, post-colonial subjects have the difficult task of conceiving of themselves as having dignity apart from the conceptions imposed on them by their oppressors. A proper leftist would know that begging for affirmation is the opposite of liberation; it is the reification of the existing patriarchal power structure.
But of course, the trans movement is not a liberationist one. It is a form of decadence and exoticism among the terminally bourgeois. So of course its chief demand is to have its precepts honored by the clerical class in charge of the bourgeois catechetics that appears between the Real Estate and Style Sections.