This is exactly right. What is the rush to medically alter vulnerable young people’s bodies? If it turns out that any of these young people have a mental disorder whereby they absolutely cannot live happily (in a relative sense since nobody is always or even usually “happy”) in their natal bodies, they can transition in adulthood. If we as a society move away from stereotypes and toward acceptance of all sorts of people - butch lesbians, effeminate men, and every other variation of gender - I suspect few people will have this disorder. For those who do, they can transition in adulthood and the rest can live in their healthy bodies. Why is this controversial? Thanks to Buck Angel for speaking truth to power.
I know that confused young people need to read articles like this from someone who understands from experience, but who can also see the bs that seems to be taking over, and the dangers of believing it. Brill piece. Thanks Buck. Please keep going!
Thank you for sharing your life. I agree with you. Children are incapable to understand and make such a monumental decision that will alter their life forever. Even those who are born intersex must learn, understand and decide what their future sex (or sexes) will be. Don’t stop speaking out!
Many adults also seem to be incapable of understanding, sadly, and are perpetuating this madness in our society and culture. I hope the wave continues to grow in this direction and sanity returns, we settle back down.
Yes, me too but you and I both know that’s a wish and not a reality.
The title wave of transition insanity has taken over the whole LGBT culture and is now threatening even our own freedoms, rights and safety. It’s like our own people are pushing us back into the closet and it scares the shit out of me!
We must speak out! We MUST but…and yes, there’s ALWAYS a “but”…it’s scary. Damn scary! I thought coming out was a long scary process but speaking out about this is even scarier! The fear of anger, rejection, retaliation, etc from my own LGBT tribe was, and still is, overwhelmingly frightening, intimidating and dreadful!!!
But if I didn’t/don’t stand up and speak out for those who don’t and can’t understand at their tender and immature age…then I’m just as bad as the transition activists who are destroying the children that we’re suppose to nurture and protect.
And when these children are old and mature enough to be able to make their own informed and rational decisions about their gender identity, then I will support their decisions.
Although I agree that quality therapy is needed, currently the therapy field is captured by the affirming mindset, prohibiting true exploration. I am a therapist and I have few colleagues in my state who I trust to understand and treat the complexity of gender dysphoria. When I try to share exploratory training info or articles on local therapists’ pages, moderators delete them.
Been a fan since Cirque, and enjoy your writing. It’s rare for people to have a clear emotional memory of childhood, to have emerged into adulthood with an understanding of those memories and further to be eloquent in communicating your understanding - a trifecta.
I would also enjoy seeing you work in NYT or Atlantic. It’s an important piece you’ve written.
You confirm my observations on transsexualism - statements like “dysphoria is in the mind”. I suspect you also feel that you can never eliminate the dysphoria, you can only tolerate it. As Mrs Hudson from Sherlock Holmes said, “what you can’t cure you must endure”.
Does anyone know whether medical associations/activist whatever have developed or are looking to develop a way of distinguishing sissy/tomboy children, who will grow up to be homosexual and have absolutely no need for any medicalization, from people who will want to go puberty blocker/cross sex hormones/surgery route?
Sad? Sad that you find it preferable that my daughter have to live your experience instead of dealing with her dysphoria and depression early. Her life is going quite well, thankfully.
Thank you for allowing me to post. It is very clear that I am not the target audience for this coalition, so I will be unsubscribing.
First, though, I would like to present one last thought for your consideration.
The author's conclusions about gender care for minors simply don't gibe with my own observations and experiences. I have tried to avoid anecdote when so much evidence is out there to support gender affirming care, but it seems to make no difference.
I find it horrifying that a person who endured such awful psychic trauma that they were homeless, abusing drugs, and engaged in prostitution would deny younger people a means to avoid such a fate.
My own child was severely depressed and engaging in self-harm as a young teen. Antidepressants had almost no impact on her depression. After months of therapy, she came out to us as transgender.
Months later, after more therapy and more antidepressants, she came to the Washington University Transgender Center. Her treatments, including hormone therapy, have completely turned her life around. She is happy, motivated, and completely free of antidepressants.
Her story is similar to nearly all the stories I have heard from other parents of trans kids. WUTC was not quick to treat her with puberty blockers or hormones; on the contrary, it was many months and many hours of talk before that was made available.
Please support leaving these important decisions as they have been: between patients, their parents, and their doctors! Ancillary staff are generally not present at every step, and do not have access to all the information. For every Chloe Cole, there are hundreds of kids who are at risk of losing care that is genuinely helping them.
The evidence supports not transitioning children and if you actually did your research you would see every country that has been doing this way before the USA says so you would not say this. BTW if we just left it up to the medical and therapy we will be seeing such a huge amount of children dealing with physical and mental problems for the rest of their lives. Sad that you think thats ok🥲🥲🥲🤣
Thank you for posting. Please do not unsubscribe. It is important for people with divergent experiences to be a part of this discussion. It is the only way we can have an honest discussion. Neither "side" in this should be trying to shout the other down or run them out of town -- nor those of us who see points on both "sides". And we should all have the courage not to let ourselves get run out of town easily.
Thank you Buck. Thank you as always. Your wisdom is appreciated, and I hope your article will be read widely.
I really don't want to quibble after reading such a fine article, but on one thing I do think a quibble is necessary. It seems to me you really should rethink your embrace of the view -- really it's an oversimplified slogan -- that you're biologically female.
You are (I assume) genetically female, but that is not the same thing as being "biologically female". Genetics does not = biology. Humans studied and learned about biologically thousands of years before we discovered genes. Genetics is a subfield of biology, very far from the whole of it; our genes exist to generate the larger features that constitute the main part of our biology.
Your larger biological features have been changed substantially from your natal biology. Due to this, you are, in fact, a mix of male and female today.
If you were to live another 150 years or so, it would probably be possible by then for you to get gene therapy and a well-functioning male member and become as consistently male as any natal or cis male is today. I suppose you won't be around then. But hopefully other humans will be around, and if so, some of them will make what will be genuinely complete transitions -- fully functioning ovaries and testes and genes and penises and wombs and hormones and tubes and all. Maybe it'll take more than 150 years to get to that, maybe less; but it'll happen -- as certainly enough as to be effectively inevitable -- in a not so distant future, assuming only one condition: that the species continues to exist and doesn't suffer catastrophic set-backs along the way.
Probably people will be able by then to detransition or make reverse transitions too, and retransition when they want, without significant loss for having gone both ways.
That's not the reality today by a long shot. Medical changes today leave major traces and losses that cannot be completely repaired. That is the underlying reason why the cautions that you call for are so important in this era.
So much for the angry, dishonest polemics about medicalization being risk-free. But so much also for the angry, opposite-dishonest polemics that "sex cannot be changed". In fact it can be changed and often is being changed - today, changed in part, in some future time changed completely, assuming humanity survives that long.
People who study the technological future are pretty sure that many other basic aspects of human biology will be changeable also by then.
Today it seems to me it is a fact that biological sex can be changed in part, not in whole. Anyone can speculate about what percentage number to give that part, but it is a significant percentage, not a marginal or negligible one. It is a part that has made a huge difference in your life, and in thousands who have followed after you. 150 years ago it could not be changed at all to the other sex, it could only be amputated. Back then, people could at most be turned into eunuchs; yet even then, everyone recognized, rightly enough, that a eunuch was something substantially different from "simply a man".
We need truth, not slogans and dogmas. False slogans and dogmas should have no place in this. Not the falsehood of the angry activist mob that screams "I'm a man, period, get over it". And not the falsehood of the angry crowd that reacts to you and to other transmen by screaming "you're a biological woman, period, face the fact". It's in fact not "the fact"; it's an angry slogan. Anger is a poor counselor.
It seems to me it's usually the case that people who are angry at the lies from one side, furious mad, and think that that side is "The Lie" writ large -- that many of these people will think that anything that hits back at that side is by definition on the side of "The Truth", and is therefore itself The Truth no matter how obviously misleading or downright false it is on points of fact. They're wrong in thinking that, and dangerously wrong. Two lies don't make a truth.
Opposing the lies of one side not only doesn't mean telling the truth; too often it means telling opposite lies. Adding more fuel to the anger on both sides, and the train crash they both seem hell-bent on having with each other. We're in real danger from that crash at this time.
Humans are anisogamous, meaning we reproduce via two very different type gametes.
In anisogamous species females are individuals born with structures that bear eggs, ie. ovaries. Males are born with structures that produce sperm at sexual maturity, i.e testes.
Genes DETERMINE sex in humans but they do NOT define it.
NEITHER SURGERY OR DRUGS CAN DEFINE, DETERMINE, OR ALTER ONE'S SEX.
Thank you for stating clearly an argument frequently given by some people in this discussion; and in so doing, showing its flaws, which seem to me fatal.
To write this accurately, I think you'd have to change it a lot and say instead that: "At present, medical methods can only remove gametes; they cannot yet create new gametes, or change a complete sexual reproductive system from male to female or vice versa. But they almost certainly will be able to do this in the future, if humanity survives. In principle the entirety of biological sex can be changed medically; we’re just not there yet."
I explained that pretty clearly earlier; or I thought I was clear. Did I state it somehow unclearly?
You might also want to say that you're trying to make a proof by way of making a definition; that is, you are defining sex solely in terms of a complete capable reproductive system; and that other people -- probably most people, who are operating within normal, pro-communications linguistics, not trying to make a point by their definition -- will regard this as an oversimplified and misleadingly reductionist definition of sex and its biology. But that would us get into linguistics, and whether it is appropriate to try to impose, on the general public discussion of sex and biology, a definition used by many biologists for the specialized purpose of distinguishing one natal reproductive sex from the other. I think it is not linguistically appropriate or accurate, but again, that's another discussion.
I'm really sorry to see the heavy use of capitalization. That always creates an unpleasant impression. It’s pretty much the same impression one gets from hearing someone try to shout other people down; which would be a regrettable method of discussion.
Fantastic essay. I agree it should also appear in the New York Times. How do we make that happen? Thanks for your courage and clarity, Buck.
This is exactly right. What is the rush to medically alter vulnerable young people’s bodies? If it turns out that any of these young people have a mental disorder whereby they absolutely cannot live happily (in a relative sense since nobody is always or even usually “happy”) in their natal bodies, they can transition in adulthood. If we as a society move away from stereotypes and toward acceptance of all sorts of people - butch lesbians, effeminate men, and every other variation of gender - I suspect few people will have this disorder. For those who do, they can transition in adulthood and the rest can live in their healthy bodies. Why is this controversial? Thanks to Buck Angel for speaking truth to power.
Yes, yes, yes. Thank you! Beautifully said, and I agree that the NYT would be stupid not to publish this and interview you.
I really like your YouTube channel. You have a sense of humor and empathy. You have a big heart. Thanks Buck Angel
Keep on rockin in the free world
I know that confused young people need to read articles like this from someone who understands from experience, but who can also see the bs that seems to be taking over, and the dangers of believing it. Brill piece. Thanks Buck. Please keep going!
Thank you for sharing your life. I agree with you. Children are incapable to understand and make such a monumental decision that will alter their life forever. Even those who are born intersex must learn, understand and decide what their future sex (or sexes) will be. Don’t stop speaking out!
Many adults also seem to be incapable of understanding, sadly, and are perpetuating this madness in our society and culture. I hope the wave continues to grow in this direction and sanity returns, we settle back down.
Yes, me too but you and I both know that’s a wish and not a reality.
The title wave of transition insanity has taken over the whole LGBT culture and is now threatening even our own freedoms, rights and safety. It’s like our own people are pushing us back into the closet and it scares the shit out of me!
We must speak out! We MUST but…and yes, there’s ALWAYS a “but”…it’s scary. Damn scary! I thought coming out was a long scary process but speaking out about this is even scarier! The fear of anger, rejection, retaliation, etc from my own LGBT tribe was, and still is, overwhelmingly frightening, intimidating and dreadful!!!
But if I didn’t/don’t stand up and speak out for those who don’t and can’t understand at their tender and immature age…then I’m just as bad as the transition activists who are destroying the children that we’re suppose to nurture and protect.
And when these children are old and mature enough to be able to make their own informed and rational decisions about their gender identity, then I will support their decisions.
Although I agree that quality therapy is needed, currently the therapy field is captured by the affirming mindset, prohibiting true exploration. I am a therapist and I have few colleagues in my state who I trust to understand and treat the complexity of gender dysphoria. When I try to share exploratory training info or articles on local therapists’ pages, moderators delete them.
Been a fan since Cirque, and enjoy your writing. It’s rare for people to have a clear emotional memory of childhood, to have emerged into adulthood with an understanding of those memories and further to be eloquent in communicating your understanding - a trifecta.
I would also enjoy seeing you work in NYT or Atlantic. It’s an important piece you’ve written.
You confirm my observations on transsexualism - statements like “dysphoria is in the mind”. I suspect you also feel that you can never eliminate the dysphoria, you can only tolerate it. As Mrs Hudson from Sherlock Holmes said, “what you can’t cure you must endure”.
Does anyone know whether medical associations/activist whatever have developed or are looking to develop a way of distinguishing sissy/tomboy children, who will grow up to be homosexual and have absolutely no need for any medicalization, from people who will want to go puberty blocker/cross sex hormones/surgery route?
Sad? Sad that you find it preferable that my daughter have to live your experience instead of dealing with her dysphoria and depression early. Her life is going quite well, thankfully.
Not what I said. But do what you need to do and hopefully it all works out for her.
Thank you for allowing me to post. It is very clear that I am not the target audience for this coalition, so I will be unsubscribing.
First, though, I would like to present one last thought for your consideration.
The author's conclusions about gender care for minors simply don't gibe with my own observations and experiences. I have tried to avoid anecdote when so much evidence is out there to support gender affirming care, but it seems to make no difference.
I find it horrifying that a person who endured such awful psychic trauma that they were homeless, abusing drugs, and engaged in prostitution would deny younger people a means to avoid such a fate.
My own child was severely depressed and engaging in self-harm as a young teen. Antidepressants had almost no impact on her depression. After months of therapy, she came out to us as transgender.
Months later, after more therapy and more antidepressants, she came to the Washington University Transgender Center. Her treatments, including hormone therapy, have completely turned her life around. She is happy, motivated, and completely free of antidepressants.
Her story is similar to nearly all the stories I have heard from other parents of trans kids. WUTC was not quick to treat her with puberty blockers or hormones; on the contrary, it was many months and many hours of talk before that was made available.
Please support leaving these important decisions as they have been: between patients, their parents, and their doctors! Ancillary staff are generally not present at every step, and do not have access to all the information. For every Chloe Cole, there are hundreds of kids who are at risk of losing care that is genuinely helping them.
Thank you for your consideration.
The evidence supports not transitioning children and if you actually did your research you would see every country that has been doing this way before the USA says so you would not say this. BTW if we just left it up to the medical and therapy we will be seeing such a huge amount of children dealing with physical and mental problems for the rest of their lives. Sad that you think thats ok🥲🥲🥲🤣
Thank you for posting. Please do not unsubscribe. It is important for people with divergent experiences to be a part of this discussion. It is the only way we can have an honest discussion. Neither "side" in this should be trying to shout the other down or run them out of town -- nor those of us who see points on both "sides". And we should all have the courage not to let ourselves get run out of town easily.
Thank you Buck. Thank you as always. Your wisdom is appreciated, and I hope your article will be read widely.
I really don't want to quibble after reading such a fine article, but on one thing I do think a quibble is necessary. It seems to me you really should rethink your embrace of the view -- really it's an oversimplified slogan -- that you're biologically female.
You are (I assume) genetically female, but that is not the same thing as being "biologically female". Genetics does not = biology. Humans studied and learned about biologically thousands of years before we discovered genes. Genetics is a subfield of biology, very far from the whole of it; our genes exist to generate the larger features that constitute the main part of our biology.
Your larger biological features have been changed substantially from your natal biology. Due to this, you are, in fact, a mix of male and female today.
If you were to live another 150 years or so, it would probably be possible by then for you to get gene therapy and a well-functioning male member and become as consistently male as any natal or cis male is today. I suppose you won't be around then. But hopefully other humans will be around, and if so, some of them will make what will be genuinely complete transitions -- fully functioning ovaries and testes and genes and penises and wombs and hormones and tubes and all. Maybe it'll take more than 150 years to get to that, maybe less; but it'll happen -- as certainly enough as to be effectively inevitable -- in a not so distant future, assuming only one condition: that the species continues to exist and doesn't suffer catastrophic set-backs along the way.
Probably people will be able by then to detransition or make reverse transitions too, and retransition when they want, without significant loss for having gone both ways.
That's not the reality today by a long shot. Medical changes today leave major traces and losses that cannot be completely repaired. That is the underlying reason why the cautions that you call for are so important in this era.
So much for the angry, dishonest polemics about medicalization being risk-free. But so much also for the angry, opposite-dishonest polemics that "sex cannot be changed". In fact it can be changed and often is being changed - today, changed in part, in some future time changed completely, assuming humanity survives that long.
People who study the technological future are pretty sure that many other basic aspects of human biology will be changeable also by then.
Today it seems to me it is a fact that biological sex can be changed in part, not in whole. Anyone can speculate about what percentage number to give that part, but it is a significant percentage, not a marginal or negligible one. It is a part that has made a huge difference in your life, and in thousands who have followed after you. 150 years ago it could not be changed at all to the other sex, it could only be amputated. Back then, people could at most be turned into eunuchs; yet even then, everyone recognized, rightly enough, that a eunuch was something substantially different from "simply a man".
We need truth, not slogans and dogmas. False slogans and dogmas should have no place in this. Not the falsehood of the angry activist mob that screams "I'm a man, period, get over it". And not the falsehood of the angry crowd that reacts to you and to other transmen by screaming "you're a biological woman, period, face the fact". It's in fact not "the fact"; it's an angry slogan. Anger is a poor counselor.
It seems to me it's usually the case that people who are angry at the lies from one side, furious mad, and think that that side is "The Lie" writ large -- that many of these people will think that anything that hits back at that side is by definition on the side of "The Truth", and is therefore itself The Truth no matter how obviously misleading or downright false it is on points of fact. They're wrong in thinking that, and dangerously wrong. Two lies don't make a truth.
Opposing the lies of one side not only doesn't mean telling the truth; too often it means telling opposite lies. Adding more fuel to the anger on both sides, and the train crash they both seem hell-bent on having with each other. We're in real danger from that crash at this time.
Or so it seems to me. What do you think?
Phenotype does not DEFINE human males or females.
Humans are anisogamous, meaning we reproduce via two very different type gametes.
In anisogamous species females are individuals born with structures that bear eggs, ie. ovaries. Males are born with structures that produce sperm at sexual maturity, i.e testes.
Genes DETERMINE sex in humans but they do NOT define it.
NEITHER SURGERY OR DRUGS CAN DEFINE, DETERMINE, OR ALTER ONE'S SEX.
Thank you for stating clearly an argument frequently given by some people in this discussion; and in so doing, showing its flaws, which seem to me fatal.
To write this accurately, I think you'd have to change it a lot and say instead that: "At present, medical methods can only remove gametes; they cannot yet create new gametes, or change a complete sexual reproductive system from male to female or vice versa. But they almost certainly will be able to do this in the future, if humanity survives. In principle the entirety of biological sex can be changed medically; we’re just not there yet."
I explained that pretty clearly earlier; or I thought I was clear. Did I state it somehow unclearly?
You might also want to say that you're trying to make a proof by way of making a definition; that is, you are defining sex solely in terms of a complete capable reproductive system; and that other people -- probably most people, who are operating within normal, pro-communications linguistics, not trying to make a point by their definition -- will regard this as an oversimplified and misleadingly reductionist definition of sex and its biology. But that would us get into linguistics, and whether it is appropriate to try to impose, on the general public discussion of sex and biology, a definition used by many biologists for the specialized purpose of distinguishing one natal reproductive sex from the other. I think it is not linguistically appropriate or accurate, but again, that's another discussion.
I'm really sorry to see the heavy use of capitalization. That always creates an unpleasant impression. It’s pretty much the same impression one gets from hearing someone try to shout other people down; which would be a regrettable method of discussion.