It is not transphobic to say the truth

This essay is based on the audiobook "It's Not Transphobic to Say Your Daughter Is A Girl: The Wise Lesbian Guide for Progressives," by Amber Alt, newly available on Audible.com

 Unfortunately, as the world now knows, that is not what happened. Instead, thousands of vulnerable young people became victims of what was, in effect, a vast medical experiment. It involved powerful drugs with potentially life-changing consequences despite a lack of data to support their use or safety long term, while some clinicians and therapists appeared to be in thrall to increasingly strident trans activist organisations that wielded undue influence over treatment protocols.    

    — Kathryn Knight in The Daily Mail

In the US context, the new medicalization of children found fertile ground in places populated by progressives like me.  Those who started asking questions soon learned to fear cancellation and social ostracization as "transphobic," exclusive, or unkind.  Others appeared unable or unwilling to think critically about the implications of rushing to medicalize kids uncomfortable in their bodies before they had even had a first crush, their other mental health concerns had been identified and treated, or they had time to consider the paradox of how ‘being one’s true self” could only be realized with expensive and damaging medical interventions.  Few thought to ask whether this was the resurgence of state sanctioned sterilization of gay and lesbian people. Those who have asked have been dismissed or discredited. 

Photo by Norbu GYACHUNG on Unsplash

In a country and culture oriented toward immediate gratification, quick fixes, and avoiding discomfort, we have failed to deeply explore kids’ distress. We have failed to help them resolve their distress with acceptance, coping, and creativity.  Instead of slowing things down, we have accelerated kids toward solutions sold by social influencers and, increasingly, by misguided physicians, therapists, and teachers.   

Girls in particular have been vulnerable to the appeal of opting out of womanhood. Dramatic increases in girls seeking transition in the US and UK in recent years  tells us that it isn’t only young lesbians caught up in the belief that they are literally male, and that the process of looking male will be worth the medical, social, financial, and emotional costs of pursuing it.  Previously gender conforming, perhaps heterosexual, girls deeply uncomfortable with the experience of femaleness in a society such as ours are heading onto the trail to trans. Lisa Littman’s outstanding 2018 research on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) in girls helps us understand social contagion as an additional dynamic in the population of girls — both same sex attracted and not —- seeking transition. 

In some ways, the carefully documented and widely observed ROGD phenomenon makes the situation more complex. In other ways, it does not add to the complexity at all; both groups of girls and young women — those gender non-conforming or gender dysphoric since childhood and those with rapid onset desire to transition — are medically healthy. They were all born in the right bodies, as the title to Dr. Isidora Sanger’s book reviewing the medical research in this area asserts. They are all caught up in a scandal of medical and social experimentation for which they may pay a lifelong price. Even worse, they are being held accountable for it, because the responsibility for decision making is being transferred to them under the misguided belief that minors have the capacity and to give informed consent for elective, invasive, experimental procedures.

We, too, as adults who care, are caught up in this scandal. We are in a deeply challenging situation.  We face the terrifying dilemma of being rejected and vilified as transphobic, abusive, and genocidal if we tell the truth OR being complicit in this medical scandal if we stay quiet. Whether you realize it or not now, we and trans-targeted kids are similarly stuck: we both suffer from horrible dilemmas created by the tenets of a belief system that feels beyond our control.

You are not alone, though you may have suffered and struggled with this in silence.   Across the Anglophone world, thousands of moms and dads and growing numbers of doctors and therapists are questioning what’s happening and how to stop it, in children’s best interests.  Detransitioners, too, increasingly visible and vocal, and are asking for accountability from the people complicit in harming them. We all are encouraging the medical system in the US to follow the lead of the other countries that are putting an end to this experimental set of practices.

A late 2022 Washington Post-KFF poll found that 68 percent of American adults oppose access to puberty-blocking medication for transgender children ages 10-14 and 58 percent oppose access to hormonal treatments for transgender kids ages 15 to 17.  More than 60 percent said trans-identified males should not be allowed to compete with women and girls in youth, high school, college and professional sports.   Nonetheless, two-thirds support bans on transgender discrimination in the military, in K-12 schools, by medical professionals, in getting health insurance, at colleges and universities, at jobs, in the workplace and in housing. These findings confirm that objections to the medicalization of children doesn’t signify transphobia or the wish to exclude adult trans-identified people from public life, as much as it reflects a desire for the safeguarding of children against irreversible harm.  

As the sociologist C. Wright Mills noted, when one person experiences a troublesome situation, we’re looking at personal trouble.  When thousands of people experience the same concern, we’re facing a social issue.  As thousands of girls and their families struggle with medicalization questions driven by trans ideology, we must recognize this as a social problem – a problem that will not be solved through the unnecessary experimental medicalization of individual bodies. The explosion in girls seeking medical transition tells us we have a social problem. The ignored voices of tens of thousands of self-identified detransitioners tells us that the solution offered by big biotech pharma and corporate medicine is itself a social problem.

In this work, my goals are to tell you the truth, to empower you to become a fierce and protective advocate for the bodily integrity of the children and adolescents, and to point you toward an evolving community of therapists, doctors, activists, and writers who will encourage you in making good decisions in support of girls, women, and reality.   As a progressive person especially, you need to be able to step out of the Right vs Left dialectic – the binary, as it were — and focus on the empirical, material reality, despite the discomfort that causes. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans adults in particular must visibly object to the medicalization of gender non-conforming kids, to disrupt the narrative that these invasive medical procedures are done in our names.

References

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3991685-majority-of-americans-oppose-gender-affirming-care-for-minors-trans-women-participating-in-sports-poll/

Knight, Kathryn. (2023, May 16). The stomach-drop moment I realized there was something terribly wrong at the Tavistock gender clinic: Nurse reveals why she blew the whistle on 'experimental' treatment on children as young as ten. The Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12091229/The-moment-realised-terribly-wrong-Tavistock-Nurse-Sue-Evans-reveals.html

Littman, Lisa (2019). Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria. PLOS ONE 14(3): e0214157. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0214157

Mills, C. Wright.  (1959). The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press.

Respaut, Robin and Terhune, Chad. (2022, October 6). Putting numbers on the rise in children seeking gender care. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-data/

Sanger, Isidora. (2022). Born in the Right Body. Independently Published.

Transgender Trend. (2019, July 1). The Surge of Referral Rates of Girls to the Tavistock Continues to Rise. https://www.transgendertrend.com/surge-referral-rates-girls-tavistock-continues-rise/