No Harm in a Fantasy World

I just finished reading Lydia Polgreen’s opinion piece, “Born This Way? Born Which Way?" I found myself wondering if I was really reading a piece in arguably one of the most respected newspapers in the world? It certainly did not feel like that, rather,  it felt like I was reading a child’s fantasy rendition of a world in which there is no harm and there is the ability to create a world completely of your liking.

In her world, Ms. Polgreen rejects the binary of male and female. She rejects all things that delineate any concrete fact. She rejects that Merriam-Webster “unhelpfully defines a woman as an adult female person.”  She further goes on, imploring us to look up female, which Merriam-Webster defines as "relating to, or being the sex that typically has the capacity to bear young or produce eggs". She notes that this is a "description that is both imprecise (“typically”) and incomplete (what of women born without these capacities?).” 

Photo by r0bida @IG on Unsplash

In her created fantasy, this very reasonable definition of a woman is contemptible and she cannot accept this because in her queer world made of words, female only exists as a concept. The concrete fact that all of us were produced from an ova and sperm and were born out of the body of a woman bears no relevance for her. 

In her world, a child that transitions can store his or her pre-pubertal, non-differentiated precursor cell lines and have fertility spared. This hypothesized modality has yet to produce one live birth and is likely not to in the near future. Again, this is fantasy. 

This opinion piece is completely the opinion of a person who has already decided on the fantasy that transitioning kids is really no big deal. It is a choice that kids make, like not joining a swim team! Her arguments are so flimsy and indefensible that one is left to assume that her weak notions have never faced a challenging alternative view.

Is this the best that the illustrious New York Times can do – defend the practice of transforming healthy bodies into cosmetic facsimiles forever tied to Big Pharma? Data now exists that shows that once a child is socially transitioned, that child will likely follow a path of pubertal suppression, and then almost certainly continue on to taking cross sex hormones. Many of those same kids will go on to have surgery, sometimes multiple surgeries. These are the facts. There are serious questions about consent, namely, can children consent to these life-long, life-altering and likely irreversible treatments? There are questions of whether we are transing gay and lesbian youth. There are questions of whether we are ignoring other physical and psychological co-morbidities. There are questions of social pressures that cause parents and teens to buy into this ideology. There are questions of the ideological capture of medical societies and institutions that are pushing these procedures. And there is always the question of who is profiting the most? 

Such questions seem to elude the author. These are pesky questions for someone who has decided that destroying the binary is just plain right and for the good of all, and that any argument or nuance is faulty and cannot be discussed. In reality, the author is a victim of her own binary. She has rejected that there is a nuanced space in between the poles of right and wrong and good and bad. A space for evidence, investigation, debate and compromise. I can find no space between nested anywhere in the author’s hypotheses. How else could she write with such conviction where she blithely compares the robbing of a child’s healthy, functioning body with not trying out for a middle school swim team?