No Pride Without Courage

Reflections on the Endocrine Society Conference, Part 1

By Lauren Leggieri

Last weekend, instead of going to a pride parade, I was standing outside of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, where the annual Endocrine Society Conference was taking place. I’m not an endocrinologist. I’m not a pharmaceutical sales rep, or a medical  professional of any kind. I’m a house painter and general handywoman from an east coast working class neighborhood. I shouldn’t have to be here, I kept thinking to myself.  I shouldn’t have to explain this to them. I thought we were past this. I thought we were accepted and integrated into society as gay men and women, able to live and celebrate life with the benefits and privileges of every other human being. But here I am, holding one sign that says most gender nonconforming kids grow up to be gay, and the other, stop transing gay kids. I lost count of how many times I watched people read my signs and turn to someone next to them and mouth the words “I never thought of that.” 

I never thought of that. It’s not easy to wrap my head around this sentiment. As if it had not occurred to this group of highly schooled professionals in the special area of endocrine medicine, that puberty is a time when hormones and feelings are in constant flux; that a child who is bound to be same sex attracted may simply need time to reconcile themselves to this fact; and that shutting down a necessary part of the human growth process is not a benign thing;  that opposite sex hormones administered to children under the guise of “gender affirming care” is not real medicine. That no one can actually change sex.

I lost count of how many times I explained to people that, as a kid I thought I was born in the wrong body, how I wanted desperately to be a boy, and how uncomfortable puberty was because it shattered that dream. That, if you look at the criteria for childhood gender dysphoria in  the DSM I checked every box. And how it wasn’t until after I had finished going through puberty that I realized I am a lesbian and that I am so grateful that this wasn’t an option for me as a kid, because I would have taken the bait. I explained to those who would listen that this is a common experience for gay youth of both sexes, the sense of feeling foreign in your own body. Isn’t this common knowledge?, I thought, as I watched countless medical professionals entering the conference building. 

And yet, they said they never even thought of that.

So here I was, standing under a two-story digital billboard flashing rainbow colors and exclaiming “Happy Pride Month”, explaining ad nauseum, to slight gasps of realization and brief pauses before an epiphany gels, that what is in fact happening in their offices and the gender clinics all over the country is the hormonal and surgical conversion of young homosexuals. True, that now there are heterosexual children being “misdiagnosed” with gender dysphoria at an alarming rate as well, it was the gay children that this snare was intended for, indeed designed to trap. More than one young gay detransitioner has related to me that they were told that they were “ the perfect candidate” for gender transition. 

It hurts to know that we continue to live in a very homophobic society, one that continues to deny that gay people, particularly lesbians, are real and that children who may be same sex attracted should be subject to a brutal and unethical mode of “treatment,” one designed to stamp out their natural sexuality. And although homosexuality was removed from the second edition of the DSM in 1973, we as a group are still pathologized, considered abnormal in some way. 

 I wasn’t alone here, outside the Convention Center. There were four of us. Four. In a time where rainbow flags are flown at the White House and every other day the media has elevated another member of the queer community to an almost sacred class of human, four homosexuals showed up to voice our concerns about what is, quite frankly, the most existential threat to our existence that has ever befallen us. A proud people would flood the streets demanding redress. A proud people would not allow themselves to be so denigrated, would not allow their children to be so manipulated and harmed. A proud people are not cowed into complacency while their legacy is destroyed and the bodies of their children are sacrificed. 

And for me, it’s especially poignant to realize that, by the time I was born in 1983, the DSM had officially “de-pathologized” homosexuality. It was a short reprieve though, because by the early 2000’s the idea of the “ trans child” had already taken root in our medical establishment, destined to injure, maim, and destroy the future of so many children, many of them destined to be gay. It occurred to me while holding my signs that I had been born into the narrowest of windows in which a woman like me could grow to be self-realized, and that possibility is rapidly vanishing before our eyes. One has to simply glance outside our window or take note of the children that populate the classrooms across America, there are no more soft little boys fluttering about, there are no more rough and tumble little girls, there are trans girls and trans boys. 

Now is the time to summon our strength, now, while all eyes are on the issue. Once the moment is gone we will be left with this as our fate. The conservatives will abandon the cause as soon as heterosexual kids are no longer prey, many of whom were the first to salivate at the thought of “correcting “ their sinful progeny, though now it is the left who have embraced the idea with a religious zealotry all their own.  The feminists will wash their hands of it and celebrate their victories in sports and women’s space, and we will be left with things as they began; with a medical diagnosis that essentially pathologies homosexuality. With a medical establishment that will still find a way to “transition” children who are destined to be gay.

All four of us who showed up last weekend are no strangers to the cost of speaking out. All of us have paid the price, some more than others. We lost friends, lovers, families, jobs, and our reputations, but we have been compelled by the truth that all of us already know, There is no pride without courage and, if we, as a community, continue to fail to raise our voices, our silence will become participation in  our own extermination.