Dolly, this was so smart, keenly observed, and humane. I’m not sure if what I have to add is an additional cultural trend, or whether it falls into one--or several--of your categories, but here goes. In my experience, we Americans have almost an allergy to things just being tough, unfair, and sad. We want to rush in and fix things (my most recent Happy Wanderer is about this), and we also don’t want to allow people to feel their feelings, just as they are, and for as long as it takes.
When my son was first diagnosed as autistic, and later when my daughter was diagnosed with congenital muscular dystrophy, everyone I knew tried to minimize what I was feeling. They did it out of love, because it made them sad to see my sadness, and to think that my kids, whom they loved very much, would suffer. So they’d predict bright futures for my kids, fail to notice when things were hard or went badly for them, point out every tiny success (when, say, my daughter managed to walk up some steps, which were 4” high and she had to haul herself up with the handrail); they would say, “See? It will all be ok.” And the irony is, it basically has been ok, but it has also been hard. Finally I said to the people in my life, “Can you let me be sad about this, at least for now?”
My point is that being a teenager is really tough for everyone, but especially when you don’t fit in for some reason, be it gender expression, autism, or something else. Our culture very badly wants to turn those feelings into a happy story of triumphing against the odds with the help of science, of finding a new and supportive community, of kids living their best lives. One reason that the minute an awkward, socially isolated kid comes out as trans s/he is celebrated by everyone is that we prefer the triumphalist story to the sadder, but realer one. It can be really rotten to feel excluded, especially as a middle-schooler or teenager, and we don’t want to think about that. We’d much rather tell the happy story.
By the way, I used to be an editor at a journal that published a lot of Derrida, Butler, Foucault, and the other authors you cite. I agree: the vast majority of it was just empty gibberish, but everyone was too scared to say so because they were worried about what other people would think. Hmmm. Sound like any other phenomenon in our culture these days?
Also: (comment #2 because now you’ve got me thinking and I can’t stop haha)
It seems to me that the flip side of this is—
We have a belief in our culture, which is relatively new and which is described in “Coddling of the American Mind,” that “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.”
It’s almost as if, if we were to acknowledge to the teens in our life during covid that this was a really bad thing they were going through, ***that would be equivalent to admitting they were now horribly traumatized and damaged, and you should probably be seeking mental health services for them.***
No. Just no.
I kept sharing my belief that going through such a miserable thing at such a young age made her particularly wise and resilient in coping. Because I believe that’s true. Hardship — to an extent— is a chance to grow stronger, more resilient, more resourceful, and wiser.
But we don’t currently believe that in this cultural moment.
So instead of saying to gender-questioning kids — “That sounds really difficult and painful” and talking about coping and strategies and the origin of their feelings, we are desperate to gloss over it and make it all OK, because as you said, we just want the happy story and not the pain and the truth.
I loved your essay on this issue when those two little girls were persuaded by everyone that they had been traumatized because a guy in a costume at Hershey Park didn’t see them during a parade. I wonder whether we as a culture have reacted by the demand for stoicism in previous generations by swinging too far in the opposite direction. I remember noticing that some of my friends, when their kids would fall or bump into something or have trouble sleeping, would react in an inordinately sympathetic way. They would shower the child with pity and anxiety. (This was only a few people--most of my friends, like me, would react to these little mishaps by saying, “Oops! Up you go! No biggie!”) The result of all this excessive sympathy was that their kids became so anxious and reactive. I admit that it’s possible that the correlation went the other way, and that the moms reacted as they did because their kids were already anxious, but it really did seem like a destructive feedback loop was set in motion whenever a mom encouraged her kids to feel injured by these little bumps and challenges.
Yes that’s tricky (parental reaction)-- some of it no doubt, I agree, is probably driven by the kind of kid you have.
You can easily see “very anxious, over-reacting kid” as leading to “over-reacting responses” in the parent: kind of a mirroring thing. Who wants to see their kid desperately upset? The parent might tend to respond in kind, as if a big injury occurred.
I see our role as parents to try to haul our kids to the middle -- a really intense over-reactive kid needs to (try to) learn to shake off the little things (much easier said than done -- but it’s still the goal). The kid at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, who has trouble expressing emotional reactions needs to learn them. Again easier said than done.
I think you’re right -- earlier stoicism, earlier generations of “kids should be seen and not heard” (and their feelings completely disregarded) maybe led to a large pendulum swing in the other direction, where kids’ feelings are not just King (we all bow down before them) but are seen as very dangerous. If your kids has too many bad feelings, he’ll be “ruined” and you “fail.”
Maybe, like parents with kids, our duty as adult members of society is to try to haul all of society into the middle too. The older we get, the more stuff we’ve seen, and perhaps the more perspective we have to offer.
There's a very American (maybe Western more broadly, even?) discomfort with real, earnest emotion and hardship. You see it around death and difficult emotions, especially. But even around love sometimes. Casual sex is seen as fine, nothing, whatever. But talking about love or marriage, especially when you're young, is seen as a kind of cringe.
Yes! Thank you for these wonderful comments, Mari!
You are so right — there is an aspect of our culture where we are acutely, acutely uncomfortable with facing other people’s sadness or hardship or unpleasant feelings.
It is such a gift to be genuine and to have people to be genuine with. “Finally I said to the people in my life, ‘Can you let me be sad about this, at least for now?’ “ Yes. Exactly! Our culture often doesn’t make room for that. I’m glad you asked for that though.
During covid, life was so hard for my daughter and her friends. I remember telling her, “this is probably one of the hardest things you’ll ever go through in your life, and it’s happening when you’re young and that’s very hard.” The message I really wanted to communicate to her was that it was OK to be really sad and grieving this lost time, to feel it to be the major horrible event that it really was, AND to also know that she and her friends were going to be OK.
Both those things can be true but in our culture we just want the happy outcome, not the suffering. For everyone. (Right now!)
I think this unfortunate impulse reached new heights when that book “The Secret” came out. That must be almost 20 years ago now. Lots of people believed in the “law of attraction” and seemed almost frantic to (1) NOT articulate or even think a negative or unpleasant thought, because it would be inviting disaster on themselves and (2) articulate “positive thoughts” amid forced smiles and false happiness in the most unlikely situations. Husband just lost his job? “I know something better is coming soon!” Big smile.
Yes! This truly plays into what we want for “trans kids” — with the immediate, insistent, almost desperate “celebration” of someone who’s just told you they are extremely unhappy in their own body, with their own name, with many important aspects of their life.
“Yay? I guess?”
And yes re the gibberish! I eventually started turning down those books because there was no way to do a “good job” editing them.
Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided pointed out this tendency in our culture, and pointed out how unhelpful it is in many cases.
The “power of positive thinking” is an idea that’s been around for a long time. To the extent that it motivates people to improve their lives, it’s not a bad thing. But it requires a clear understanding of what can be fixed, and how to go about it. It seems we have pushed a good concept into a fantasyland where wishing hard enough can make it so. Exactly where the trans movement has gone.
I’ll have to look at that, Heyjude! Is it a whole book? I’ll Google it.
Yes. Positive thinking can exert a real difference -- like a motivational difference, or a difference in how you view your options (by looking hard for the good bit among the bad) but it took on this bizarre “magical thinking” quality.
It is a book, I think you would find it interesting. She says the downside to all the “you got this” comments is that it becomes almost a failure if you don’t get better. Sadly she passed away recently.
I’m sorry your daughter had a hard time firing Covid. That whole time was so awful for kids. You are a good mom to talk with her about it in an honest way that allowed her to feel her feelings.
It was awful -- she thrived on school and being around her friends and boyfriend. Everything shut down. But she did come out stronger! I worry about the narrative that “kids will never recover” from these lost years-- as much as I just made fun of “The Secret,” I also think kids pick up on our messages and beliefs. Part of the reason we have so many kids believing they are traumatized and damaged is perhaps because they’ve been told it so often.
If they can be convinced that their teenage angst is due to being in the wrong body, they can be convinced of ...anything else too.
It’s a very strange mix -- being a teenager -- of being very potentially strong and very potentially vulnerable.
Also, AMEN AMEN AMEN, all day long. My gosh, how I loathed my critical theory classes, for exactly the reasons you describe:
"Because I’m convinced they said nothing. The sentences didn’t make sense, the paragraphs didn’t make sense, and I suspect it wasn’t because I was stupid and couldn’t comprehend the lofty ideas. My perception was these books were some kind of academic version of the Emperor’s New Clothes, a 'blah blah blah Foucault' refuge for people who could neither think nor write anything of value."
Oct 17, 2022·edited Oct 17, 2022Liked by The 21st Century Salonnière
What's especially odd are that some of these ideas don't seem to work together.
On one hand, you have the Foucault bio-power, science is fake, everything is a social construct, nothing is real blah blah blah stuff
On the other hand, you the seemingly concrete claim of "people have a certain immutable identity at birth that cannot be changed and all the medical orgs agree with me on this"
It's as if I saw people claiming to be both Marxists and Hayekian libertarian capitalists. Or a group of people claimed to be New Atheists and Muslim Salafists. It's just so strange to see them together. I think the whole thing went mainstream before everyone got the talking points straight.
We've seen a similar idea with respect to gay marriage. There's the bio-power/it's all social construct stuff, and there's the "born this way" claim that it's genetic or immutable. However, the gay marriage movement didn't oscillate between them, it stayed firmly in the latter camp. I'm not going to debate which one is right, but that's the rhetoric gay marriage advocates chose and it worked pretty well.
Exactly, the ideas _don’t_ work well together but if you question this you’re an old-fashioned Enlightenment thinker, not a new advanced “flexible” postmodern (aka fuzzy and muddled) thinker.
Oct 17, 2022·edited Oct 17, 2022Liked by The 21st Century Salonnière
You're also liable to get called a bigot. I think that's what really keeps these contradictory ideas together. I'm no great thinker, so I'm pretty sure tons of others have recognized this. They feel afraid to speak out, though, so we end up in an emperors new clothes situation
I agree Klaus, I have thought that these ideas don’t quite fit together and leave me with a sense of unease but I lack the language necessary to contradict it so I stay silent (for the most part) because I know that I couldn’t hold my own in a debate simply because I don’t have the education necessary to give me the language to fight it.
You are a great thinker: also, I do think being afraid to speak out is what is perpetuating this nonsense for so long. It would be kind of funny except real people are being hurt by it every day, while people who truly know better keep their mouths shut.
Difficult (to us) but easy (to the true believers). They don’t see any problem with the conflicts, and if you point those out, you are a bad, bigoted, hate-filled person.
I think we just keep trying to have the conversation. There are true believers who will never come around, but there are plenty of followers in the world who are just going along. Once a new narrative catches on -- especially a narrative that makes a lot more sense -- a lot of people will be relieved to say “me too -- I always sort of thought so too.”
"On one hand, you have the Foucault bio-power, science is fake, everything is a social construct, nothing is real blah blah blah stuff
On the other hand, you the seemingly concrete claim of 'people have a certain immutable identity at birth that cannot be changed and all the medical orgs agree with me on this'"
I think it's possible that disenfranchised kids started saying the former, then powerful organizations like pharma and plastic surgery, recognizing the flexibility afforded by such fuzzy language and lazy thinking, took advantage of it to sell the latter.
Yes that’s a great point -- I do suppose that different groups will find different (conflicting) parts of the narrative more amenable to their favorite part of the cause.
Dolly, this piece is really outstanding! A fine digest of the current thinking. I need to spend some time thinking before I can comment further, and I would imagine that provoking thought was exactly the purpose. Well done.
A first, to be quoted in a Substack! You tie various cultural threads together in a convincing fashion and out we come with trans positivity. I've seen the power of social media with my daughter who was essentially groomed into an eating disorder back when that was all the rage and agree with you that the trans phenomenon is intimately tied to social media use by our kids. Jonathan Haidt believes we should keep phones away from our kids till they're 16. This sounds like an impossibility but I've read of a number of families that have done this and reclaimed their children as a result.
For me, the most insidious aspect of all of this is how big business has joined our institutions, governments and schools to promote queer society. In the 60s and 70s, the establishment mostly frowned on self-expression, personal freedom and subjective realities; now, they promote them to make more money. You probably know of Jennifer Bilek's work on this issue. You've really got to wonder about the authenticity of a movement when it promotes itself as revolutionary but is supported wholeheartedly by those whose main purpose in life is to make money. Trans as the newest frontier in capitalism where possibilities for constant growth is running up against planetary limits.
Finally, I take some small bit of responsibility for all of this evil because as an English teacher, in my early years, and as a child of the 60s and 70s, I often talked to students about "finding themselves". I can see now where this prompt has led. Too much talk about the self and its priorities, and too little about how we came up with a fairly enlightened society and our responsibility to maintain it. All with good intentions that still persist but distorted by disengagement from physical reality. It's a brave new world, don't you know.
It's all a matter of balance, you know? You mustn't be hard on yourself for promoting "finding yourself" -- it's one important task among many. It's a good message in normal times. Now the pendulum has swung pretty hard in the other direction, and a better message for today might me "Think a little more about other people instead of yourself and what you want" -- but times change!
RE: "Jonathan Haidt believes we should keep phones away from our kids till they're 16. This sounds like an impossibility but I've read of a number of families that have done this and reclaimed their children as a result."
I believe Helena wrote about this just this morning and was skeptical that this was a very effective strategy -- BUT! -- I really think removing someone completely from an addictive or obsessive situation is the best way to get them to come back to reality and reassess.
If you have a 12 or 13 year old child, you have a lot of control and can do this pretty easily. It's harder the older they get -- the can earn their own money, they can buy their own cell phone, etc.
But I liken cutting them off from the internet and the friends that are feeding their obsession as akin to throwing a cold bucket of water on them. It can wake them up and bring them back to themselves. There is something about immersing yourself in this very false reality which is very self-sustaining.
And yes, big business and our institutions are banding together -- and our schools. It's bizarre. For some, it's the social justice points, and for others, it's a huge money maker. Everyone wins but the "customers."
You're not wrong about postmodern books. I have a theory that believing unintuitive things makes people feel smart. That may be because occasionally an unintuitive thing is revolutionary. Or it may be because people assume if something's hard to grasp, it's important and wise.
Postmodernism is a fount of nonsense that unsophisticated thinkers can cite, giving them some cred behind their lazy thinking. And it always works, as the Sokal affair proved.
"people assume if something's hard to grasp, it's important and wise" -- and the converse is, people don't want to admit they don't understand it at all, for fear of being thought not very bright. That stuff is a mess and it makes no sense. We need to be brave enough to say it.
First up I wanted to add, that the act of breast feeding doesn't make your breast sag - please keep breastfeeding mothers!
It's a common misconception.
Breast changes from pregnancy related growth (size, milk ducts etc.) are the reason, yet smoking for example is a bigger risk factor.
An interesting question about this is, if induced lactation leads to breast sagging.
Also I wanted to add that the correct binding of breast for a limited time isn't harmful (as far as we know). But how many really do that?
I assume though, that you meant this.
Your blog entries about trans issues are my most favorite on the internet, although this one was a bit more harsh and I can guarantee you many people from "the other side" will view parts very condenscendingly written, especially the latter parts with a sarcastic undertone.
Certainly one should be able to read posts like this without fuming or becoming emotionally invested, but I fear, that the people you want to reach / get listening, will be much more likely to feel attacked, offended or any kind of aggression one can imagine.
So one has to keep neutrality as much as possible in such energy laden debates, even if one is biased - like you stated.
Thanks for the feedback. I’ll have to go back over it and look for the harsh or condescending parts, because that wasn’t my intention and. I was not aware. !!!
If trans is a solution that more people are choosing, part of the phenomenon is its increased visibility AS a solution. Countless times I have heard and read the stories of internet acquaintances who identify under the less well known (ie trans, asexual, nonbinary) parts of the LGBT+ umbrella who describe the feeling of relief from having discovered "there's a WORD for it/me/my experiences!"
So related to the Civil Rights / Progressivism thread, I see a sort of 'civil rights/feminism marches on' where the obvious low-hanging fruit of formal equality was picked (we've got the vote! we can have jobs! we as a society generally recognize that all people are equal, and we've outlawed discrimination based on race and sex and disability. So what's an activist to do, when big picture level data still shows significant inequality on outcomes?
They can go after the higher-hanging fruit of identifying and addressing root causes, and/or they can find a group that's still being discriminated against and rerun the civil rights playbook*. Now we've got trans, and the neurodivergent and people with mental illnesses (sometimes these overlap), and queer folks, and people with alternative lifestyles. You're a person, maybe a young person; you're not happy in your skin, you don't connect with your peers, you feel like an outsider in society, and all you have to do is get on the internet and look around a bit, and now there's all this information out there, for better or worse.
*I originally had a thing here about how current-day 'civil rights' fights differ from the civil rights struggles of the past, but realized I was haring off on a tangent. To summarize, the fight against racism and sex discrimination really were fights against oppression; the fight for acceptance of the groups mentioned above are fights against bias and closemindedness. The latter is a problem of a very different order and rerunning the civil rights playbook was the wrong move.
This sociological work makes me feel lucky to have come across it. One thought I never dared express is we have gone to far in this elevation of the underdog. But in reality it is an elevation driven by indifference, which otherwise I don't think many would bother persevering into for its own sake. And the victims of this illusory pedestal, the kids who are being affirmed, might be deeply conscious of what is truly society 's cheap self indulgence, within which carelessness and neglect are shamelessly rooted.
Caroline: “it is an elevation driven by indifference” -- I think this is a really really important point.
Exhibit A -- all the people whose kids (or friends’ and neighbors kids) aren’t caught up in this. If this is just happening to Other People’s Kids, we’ll then it’s easy to affirm and say all the right things, and who cares about the infertility, chronic pain, brittle bones, or other medical harm?
The Scientific Revolution thread: science has proven itself as an engine for improving life. Any thinking person can see that. But we have vested far too much power and authority in the idea of “following the science”, to the point where we have one scientist claiming that he is the representative of all science. Anyone who disagrees is a “science denier”.
How many times have we heard “if we can land a man on the moon, we should be able to do ‘x’”? We have accorded the biological and social sciences the same level of certainty as physics. Biology and social sciences (not to mention climate science) involve levels of complexity far beyond Newtonian physics. Modern biology and medicine have made great strides. But they are nowhere near the level of Newtonian physics. We want to believe they are, while at the same time we see ads every day listing possible side effects to the myriad new drugs. Yet somehow we have put aside all common sense and choose to believe that medicine can make a man into a woman, and further, we are causing harm if we doubt it.
A more realistic view of the progress and limitations of biology and medicine would be in order.
Yes. I was sort of having this convo a bit on someone else's substack recently.
Part of the problem is not JUST the uncertainty of science -- although it's less certain that many people think -- but it's that people do cherry-pick to promote agendas.
This becomes a disaster when we have a pandemic and one side is saying one thing (right or wrong) and the other side is saying the opposite (right or wrong -- the data doesn't matter).
People will cling to their ideological beliefs regardless of the data.
As I said on the other substack, what needed to happen in something as serious as a pandemic was for all the best minds of ALL political beliefs to get together and decide collectively what the data were telling us AND message that effectively to ALL Americans AND also explain clearly why and on what basis the advice was changing over time -- because people didn't understand that either.
If you have no trust in anyone but your own political side, and your political side is just promoting a message unrelated to the data, then no one will believe the data, or even know what the data is.
Same for trans stuff. If one political side says "it is healthy and necessary and every decent person should support it" and the other side says "it is unhealthy and unnecessary and every decent person should oppose it" people make their choices based on their politics and not on the evidence. And no one knows the evidence.
It's so frustrating. We need science to be a neutral thing, where of COURSE there will be disagreements but everyone will agree what the evidence is; they just disagree what all the evidence means.
There is no universe in which the same set of true facts results in some people believing "it is healthy and necessary and every decent person should support it" and others believing "it is unhealthy and unnecessary and every decent person should oppose it."
At least one side, and often both, are cruelly misinformed.
I don’t see it as a matter of simply following your side. I really hope we still have vestiges of common sense and logic. And also the ability to evaluate evidence in relation to the claim made- not simply on the credentials of those making the claim.
Being a simple person, I subscribe to Carl Sagan’s dictum: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. “Transition medicine” fails that test. If your claim is that you can, and must, provide drugs and surgery that will fulfill the desire to “be” the opposite sex, you better have some extraordinarily solid evidence. There is none, but we are instructed to “follow the science” nonetheless.
Celeste -- I'm so sorry this is happening to you -- this sounds like a nightmare. Do you have support? I know there are parent groups out there. I hope you have a good lawyer. Let us know how it goes. I'll be thinking good thoughts for you and your daughter.
I’m glad you’ve got good support, have a good lawyer (and understand the legal system yourself — excellent!)
The stepmom angle really adds something especially difficult. Most people want to be cordial and supportive with the kids’ “steps” but in this case you’ve really got to put your foot down. Wow that’s hard.
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and experiences.
There definitely seems to be — judging by parental anecdotes (and sadly there are many!) — a link between being “very much online” and adopting these gender ideas (or having odd or lacking socialization skills).
But there have always been online dangers. Before there were online trans groups, there were pro anorexia groups, or there were perverted old guys posing as teens and trying to get kids to share pictures and get sexual with them.
I guess I’m saying — I do see your point that parental absence might contribute a bit, but also please don’t be overly hard on yourself. Online dangers were always there and some kids fall into them. (The question is, what do we do next?)
Another way to look at it is — all adolescents and young adults spend time out of their parents’ supervision, whether online or in person. Most kids probably try alcohol and drugs, too, right? And a small fraction develop an alcohol or drugs problem, and the rest do not. It’s the same with the gender stuff.
The problem was not that the kids were allowed to go unsupervised among their peers. That wasn’t the problem — that didn’t cause the alcohol problem or the gender problem.
We could of course have a long nature-nurture convo about why some kids develop an alcohol problem and others don’t, or why some fall prey to trans ideology and others don’t.
And I think there is also merit to what you’re saying — a totally unsupervised kid online is probably more likely to get into deeper trouble than a more sheltered kid.
I guess the question is — and this is where my empathy / sympathy for families reaches a peak — what are parents supposed to do when they do recognize a “gender issue” in their child?
Wherever you turn — schools, mental health experts, doctors, even the court system in some cases — parents will be actively undermined and told they must “affirm” their child’s illness and allow/promote transition.
So parents are not only completely on their own in this situation, but they are also cast as villains if they don’t actively participate in their child’s self-destruction. That’s the saddest part to me. You see your kid in trouble and there are no obvious resources available to you, and everyone hates you for wanting to try.
I wish you and your son the very best. I know there are some online support groups for parents. They are likely google-able or maybe some readers have links they could share here? The “Gender: A Wider Lens” podcast has mentioned retreats for parents in the past, and I’ve heard Stella say she runs online support groups? That might be a place to start if you’re interested.
It’s really hard. I can’t blame you for feeling that you don’t want to see him when he’s in this mindset -- many people liken it to their kids being in a cult. There is just no getting through to him. People describe it like -- the person they know just isn’t there: there’s some kind of false cult-self. If he were 12, you could set all sorts of limits on him. Since he’s in his 20s, there’s little you can do, right?
I read recently -- and gosh I wish I could remember where, or looked into where those numbers came from -- that the average guy maintains his trans identity for seven years. That seems like a lot of wasted time and years, but the only young guy I know (son of a friend’s friend) who snapped out of it took 7 years.
I hope things get better for your son and for you: it’s a mess. If we were all trying to help these kids and young adults face reality and take responsibility for their own lives, I’m sure it would be a lot shorter. Our society, in supporting this, is dragging it out.
Oh by the way -- the internet thing -- I’ve just heard so many (many!) parents attribute their kids’ gender issues to ideas they got from the internet and from sleazy people on the internet that perhaps I assumed you ascribed it a bigger role than you were.
It seems very damaging -- kids can pretend to be anyone, they can pretend to be any age or appearance or sex. A lot of guys find they get a lot of attention by playing with girl avatars? Sometimes I think it starts there and they believe life would be easier or more fun as a girl?
Very interesting discussion. Spicey, well wishes. Salon, thought provoking as a always. Your combined thoughts and experiences offer some great perspectives on a "not yet but could be" personal subject. My tomboy daughter came out as gay a few years ago in college, to the surprise of none of us. She's always been an athlete, the girl who only plays football with boys at recess type. The only time she put on make up was for figure skating competitions (she and her sister fell in love with it on a local pond from about when they learned to walk). She went on to become a D1 soccer athlete. But she never gave up the boy thing. She's just always been a masculine woman. We love and support her exactly as she is, and always have
My "fear", if you will, is the next step. Will she feel pressure to transition? The trans thing wasn't on the radar when she came out, and that wasn't that long ago. Now, if you're someone in her situation, you're bombarded with messaging that it's not just OK, it's the right thing to do. Thing is, there's nothing wrong with who she is
What resonated with me, Salon, was your astute observation about the objective and subjective. The movement found gold mining the latter. Truth is "their truth", entirely based on subjective accounts. Incredibly, then they turn it around and apply it to others objectively. If you don't fully buy in to the latest "my truth", you're objectively a bigot, homopobe, etc. They want a subjective truth applied objectively
No wonder everyone's confused. Take gay marriage. As a libertarian leaning conservative, my position has always been, "who cares?" As a political and cultural issue, Obama even ran on "man and a woman" in '08. Think of that. Forget about the politics. It's astonishing that something mainstream culturally, not 15 years ago, is a position that you aren't even allowed to state publicly today.
And therein lies the danger. They've created a game with ever changing rules. Yet, if you don't play by them, you're banished. And social media, with diminishing actual human interaction, acts as the perfect mechanism in which to play. It first broadcasts the latest rules, then enforces them, complete with mob justice, real time shaming, and 24 hour burials
It's the perfect way to circumvent the first amendment (though that will always remain the top target). It doesn't require any law change. Cultual pressure works. Talk about power. Who benefits? The institutional powers
I despise institutional power. While they used to laughably annoying, they now creat group think and lemmings of such force it's ruining real relationships. It's dehumanizing to the point where a kid calls her father all the ism's known to man- at his own funeral- simply because he votes and thinks differently. God help us
Thanks so much for sharing these comments JD. I really hope your daughter remains happy and content in her own body.
You make great observations about the changing rules and how we have to parrot whatever the current “correct” thing is deemed to be. It’s the opposite of freedom of thought or having the ability to think and decide issues. It’s “what beliefs must I adopt and proclaim this week?”
I worry about people like your daughter — happy lesbians. Twenty years ago they’d be fine and live their lives. Now today there’s someone around every corner wanting to tell her she might really be a guy. It’s a mess. It’s so brutal.
The girls used to lovingly raz me with, "girls go to college to get more knowledge. Guys go to Jupiter to get more stupider" Now, I hope she actually believes it
A little Fri humor. I once responded, without thinking, "guys go to college to get more knowledge. Girls go to Venus to get...". Stopped short, thankfully. Still, must have scared the younger one off
"He wasn’t speaking to me - he wasn’t even in the room with me; he was busy delivering scripted lines to his imaginary audience in falsetto. I was just the furniture."
As a trans widow, I can confirm that this is eerily accurate.
It is one of the strongest signs that these unfortunate people really desperately need mental health care while society looks the other way and pretends like they’re self-actualizing.
It’s incomprehensible, the degree to which we are all lying to ourselves. This breaks my heart.
Having heard your story, Shannon, I know how your ex seemed like a person with a full life, a good relationship, a variety of interests -- and then this obsession / addiction took all of this away, from him and from you.
The families are left with these empty husks of people whom they don’t even recognize as having the same personalities anymore. It’s desperately sad, and I don’t understand how it could be any more obvious that this is not a healthy, happy outcome for ANYONE involved.
It gets spun as “the parents are just bigots” or “the trans widows are just bitter and disappointed” -- and if their children / partners are not doing well, it’s because the families were not loving or accepting or understanding enough. No. These are people who are suffering, who have lost their way, and who desperately need to find a way back to themselves.
I’m very grateful to people -- parents, trans widows, anyone involved -- who are willing to tell their stories. The more that people realize that these stories are the _typical_ stories, not outliers, the better off we will ALL be.
Thank you so much for putting yourselves out there.
"I don’t understand how it could be any more obvious that this is not a healthy, happy outcome for ANYONE involved."
It's because for every one of us who has had to fight a tide of opposition to get five minutes on a barely-visible platform, there are 43 stories in People or Vanity Fair about how sparkly and sexy trans people's lives are.
Why that's happening is another matter, and well addressed by your article. My guess is that corporate greed on the one side and "We Buy Solutions" on the other is a major driver.
There's a lot of money in it. I do think that's no unrelated to the visibility of the "solutions" on offer. There's no money in loving and accepting yourself. That's the antithesis of being a good customer, to be happy and content.
And it's sad that it's so true -- your story needs a big megaphone, and the "sparkly and sexy" stories need to go to the fiction section -- or at least appear in proportion to the reality. There are at least a hundred trans people for every happy and thriving one. At least.
I have been wondering how soon before the detransitioning medical clinics start up and start to cash in. The only obstacle is the narrative that transition, if someone says they want it, is always the right course of action — where would all the detrans patients come from, then? That’s a problem that needs to be explained.
Dolly, this was so smart, keenly observed, and humane. I’m not sure if what I have to add is an additional cultural trend, or whether it falls into one--or several--of your categories, but here goes. In my experience, we Americans have almost an allergy to things just being tough, unfair, and sad. We want to rush in and fix things (my most recent Happy Wanderer is about this), and we also don’t want to allow people to feel their feelings, just as they are, and for as long as it takes.
When my son was first diagnosed as autistic, and later when my daughter was diagnosed with congenital muscular dystrophy, everyone I knew tried to minimize what I was feeling. They did it out of love, because it made them sad to see my sadness, and to think that my kids, whom they loved very much, would suffer. So they’d predict bright futures for my kids, fail to notice when things were hard or went badly for them, point out every tiny success (when, say, my daughter managed to walk up some steps, which were 4” high and she had to haul herself up with the handrail); they would say, “See? It will all be ok.” And the irony is, it basically has been ok, but it has also been hard. Finally I said to the people in my life, “Can you let me be sad about this, at least for now?”
My point is that being a teenager is really tough for everyone, but especially when you don’t fit in for some reason, be it gender expression, autism, or something else. Our culture very badly wants to turn those feelings into a happy story of triumphing against the odds with the help of science, of finding a new and supportive community, of kids living their best lives. One reason that the minute an awkward, socially isolated kid comes out as trans s/he is celebrated by everyone is that we prefer the triumphalist story to the sadder, but realer one. It can be really rotten to feel excluded, especially as a middle-schooler or teenager, and we don’t want to think about that. We’d much rather tell the happy story.
By the way, I used to be an editor at a journal that published a lot of Derrida, Butler, Foucault, and the other authors you cite. I agree: the vast majority of it was just empty gibberish, but everyone was too scared to say so because they were worried about what other people would think. Hmmm. Sound like any other phenomenon in our culture these days?
Also: (comment #2 because now you’ve got me thinking and I can’t stop haha)
It seems to me that the flip side of this is—
We have a belief in our culture, which is relatively new and which is described in “Coddling of the American Mind,” that “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.”
It’s almost as if, if we were to acknowledge to the teens in our life during covid that this was a really bad thing they were going through, ***that would be equivalent to admitting they were now horribly traumatized and damaged, and you should probably be seeking mental health services for them.***
No. Just no.
I kept sharing my belief that going through such a miserable thing at such a young age made her particularly wise and resilient in coping. Because I believe that’s true. Hardship — to an extent— is a chance to grow stronger, more resilient, more resourceful, and wiser.
But we don’t currently believe that in this cultural moment.
So instead of saying to gender-questioning kids — “That sounds really difficult and painful” and talking about coping and strategies and the origin of their feelings, we are desperate to gloss over it and make it all OK, because as you said, we just want the happy story and not the pain and the truth.
I loved your essay on this issue when those two little girls were persuaded by everyone that they had been traumatized because a guy in a costume at Hershey Park didn’t see them during a parade. I wonder whether we as a culture have reacted by the demand for stoicism in previous generations by swinging too far in the opposite direction. I remember noticing that some of my friends, when their kids would fall or bump into something or have trouble sleeping, would react in an inordinately sympathetic way. They would shower the child with pity and anxiety. (This was only a few people--most of my friends, like me, would react to these little mishaps by saying, “Oops! Up you go! No biggie!”) The result of all this excessive sympathy was that their kids became so anxious and reactive. I admit that it’s possible that the correlation went the other way, and that the moms reacted as they did because their kids were already anxious, but it really did seem like a destructive feedback loop was set in motion whenever a mom encouraged her kids to feel injured by these little bumps and challenges.
Yes that’s tricky (parental reaction)-- some of it no doubt, I agree, is probably driven by the kind of kid you have.
You can easily see “very anxious, over-reacting kid” as leading to “over-reacting responses” in the parent: kind of a mirroring thing. Who wants to see their kid desperately upset? The parent might tend to respond in kind, as if a big injury occurred.
I see our role as parents to try to haul our kids to the middle -- a really intense over-reactive kid needs to (try to) learn to shake off the little things (much easier said than done -- but it’s still the goal). The kid at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, who has trouble expressing emotional reactions needs to learn them. Again easier said than done.
I think you’re right -- earlier stoicism, earlier generations of “kids should be seen and not heard” (and their feelings completely disregarded) maybe led to a large pendulum swing in the other direction, where kids’ feelings are not just King (we all bow down before them) but are seen as very dangerous. If your kids has too many bad feelings, he’ll be “ruined” and you “fail.”
Maybe, like parents with kids, our duty as adult members of society is to try to haul all of society into the middle too. The older we get, the more stuff we’ve seen, and perhaps the more perspective we have to offer.
There's a very American (maybe Western more broadly, even?) discomfort with real, earnest emotion and hardship. You see it around death and difficult emotions, especially. But even around love sometimes. Casual sex is seen as fine, nothing, whatever. But talking about love or marriage, especially when you're young, is seen as a kind of cringe.
“Casual sex is seen as fine, nothing, whatever. But talking about love or marriage, especially when you're young, is seen as a kind of cringe.”
This is a really interesting point and I’ve never thought about that!
Hm ...
Yes! Thank you for these wonderful comments, Mari!
You are so right — there is an aspect of our culture where we are acutely, acutely uncomfortable with facing other people’s sadness or hardship or unpleasant feelings.
It is such a gift to be genuine and to have people to be genuine with. “Finally I said to the people in my life, ‘Can you let me be sad about this, at least for now?’ “ Yes. Exactly! Our culture often doesn’t make room for that. I’m glad you asked for that though.
During covid, life was so hard for my daughter and her friends. I remember telling her, “this is probably one of the hardest things you’ll ever go through in your life, and it’s happening when you’re young and that’s very hard.” The message I really wanted to communicate to her was that it was OK to be really sad and grieving this lost time, to feel it to be the major horrible event that it really was, AND to also know that she and her friends were going to be OK.
Both those things can be true but in our culture we just want the happy outcome, not the suffering. For everyone. (Right now!)
I think this unfortunate impulse reached new heights when that book “The Secret” came out. That must be almost 20 years ago now. Lots of people believed in the “law of attraction” and seemed almost frantic to (1) NOT articulate or even think a negative or unpleasant thought, because it would be inviting disaster on themselves and (2) articulate “positive thoughts” amid forced smiles and false happiness in the most unlikely situations. Husband just lost his job? “I know something better is coming soon!” Big smile.
Yes! This truly plays into what we want for “trans kids” — with the immediate, insistent, almost desperate “celebration” of someone who’s just told you they are extremely unhappy in their own body, with their own name, with many important aspects of their life.
“Yay? I guess?”
And yes re the gibberish! I eventually started turning down those books because there was no way to do a “good job” editing them.
Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided pointed out this tendency in our culture, and pointed out how unhelpful it is in many cases.
The “power of positive thinking” is an idea that’s been around for a long time. To the extent that it motivates people to improve their lives, it’s not a bad thing. But it requires a clear understanding of what can be fixed, and how to go about it. It seems we have pushed a good concept into a fantasyland where wishing hard enough can make it so. Exactly where the trans movement has gone.
I’ll have to look at that, Heyjude! Is it a whole book? I’ll Google it.
Yes. Positive thinking can exert a real difference -- like a motivational difference, or a difference in how you view your options (by looking hard for the good bit among the bad) but it took on this bizarre “magical thinking” quality.
It is a book, I think you would find it interesting. She says the downside to all the “you got this” comments is that it becomes almost a failure if you don’t get better. Sadly she passed away recently.
It's a great point -- yes, I heard she'd died and I didn't think she was very old either.
I’m sorry your daughter had a hard time firing Covid. That whole time was so awful for kids. You are a good mom to talk with her about it in an honest way that allowed her to feel her feelings.
It was awful -- she thrived on school and being around her friends and boyfriend. Everything shut down. But she did come out stronger! I worry about the narrative that “kids will never recover” from these lost years-- as much as I just made fun of “The Secret,” I also think kids pick up on our messages and beliefs. Part of the reason we have so many kids believing they are traumatized and damaged is perhaps because they’ve been told it so often.
If they can be convinced that their teenage angst is due to being in the wrong body, they can be convinced of ...anything else too.
It’s a very strange mix -- being a teenager -- of being very potentially strong and very potentially vulnerable.
Ooh, you are really onto something with this. The "optimism only" thread, perhaps. I really dislike this particular cultural tendency.
Very much!! It's so one-sided and false. Who wants to go around being false?
This was a banger of a piece, Dolly. Nice job!
Also, AMEN AMEN AMEN, all day long. My gosh, how I loathed my critical theory classes, for exactly the reasons you describe:
"Because I’m convinced they said nothing. The sentences didn’t make sense, the paragraphs didn’t make sense, and I suspect it wasn’t because I was stupid and couldn’t comprehend the lofty ideas. My perception was these books were some kind of academic version of the Emperor’s New Clothes, a 'blah blah blah Foucault' refuge for people who could neither think nor write anything of value."
Ah Tytonidaen! A kindred spirit in the “theory stuff” -- I could rag on it all day! Haha.
What's especially odd are that some of these ideas don't seem to work together.
On one hand, you have the Foucault bio-power, science is fake, everything is a social construct, nothing is real blah blah blah stuff
On the other hand, you the seemingly concrete claim of "people have a certain immutable identity at birth that cannot be changed and all the medical orgs agree with me on this"
It's as if I saw people claiming to be both Marxists and Hayekian libertarian capitalists. Or a group of people claimed to be New Atheists and Muslim Salafists. It's just so strange to see them together. I think the whole thing went mainstream before everyone got the talking points straight.
We've seen a similar idea with respect to gay marriage. There's the bio-power/it's all social construct stuff, and there's the "born this way" claim that it's genetic or immutable. However, the gay marriage movement didn't oscillate between them, it stayed firmly in the latter camp. I'm not going to debate which one is right, but that's the rhetoric gay marriage advocates chose and it worked pretty well.
Exactly, the ideas _don’t_ work well together but if you question this you’re an old-fashioned Enlightenment thinker, not a new advanced “flexible” postmodern (aka fuzzy and muddled) thinker.
You're also liable to get called a bigot. I think that's what really keeps these contradictory ideas together. I'm no great thinker, so I'm pretty sure tons of others have recognized this. They feel afraid to speak out, though, so we end up in an emperors new clothes situation
I agree Klaus, I have thought that these ideas don’t quite fit together and leave me with a sense of unease but I lack the language necessary to contradict it so I stay silent (for the most part) because I know that I couldn’t hold my own in a debate simply because I don’t have the education necessary to give me the language to fight it.
You are a great thinker: also, I do think being afraid to speak out is what is perpetuating this nonsense for so long. It would be kind of funny except real people are being hurt by it every day, while people who truly know better keep their mouths shut.
It just shows how difficult it is to make insanity seem rational.
Difficult (to us) but easy (to the true believers). They don’t see any problem with the conflicts, and if you point those out, you are a bad, bigoted, hate-filled person.
Of course, that makes it impossible to reason with them. So then what?
I think we just keep trying to have the conversation. There are true believers who will never come around, but there are plenty of followers in the world who are just going along. Once a new narrative catches on -- especially a narrative that makes a lot more sense -- a lot of people will be relieved to say “me too -- I always sort of thought so too.”
"On one hand, you have the Foucault bio-power, science is fake, everything is a social construct, nothing is real blah blah blah stuff
On the other hand, you the seemingly concrete claim of 'people have a certain immutable identity at birth that cannot be changed and all the medical orgs agree with me on this'"
I think it's possible that disenfranchised kids started saying the former, then powerful organizations like pharma and plastic surgery, recognizing the flexibility afforded by such fuzzy language and lazy thinking, took advantage of it to sell the latter.
Yes that’s a great point -- I do suppose that different groups will find different (conflicting) parts of the narrative more amenable to their favorite part of the cause.
Dolly, this piece is really outstanding! A fine digest of the current thinking. I need to spend some time thinking before I can comment further, and I would imagine that provoking thought was exactly the purpose. Well done.
Thank you so much, Heyjude! I always appreciate your input!
A first, to be quoted in a Substack! You tie various cultural threads together in a convincing fashion and out we come with trans positivity. I've seen the power of social media with my daughter who was essentially groomed into an eating disorder back when that was all the rage and agree with you that the trans phenomenon is intimately tied to social media use by our kids. Jonathan Haidt believes we should keep phones away from our kids till they're 16. This sounds like an impossibility but I've read of a number of families that have done this and reclaimed their children as a result.
For me, the most insidious aspect of all of this is how big business has joined our institutions, governments and schools to promote queer society. In the 60s and 70s, the establishment mostly frowned on self-expression, personal freedom and subjective realities; now, they promote them to make more money. You probably know of Jennifer Bilek's work on this issue. You've really got to wonder about the authenticity of a movement when it promotes itself as revolutionary but is supported wholeheartedly by those whose main purpose in life is to make money. Trans as the newest frontier in capitalism where possibilities for constant growth is running up against planetary limits.
Finally, I take some small bit of responsibility for all of this evil because as an English teacher, in my early years, and as a child of the 60s and 70s, I often talked to students about "finding themselves". I can see now where this prompt has led. Too much talk about the self and its priorities, and too little about how we came up with a fairly enlightened society and our responsibility to maintain it. All with good intentions that still persist but distorted by disengagement from physical reality. It's a brave new world, don't you know.
It's all a matter of balance, you know? You mustn't be hard on yourself for promoting "finding yourself" -- it's one important task among many. It's a good message in normal times. Now the pendulum has swung pretty hard in the other direction, and a better message for today might me "Think a little more about other people instead of yourself and what you want" -- but times change!
RE: "Jonathan Haidt believes we should keep phones away from our kids till they're 16. This sounds like an impossibility but I've read of a number of families that have done this and reclaimed their children as a result."
I believe Helena wrote about this just this morning and was skeptical that this was a very effective strategy -- BUT! -- I really think removing someone completely from an addictive or obsessive situation is the best way to get them to come back to reality and reassess.
If you have a 12 or 13 year old child, you have a lot of control and can do this pretty easily. It's harder the older they get -- the can earn their own money, they can buy their own cell phone, etc.
But I liken cutting them off from the internet and the friends that are feeding their obsession as akin to throwing a cold bucket of water on them. It can wake them up and bring them back to themselves. There is something about immersing yourself in this very false reality which is very self-sustaining.
And yes, big business and our institutions are banding together -- and our schools. It's bizarre. For some, it's the social justice points, and for others, it's a huge money maker. Everyone wins but the "customers."
You're not wrong about postmodern books. I have a theory that believing unintuitive things makes people feel smart. That may be because occasionally an unintuitive thing is revolutionary. Or it may be because people assume if something's hard to grasp, it's important and wise.
Postmodernism is a fount of nonsense that unsophisticated thinkers can cite, giving them some cred behind their lazy thinking. And it always works, as the Sokal affair proved.
I agree 100%
"people assume if something's hard to grasp, it's important and wise" -- and the converse is, people don't want to admit they don't understand it at all, for fear of being thought not very bright. That stuff is a mess and it makes no sense. We need to be brave enough to say it.
First up I wanted to add, that the act of breast feeding doesn't make your breast sag - please keep breastfeeding mothers!
It's a common misconception.
Breast changes from pregnancy related growth (size, milk ducts etc.) are the reason, yet smoking for example is a bigger risk factor.
An interesting question about this is, if induced lactation leads to breast sagging.
Also I wanted to add that the correct binding of breast for a limited time isn't harmful (as far as we know). But how many really do that?
I assume though, that you meant this.
Your blog entries about trans issues are my most favorite on the internet, although this one was a bit more harsh and I can guarantee you many people from "the other side" will view parts very condenscendingly written, especially the latter parts with a sarcastic undertone.
Certainly one should be able to read posts like this without fuming or becoming emotionally invested, but I fear, that the people you want to reach / get listening, will be much more likely to feel attacked, offended or any kind of aggression one can imagine.
So one has to keep neutrality as much as possible in such energy laden debates, even if one is biased - like you stated.
I'm looking forward to your next post!
Greetings from Germany
Thanks for the feedback. I’ll have to go back over it and look for the harsh or condescending parts, because that wasn’t my intention and. I was not aware. !!!
If trans is a solution that more people are choosing, part of the phenomenon is its increased visibility AS a solution. Countless times I have heard and read the stories of internet acquaintances who identify under the less well known (ie trans, asexual, nonbinary) parts of the LGBT+ umbrella who describe the feeling of relief from having discovered "there's a WORD for it/me/my experiences!"
So related to the Civil Rights / Progressivism thread, I see a sort of 'civil rights/feminism marches on' where the obvious low-hanging fruit of formal equality was picked (we've got the vote! we can have jobs! we as a society generally recognize that all people are equal, and we've outlawed discrimination based on race and sex and disability. So what's an activist to do, when big picture level data still shows significant inequality on outcomes?
They can go after the higher-hanging fruit of identifying and addressing root causes, and/or they can find a group that's still being discriminated against and rerun the civil rights playbook*. Now we've got trans, and the neurodivergent and people with mental illnesses (sometimes these overlap), and queer folks, and people with alternative lifestyles. You're a person, maybe a young person; you're not happy in your skin, you don't connect with your peers, you feel like an outsider in society, and all you have to do is get on the internet and look around a bit, and now there's all this information out there, for better or worse.
*I originally had a thing here about how current-day 'civil rights' fights differ from the civil rights struggles of the past, but realized I was haring off on a tangent. To summarize, the fight against racism and sex discrimination really were fights against oppression; the fight for acceptance of the groups mentioned above are fights against bias and closemindedness. The latter is a problem of a very different order and rerunning the civil rights playbook was the wrong move.
This is a really, really interesting comment Ying. I sense the truth in it and will let these ideas percolate.
This sociological work makes me feel lucky to have come across it. One thought I never dared express is we have gone to far in this elevation of the underdog. But in reality it is an elevation driven by indifference, which otherwise I don't think many would bother persevering into for its own sake. And the victims of this illusory pedestal, the kids who are being affirmed, might be deeply conscious of what is truly society 's cheap self indulgence, within which carelessness and neglect are shamelessly rooted.
Caroline: “it is an elevation driven by indifference” -- I think this is a really really important point.
Exhibit A -- all the people whose kids (or friends’ and neighbors kids) aren’t caught up in this. If this is just happening to Other People’s Kids, we’ll then it’s easy to affirm and say all the right things, and who cares about the infertility, chronic pain, brittle bones, or other medical harm?
Is Coddling of the American Mind a good read btw? I feel like a lot of pop non-fiction doesn't offer much more than the Wikipedia summary
Yea it’s good but at this point you might have heard all the main points repeated in a bunch of places
The Scientific Revolution thread: science has proven itself as an engine for improving life. Any thinking person can see that. But we have vested far too much power and authority in the idea of “following the science”, to the point where we have one scientist claiming that he is the representative of all science. Anyone who disagrees is a “science denier”.
How many times have we heard “if we can land a man on the moon, we should be able to do ‘x’”? We have accorded the biological and social sciences the same level of certainty as physics. Biology and social sciences (not to mention climate science) involve levels of complexity far beyond Newtonian physics. Modern biology and medicine have made great strides. But they are nowhere near the level of Newtonian physics. We want to believe they are, while at the same time we see ads every day listing possible side effects to the myriad new drugs. Yet somehow we have put aside all common sense and choose to believe that medicine can make a man into a woman, and further, we are causing harm if we doubt it.
A more realistic view of the progress and limitations of biology and medicine would be in order.
Yes. I was sort of having this convo a bit on someone else's substack recently.
Part of the problem is not JUST the uncertainty of science -- although it's less certain that many people think -- but it's that people do cherry-pick to promote agendas.
This becomes a disaster when we have a pandemic and one side is saying one thing (right or wrong) and the other side is saying the opposite (right or wrong -- the data doesn't matter).
People will cling to their ideological beliefs regardless of the data.
As I said on the other substack, what needed to happen in something as serious as a pandemic was for all the best minds of ALL political beliefs to get together and decide collectively what the data were telling us AND message that effectively to ALL Americans AND also explain clearly why and on what basis the advice was changing over time -- because people didn't understand that either.
If you have no trust in anyone but your own political side, and your political side is just promoting a message unrelated to the data, then no one will believe the data, or even know what the data is.
Same for trans stuff. If one political side says "it is healthy and necessary and every decent person should support it" and the other side says "it is unhealthy and unnecessary and every decent person should oppose it" people make their choices based on their politics and not on the evidence. And no one knows the evidence.
It's so frustrating. We need science to be a neutral thing, where of COURSE there will be disagreements but everyone will agree what the evidence is; they just disagree what all the evidence means.
There is no universe in which the same set of true facts results in some people believing "it is healthy and necessary and every decent person should support it" and others believing "it is unhealthy and unnecessary and every decent person should oppose it."
At least one side, and often both, are cruelly misinformed.
I don’t see it as a matter of simply following your side. I really hope we still have vestiges of common sense and logic. And also the ability to evaluate evidence in relation to the claim made- not simply on the credentials of those making the claim.
I’m just responding to what I see? I think most people do seem to blindly follow their side. Of course there are always some logical people.
Being a simple person, I subscribe to Carl Sagan’s dictum: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. “Transition medicine” fails that test. If your claim is that you can, and must, provide drugs and surgery that will fulfill the desire to “be” the opposite sex, you better have some extraordinarily solid evidence. There is none, but we are instructed to “follow the science” nonetheless.
Celeste -- I'm so sorry this is happening to you -- this sounds like a nightmare. Do you have support? I know there are parent groups out there. I hope you have a good lawyer. Let us know how it goes. I'll be thinking good thoughts for you and your daughter.
Please do!
I’m glad you’ve got good support, have a good lawyer (and understand the legal system yourself — excellent!)
The stepmom angle really adds something especially difficult. Most people want to be cordial and supportive with the kids’ “steps” but in this case you’ve really got to put your foot down. Wow that’s hard.
Sending you all good thoughts!!!!!
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and experiences.
There definitely seems to be — judging by parental anecdotes (and sadly there are many!) — a link between being “very much online” and adopting these gender ideas (or having odd or lacking socialization skills).
But there have always been online dangers. Before there were online trans groups, there were pro anorexia groups, or there were perverted old guys posing as teens and trying to get kids to share pictures and get sexual with them.
I guess I’m saying — I do see your point that parental absence might contribute a bit, but also please don’t be overly hard on yourself. Online dangers were always there and some kids fall into them. (The question is, what do we do next?)
Another way to look at it is — all adolescents and young adults spend time out of their parents’ supervision, whether online or in person. Most kids probably try alcohol and drugs, too, right? And a small fraction develop an alcohol or drugs problem, and the rest do not. It’s the same with the gender stuff.
The problem was not that the kids were allowed to go unsupervised among their peers. That wasn’t the problem — that didn’t cause the alcohol problem or the gender problem.
We could of course have a long nature-nurture convo about why some kids develop an alcohol problem and others don’t, or why some fall prey to trans ideology and others don’t.
And I think there is also merit to what you’re saying — a totally unsupervised kid online is probably more likely to get into deeper trouble than a more sheltered kid.
I guess the question is — and this is where my empathy / sympathy for families reaches a peak — what are parents supposed to do when they do recognize a “gender issue” in their child?
Wherever you turn — schools, mental health experts, doctors, even the court system in some cases — parents will be actively undermined and told they must “affirm” their child’s illness and allow/promote transition.
So parents are not only completely on their own in this situation, but they are also cast as villains if they don’t actively participate in their child’s self-destruction. That’s the saddest part to me. You see your kid in trouble and there are no obvious resources available to you, and everyone hates you for wanting to try.
I wish you and your son the very best. I know there are some online support groups for parents. They are likely google-able or maybe some readers have links they could share here? The “Gender: A Wider Lens” podcast has mentioned retreats for parents in the past, and I’ve heard Stella say she runs online support groups? That might be a place to start if you’re interested.
It’s really hard. I can’t blame you for feeling that you don’t want to see him when he’s in this mindset -- many people liken it to their kids being in a cult. There is just no getting through to him. People describe it like -- the person they know just isn’t there: there’s some kind of false cult-self. If he were 12, you could set all sorts of limits on him. Since he’s in his 20s, there’s little you can do, right?
I read recently -- and gosh I wish I could remember where, or looked into where those numbers came from -- that the average guy maintains his trans identity for seven years. That seems like a lot of wasted time and years, but the only young guy I know (son of a friend’s friend) who snapped out of it took 7 years.
I hope things get better for your son and for you: it’s a mess. If we were all trying to help these kids and young adults face reality and take responsibility for their own lives, I’m sure it would be a lot shorter. Our society, in supporting this, is dragging it out.
Oh by the way -- the internet thing -- I’ve just heard so many (many!) parents attribute their kids’ gender issues to ideas they got from the internet and from sleazy people on the internet that perhaps I assumed you ascribed it a bigger role than you were.
It seems very damaging -- kids can pretend to be anyone, they can pretend to be any age or appearance or sex. A lot of guys find they get a lot of attention by playing with girl avatars? Sometimes I think it starts there and they believe life would be easier or more fun as a girl?
Very interesting discussion. Spicey, well wishes. Salon, thought provoking as a always. Your combined thoughts and experiences offer some great perspectives on a "not yet but could be" personal subject. My tomboy daughter came out as gay a few years ago in college, to the surprise of none of us. She's always been an athlete, the girl who only plays football with boys at recess type. The only time she put on make up was for figure skating competitions (she and her sister fell in love with it on a local pond from about when they learned to walk). She went on to become a D1 soccer athlete. But she never gave up the boy thing. She's just always been a masculine woman. We love and support her exactly as she is, and always have
My "fear", if you will, is the next step. Will she feel pressure to transition? The trans thing wasn't on the radar when she came out, and that wasn't that long ago. Now, if you're someone in her situation, you're bombarded with messaging that it's not just OK, it's the right thing to do. Thing is, there's nothing wrong with who she is
What resonated with me, Salon, was your astute observation about the objective and subjective. The movement found gold mining the latter. Truth is "their truth", entirely based on subjective accounts. Incredibly, then they turn it around and apply it to others objectively. If you don't fully buy in to the latest "my truth", you're objectively a bigot, homopobe, etc. They want a subjective truth applied objectively
No wonder everyone's confused. Take gay marriage. As a libertarian leaning conservative, my position has always been, "who cares?" As a political and cultural issue, Obama even ran on "man and a woman" in '08. Think of that. Forget about the politics. It's astonishing that something mainstream culturally, not 15 years ago, is a position that you aren't even allowed to state publicly today.
And therein lies the danger. They've created a game with ever changing rules. Yet, if you don't play by them, you're banished. And social media, with diminishing actual human interaction, acts as the perfect mechanism in which to play. It first broadcasts the latest rules, then enforces them, complete with mob justice, real time shaming, and 24 hour burials
It's the perfect way to circumvent the first amendment (though that will always remain the top target). It doesn't require any law change. Cultual pressure works. Talk about power. Who benefits? The institutional powers
I despise institutional power. While they used to laughably annoying, they now creat group think and lemmings of such force it's ruining real relationships. It's dehumanizing to the point where a kid calls her father all the ism's known to man- at his own funeral- simply because he votes and thinks differently. God help us
Thanks so much for sharing these comments JD. I really hope your daughter remains happy and content in her own body.
You make great observations about the changing rules and how we have to parrot whatever the current “correct” thing is deemed to be. It’s the opposite of freedom of thought or having the ability to think and decide issues. It’s “what beliefs must I adopt and proclaim this week?”
I worry about people like your daughter — happy lesbians. Twenty years ago they’d be fine and live their lives. Now today there’s someone around every corner wanting to tell her she might really be a guy. It’s a mess. It’s so brutal.
The girls used to lovingly raz me with, "girls go to college to get more knowledge. Guys go to Jupiter to get more stupider" Now, I hope she actually believes it
A little Fri humor. I once responded, without thinking, "guys go to college to get more knowledge. Girls go to Venus to get...". Stopped short, thankfully. Still, must have scared the younger one off
"He wasn’t speaking to me - he wasn’t even in the room with me; he was busy delivering scripted lines to his imaginary audience in falsetto. I was just the furniture."
As a trans widow, I can confirm that this is eerily accurate.
It is one of the strongest signs that these unfortunate people really desperately need mental health care while society looks the other way and pretends like they’re self-actualizing.
It’s incomprehensible, the degree to which we are all lying to ourselves. This breaks my heart.
Having heard your story, Shannon, I know how your ex seemed like a person with a full life, a good relationship, a variety of interests -- and then this obsession / addiction took all of this away, from him and from you.
The families are left with these empty husks of people whom they don’t even recognize as having the same personalities anymore. It’s desperately sad, and I don’t understand how it could be any more obvious that this is not a healthy, happy outcome for ANYONE involved.
It gets spun as “the parents are just bigots” or “the trans widows are just bitter and disappointed” -- and if their children / partners are not doing well, it’s because the families were not loving or accepting or understanding enough. No. These are people who are suffering, who have lost their way, and who desperately need to find a way back to themselves.
I’m very grateful to people -- parents, trans widows, anyone involved -- who are willing to tell their stories. The more that people realize that these stories are the _typical_ stories, not outliers, the better off we will ALL be.
Thank you so much for putting yourselves out there.
Thank you.
"I don’t understand how it could be any more obvious that this is not a healthy, happy outcome for ANYONE involved."
It's because for every one of us who has had to fight a tide of opposition to get five minutes on a barely-visible platform, there are 43 stories in People or Vanity Fair about how sparkly and sexy trans people's lives are.
Why that's happening is another matter, and well addressed by your article. My guess is that corporate greed on the one side and "We Buy Solutions" on the other is a major driver.
There's a lot of money in it. I do think that's no unrelated to the visibility of the "solutions" on offer. There's no money in loving and accepting yourself. That's the antithesis of being a good customer, to be happy and content.
And it's sad that it's so true -- your story needs a big megaphone, and the "sparkly and sexy" stories need to go to the fiction section -- or at least appear in proportion to the reality. There are at least a hundred trans people for every happy and thriving one. At least.
I have been wondering how soon before the detransitioning medical clinics start up and start to cash in. The only obstacle is the narrative that transition, if someone says they want it, is always the right course of action — where would all the detrans patients come from, then? That’s a problem that needs to be explained.