Jan 20, 2022·edited Jan 20, 2022Liked by The 21st Century Salonnière
I read this essay when it first landed in my inbox but I was eyebrows-deep in work at the time. I just want to say thanks for writing it. As a scholar with expertise in the social history of medicine, women, and gender, I agree with every word.
I'm at a loss how to stem the tide among my young-adult students. I do pose questions about the dogma, and I'm intent on doing so in a way that conveys my love for my many gender non-conforming students. But by the time students land in my classroom, they're thoroughly marinated in ideas about gender that kids propagate to other kids on Tumblr, Insta infographics, and now TikTok. Many of the trans-identifying young people have already medicalized.
Even the brightest of my students will parrot things like "trans women have periods" and "there are six sexes." The latter statement came from one of my own kids; we had a talk about what that Y chromosome does, or more precisely the SRY gene, in people with atypical configurations of X and Y. But my kid knows I've been standing up for gender-atypical people since before he was born. Questioning the current dogma in the classroom risks my livelihood, yet I'm doing it as much as I can without so alienating students that they tune me out or get me fired.
I've been caught in a crisis of conscience for five years now and I feel powerless to stop the onrushing train. Twenty years ago, hardly any feminist scholar envisioned that contesting the rigidity of binary gender norms would result in the mass medicalization of children. Why have so many of us gone along with it? Certainly a big piece of the explanation is careerism for those whose research is congenial to the dogma. Possibly an even bigger piece is that anyone who raises questions would immediately branded a transphobe or TERF, pilloried in public, ostracized, and quite likely fired or hounded out of their positions. It's hard to know what proportion of feminist scholars fall into each camp because almost everyone in the latter group is terrified.
If I thought speaking very bluntly in public would save a single young person from unnecessary medicalization, it would be worth getting fired. But instead, I'd be branded a TERF and my arguments immediately dismissed. It's an awful Catch-22. I have been speaking privately with some local mothers whose tween girls have identified as trans, and once publicly on FB with another local mother whose daughter was about to have top surgery. The latter conversation didn't make any difference. But conversations with mothers of younger kids have been helpful to them, I think.
My apologies for barging into an old thread. I just wanted to let you know that I deeply value this essay - as a scholar, mother, and human. Please keep writing about this topic. I'll keep pushing the envelope as best I can in my sphere. It's not nearly enough. It's also not nothing.
This is the essay the western world needs to read. I tried writing it myself, as the shell-shocked (yes, I’m being figurative) mother of a suddenly trans- identifying teen daughter. I poured my four years of dogged research understanding, fused with my evidence-based commonsense worldview and topped it with a soupçon of first-person mother-daughter heartbreak, to produce 4,000 words of the most earnest, eloquent, and (I thought) persuasive essay yet written on this subject. And it’s apparently unpublishable because it betrays the fury that I just can’t edit out. You have written the piece that rises above it all, an eloquent distillation of the essential argument and nothing but: it is unassailable. Now, how do we get it read by the whole western world?
I haven’t read a more exceptional piece than this (and the follow up) on this topic until now. I love that you have written this and I bow down in utmost respect! Now if only the whole of western society would read it.
I would like to compliment the participants on the quality of this conversation. It shows that people with differing views can still have a thoughtful and productive discussion. That is something we don't see much of any more.
My wife studied cultural anthropology and I could not get enough of the stories she relayed from her ethnomedicine lecture. But somehow I never viewed our own culture-specific illnesses this way. This is really eye-opening to me. Nobody talked about trans when I grew up but there were so many (mostly) girls haunted by bulimia and borderline personality disorder. Would those girls become trans-men today? Or would they develop pseudo-tourettes?
This article and the companion really resonate with me. It aligns with Lisa Marchiano's article - on transgender teens and psychic epidemics https://doi.org/10.1080/00332925.2017.1350804 but also explains so well the local and time-bound response to mental health challenges as 'culture bound syndromes. As an older lesbian and therefore somewhat gender non-conforming I can see precisely how as a child I would likely have leapt at the 'culture bound syndrome' now on offer even though it would have been a rough approximation to, rather than an accurate representation of,the specific 'not fitting in well with my peers' symptoms that I was noticing.
When I have heard the testimony of young detransitioners now on offer I think I am seeing exactly the same thing - initial gratitude for an explanation that, at least, partially fitted the discomfort - but which sooner or later turns out to have been a very poor explanation of it. When i found it the ability to sidestep what I had understood as the need to adherence to gender based stereotypes was a far better explanation
My admiration for the piece (thank you for writing and publishing it!) is much greater than my own expertise or handle on the statistics on the matter, but I’ll add my experience as a clinician that has seen a lot of these kids. Almost all of the ones I’ve seen have been girls ( perhaps simply because the disorder I treat manifests more often in girls) and every single one of them suffers from severe anxiety, and most from depression as well, and “neurodivergence”, which these days also is born like a badge of honor among the young, is a frequently diagnosed comorbidity. As a mother of a young woman I’m also familiar with the social pressure to be “non-binary”. To be “cis” is to be not cool.
What I’m working my way towards here is that my impression is that these aren’t even very gender non-confirming people in many cases, in terms of behavior, mannerisms, aesthetic and sexual preferences etc. I believe that in (probably a large percentage of the cases) “being trans” is simply the solution offered to young people that are (understandably, one might add, given the social and social media landscape they’re grazing in) feeling anxious and lost. An additional force may be the self-hatred young “white” people are taught to feel, and girls seem to be especially receptive to this. “Transitioning” to a minority group is a way of escaping the guilt and ostracism of belonging to the oppressor group.
I really appreciate the lens of cultural phenomena you bring to this. It reminds me of the Swedish phenomenon of Resignation Syndrome. I think it is one of the more powerful examples of the effect of cultural expectation and examples.
"Trans" is a two-generation enactment. Trans 'hides' a huge mental health crisis among young people today. The label 'fits' any kid who is dissociated, dysregulated, and self hating, by providing a "designated issue" that targets self hate to the sexed body, which at the same time exonerates bullies, abuse, or neglect of their role in the child's sorrow. Instead of a miserable child (which could be the parent's fault) you have a brave and stunning TG kid. It's a coverup.
The number of dissociated and self hating kids is rising because every generation is feebler at imparting *requisite* developmental experiences to babies and toddlers. This ability must urgently be re-imbued.
Parenting skills are learned when we see them modeled. Fewer and fewer of us have seen good modeling, as fewer are cared for by *parents* in this time span. The current cohort of parents is IMPAIRED in their skill set, and very poor in what used to be considered "common knowledge."
0-3 is the time when the building blocks of the stable self are built: emotional self-regulation, agency, internal locus of control. Kids who do not receive enough mirroring, external co regulation, and safe/secure attachment 0-3 are not able to build those 'adult' skills.
Teens recapitulate toddler developmental hurdles. Parents who relied on 'give a cookie' at 2 are not equipped to deal with the teen versions of these tantrums, grandiosity, and magical thinking.
I just discovered your blog through comments you made on Freddie deBoer. Reading this post, I presume you're aware of the culturallyboundgender wordpress blog? (Or are you even the same author?) I've always had a lot of respect for the post over there describing exactly how "third gender" worked in native american societies, and the theory why some of those societies had them and others didn't.
The point where it gets ridiculous for me is when a "diversity trainer" at work claims that being addressed by the correct pronouns is a universal human need. There is so much to be said about that statement, starting with there being more Mandarin native speakers than English, and the former does not have pronouns in the same way at all, I'm told - and certainly not gendered ones.
This is so interesting! I imagine a trans person who received surgery would push back by saying they’ve always been uncomfortable with their specific body parts, not just gender stereotypes and gender roles. (But of course it’s hard to disentangle those feelings from wishing you could be treated as male or female…. Not to mention that a lot of cis people hate puberty and hate parts or their body.)
They would also likely say that we’re the first culture to accept trans people, and that every other culture (past and present) has trans people who are afraid to come out. But even if that’s true, it makes me wonder if the current solution we sell people leads to more happiness than a world where everyone accepted that you can’t change your body’s sex characteristics. There are obviously complications and unpleasant side effects for a lot of people, although as medicine advances those may be reduced.
This is now the second time I've read this article. The context provided here is simply intuitive, in contrast to all other discussion about this topic, which in one way or another has been found wanting for perspective, curiosity or intellectual honesty. As much as people, even some I admire, want to downplay the significance of this topic, or to reductively explain it away as just being "culture war fodder", I think this is one of the biggest stories of our time, and I don't feel that anybody in the conversation is quite asking the obvious questions. I thank you for your compassionate and well-researched take on Western society's thirdest of third rails.
I read this essay when it first landed in my inbox but I was eyebrows-deep in work at the time. I just want to say thanks for writing it. As a scholar with expertise in the social history of medicine, women, and gender, I agree with every word.
I'm at a loss how to stem the tide among my young-adult students. I do pose questions about the dogma, and I'm intent on doing so in a way that conveys my love for my many gender non-conforming students. But by the time students land in my classroom, they're thoroughly marinated in ideas about gender that kids propagate to other kids on Tumblr, Insta infographics, and now TikTok. Many of the trans-identifying young people have already medicalized.
Even the brightest of my students will parrot things like "trans women have periods" and "there are six sexes." The latter statement came from one of my own kids; we had a talk about what that Y chromosome does, or more precisely the SRY gene, in people with atypical configurations of X and Y. But my kid knows I've been standing up for gender-atypical people since before he was born. Questioning the current dogma in the classroom risks my livelihood, yet I'm doing it as much as I can without so alienating students that they tune me out or get me fired.
I've been caught in a crisis of conscience for five years now and I feel powerless to stop the onrushing train. Twenty years ago, hardly any feminist scholar envisioned that contesting the rigidity of binary gender norms would result in the mass medicalization of children. Why have so many of us gone along with it? Certainly a big piece of the explanation is careerism for those whose research is congenial to the dogma. Possibly an even bigger piece is that anyone who raises questions would immediately branded a transphobe or TERF, pilloried in public, ostracized, and quite likely fired or hounded out of their positions. It's hard to know what proportion of feminist scholars fall into each camp because almost everyone in the latter group is terrified.
If I thought speaking very bluntly in public would save a single young person from unnecessary medicalization, it would be worth getting fired. But instead, I'd be branded a TERF and my arguments immediately dismissed. It's an awful Catch-22. I have been speaking privately with some local mothers whose tween girls have identified as trans, and once publicly on FB with another local mother whose daughter was about to have top surgery. The latter conversation didn't make any difference. But conversations with mothers of younger kids have been helpful to them, I think.
My apologies for barging into an old thread. I just wanted to let you know that I deeply value this essay - as a scholar, mother, and human. Please keep writing about this topic. I'll keep pushing the envelope as best I can in my sphere. It's not nearly enough. It's also not nothing.
As an ex trans 'woman' I can attest to everything you describe here.
There is no gene that encodes for long hair, dresses, and pronouns, and it's absurd to live life believing that.
I medically and socially transitioned from male to female and lived that way for 4 years.
I'm grateful to have found truth, and found a way out of those destructive thought patterns.
This is the essay the western world needs to read. I tried writing it myself, as the shell-shocked (yes, I’m being figurative) mother of a suddenly trans- identifying teen daughter. I poured my four years of dogged research understanding, fused with my evidence-based commonsense worldview and topped it with a soupçon of first-person mother-daughter heartbreak, to produce 4,000 words of the most earnest, eloquent, and (I thought) persuasive essay yet written on this subject. And it’s apparently unpublishable because it betrays the fury that I just can’t edit out. You have written the piece that rises above it all, an eloquent distillation of the essential argument and nothing but: it is unassailable. Now, how do we get it read by the whole western world?
I haven’t read a more exceptional piece than this (and the follow up) on this topic until now. I love that you have written this and I bow down in utmost respect! Now if only the whole of western society would read it.
Thank you so much!!
I would like to compliment the participants on the quality of this conversation. It shows that people with differing views can still have a thoughtful and productive discussion. That is something we don't see much of any more.
My wife studied cultural anthropology and I could not get enough of the stories she relayed from her ethnomedicine lecture. But somehow I never viewed our own culture-specific illnesses this way. This is really eye-opening to me. Nobody talked about trans when I grew up but there were so many (mostly) girls haunted by bulimia and borderline personality disorder. Would those girls become trans-men today? Or would they develop pseudo-tourettes?
Thank you for this article... so interesting.
This article and the companion really resonate with me. It aligns with Lisa Marchiano's article - on transgender teens and psychic epidemics https://doi.org/10.1080/00332925.2017.1350804 but also explains so well the local and time-bound response to mental health challenges as 'culture bound syndromes. As an older lesbian and therefore somewhat gender non-conforming I can see precisely how as a child I would likely have leapt at the 'culture bound syndrome' now on offer even though it would have been a rough approximation to, rather than an accurate representation of,the specific 'not fitting in well with my peers' symptoms that I was noticing.
When I have heard the testimony of young detransitioners now on offer I think I am seeing exactly the same thing - initial gratitude for an explanation that, at least, partially fitted the discomfort - but which sooner or later turns out to have been a very poor explanation of it. When i found it the ability to sidestep what I had understood as the need to adherence to gender based stereotypes was a far better explanation
This is incredibly insightful and brilliantly written, thank you.
My admiration for the piece (thank you for writing and publishing it!) is much greater than my own expertise or handle on the statistics on the matter, but I’ll add my experience as a clinician that has seen a lot of these kids. Almost all of the ones I’ve seen have been girls ( perhaps simply because the disorder I treat manifests more often in girls) and every single one of them suffers from severe anxiety, and most from depression as well, and “neurodivergence”, which these days also is born like a badge of honor among the young, is a frequently diagnosed comorbidity. As a mother of a young woman I’m also familiar with the social pressure to be “non-binary”. To be “cis” is to be not cool.
What I’m working my way towards here is that my impression is that these aren’t even very gender non-confirming people in many cases, in terms of behavior, mannerisms, aesthetic and sexual preferences etc. I believe that in (probably a large percentage of the cases) “being trans” is simply the solution offered to young people that are (understandably, one might add, given the social and social media landscape they’re grazing in) feeling anxious and lost. An additional force may be the self-hatred young “white” people are taught to feel, and girls seem to be especially receptive to this. “Transitioning” to a minority group is a way of escaping the guilt and ostracism of belonging to the oppressor group.
I really appreciate the lens of cultural phenomena you bring to this. It reminds me of the Swedish phenomenon of Resignation Syndrome. I think it is one of the more powerful examples of the effect of cultural expectation and examples.
"Trans" is a two-generation enactment. Trans 'hides' a huge mental health crisis among young people today. The label 'fits' any kid who is dissociated, dysregulated, and self hating, by providing a "designated issue" that targets self hate to the sexed body, which at the same time exonerates bullies, abuse, or neglect of their role in the child's sorrow. Instead of a miserable child (which could be the parent's fault) you have a brave and stunning TG kid. It's a coverup.
The number of dissociated and self hating kids is rising because every generation is feebler at imparting *requisite* developmental experiences to babies and toddlers. This ability must urgently be re-imbued.
Parenting skills are learned when we see them modeled. Fewer and fewer of us have seen good modeling, as fewer are cared for by *parents* in this time span. The current cohort of parents is IMPAIRED in their skill set, and very poor in what used to be considered "common knowledge."
0-3 is the time when the building blocks of the stable self are built: emotional self-regulation, agency, internal locus of control. Kids who do not receive enough mirroring, external co regulation, and safe/secure attachment 0-3 are not able to build those 'adult' skills.
Teens recapitulate toddler developmental hurdles. Parents who relied on 'give a cookie' at 2 are not equipped to deal with the teen versions of these tantrums, grandiosity, and magical thinking.
I just discovered your blog through comments you made on Freddie deBoer. Reading this post, I presume you're aware of the culturallyboundgender wordpress blog? (Or are you even the same author?) I've always had a lot of respect for the post over there describing exactly how "third gender" worked in native american societies, and the theory why some of those societies had them and others didn't.
The point where it gets ridiculous for me is when a "diversity trainer" at work claims that being addressed by the correct pronouns is a universal human need. There is so much to be said about that statement, starting with there being more Mandarin native speakers than English, and the former does not have pronouns in the same way at all, I'm told - and certainly not gendered ones.
This was sensitively and beautifully written.
This is so interesting! I imagine a trans person who received surgery would push back by saying they’ve always been uncomfortable with their specific body parts, not just gender stereotypes and gender roles. (But of course it’s hard to disentangle those feelings from wishing you could be treated as male or female…. Not to mention that a lot of cis people hate puberty and hate parts or their body.)
They would also likely say that we’re the first culture to accept trans people, and that every other culture (past and present) has trans people who are afraid to come out. But even if that’s true, it makes me wonder if the current solution we sell people leads to more happiness than a world where everyone accepted that you can’t change your body’s sex characteristics. There are obviously complications and unpleasant side effects for a lot of people, although as medicine advances those may be reduced.
This is now the second time I've read this article. The context provided here is simply intuitive, in contrast to all other discussion about this topic, which in one way or another has been found wanting for perspective, curiosity or intellectual honesty. As much as people, even some I admire, want to downplay the significance of this topic, or to reductively explain it away as just being "culture war fodder", I think this is one of the biggest stories of our time, and I don't feel that anybody in the conversation is quite asking the obvious questions. I thank you for your compassionate and well-researched take on Western society's thirdest of third rails.
Making up terms/names other than trans + woman/man would help.
Excellent article. I came to the same conclusions as you did but I had to write similar arguments in a much more complicated manner: https://kirino.substack.com/p/the-transgender-mirage?s=w
I think I should write an article about how the specific type of autogynephilia induced-gender dysphoria is something we made up.