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.
Thank you for these thoughtful comments, Patty! You’re not barging at all! I appreciate your thoughts at any time—whether the thread is new or old.
I agree with everything you’ve said. It’s true that kids tend to be thoroughly indoctrinated early— and part of their developmental task is to separate from us old folks, and so they’re not predisposed to listen to the “wisdom” of middle-agers.
Yet it’s important to try to dialog with them, especially if they are making irreversible medical decisions — if and when we think we can have an effect. And we’re both doing what we can, right? That matters.
I relate to what you said about putting one’s livelihood at risk. Everyone needs to be so circumspect to avoid running afoul of their employers.
The other problem is: if the cultural consensus is that anyone who disagrees with the current ideology is a bigot or an out-of-touch dinosaur, no one listens even if you boldly speak out, right? And the only point of speaking out is to have the opportunity to be heard and to have an effect.
So it’s tricky.
Like you, I’ve spoken privately to some families I know. Sometimes it has a beneficial effect, but sometimes the parents are steeped in the new gender ideology and wear their “affirmation” like a badge of pride, as if it’s proof of what loving parents they are. They are loving parents, but they’ve accepted a monstrous ideology that something is so wrong with their child that they’re willing for him or her to radically change.
I will definitely keep writing about this. It’s the most harmful thing happening to vulnerable kids right now in our culture. The main thing I want people to know, though, is already in this post. If trans is something we made up, it changes everything about how we respond (for the better). We need people to see that, clearly. We made this up. Every medicalized child is someone we medically harmed on the basis of a cultural narrative. A story. It’s so painful to watch.
Two different problems are involved in your situation. One is the trans-mania. The other is, to adopt the trendy term, “cancel culture,” the insistence that questioning certain claims, particularly concerning “identity,” is grounds for ostracism.
Both require bravery and risk-taking to tackle head-on. Perhaps you are correct that your nibbling around the edges, as it were, is the most effective tactic at this point. But if you’ll forgive the presumption, could there be an element of rationalization in your calculations? Are you sure that boldness would be ineffective? That your message would be lost and that you couldn’t save a single young person from unnecessary medicalization, to use your terms?
I’d like to think I’m just being prudent and strategic when I hold my tongue about this and other topics. But I have to admit to myself that cowardice is more accurate.
Thanks for sharing your experience, Ryan. I hope you are feeling good about life now. A lot of people who transition don’t seem to find the happiness, fulfillment, and authenticity they’re looking for, which is what made me first want to take a closer look at what’s happening.
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?
Thank you for the generous comments, Jen. I'm so sorry to hear you've been struggling with this in your own family. The messages parents get from the mainstream -- that the only appropriate response is affirmation and life-long medical treatments for their physically healthy child -- can be overwhelming and crazy-making, when it doesn't match what you know is true, on a gut-level, about your family's situation.
There's currently no room to have conversations or to disagree with the dominant cultural narrative. I have so much respect and admiration for the parents who want to ask questions, who want dialog and answers, who don't immediately "go along" with the current mainstream practices -- which are going to be looked back on with horror. Whether or not parents like yourself succeed in protecting your own children from medical harm, at least you will know you tried, and didn't just go along with it.
I understand how hard it is to write about these topics and keep our own emotion out of it. My view is that kids are being harmed -- and it's hard sometimes to keep a neutral tone about it. I imagine if it's your own child being harmed, it's got to be orders of magnitude more difficult to edit out your emotion.
I wish you all the best. I'll keep writing substack posts, including semi-regular posts on sex and gender, because this is a topic I care very deeply about. Hopefully the tide is going to turn to more open inquiry and discussion of what it could possibly mean to "be" trans, and that will give us all some space to talk about policy, and how what our culture is doing now just doesn't make sense.
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 so much for your comments, Tilman. I remember the first time I considered culture-specific illnesses in our own culture -- it truly blew my mind. It's one of those things (for me) which, once I saw it, my perspective on a lot of phenomena shifted. I started to see a lot of cultural influences and couldn't un-see them.
This is something I'm going to look into more (when I have time, to look at the literature I mean) but I really think you're onto something re bulimia and borderline personality disorder. There are so many anecdotes about people with both eating disorders + trans identity, and both borderline personality + trans identity. I very much believe there are links. There's also a lot of overlap with kids on the "autism spectrum" and kids who develop a trans identity too -- and of course that's complicated too, because what we now consider "on the spectrum" compared to what was considered "autism" in the 1970s (say) are very different. "The ASD spectrum" has undergone some changes similar to "PTSD" and in that sense, it's something we made up, too (I think). Of course there are (I think) some underlying physical causes to what we used to consider old-school "autism." But what we label ASD now is a cultural construct.
If you happened to look at the other post about TikTok tics (I'm thinking you did since you bring up pseudo-Tourette's), maybe you saw that one of the researchers informally told me that there's a lot of overlap between kids who develop pseudo-Tourette's and trans identities.
So...the way I think about this (or anything) is still evolving of course, but I see two macro-groups of young people who develop trans identities.
One are the extremely gender-nonconforming kids many of whom in earlier times would have just grown up gay or lesbian (not all, but many), and a very few of whom in earlier times would be so distressed by not being the opposite sex that they would wish to transition. Now, a lot of those gender-nonconforming kids are swept up in our current gender mania and pushed toward transition by well-meaning parents, teachers, peers, and social media. Little Aidan likes sparkly things and long hair -- well, maybe he should explore whether he'd rather be a girl! (And little Aidan, not knowing such a thing is impossible, not knowing such a thing involves life-long health-compromising "treatments" eagerly goes along with it -- being a girl sounds good to him.)
The other macro-group are more like the kids described in the TikTok tic post: the kids who for whatever reason "just don't fit in" (e.g., kids on the "ASD spectrum"; or kids who struggle with social skills); or the kids who for whatever reason hate their current bodies (e.g., kids who've experienced sexual abuse); or kids who struggle establishing a stable identity (this could be true of any kid with a typically tumultuous adolescence, but is an especially difficult lifelong struggle with those with borderline personality disorder).
All these categories of kids are vulnerable to whatever the current idiom of distress is: It could be multiple personalities (which also, by the way, seems to be "coming back" via TikTok); pseudo-Tourette's; "recovered memories" of ritual abuse; eating disorders; or now, a trans identity.
Vulnerable kids who are looking for simple solutions to their complex problems will always be with us: and a new "solution" is likely to be forever coming down the pike. In the case of transition, the "solution" is especially pernicious.
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.
Wow Elba. I’m speechless. Thanks for these kind words. I care so deeply about this issue. It seems like our entire society is participating in hurting kids, and yet they are well-intentioned and don’t see what they’re doing. I would do anything to promote a wider, loving, evidence-based public conversation on this issue. Thank you for coming by and thanks for your support for these precious folks’ well-being.
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.
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
Thank you for those comments and the link -- that's an amazing article!
You can see why people in distress would really find relief in a potential "explanation" -- even if the explanation later turns out to be wrong.
Thanks for sharing your experiences too -- you have so much of value to share, and I hope you will! I think a lot of people who grew up before this was "a thing" can envision themselves, if they were growing up now, latching onto this as an explanation or solution. People who are a bit older, who grew up before this was a cultural phenomenon, often say they feel they dodged a bullet.
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.
Thank you, Völva, for these really important and valuable comments! I hope everyone who reads this article reads your comments as well.
(Also, I will have to look up Resignation Syndrome after this.)
Yes! I agree so much with what you’ve said and observed!
So the way our culture treats (truly) gender nonconforming people, and the way our culture thinks about what that means, formed the whole “wrong body, transition or die” narrative we’re all familiar with.
However, once that became entrenched, and “being trans” became a common idiom of distress in our culture, many, many (!) other people adopted that idiom of distress as well.
That’s the aspect of “social contagion” we’ve heard about from Lisa Littmann and an increasing number of clinicians (especially in places like Sweden and Finland) and parents. It’s become a catch-all self-diagnosis for every quirky or unhappy kid, or every kid who doesn’t want to be a basic, boring, oppressive straight “cis” kid. Who wants to be the oppressor? No one.
And yes, kids struggling with anxiety, depression, “neurodivergence” — or just the stresses of puberty, because that’s never been an easy time, developmentally — are all drawn in, sort of in a “second wave” after our earlier cultural treatment of gender-nonconforming kids established the diagnosis and the ground rules and the narrative.
In fact — not to send people to yet another article, but if anyone is interested in the social contagion aspect of this, which is certainly an important piece of the story, I’ll provide the link — I wrote a little about this topic in “TikTok Tics and Mass Sociogenic Illness.” https://bprice.substack.com/p/tiktok-tics-and-mass-sociogenic-illness
Thank you for supplying the link to yet another fantastic article, another absolute delight. I’m very grateful that in todays world, that sometimes seems inhabited by intellectual zombies marching in lockstep towards a cliff, there are still intellectuals such as yourself who demonstrate both originality of thought and courage of heart! I look forward to more of your writing!
"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 agree with you that all sorts of unhappy / dyregulated kids are currently put in the “trans bucket.”
I agree with you that parenting skills are lacking -- even more critically (perhaps?) parents have no faith in themselves. If they have a kid with emotional problems, and the kid self-diagnoses as “trans” and every institution -- the schools, the medical community, the mental health community -- are saying “yes you must trans your kid or your kid will kill themselves,” very, very few parents are willing to stand up to that pressure, to stand up for what they know is right, and say “no, this gender stuff is not my child’s problem. She needs help for her actual mental health problems.”
Almost none. People will medically harm their kids because they don’t have the confidence not to. They are too afraid of social disapproval, so they won’t protect their own children. What instincts do we as parents have, if not to protect our own children? If society can talk us out of that, they can talk us out of anything. That’s alarming.
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.
Hi! Thanks for mentioning that Wordpress blog. So I haven’t heard of it ( and am not the author!) but am very interest to go check it out later!
Diversity trainers say a lot of strange things don’t they!?! I didn’t know about Mandarin but that’s a great point. I’ve heard of some other languages (and I forget which now) which handle gender differently.
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.
Thank you for these generous comments, Exhausted Majority. I wish we could nudge the trans conversation in this direction, because once a person perceives this as a cultural creation, the question of “what to do about distressed kids” yields very different (and probably healthier) answers.
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.
Hi Carina! I really appreciate that you stopped by, took the time to read an incredibly long post, and added your thoughts here! I've enjoyed reading your comments on Freddie's substack, too.
To me, the fa'afafine example is so compelling precisely because it's an example of a culture where no one is "afraid to come out" -- they just live their lives, are accepted, and don't have this distress about their bodies. Ours is not the first culture to "accept" trans people -- but indeed, what "are" "trans people" other than this cultural expression that we've all mutually created with its narrative of wrongness and despair which we can "fix"?
I see a lot of parallels with other types of cosmetic surgery but that's maybe a convo for another day. Even friends who insist they're getting the boob job "for themselves" seem (to me) to be dissatisfied because our culture has taught them to be dissatisfied -- not because there is anything wrong with their aging or post-breastfeeding breasts.
And even that term, you see --"coming out" -- is borrowed from the paradigm of sexual orientation, when in fact people's gender expression is not tied to their sex, unless they make it so. It makes sense that we have an idea about "coming out" in the context of a behavior that to most people is unseen (who they have sex with). In the 1950s, if same-sex attraction was shameful, your confirmed-bachelor uncle would simply have to put up with being set up on blind dates year after year. In a context where it becomes acceptable to have same-sex partners, there can be such a thing as "coming out to" your family, to let them know that you have no interest in the partners they're setting you up with.
With gender nonconformity, there's really nothing that needs to "come out" -- the boy who likes to play with dolls simply "is how he is" and everyone who knows him sees that and knows it. They either give him dolls, and let him have a good time, or they try to make him into a boy who likes trucks. I think the latter is more likely to create the sort of unhappy child who tries to give the adults what they want and harbors a wish that he'd really been born a girl so he could play with dolls in peace.
There's so much more I could say but...well, the comment might be longer than the original post, and that's saying something.
I really appreciate the opportunity for discussion with you!
I have three sons and it only recently occurred to me that the eldest two (age 13 and 9) are “gender non conforming” because they both have very long hair. My 9yo is also very loving and maternal/paternal toward babies. That being said, we’re very clear that whatever and whoever they like is cool.
So far it seems like the only way they’re nonconforming is what I just mentioned; they are both very attached to their hair, however, and I can imagine it being outrageously distressing if we forced them to cut it. Especially when you’re a kid going through essential personality forming psychological stages, I can see how something like forced hair cutting would be outsized traumatic and confusing.
Yes, I think you’re right—it could be. And especially if along with the forced hair cutting kids got the message that they were displeasing or disappointing their family by not being “masculine” enough.
What’s interesting, too, is in the earlier form of this — the 20th century version — it was only _extreme_ outliers, boys who were _extremely_ feminine (and usually not girls, because we provided an acceptable cultural niche for “tomboys”) who insisted they really wanted to be the opposite sex.
The older way we handled it, before “affirming” (and transitioning children), was “watchful waiting.” Basically, we left them alone as much as possible to develop naturally, and advised parents to be loving and supportive. And the vast majority of these boys decided they were happy in their skin by the end of adolescence. Only a very few still insisted they wished they were girls by the end of adolescence, and almost all of those boys became effeminate men who were very unhappy / nonaccepting of themselves.
The demographics of who becomes “trans kids” now are much different, and it’s not too big of a stretch these days to imagine boys whose gender nonconformity lies only in long hair and being nurturing being caught up in it. Any sign that kids are not GI Joe or Barbie, and some well-meaning person will ask for their pronouns and suggest they might be trans.
When you consider how damaging it is for kids to hate their body and their identity (not to mention being permanently medicalized), if I had young kids now, I’d personally be indoctrinating them (“indoctrinating” I hope in a healthy way) that our bodies just are how they are, and our personalities are how they are, and it’s all good. I’d be teaching them to love themselves as they are, and taking every opportunity to dialogue (gently) and get them to question and think critically about the things that all young kids are taught now in school and in media about “gender identity.”
My 13yo has in the past, before puberty began to be a factor, been referred to as she and her in public places, to which he would calmly and unaffectedly reply "I'm a boy." It never seemed to bother him that he was misidentified, and I'm thinking it's because as a family we never attached any rightness or wrongness to a certain way of being. This year (8th grade) he has two "trans" friends (one M to F and one F to M) and it doesn't seem like there's any kind of big deal to it. I have no clue if there's any medical interventions involved, but in my view, I think it's great to let kids explore different ways of presenting themselves, however feels comfortable and good, as long as it's not hurting anyone. The medical aspects are what really give me pause, because there seems to be a lot of evidence that it's a very very small percentage of kids who remain dysmorphic through puberty and into adulthood. (And if they do, cool! Let's get them humane and respectful care!)
I agree humane and respectful care is good (of course)! And I don't think it makes sense to _stop_ adults from choosing cosmetic procedures, or to ban them. But I have wondered whether gender surgeries are humane or respectful. After thinking a lot about it, I think not. I know that’s not a popular belief. (I also believe it's unethical for a surgeon to perform _any_ cosmetic surgeries without a medical benefit, so at least I'm consistent in my unpopular belief, haha.)
There's little-to-no evidence that transgender surgeries make people "happier" (indeed, that's why Johns Hopkins stopped doing the surgeries in the late 1970s -- but it seems they and a lot of other places have forgotten this).
Really, it's not a big surprise that people who experience this level of emotional distress and who hate their bodies this much -- whatever the underlying reason -- often continue to suffer enormous emotional distress and to hate their bodies after the surgeries, especially when you consider the high rate of complications, surgical failures, chronic pain, and the unavoidable fact that you really haven't made a very good simulation of what the person believed they wanted. It’s never the case that "I have a vagina now, and now I can have the sorts of partners and sexual experiences I wanted." Christine Jorgensen discovered that in the 1950s and it's been true ever since.
It’s sometimes the case that the person is glad to have had the surgery, overall. But I’ve never heard of it living up to people’s expectations or making them really happy if they weren’t already a happy person.
If you were already happy, you wouldn’t need the surgery. If you weren’t already happy, you won’t become happy after surgery. You haven't solved your emotional problem. These surgeries are a dead end.
But there are plenty of cosmetic surgeons out there who disagree with me. It's so baked into our culture, the beliefs that cosmetic surgeries are a personal choice, that they're no big deal, and that they improve people's lives (even though a certain small percentage of the patients _die_ ). I doubt in our lifetimes we'll ever find that our culture looks at cosmetic procedures as anything other than a valid personal choice.
And I also agree with you it's great to let kids explore different ways of presenting themselves! Indeed, I started out thinking that kids calling themselves "trans" was no big deal (let the young have their exploration, the same way we did!) but again: the problem is the cultural context of the pronouns and the trans declarations. The entire culture turns on a dime and starts behaving as if this stuff were a literal truth about the kid, instead of just exploration.
So I find myself worrying a bit about your son’s 8th grade "trans" friends -- and it could be because my own kids are older (late teens to mid 20s) and so I've seen this scenario played out. A portion of these kids will end up with orchiectomies or mastectomies. A portion will be sterilized before they knew whether they wanted kids someday. A portion will have permanent reminders in the form of hair loss, scars, deepened voices, facial hair. And a portion will regret all of it, and have a long road of emotional and physical recovery ahead of them.
Often today, what starts on the kid's part as playful exploration becomes in this cultural context a well-worn and predictable pathway to irreversible medical harm. Not for every single kid of course, but for some. Not every kid who shoots heroin becomes a junkie, either, but parents wouldn't consider shooting heroin a benign form of youthful exploration.
Gender exploration is not benign, because our culture has medicalized it. We didn’t see that with earlier generations’ form of exploration. Adults in earlier generations stood back and let kids experiment with being a hippie, punk, devil-worshipper, goth, vampire, emo, whatever, until they figured out their identity for themselves (and usually abandoned whatever identity their generation used for this purpose). How many 75-year-old hippies are still around? How many 60-year-old punks? And none of it was irreversible.
That's why I'm not in favor of sitting back and letting kids play around with gender. In this case, too much is at stake and I'm in favor of gently grounding kids in reality. If a kid, for instance, were grounded in reality: “I’m a boy who loves to wear makeup and hang around with girls” then I would say yes, wear all the makeup you want. Hang out with anyone you like.
But pronouns, no; calling yourself the opposite sex, no. As a parent, that is where I (personally) would draw the line.
And I come back to the "cultural creation" of it all. Other cultures don't need the pronoun changes "to be happy." Other cultures' gender nonconforming people don't need other people to call them the opposite sex or believe them to be the opposite sex. Other cultures don't need to offer sterilization and surgeries "to be happy." These are not things that anyone needs in order to be happy, whole, or genuine. These are things we invented, and they hurt more than they help.
Every time I see a well-meaning mother frantically correct someone's "misgendering" of her child, I die a little bit inside. This parent is doing what she believes in her heart to be something right and good. Yet from where I sit, I see it as very damaging. It's like watching someone slap their kid in the face, when they think they’re doing something good.
Yes, I'm in total agreement that the medicalization is a major, major problem. I'm thinking of Jazz Jennings, who since her gender reassignment surgery has had terrible surgical side effects, has admitted to massive depression, and has gained a HUGE amount of weight. She says she doesn't regret having the surgery; but if she hadn't had the surgery...how would she be? I admit I'm only tangentially aware of her, but from the general stuff I've seen about her, she seemed to be a happy, healthy kid BEFORE surgery.
It's really interesting because I see in your philosphy echoes of Judith Butler's theory that gender is a performance (which I'm pretty sure I mostly agree with) which is why it is so heavily influenced by culture, and also the power of language in defining gender. The pronouns changing doesn't bother me, because unlike Butler, I simply don't believe that saying something makes it so. The belief that saying something makes it so is what is leading to the medicalization of gender, because physicality and biology are now controlled by thoughts and words, not the other way around.
I don't know my son's friends well, but one of the two has adopted a gender-neutral name. I'm not sure of either of their pronouns. But I think for "trans" kids, in particular, they/them might be an elegant solution that allows the exploration without the literalism.
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.
Thank you for these thoughtful comments, Patty! You’re not barging at all! I appreciate your thoughts at any time—whether the thread is new or old.
I agree with everything you’ve said. It’s true that kids tend to be thoroughly indoctrinated early— and part of their developmental task is to separate from us old folks, and so they’re not predisposed to listen to the “wisdom” of middle-agers.
Yet it’s important to try to dialog with them, especially if they are making irreversible medical decisions — if and when we think we can have an effect. And we’re both doing what we can, right? That matters.
I relate to what you said about putting one’s livelihood at risk. Everyone needs to be so circumspect to avoid running afoul of their employers.
The other problem is: if the cultural consensus is that anyone who disagrees with the current ideology is a bigot or an out-of-touch dinosaur, no one listens even if you boldly speak out, right? And the only point of speaking out is to have the opportunity to be heard and to have an effect.
So it’s tricky.
Like you, I’ve spoken privately to some families I know. Sometimes it has a beneficial effect, but sometimes the parents are steeped in the new gender ideology and wear their “affirmation” like a badge of pride, as if it’s proof of what loving parents they are. They are loving parents, but they’ve accepted a monstrous ideology that something is so wrong with their child that they’re willing for him or her to radically change.
I will definitely keep writing about this. It’s the most harmful thing happening to vulnerable kids right now in our culture. The main thing I want people to know, though, is already in this post. If trans is something we made up, it changes everything about how we respond (for the better). We need people to see that, clearly. We made this up. Every medicalized child is someone we medically harmed on the basis of a cultural narrative. A story. It’s so painful to watch.
Two different problems are involved in your situation. One is the trans-mania. The other is, to adopt the trendy term, “cancel culture,” the insistence that questioning certain claims, particularly concerning “identity,” is grounds for ostracism.
Both require bravery and risk-taking to tackle head-on. Perhaps you are correct that your nibbling around the edges, as it were, is the most effective tactic at this point. But if you’ll forgive the presumption, could there be an element of rationalization in your calculations? Are you sure that boldness would be ineffective? That your message would be lost and that you couldn’t save a single young person from unnecessary medicalization, to use your terms?
I’d like to think I’m just being prudent and strategic when I hold my tongue about this and other topics. But I have to admit to myself that cowardice is more accurate.
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.
Thanks for sharing your experience, Ryan. I hope you are feeling good about life now. A lot of people who transition don’t seem to find the happiness, fulfillment, and authenticity they’re looking for, which is what made me first want to take a closer look at what’s happening.
Everyone deserves a good life.
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?
Thank you for the generous comments, Jen. I'm so sorry to hear you've been struggling with this in your own family. The messages parents get from the mainstream -- that the only appropriate response is affirmation and life-long medical treatments for their physically healthy child -- can be overwhelming and crazy-making, when it doesn't match what you know is true, on a gut-level, about your family's situation.
There's currently no room to have conversations or to disagree with the dominant cultural narrative. I have so much respect and admiration for the parents who want to ask questions, who want dialog and answers, who don't immediately "go along" with the current mainstream practices -- which are going to be looked back on with horror. Whether or not parents like yourself succeed in protecting your own children from medical harm, at least you will know you tried, and didn't just go along with it.
I understand how hard it is to write about these topics and keep our own emotion out of it. My view is that kids are being harmed -- and it's hard sometimes to keep a neutral tone about it. I imagine if it's your own child being harmed, it's got to be orders of magnitude more difficult to edit out your emotion.
I wish you all the best. I'll keep writing substack posts, including semi-regular posts on sex and gender, because this is a topic I care very deeply about. Hopefully the tide is going to turn to more open inquiry and discussion of what it could possibly mean to "be" trans, and that will give us all some space to talk about policy, and how what our culture is doing now just doesn't make sense.
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.
Thank you so much for your comments, Tilman. I remember the first time I considered culture-specific illnesses in our own culture -- it truly blew my mind. It's one of those things (for me) which, once I saw it, my perspective on a lot of phenomena shifted. I started to see a lot of cultural influences and couldn't un-see them.
This is something I'm going to look into more (when I have time, to look at the literature I mean) but I really think you're onto something re bulimia and borderline personality disorder. There are so many anecdotes about people with both eating disorders + trans identity, and both borderline personality + trans identity. I very much believe there are links. There's also a lot of overlap with kids on the "autism spectrum" and kids who develop a trans identity too -- and of course that's complicated too, because what we now consider "on the spectrum" compared to what was considered "autism" in the 1970s (say) are very different. "The ASD spectrum" has undergone some changes similar to "PTSD" and in that sense, it's something we made up, too (I think). Of course there are (I think) some underlying physical causes to what we used to consider old-school "autism." But what we label ASD now is a cultural construct.
If you happened to look at the other post about TikTok tics (I'm thinking you did since you bring up pseudo-Tourette's), maybe you saw that one of the researchers informally told me that there's a lot of overlap between kids who develop pseudo-Tourette's and trans identities.
So...the way I think about this (or anything) is still evolving of course, but I see two macro-groups of young people who develop trans identities.
One are the extremely gender-nonconforming kids many of whom in earlier times would have just grown up gay or lesbian (not all, but many), and a very few of whom in earlier times would be so distressed by not being the opposite sex that they would wish to transition. Now, a lot of those gender-nonconforming kids are swept up in our current gender mania and pushed toward transition by well-meaning parents, teachers, peers, and social media. Little Aidan likes sparkly things and long hair -- well, maybe he should explore whether he'd rather be a girl! (And little Aidan, not knowing such a thing is impossible, not knowing such a thing involves life-long health-compromising "treatments" eagerly goes along with it -- being a girl sounds good to him.)
The other macro-group are more like the kids described in the TikTok tic post: the kids who for whatever reason "just don't fit in" (e.g., kids on the "ASD spectrum"; or kids who struggle with social skills); or the kids who for whatever reason hate their current bodies (e.g., kids who've experienced sexual abuse); or kids who struggle establishing a stable identity (this could be true of any kid with a typically tumultuous adolescence, but is an especially difficult lifelong struggle with those with borderline personality disorder).
All these categories of kids are vulnerable to whatever the current idiom of distress is: It could be multiple personalities (which also, by the way, seems to be "coming back" via TikTok); pseudo-Tourette's; "recovered memories" of ritual abuse; eating disorders; or now, a trans identity.
Vulnerable kids who are looking for simple solutions to their complex problems will always be with us: and a new "solution" is likely to be forever coming down the pike. In the case of transition, the "solution" is especially pernicious.
BPD is so closely associated with being trans that somebody saw fit to publish this dereliction of duty: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31490187/
Omg! How can they not see it when they even wrote this study on it?!
It's astonishing, isn't it?
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!!
Wow Elba. I’m speechless. Thanks for these kind words. I care so deeply about this issue. It seems like our entire society is participating in hurting kids, and yet they are well-intentioned and don’t see what they’re doing. I would do anything to promote a wider, loving, evidence-based public conversation on this issue. Thank you for coming by and thanks for your support for these precious folks’ well-being.
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.
Heyjude, I value and welcome this conversation very much.
I'm just dropping by to say that this was a very well-written take on the subject. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you CG! I appreciate you taking the time to read and comment.
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
Thank you for those comments and the link -- that's an amazing article!
You can see why people in distress would really find relief in a potential "explanation" -- even if the explanation later turns out to be wrong.
Thanks for sharing your experiences too -- you have so much of value to share, and I hope you will! I think a lot of people who grew up before this was "a thing" can envision themselves, if they were growing up now, latching onto this as an explanation or solution. People who are a bit older, who grew up before this was a cultural phenomenon, often say they feel they dodged a bullet.
This is incredibly insightful and brilliantly written, thank you.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read and comment, Mark.
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.
Thank you, Völva, for these really important and valuable comments! I hope everyone who reads this article reads your comments as well.
(Also, I will have to look up Resignation Syndrome after this.)
Yes! I agree so much with what you’ve said and observed!
So the way our culture treats (truly) gender nonconforming people, and the way our culture thinks about what that means, formed the whole “wrong body, transition or die” narrative we’re all familiar with.
However, once that became entrenched, and “being trans” became a common idiom of distress in our culture, many, many (!) other people adopted that idiom of distress as well.
That’s the aspect of “social contagion” we’ve heard about from Lisa Littmann and an increasing number of clinicians (especially in places like Sweden and Finland) and parents. It’s become a catch-all self-diagnosis for every quirky or unhappy kid, or every kid who doesn’t want to be a basic, boring, oppressive straight “cis” kid. Who wants to be the oppressor? No one.
And yes, kids struggling with anxiety, depression, “neurodivergence” — or just the stresses of puberty, because that’s never been an easy time, developmentally — are all drawn in, sort of in a “second wave” after our earlier cultural treatment of gender-nonconforming kids established the diagnosis and the ground rules and the narrative.
In fact — not to send people to yet another article, but if anyone is interested in the social contagion aspect of this, which is certainly an important piece of the story, I’ll provide the link — I wrote a little about this topic in “TikTok Tics and Mass Sociogenic Illness.” https://bprice.substack.com/p/tiktok-tics-and-mass-sociogenic-illness
Thank you again for your wonderful input!
Thank you for supplying the link to yet another fantastic article, another absolute delight. I’m very grateful that in todays world, that sometimes seems inhabited by intellectual zombies marching in lockstep towards a cliff, there are still intellectuals such as yourself who demonstrate both originality of thought and courage of heart! I look forward to more of your writing!
Thank you so much Völva for your kind remarks. I’m blushing. I’m so glad to have you here!
"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 agree with you that all sorts of unhappy / dyregulated kids are currently put in the “trans bucket.”
I agree with you that parenting skills are lacking -- even more critically (perhaps?) parents have no faith in themselves. If they have a kid with emotional problems, and the kid self-diagnoses as “trans” and every institution -- the schools, the medical community, the mental health community -- are saying “yes you must trans your kid or your kid will kill themselves,” very, very few parents are willing to stand up to that pressure, to stand up for what they know is right, and say “no, this gender stuff is not my child’s problem. She needs help for her actual mental health problems.”
Almost none. People will medically harm their kids because they don’t have the confidence not to. They are too afraid of social disapproval, so they won’t protect their own children. What instincts do we as parents have, if not to protect our own children? If society can talk us out of that, they can talk us out of anything. That’s alarming.
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.
Hi! Thanks for mentioning that Wordpress blog. So I haven’t heard of it ( and am not the author!) but am very interest to go check it out later!
Diversity trainers say a lot of strange things don’t they!?! I didn’t know about Mandarin but that’s a great point. I’ve heard of some other languages (and I forget which now) which handle gender differently.
I’m so glad you’re here! Welcome.
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.
Thank you for these generous comments, Exhausted Majority. I wish we could nudge the trans conversation in this direction, because once a person perceives this as a cultural creation, the question of “what to do about distressed kids” yields very different (and probably healthier) answers.
This was sensitively and beautifully written.
Thank you so very much, Erin.
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.
Hi Carina! I really appreciate that you stopped by, took the time to read an incredibly long post, and added your thoughts here! I've enjoyed reading your comments on Freddie's substack, too.
To me, the fa'afafine example is so compelling precisely because it's an example of a culture where no one is "afraid to come out" -- they just live their lives, are accepted, and don't have this distress about their bodies. Ours is not the first culture to "accept" trans people -- but indeed, what "are" "trans people" other than this cultural expression that we've all mutually created with its narrative of wrongness and despair which we can "fix"?
I see a lot of parallels with other types of cosmetic surgery but that's maybe a convo for another day. Even friends who insist they're getting the boob job "for themselves" seem (to me) to be dissatisfied because our culture has taught them to be dissatisfied -- not because there is anything wrong with their aging or post-breastfeeding breasts.
And even that term, you see --"coming out" -- is borrowed from the paradigm of sexual orientation, when in fact people's gender expression is not tied to their sex, unless they make it so. It makes sense that we have an idea about "coming out" in the context of a behavior that to most people is unseen (who they have sex with). In the 1950s, if same-sex attraction was shameful, your confirmed-bachelor uncle would simply have to put up with being set up on blind dates year after year. In a context where it becomes acceptable to have same-sex partners, there can be such a thing as "coming out to" your family, to let them know that you have no interest in the partners they're setting you up with.
With gender nonconformity, there's really nothing that needs to "come out" -- the boy who likes to play with dolls simply "is how he is" and everyone who knows him sees that and knows it. They either give him dolls, and let him have a good time, or they try to make him into a boy who likes trucks. I think the latter is more likely to create the sort of unhappy child who tries to give the adults what they want and harbors a wish that he'd really been born a girl so he could play with dolls in peace.
There's so much more I could say but...well, the comment might be longer than the original post, and that's saying something.
I really appreciate the opportunity for discussion with you!
I have three sons and it only recently occurred to me that the eldest two (age 13 and 9) are “gender non conforming” because they both have very long hair. My 9yo is also very loving and maternal/paternal toward babies. That being said, we’re very clear that whatever and whoever they like is cool.
So far it seems like the only way they’re nonconforming is what I just mentioned; they are both very attached to their hair, however, and I can imagine it being outrageously distressing if we forced them to cut it. Especially when you’re a kid going through essential personality forming psychological stages, I can see how something like forced hair cutting would be outsized traumatic and confusing.
Yes, I think you’re right—it could be. And especially if along with the forced hair cutting kids got the message that they were displeasing or disappointing their family by not being “masculine” enough.
What’s interesting, too, is in the earlier form of this — the 20th century version — it was only _extreme_ outliers, boys who were _extremely_ feminine (and usually not girls, because we provided an acceptable cultural niche for “tomboys”) who insisted they really wanted to be the opposite sex.
The older way we handled it, before “affirming” (and transitioning children), was “watchful waiting.” Basically, we left them alone as much as possible to develop naturally, and advised parents to be loving and supportive. And the vast majority of these boys decided they were happy in their skin by the end of adolescence. Only a very few still insisted they wished they were girls by the end of adolescence, and almost all of those boys became effeminate men who were very unhappy / nonaccepting of themselves.
The demographics of who becomes “trans kids” now are much different, and it’s not too big of a stretch these days to imagine boys whose gender nonconformity lies only in long hair and being nurturing being caught up in it. Any sign that kids are not GI Joe or Barbie, and some well-meaning person will ask for their pronouns and suggest they might be trans.
When you consider how damaging it is for kids to hate their body and their identity (not to mention being permanently medicalized), if I had young kids now, I’d personally be indoctrinating them (“indoctrinating” I hope in a healthy way) that our bodies just are how they are, and our personalities are how they are, and it’s all good. I’d be teaching them to love themselves as they are, and taking every opportunity to dialogue (gently) and get them to question and think critically about the things that all young kids are taught now in school and in media about “gender identity.”
My 13yo has in the past, before puberty began to be a factor, been referred to as she and her in public places, to which he would calmly and unaffectedly reply "I'm a boy." It never seemed to bother him that he was misidentified, and I'm thinking it's because as a family we never attached any rightness or wrongness to a certain way of being. This year (8th grade) he has two "trans" friends (one M to F and one F to M) and it doesn't seem like there's any kind of big deal to it. I have no clue if there's any medical interventions involved, but in my view, I think it's great to let kids explore different ways of presenting themselves, however feels comfortable and good, as long as it's not hurting anyone. The medical aspects are what really give me pause, because there seems to be a lot of evidence that it's a very very small percentage of kids who remain dysmorphic through puberty and into adulthood. (And if they do, cool! Let's get them humane and respectful care!)
I agree humane and respectful care is good (of course)! And I don't think it makes sense to _stop_ adults from choosing cosmetic procedures, or to ban them. But I have wondered whether gender surgeries are humane or respectful. After thinking a lot about it, I think not. I know that’s not a popular belief. (I also believe it's unethical for a surgeon to perform _any_ cosmetic surgeries without a medical benefit, so at least I'm consistent in my unpopular belief, haha.)
There's little-to-no evidence that transgender surgeries make people "happier" (indeed, that's why Johns Hopkins stopped doing the surgeries in the late 1970s -- but it seems they and a lot of other places have forgotten this).
Really, it's not a big surprise that people who experience this level of emotional distress and who hate their bodies this much -- whatever the underlying reason -- often continue to suffer enormous emotional distress and to hate their bodies after the surgeries, especially when you consider the high rate of complications, surgical failures, chronic pain, and the unavoidable fact that you really haven't made a very good simulation of what the person believed they wanted. It’s never the case that "I have a vagina now, and now I can have the sorts of partners and sexual experiences I wanted." Christine Jorgensen discovered that in the 1950s and it's been true ever since.
It’s sometimes the case that the person is glad to have had the surgery, overall. But I’ve never heard of it living up to people’s expectations or making them really happy if they weren’t already a happy person.
If you were already happy, you wouldn’t need the surgery. If you weren’t already happy, you won’t become happy after surgery. You haven't solved your emotional problem. These surgeries are a dead end.
But there are plenty of cosmetic surgeons out there who disagree with me. It's so baked into our culture, the beliefs that cosmetic surgeries are a personal choice, that they're no big deal, and that they improve people's lives (even though a certain small percentage of the patients _die_ ). I doubt in our lifetimes we'll ever find that our culture looks at cosmetic procedures as anything other than a valid personal choice.
And I also agree with you it's great to let kids explore different ways of presenting themselves! Indeed, I started out thinking that kids calling themselves "trans" was no big deal (let the young have their exploration, the same way we did!) but again: the problem is the cultural context of the pronouns and the trans declarations. The entire culture turns on a dime and starts behaving as if this stuff were a literal truth about the kid, instead of just exploration.
So I find myself worrying a bit about your son’s 8th grade "trans" friends -- and it could be because my own kids are older (late teens to mid 20s) and so I've seen this scenario played out. A portion of these kids will end up with orchiectomies or mastectomies. A portion will be sterilized before they knew whether they wanted kids someday. A portion will have permanent reminders in the form of hair loss, scars, deepened voices, facial hair. And a portion will regret all of it, and have a long road of emotional and physical recovery ahead of them.
Often today, what starts on the kid's part as playful exploration becomes in this cultural context a well-worn and predictable pathway to irreversible medical harm. Not for every single kid of course, but for some. Not every kid who shoots heroin becomes a junkie, either, but parents wouldn't consider shooting heroin a benign form of youthful exploration.
Gender exploration is not benign, because our culture has medicalized it. We didn’t see that with earlier generations’ form of exploration. Adults in earlier generations stood back and let kids experiment with being a hippie, punk, devil-worshipper, goth, vampire, emo, whatever, until they figured out their identity for themselves (and usually abandoned whatever identity their generation used for this purpose). How many 75-year-old hippies are still around? How many 60-year-old punks? And none of it was irreversible.
That's why I'm not in favor of sitting back and letting kids play around with gender. In this case, too much is at stake and I'm in favor of gently grounding kids in reality. If a kid, for instance, were grounded in reality: “I’m a boy who loves to wear makeup and hang around with girls” then I would say yes, wear all the makeup you want. Hang out with anyone you like.
But pronouns, no; calling yourself the opposite sex, no. As a parent, that is where I (personally) would draw the line.
And I come back to the "cultural creation" of it all. Other cultures don't need the pronoun changes "to be happy." Other cultures' gender nonconforming people don't need other people to call them the opposite sex or believe them to be the opposite sex. Other cultures don't need to offer sterilization and surgeries "to be happy." These are not things that anyone needs in order to be happy, whole, or genuine. These are things we invented, and they hurt more than they help.
Every time I see a well-meaning mother frantically correct someone's "misgendering" of her child, I die a little bit inside. This parent is doing what she believes in her heart to be something right and good. Yet from where I sit, I see it as very damaging. It's like watching someone slap their kid in the face, when they think they’re doing something good.
This stuff is really hard.
Yes, I'm in total agreement that the medicalization is a major, major problem. I'm thinking of Jazz Jennings, who since her gender reassignment surgery has had terrible surgical side effects, has admitted to massive depression, and has gained a HUGE amount of weight. She says she doesn't regret having the surgery; but if she hadn't had the surgery...how would she be? I admit I'm only tangentially aware of her, but from the general stuff I've seen about her, she seemed to be a happy, healthy kid BEFORE surgery.
It's really interesting because I see in your philosphy echoes of Judith Butler's theory that gender is a performance (which I'm pretty sure I mostly agree with) which is why it is so heavily influenced by culture, and also the power of language in defining gender. The pronouns changing doesn't bother me, because unlike Butler, I simply don't believe that saying something makes it so. The belief that saying something makes it so is what is leading to the medicalization of gender, because physicality and biology are now controlled by thoughts and words, not the other way around.
I don't know my son's friends well, but one of the two has adopted a gender-neutral name. I'm not sure of either of their pronouns. But I think for "trans" kids, in particular, they/them might be an elegant solution that allows the exploration without the literalism.
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.
I’ll check that out — thanks for the link. Autogynephilia is really hard to discuss but I’m going to do that too, one of these days.