Letter To a Well Meaning Bystander

Open your mind-when it comes to trans, you might be misguided

Dear Friend,

I appreciate the concern expressed for my daughter and any difficulties that she and our family might be facing. I know your sympathy is sincere and you would like to be helpful if possible. I thank you for your suggestion of {embracing ‘his’ new identity, referral to a gender counselor, referral to PFLAG, link to Gender Spectrum, unqualified support for ‘trans rights’, hoping that society accepts ‘him as he truly is’, invitation to an affirming religious congregation} because of the spirit in which it was made, because it was motivated by your care and compassion. I value our friendship and will trust in your ability to entertain an honest response you may not have expected, to trust that I also sincerely mean well.

What would actually be most helpful to our family right now, and to many other people who are in or are soon to be in similar situations, is your open minded, slow paced and careful consideration that maybe much of what you’ve heard about gender identity and transgender youth is actually wrong. That the recent enthusiasm for encouraging young people along a path of opposite sex make believe, proceeding step by step into sterility and lifelong medical dependency, is not simply a generous extension of recognition and acceptance to a long oppressed minority. Rather, it’s a dangerous embrace of a new faith in preference to and denial of objective reality, tangled up with a contagious moral certainty, that has jumped the rails of good sense. In this respect it looks like just another in the series of retrospectively bizarre cultural manias that punctuate history: lynching heretics or worshipping the miraculous relics of martyrs, utopian communities with free sex or no sex at all, multi-level marketing and financial bubbles in general, recovered memories and ritual satanic abuse, the Children’s Crusade, spiritual discovery through LSD, etc., etc. Eventually this craze too will burn out, but not before leaving many thousands of people badly injured who were unlucky enough to be emotionally vulnerable and suffering from one of the perennial anguishes of being human at the moment when a new magical solution swept through the popular imagination.

Charles MacKay, in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, wrote that “men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

Although it would have baffled nearly anyone 20 years ago, the herd now has largely accepted, or at least submitted to not publicly doubting, the following claims.

Everyone has an innate gender identity which is independent of biological sex and can only reliably be recognized by oneself, through introspection.
Gender identity forms very early in life, unaffected by social influence, and is thereafter stable. A child can accurately identify their own gender identity without fear that they may change their mind later in life.
Gender identity can be completely male, completely female, or some intermediate or fluctuating blend of characteristics traditionally associated more often with one sex. Any such gender identity is perfectly natural and just as healthy as another. Transgenderism is not a mental disorder nor a symptom of any such disorder.
Any psychological distress or maladaptive behavior that a transgender person exhibits should be attributed first to the minority stress of not being accepted by society for who they truly are. Only after full medical and social accommodation has been made for their gender identity does it make sense to inquire into any other possible causes of psychological distress.
Psychological gender identity takes precedence over mere physical sex in two critical ways:
1. Where they are in conflict it is assumed that the mental self image is more essential and immutable, more susceptible to accidental damage and permanent suffering than the body, so that it is the body that must change, through drugs and surgery. No psychological therapy that might question gender identity claims can be permitted.
2. Where society has seen fit to provide single sex accommodations, their defining categories must now be reframed from objective physical definitions to subjective mental self-definitions. Anyone can choose their own category.
Although transgender identification in itself is completely normal and healthy, it demands aggressive, irreversible and experimental medical intervention that should be paid for by others, as though it were a rare and life threatening disease.
Questioning any of these claims is an expression of hate that can only contribute to the incredibly high suicidality of these perfectly healthy people and delay the life-saving medical and social interventions they require.

You’ve probably never seen it laid out quite like this, but I don’t think this is an unfair mischaracterization of the essential logic behind the “Affirmation Only” theory that has swept through many institutions recently. The conclusion all of the above is supposed to buttress is that immediate and unquestioning affirmation, including social and then medical transition, is the only helpful or ethical response to a claim of transgender identity by a young person. As Gender Affirmation theory has gained currency over the past decade, we’ve gone from almost no one having heard of a transgender child to laws being passed against “gender identity conversion therapy” and schools socially transitioning children without their parent’s knowledge. Yet I believe that, if one spends enough time carefully considering each of the claims above, it’s not hard to see that they are all quite doubtful, at best.

I don’t actually know what you personally think of all of this. I suspect most people are reluctant to speak with full candor on this topic. Perhaps your life has been minimally touched by this issue so far, so you haven’t been compelled to think deeply about it or do any independent research. Maybe you’ve heard that science stands behind Gender Affirmation and have seen no reason to question that. Maybe you have noticed some contradictions or inconvenient unexplained facts, but politeness, agreeableness and a desire to avoid unnecessary trouble has led you to nod along with the herd. Maybe it has hit your life hard, through a family member, and in your desperate love for that person, hearing only from experts who advise it’s the only way, you have gone along with transition and embraced the new religion because you need to believe that things will work out for the best.

Whatever you really think, I do not expect or even hope to affect your opinions quickly through argument. That’s not how people work, including, of course, myself. Once formed, from whatever origin, opinions are sticky things. They become bound up with our ego, our delicate self-regard. It takes time and privacy to slowly reexamine inconsistencies that pop up among our beliefs and decide how best to grind them against one another and eventually prune them back into respectability. We need to find our own way, our own narrative, out of that thicket. That’s why, although people go mad in herds, they recover their senses only slowly and individually.

What I do hope is that the concern and generosity that led to your expression of support could extend into doing me the favor of reading some things of which you might not have been aware, and seeing where that leads. Please take your time.

Although it’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it, there is a rapidly growing group of dissidents from the dominant narrative about gender identity and affirmation. This group is much more ideologically diverse than its opponents would like to portray, and in my experience substantially from the left/liberal side of their national cultures. People tend to fall out of the dominant belief and into the dissidents via one of four routes: as medical or mental health professionals whose direct experience leads them to question affirmation-only therapies; as parents of previously gender conforming teens who adopt a transgender identity and pursue medical transition under obvious social and ideological influence; as feminists or gay rights supporters who see mission drift in the evolving LGBTQ+ as undermining and damaging what their movements previously stood for; and by those who adopted a transgender identity themselves, for some months or decades, and eventually found their way out of it or wish to dampen the current enthusiasm. Which you may find most surprising, informative or compelling depends on you. The following is just the tip of the iceberg.

Parents

Nothing is more important to most parents than the welfare of their children. There’s an urgent reality to having a child who decides that they want medical sex transition that cuts through the idealistic generalizations pushed by ‘experts’. Many parents with science backgrounds have done more and better investigation of the research basis for gender affirmation than the educators, therapists and doctors engaging in it. An excellent starting place is Pitt’s Newsletter. An early prominent voice in the wilderness was US based 4thWaveNow. In the UK, Transgender Trend, became a similar rallying point. Worldwide there are now many grass-roots parents organizations with their own websites. Recently Genspect has formed as something of an umbrella group.

Doctors and Therapists

It’s a deliberately fostered misconception that Gender Affirmation is backed by solid science. Although there’s a large body of publications by GA advocates, it’s a very low quality literature rife with shoddy methodology and unchallenged confirmation bias. SEGM is oriented towards critical review of scientific claims involving gender medicine. Thoughtful Therapists is a group of mental health practitioners who work with the relevant patient group and are skeptical of affirmation-only recommendations.