The transgender issue - Part VI - "I'm pretty sure I'm right."

"I'm pretty sure I'm right."

I love it when I get that feeling, as I do when I open up solicitations from the Southern Poverty Law Center where they tell me my contributions will go to fighting gerrymandering in Alabama or Missouri.

Why can't I get that feeling when I declare the best thing to do is withhold puberty blockers from kids under sixteen because it would lead to faulty bone development and because most kids then go on to do serious damage with hormone treatments and eventually surgery.

I just watched one of my favorite German satirists, Jan Böhmermann, take up the topic.  He sneers at the question by the unenlightend segment of the population who worry about men in women's changing rooms. No doubts. Why should they be allowed in? "Because transwomen are women!" 

There you go. Truth by declaration. He goes on to celebrate the rejection of the 1980-something law requiring trans people to jump through all sorts of hoops before being allowed to change their gender and congratulates Germany for catching up with fifteen other nations that allow the change on the basis of a simple declaration. Böhmermann has enough confidence that he's on the right side of history not only to declare what's true, but to sneer at those who disagree with him.

Why does this question continue to plague me? Why do I continue to want to hear from the other side, from the religious folk who tell me you need to stay in the gender you were born into because it's God's will.  (And I hate it that I have to use "gender" here because "sex" is an outmoded concept)  And from others of the political right wing.  Why can't I just do what I always do and go with the leftist flow? Not merely the leftist flow, but apparently with the majority of LGB people who are in solidarity with the transactivists?

A couple days ago, I blogged about how I was persuaded that professional theologians of the Christian persuasion had some of the most clear-headed arguments against transgendering and for detransgendering. I deliberately chose them because I knew they'd be on "the other side" and I needed to push the strength of my own convictions. Sean McDowell, the interviewer, makes clear he knows he's right because his convictions are biblically based. In another interview, with a more gay-friendly evangelical who sees no conflict between his faith and being gay, McDowell insists he's got it right and isn't going to be persuaded by any modernist attempt to restructure traditional theology. I sit here, in my lived gay experience, listening to a man who believes my soul depends on giving up my marriage to a man and my entire circle of friends and family who whole-heartedly believe, as I do, that God, if he exists, doesn't care what I do with my naughty parts. And I'm supposed to believe this man when he pronounces on the trans question? Because I am pre-disposed to believe him anyway? So much for listening to "people in the know" when you haven't got the time or the energy to dig for truth and understanding on your own.

This is the thorniest issue I've come across in a very long time. Reason doesn't help me out here. Arguments on one side are offset by equally convincing arguments on the other.

Have a listen to this Swedish documentary, for example, on efforts to get folks at the Karolinska Institute who enabled transgender kids access to hormones and surgery as part of "gender-affirming" care, and the disastrous results which followed.

Then listen to this Frontline Program which makes an equally powerful argument for listening to your kids when they describe the need to change sex (sorry - I know I'm supposed to say gender, but I just can't) as a life-and-death issue.

And then tell me you don't have the same doubts about declaring "I'm pretty sure I'm right."

Detransitioning - Part V on the Transgender Issue

About six weeks ago, I started a four-part think-aloud here on Hepzibah about the transgender issue, knowing I was risking being a fool by rushing in (on Aug. 7, 9, 11 and 15) and pretending I could both view it from a neutral position and take a stand at the same time. I still hold those dual views - that transgender people need our support on a personal level and the question of medical intervention on the human body should not be left to people who go through life saying "whatever!"

After four attempts to shed light on the topic I decided I'd had my say (my "think-aloud") and it was time to face my limitations and shut up and listen a while before saying any more. So I put it on the back burner, along with my concern over whether American democracy is in real danger or merely facing another bump in the road, whether I should take my love of animals more seriously and become a vegetarian, whether the U.S. should continue to support Ukraine (I'm not really on the fence on that one; I say yes.), and all the other "eat your peas and think of the starving children in Africa" issues that cross my path.

The response to my discussion of the transgender issue was disappointing. One friend asked me, "Why do you care? It's such a trivial issue in the greater scheme of things. And it affects so few people!"  I didn't argue with him, but my mind went to the several videos I had watched by people who had come to regret their choices to undergo breast and penis removal. I have no trouble imagining myself in other people's shoes, normally. I like to think I can imagine being Jewish, being black, emigrating to another country. But for the life of me I can't get my head around the idea of having my penis lopped off.  And back in the early 70s one of my closest friends took his own life, and for years afterward, I had dreams of shouting at him, "Why didn't you wait! Just a few years. Life for gay people will get better. Much better!" I have become obsessed with the idea of preventing young people from making decisions they come to regret - or would if they were still alive. So in some indirect way this issue has become personal for me.  

And then there's the fact that the place where I normally sit - on the left of the political spectrum, with democrats and LGBT people, doesn't quite feel at home anymore. Just as the Republicans have usurped American democracy, I have the sinking feeling that the trans activists are taking more of the LGBT space than is justified, and perhaps the people who like to label the extreme left "woke" are not just the Marjorie Taylor Greene idiots the left like to think they are. Maybe we ought to think more about lock-step support of some of our inclinations to do the right thing and come down on the right side of history. Hate speech, for example. I can't get a handle on that issue, either. In Germany, you can't say anything good about Hitler and the Nazis. They've shut down free speech on that issue and everything in me wants to shout, "Hallelujah, good on ya, Deutschland! Way to go!" But then where do I go with that other voice in my head that insists, "the only way to counter bad speech is with more speech, not with censorship." My head goes with that one. I understand, in principle, how the attempt at a cure can sometimes be worse than the disease.

So here's Part V of my thoughts on the transgender issue. What are we to make of the folk now claiming in ever-increasing numbers that they made a mistake by medically intervening their way out of gender dysphoria? I know the numbers are still small, but not so small they can be ignored. On the one hand, anecdotal evidence is quite often misleading and potentially worthless. On the other hand, if you listen to the collective testimony of individuals now filling the internet with their claims they made a mistake, if you've got a conscience, you have to let that testimony in. At least give the issue a serious hearing.

Of all the articles and videos I've come across on the issue of detransitioning, one in particular stands out. I am drawn to it because it comes from a place I normally run from. Two Christian doctors talking about the issue and insisting it has not only a social, a legal and a medical dimension, but a spiritual one. "Aaaargh" as they say in the comics. Gag me with a spoon. But my life experience has demonstrated that all sorts of b.s.ers and bloviators (if there's a difference) can sometimes come out with gems of wisdom. Nobody should be rejected out of hand until they've had their say. And the more I listened, the more I concluded they had a great deal of information I needed to consider.  Here I am, in bed with anti-gay homophobes, I said to myself. Just what I need to check the strength of my convictions.

I'm talking about Sean McDowell talking to Paul Rhodes Eddy, in an hour-long piece from three months ago.   Sean McDowell is a professor of theology at Biola University, a Christian college near Anaheim in the greater Los Angeles area. He is the author/editor of around fifteen books on Christian apologetics. He has a PhD in Christian apologetics from a Southern Baptist theological seminary. I'm familiar with him as an opponent of same-sex marriage of the "hate the sin and love the sinner" school of thought. Nice guy, from what I can see.

And here is the blurb on Dr. Paul Rhodes Eddy from the Center for Faith, Sexuality and Gender, with which he is associated: 

Paul Rhodes Eddy (PhD, Marquette University) is Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Bethel University in St. Paul, MN. He has authored, co-authored, or co-edited a dozen books, including Understanding Transgender Identities: Four Views (Baker Academic, 2019). He is also a Teaching Pastor at Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, MN. He lives in White Bear Township, MN with his wife Kelly and their two sons. 

As I listened to their discussion, I saw my task as trying to distinguish the parts of what they had to say that I might assume to stem from their bias as anti-LGBT Christian apologists from what they had to say as objective scientists. And when I say "they" I mean chiefly Dr. Eddy, the sex researcher being interviewed by Dr. McDowell. My starting place comes from lived experience as a gay man; Dr. Eddy's starting place is almost certainly colored by the world he lives in of men and women who believe my embrace of homosexuality as a positive thing is misplaced, and transgendered people - perhaps - I can't be sure - are even more in need of corrective thought. That raises the obvious question: can either of us be objective here? 

The longer I listened, the more I thought I saw their Christian orientation (not to say bias) leaking through their conclusions, the more I was persuaded that Dr. Eddy is no less sincere in his desire to understand the transgender dilemma than I am.  And the more I found a meeting of the minds. We both reach pretty much the same conclusions on transitioning and detransitioning. Tempting as it is to ascribe his conclusions to a Christian ideological bias, how can I explain away the fact that I reach pretty much those same conclusions?  I felt that obligated me to give him the same benefit of the doubt that I am inclined to give myself.

I recommend you give them a listen, if you have the time. It's only an hour.  But if you want a condensed version, here's my take on what they had to say:

McDowell and Eddy begin their discussion with a Christian liberal admission that the church has not always done the right thing in dealing with sexuality. I am reminded of the times I have observed how readily people can become conciliatory once their ability to bully has been checked. And their claim that they see their goal as "missiological" - wonderful word, that - gives me the creeps. But we're just getting started.

First off, "detransitioning" is defined, simply, and I'd say obviously, as "reversing the transitioning process."  Transitioning is divided into three parts: social (taking on attitudes and behavior of the opposite sex), medical (from puberty blockers to hormone therapy to surgery), and legal (taking steps, such as official name change, to reorient the world to one's transgender change). [Please note that I am following the transgender activist practice of using "transgender" to include what was once commonly distinguished as medical-biological (transsexual) as well as social (transgender). I don't like blurring the distinction, but I'm going with the flow here because I don't want to get hung up on the linguistic dilemma.]

Alarm bells went off for me when Eddy observed that Darwinian evolutionary theory opened up the perspective of seeing sex and non-binary and on a spectrum, since embryonic development takes us through the female-to-male journey in the womb. My thought was, "What's he getting at? Is he trying to shade evolution at the same time as the choice to transgender?" They move on before I can get an answer to that question.

Eddy credits the internet with the growth of interest in transgendering. Specifically with the idea that it was something one might consider doing. At the end of the last century there was relatively little interest, but between 2004 and 2007 there was a sudden spike in the number of adolescents reporting gender dysphoria. And, of course, as dysphoria became more prevalent, so did transitioning - and ultimately detransitioning, as well. Eddy cites two studies of adolescents in schools, one in Minnesota in 2016 showing 2.7% of 80,000 students surveyed in grades 9 and 11 reporting "some sort of transgender or gender-diverse identity."  A second study, in Pennsylvania in 2021, showed 9.2% of students reporting "gender-diverse identity."  If these studies are reliable (a big "if") they suggest a strong increase in dysphoria-consciousness. (And that, of course, opens up the question of whether transgender-consciousness is the same thing as dysphoria. I believe it is not, but that's a question for another time.) 

Another question that cannot be ignored is why the sex ratio has changed so remarkably. Where once it was boys/men wanting to be girls/women, these days it is primarily girls/women wanting to be boys/men.

And a third question is what is the explanation for the high correlation between people with gender dysphoria and people with autism.

When they reach the question of why it is that transgendering has become such an issue at this time, I begin to appreciate Eddy's ability to be neutral. He acknowledges the culture war which polarizes us all: him on the Christian "God wants us to marry the opposite sex only and remain in the bodies we were born into" side, and me on the side of those who come up with things like"you don't tell me who I can love and who I can marry - I have the right as a citizen living in a democracy to make that decision on my own" and "seems to me the 'born into' question is up for grabs at the moment." But to his credit (in my view) he suggests we look at these questions from a multivariate perspective, and not assume simple single causes. He advocates a "bio-psycho-social" model to follow. I grit my teeth when he adds that, as a Christian, he'd like to add a spiritual component to that mix and make it a "numa-bio-psycho-social" model, and I immediately want to know how the spiritual differs from the psychological. But that's clearly another rabbit hole we probably need to walk past.

What kinds of issues does the bio-psycho-social model direct us to? The "bio" part leads us to ask whether there are chemicals in the environment, for example, that ought to get us to focus on such things as the intersex question. Sounds to me like asking us whether there's something in the water. But who knows? Maybe there's something there. The "social" aspect is the biggie, as far as I'm concerned. When somebody identifies as transgender, are we doing the right thing by insisting on a gender-affirming approach? Are we seriously doing right by kids by going with their assertion that they are "in the wrong body"? I've come down on that side, so far, and I'm still there. But I recognize it as a legitimate question, mostly because my life has been one discovery after another that I have held firm convictions that I later come to understand as erroneous, and the only proper approach to scientific questions is to assume truth to be "the sum total of all knowledge to date subject to change at any moment with the introduction of new reliable information."

Then comes the troubling possibility that some people have come upon gender dysphoria through interaction with their peers. Adolescents are notoriously susceptible to peer group influence and it's an open secret that a lot of bad ideas get into the heads of kids from television and social media. There's even as word for it: social contagion. Add to that the increasing social acceptance of transgender folk and the fact that insurance companies, some of them, are now willing to pay for medical transitioning, and you've got a whole new ball game, a whole new reason to make the leap. And, of course, from the perspective of somebody who later wants to detransition, a whole new risk one should avoid. Either way, a whole new complexity. Not as dramatic as the possibility that, perhaps not in the immediate future, but eventually, we may see uteruses transplanted into male bodies. But complex for sure.

I'd like to make a brief discursion here to take up two issues McDowell and Eddy do not address. I'm old enough to remember when people went to extremes to hide the fact that they were gay. Old enough to be astonished at how radically the world has changed. Today I can be openly gay and the world I live in, at least, is totally supportive. Positive images are everywhere. The most popular movie on Netflix recently has been Red, White and Royal Blue, a wonderful fantasy in which two drop-dead gorgeous men, one the second in line to the British throne and one the son of America's first female president fall in love and even get portrayed having anal sex in one scene. How's that for a switch? And the world roars its approval. Given this reality, it will surprise no one that all sorts of young men and women who probably would have been too inhibited to explore same-sex sex only recently are now giving it a go. I celebrate this. I think it's good for young people to get drunk a few times. It's the only way one can learn what drink does to you. Do you become a silly drunk? An obnoxious drunk? A morose drunk? You need to know yourself and know what the risks are. Similarly, I think you should know yourself sexually. Young people experiment with sex and if they discover they are essentially heterosexual after a couple gay trysts, all the better. Self-knowledge is essential to a good life.

But what about experimenting with switching sex and gender? Socially, I'd say the situation is the same as experimenting with same-sex behavior. No harm done, except possibly to your dignity and loss of standing in your old social circles. Do it, if you feel like it, I say. If nothing else, it will put you in the shoes of more serious-minded gender dysphoric people. You will experience the difficulties they go through. But again, I draw the line at medical intervention. Cut off your breasts or your penis and you don't get to go back again. Not something to mess with. Not a parallel with experimenting with being gay.

The other issues is a big one, in my mind. There is a glaring inconsistency, as I see it, in the transgender claim, from guru Judith Butler on down, that gender (and sex!) are fluid, that there are any number of ways of being a man or a woman, that being non-binary is the way to go. But at the same time people who believe they were born into the wrong body and want to change their gender seem to go for the stereotypes of the opposite sex. Male to female candidates want to be Marilyn Monroe, not Angela Merkel. Female to male often go for the lumberjack or tough guy image, not the self-effacing polite gentleman who gives his seat to a lady. What's that all about, other than calling the "multiple gender" notion into doubt? 

But maybe I'm making too much of that idea. Let me get back to the discussion between McDowell and Eddy.  They don't use the word zeitgeist but theyacknowledge that transgendering is so much with us that there are now children as young as three or four being socially transgendered.  And it's now clear that once the three-step process starts (from social to blockers and hormones [estrogen or testosterone] to surgery) it's quite likely to continue. And that means that detransitioning will as well. I note, though, that that does not speak to the real issue, which is whether the percentage of those transitioning warrants the calls to stop the process entirely. That, it seems to me, remains very much an open question which McDowell and Eddy, now thirty minutes into their discussion, have not resolved.

Eddy takes up the distinction between regret over transitioning and detransitioning. The three main reasons for the former, regret, are: 1) some medical complications; 2) a less-than-satisfactory functional outcome; and 3) a less-than-satisfactory esthetic/appearance. However, while the statistics on the regret rate run between 1% and 2.2%, the rates for actual detransitioning run between .5% and 1%. But, I suspect, there is an issue of numbers, here. Eddy himself describes the statistics as "dicey."

Once Eddy gets into the think of the discussion on detransitioning, he focuses on the complexity behind the figures. Many of the early studies on transitioning, he points out, were undertaken at a time when transitioning came only after extensive counseling, and an attitude which favored moving slowly and carefully.  Thus one should expect lower levels of detransitioning from that early era because more thought went into the decision to transition in the first place. Nowadays, when people launch into medical measures after sometimes as little as thirty minutes of counseling, one supposes the risks of an unwise choice have shot way up. This highlights the dilemma one faces over whether to listen to those who threaten suicide or self-harm if they don't get permission to transition or to those who insist on taking it slow, and call their bluff. No enviable spot to be in, for sure.

But don't miss the point here. The overwhelming majority of those who transition find their lives are better after doing so. Figures go as high as 98%. That too is not an insignificant fact, fuzzy statistics notwithstanding. And both Christian apologists reach that conclusion from the data available. And yet, they also warn that in years to come we may have to reevaluate these conclusions as the almost inevitable increase in testimonies from detransitioners eventually comes in. By the end of their session, I find myself better informed, but no less convinced I should be put off by an overriding approach that favors caution.

At the end of their discussion, Eddy gets into the question of the reliability of psychological research in general, the search for data on the transgender issue being only one subset of that research. The problem, he stresses, is what he calls replication bias, the fact (he asserts) that 1) much psychological research never gets replicated, and 2) some research gets taken early on as authoritative and research that counters its findings gets ignored. Add to that the fact that there is yet to be established a standardization of linguistic terms and of measuring tools and the fact that much of what we claim to know is based on retrospective studies, and there is good reason to push the pause button. Just as self-report data is notoriously unreliable, so is data that comes from recall.  

When it comes to detransition studies, there is another huge problem, according to Eddy. Many of the studies deal with people who decide to - or decide not to - transition after a few months or a couple years. But other studies show that most of those who detransition do so only after eight or ten years. So these people's experience is not being captured in most of the current studies on detransitioning. Also, detransitioners are less likely to seek the advice of those medical advisors they transitioned with. I wish I could question Eddy about this, though. What difference does it make where the statistics come from on detransitioning? Wouldn't an individual detransitioner be counted as such no matter whether they went through their original transitioning doctor or another doctor? I'm now beginning to worry that maybe my original suspicion that and understanding of the transgender issue is riddled with bias. But is it, in this case, a pro-Christian bias? Or my inclination to see an ideological pro-Christian bias where there isn't one? I am none the wiser after two careful engagements with this video.

We are left with the impression that we are only at the beginning of a useful understanding of how to proceed rationally with people suffering from gender dysphoria, despite the number of years the problem has been around. 

Eddy and McDowell end on the question of where to go from here and how to advise parents faced with children with gender dysphoria. Eddy advocates use of not a gender-affirming model but what he calls a gender-exploratory model.  In plain English: more "let's think about this" than "whatever you say, dear." Once again we are confronted with a choice of going with the head or the heart, the head being the exploratory approach where we question and reason, the heart being affirmation as a way to show love to our children by giving them assurance we trust them to know what they need from life.

And - again, no surprise - which way you go will depend on the kind of relationship you have with your kids, how much trust you have established with them, how much freedom you've granted them to try new things and fail, and how much you believe they have acquired the maturity to make wise decisions.

Not something you can get help with from outside. Not something a counselor or therapist can assess with certainty. Something that has to be taken on a case-by-case basis. Welcome to reality, where you have to call the shots with the knowledge you are limited to and accept the consequences they leave you with.

Ten questions - the transgender question - Part IV

People of good will and optimism try not to see the world in black and white - binary - terms. They prefer to describe much of it in grey - and, whenever possible, in glorious colors.  We disparage the pre-modern catholic penchant for dividing women into virginal saints and "fallen" women, consider cowboy movies where there are good guys in white hats and villains in black hats unsophisticated. We messed up bigtime with the one-drop definition of race we use in America, where a person is white unless they have even the smallest bit of African ancestry in them, whereupon they become black.  And why we continue to operate under that fiction is beyond me.

Not that there aren't binaries. Life and death, off and on, yes and no, something and nothing are binaries. So is male and female, although people on one side of the transgender debate now getting so much attention are calling that into question.  Either one insists on the traditional approach to science, which defines truth as something empirically verifiable, or one buys into the recent postmodern fad of insisting all is flux, and (at least in the sophomoric versions of postmodernism so many people go with) there is no truth, but only one person's "narrative" set against another's.  One side (where I stand, at least for the moment) insists that since more than 98% of people are born clearly male or female, this is enough to make this a binary category. The other side argues that the fact that 1.7% of kids are born intersex suggests that we should see this as a spectrum instead. That means the distinction between sex and gender (once defined as a subjective social category) is lost, and one can use transsexual and transgender interchangeably. This view is now so widespread that, as I mentioned in my previous blog entry, the publication manual of the APA, the American Psychological Association, the gold standard for such things, "has determined that the term 'transsexual' is largely outdated." Read: use transgender for both transgender and transsexual, since the distinction between them is now blurred.

This blurring disturbs me, since I see acting as if there is no reason to distinguish between male and female runs counter to common sense and opens the door to all kinds of bad outcomes. If there is no distinction, what justification to we have for women's sports, for example. Or for keeping women from being thrown in jail with men. How do we keep useful track of crime statistics? Or speak of sexual and emotional maturity? Or acknowledge sexism and the power dynamic in any meaningful way?

But perhaps the biggest problem associated with the transgender debate is that there are so many unknowns and so much misinformation. I'm tempted to call this the age of misinformation, in fact, but let's stick with the importance of gathering accurate information and avoid jumping too hastily into the unknown.

So far, I've come up with ten questions that come to mind.  I make no effort to prioritize or evaluate their importance), and I suspect if one tries, one can come up with many more. But here are my ten, for starters:

1. If young people are going to take puberty blockers, how safe are they? According to the Mayo Clinic, "Puberty blockers are not recommended for children who have not started puberty." At the same time, the consensus is that puberty blockers are a relatively new medical procedure, and we don't have enough information on its long-term effects. We need to consider puberty blockers experimental medicine.

2. At what age should we allow kids to make decisions that are at odds with their parents' decisions? What responsibility do schools and hospitals and other institutions have to convey information they learn from children and adolescents to their parents, and at what age?

3. There is evidence that a lot of young people suffering gender dysphoria commonly suffer co-morbidities simultaneously. A much higher percentage than normal are autistic, for example. Many have suffered physical and mental abuse. Ideally, we should learn where the line is between the gender dysphoria and these other problems, if at all possible, and make sure we are treating the dysphoria on the basis of this reliable information.

4. How seriously should we consider the possibility of "social contagion," the term used to signify the possibility young people are calling themselves trans because they are caught up in a fad. There appears to be strong evidence of this possibility. One can feel dysphoria because of external disapproval or internal disapproval. Arguably, the solution to dysphoria derived from external disapproval is likely to be found through therapy, while a strong argument can be made that dysphoria stemming from internal anxiety should elicit strong emotional and other support.

5. Until recently, many people calling themselves trans would consider themselves gay or lesbian.  Bisexuals once had to endure the suspicion many gays and lesbians had that they were simply not yet ready to accept their same-sex feelings as legitimate, and took the bi- identity as a way of looking less confrontational to straight people. Nowadays there is less resistance to the claim of bisexuality. Is the same thing going on with trans people? Are they people whose claims will be increasingly accepted in time?

6. When a person goes from gay to trans, they change identities. How many of them also change sexuality? If a gay man becomes trans, does he then become heterosexual in sexual orientation? Or does he also switch sexual orientations and become a lesbian? This is not a question that anybody needs to fuss over, obviously, but it would be interesting, if anybody looking for a PhD dissertation topic in LGBT studies wants to take it on. It would tell us something about sexual orientation that we don't yet understand.

7. Advocates of a postmodern insistence that "transgender women are women" have to contend with the argument that this approach is skewing the statistics on male crime.  There is only one study I'm familiar with showing that transgender women, i.e., MtF trans people continue to commit crimes, including sexual crimes at the same rate as non-transgender males, and far more than cis-gender women, but it is contested. This raises the question, at what point, now or in the future, should we start taking these statistics seriously?

8. Feminist movement around the world is credited with raising the consciousness around the fact that men are socialized to think it is natural to commit violence against women - they "just can't help it." Such consciousness has led to laws to protect women as well as a change in social attitudes toward that violence. If the distinction between cisgender women and transgender women is lost, and if male-pattern violence continues, how will we keep track of violence statistics with any accuracy? Will this ever matter? If so, when?

9. In the UK, there has only been one institution devoted to dealing with transgender kids, if I understand the scene correctly. And that is the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) of North London's Tavistock Clinic. It is still in operation, but its work took a hit and it was closed down in 2021 when a suit was filed against it by a woman treated there who had a double mastectomy at age 20, and now regrets transitioning, arguing that GIDS should have taken into consideration that her gender dysphoria could be attributed to her mother's alcoholism, her social isolation as a lesbian and depression as much as to gender dysphoria. The decision to shut Tavistock down became a national scandal and the decision was reversed a year later. But the case has led to greater awareness of the risks of acting in the absence of sufficient data on treatments that must be considered experimental. [For a full history of the case, see Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.] There is at present no end of questions about whether and when treatment by puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgery are indicated, and where the lines are between them, The need for clinical  research is urgent.

And finally, one last question. This one is for me personally, and not one to add to the library of general knowledge:

10. Why have so many lesbians and gays and other lefties of a progressive bent climbed on the postmodern bandwagon and taken on the view that one can blur the distinction between sex and gender? It's a distinction we worked hard to make and get the general public to make. Why have they surrendered it so easily? Is it lockstep solidarity with transgender people because they believe we LGBs have to stick together with the Ts? (The Ts that want to claim "I'm a woman if I choose to claim I'm a woman.") If that's the case, shame on them, I say, for making the same cognitive error as the right-wingers, surrendering scientific rigour for political expediency. And it's all so unnecessary, since a man can live as a woman in every way that doesn't involve threatening the safe spaces I believe women have a right to.  I'm with my friend Bill. Ideally, we should create three kinds of spaces: men only, women only, mixed for when separation is unnecessary. Two questions here: Is this even remotely practical? And how many LGB people does this involve, anyway? OK: three questions: Have I got this all wrong? 

As I've said before, there are many approaches one might take to the transgender issue. It is an inherently divisive issue, probably because there's more we don't know about it than there are things we do know.  Most of the time Bill and I can finish each other's sentences. But we've taken very different perspectives on this issue, which fact, when put together with the fact that gays and lesbians generally are sharply divided on this topic as well, is evidence that we're dealing with one of the hottest topics to come down the pike in a long time.   I've taken a legalistic and policy-making approach; Bill prefers a compassionate one. I've been more head; he's been more heart. What we both agree on is that we need to avoid the extremes, such as the far-right Republican view that there should be no government support at all for transgender people. We both find that not just insincere and politically manipulative, but just plain cruel.

I tried to put this topic of how best to approach the transgender issue aside, declaring it's none of my business, and get on with other things. But it's a public policy issue and people's lives and mental health are riding on it, so I believe leaving it to the politicians is not the way to go. It calls for an informed public.

And if you are tempted to say I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill, consider the fact that since 2010 the number of girls referred to the Tavistock Clinic has increased by 5000%.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the topic. 

A Search in Progress (The transgender question - Part III)

My Japanese husband and I got into an argument at dinner the other night over Tokyo's transport system's decision to provide women commuters with women-only cars on the trains during rush hour.  Not a new thing, but the topic of safe spaces for women came up when I shared the blog topic I'd been working on. My spousal unit insisted we should focus on getting men to stop molesting women. I tried to make the point that that's a long-term solution and I'm talking only about a short-term solution, but my husband is not yet fifty and is handicapped by limited powers of logic common to so many youth of today. When we first met, he was in Women's Studies and you might say we've switched places. More miso soup?

Given that men are, what, 100 times more likely to molest women than women men, I'm fully in support of creating safe spaces for women. I say this to establish my take on the transgender issue I've been trying to update my knowledge on the past few weeks. You may remember the story of Lia Thomas, who made women uncomfortable when she removed her pants and showed her male genitalia in a locker room in Kentucky last February. 

And the story only gets better. Thomas beat out all the women on the team and got to take home a trophy that should have been shared with the woman filing the complaint because, she was told, they needed to get the right photo.

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I remember my mother asking me once, when I was in high school, why I wanted to go to mass with my Catholic friends during lent. Religion was still important in those days, and I remember my father telling me that "we didn't believe all those things" the Catholics believed. "What do we believe, Daddy?" my little sister asked him.

The question was probably the first time I was exposed to the notion that belief was not an individual choice but a tribal one. We believed what our parents taught us to believe. And they believed what they were taught in Sunday School. And we lived in the U.S., a country where people lived side by side with people who believed different things. Some of them wrong. Because it was unacceptable to question the importance of religion, and people were encouraged to proclaim their faith and were looked up to when they did so, the ground was made fertile for the notion of multiple truths. Unfortunately, that freedom, along with the freedom to be stupid, has come back recently to bite a chunk out of our backsides.

It's called postmodernism. Once an academic topic for nerds, like the abstract notions of beauty and justice, we find ourselves engaged in a public debate over the way we define truth. "Show me and I'll believe you" people, grounded in the scientific method, want to limit it to the empirically verifiable; people captured by the postmodern notion du jour insist we have no way of establishing truth in the long run and must make do with the beliefs we have created to make sense of the universe, the "narratives." You know, if you're a Euro-American you're likely to believe that Columbus "discovered" America. If you're a native American, 1492 was the beginning of the end of your civilization. There is no neutral, objective place to stand to judge one of these narratives as superior to the other. You simply have to go along with what Kellyanne Conway, early on in the Trump administration, notoriously called "alternative facts." Wikipedia tells us that within four days of her public definition of truth, the sales of George Orwell's 1984 increased 95-fold.

Where once we looked to religious authority (or daddy) to tell us what to believe we now feel perfectly comfortable, many of us, creating our own truths. What is a woman?  To most people on the political left, the kind of people who got behind the cause of gay liberation and rejected the right-wing rejection of gay people, this means getting behind trans people, as well. And that means adopting the postmodern notion that I get to follow any narrative I choose. I become a woman the moment I declare that I am a woman.

That's why Lia Thomas caused all this ruckus back in February. She got to use that women's changing room in Kentucky back then because Biden, our lefty (progressive) president, got behind the changes to Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits sex-based discrimination, which changes would allow transgender female athletes equal access to women's spaces.

I have to admit that I was, until this transgender issue became front and center, pretty much OK with the notion of taking my cues from my fellow democrats. I live in Berkeley, California, where you don't normally ask people what their political views are. You assume they are democrats unless they tell you otherwise. And they usually don't. You can assume the place is gay-friendly, and nobody has ever asked us to take down the sign in front of our house which reads black lives matter, etc.

But now I find myself wondering how the hell I seem to have gotten in bed with right-wingers. I've made clear that I want to maintain the distinction between sex and gender, for the reasons I just outlined with the Lia Thomas story. This is, to me, not a trivial distinction. At the same time, I don't want to go on record as believing there is no such thing as trans people or that people should not have the right to change their sex and their gender. I just want them to wait until they have reached the age of maturity.

For years to come, we will be trying to explain why the issue of transgender is different from abortion and gay rights, why the left has been sucked into this postmodern nonsense, why when I go to my favorite blogs I find my friends at loggerheads. Richard Dawkins, for example, one of my favorite atheists, has come out strongly against this postmodern truth nonsense. But two other atheist bloggers, Stephen Woodford and Forrest Valkai, jump all over him for it, Valkai even taking the view that gender (meaning "sex") is an inner feeling that one discovers in time. And Woodford, was once himself bounced out of some organization for being "transphobic" before he was let back in. I won't leave links to these many discussions, because I want to not go off on even more tangents, and you can find them easily. J.K. Rowling, like Dawkins, has made strong statements in favor of old fashioned scientific definitions and against postmodern fuzziness, and she now needs bodyguards for her efforts.

In tracking down who's who on both sides - let's call them the distinction makers like Dawkins and Rowling on one side and the transactivist postmodernists on the other - I find myself over and over again in bed with what to me is definitely the wrong crowd. Matt Walsh, for example, a Tennessee conservative, ardently opposed to gay rights, a man the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a "peddlar of fear and disinformation," has made a film entitled "What is a Woman?" I listen to him and find myself nodding in agreement on the trans issue.  How did this happen?

Where this becomes a really important question is when it comes to the issue of "gender-affirming care." Until I started my recent reading, I would nod in agreement with any trans activist insisting that trans youngsters should get all the support they possibly can. They should not have to face hostile therapists trying to talk them out of their trans identities. But then I read of the Tavistock Center, Britain's only real support center for trans youth, being closed down because they were "too quick" to provide blockers and hormones, according to the National Health Service, and I have to push pause. Obviously, there's more to this story than what is found on the surface.

The radicals among the trans activists are no longer the predictable lefties of yesteryear. They line up with their postmodern "I am what I say I am" stance and label their opposition "TERFs" - Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. Bad guys, allegedly. But the more I learn about these bad guys, the more I identify with them. I'm talking about people like Posie Parker, aka Kelly-Jay Keen-Minshul, a British anti-transgender rights activist and founder of the organization Standing for Women. Her simple, once obvious, definition of a woman as an "adult human female" got her in trouble with the radical trans activists and secured her a place on Tucker Carlson (and how's that for disgusting bedfellows?)

Others in this group include Lisa Selin Davis, who had a daughter who was a tomboy. Pressured to come out as trans, the daughter had to convince her mother that she simply liked rough housing and was perfectly happy being a girl. That led to Davis' book Tomboy.

Another is Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, and the title says it all, as does The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls by Kara Densky.

Another major text in this genre is Helen Joyce's Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality.

This is not an exhaustive list. I had no idea at the start of all this that there was so much stuff to ponder, so many publications, so many nuanced views, and that it has been going on not for just the past couple of years, but for decades now. I'm a real johnny-come-lately to this party.

I don't know where the transgender debates are headed, whether progressives on the left will come to believe they've been duped, as I currently believe they are, at present. Whether I'll turn out to have thrown my lot in with the wrong crowd when I insist that kids should not be making decisions that involve medical alterations to healthy bodies.

I am no longer totally in the dark on this topic, but I've by no means reached the place where I have total confidence I've got a handle on it, either. There is much that I haven't taken up here, such as the fact we've been talking more about trans women, previously known as male-to-female people than about trans (female-to-male) men. And the fact that I've approached things more from a legalistic, or policy-making perspective and dwelt on the exceptional cases rather than the more common issues facing trans people. But I trust others will compensate for my lack of authority and adequacy of coverage.

This is, for me, a search for understanding in progress. Not finished by any means, but I've got to get on to other things.

Be kind to trans people. They've got a lot of shit to deal with.

Approaching the transgender question: Part II (still linguistic, mostly)

I stated publicly the other day that I think the distinction between sex and gender is not only a useful one, but a logical linguistic one: sex has to do with the body parts and gender with the roles one plays in society. I believe that while doctors can call the sex wrong at times (an infinitely small number of times, but the number shouldn't matter) one should know one's sex if faced with a cancer of the uterus diagnosis. As for gender, like with any other socially-constructed category, one needs to show flexibility. When things get political, I choose to reflect the view of most progressives who say, "I don't tell you whether you are trans or not; you tell me and I'll go along with you and try my best to support the way you want to live in the world." I can't repeat often enough that I think the goal in any discussion, whether you and others see you as an insider to the topic or whether you're just trying to become more informed on the issue so you can vote sensibly on issues affecting trans people, is how can we first do no harm, and second, make the lives of people suffering from gender dysphoria easier?

Note that I'm using the word "trans" here, and some people find that archaic and insist I should be saying "transgender." But I'm getting ahead of myself.  I'll get to that directly.

I'm trying to tread softly here and acknowledge that I'm approaching this question as an amateur. I claim absolutely no expertise and tell myself I've got far more to learn than I have useful stuff to share. But I also believe it's useful to think out loud and let the world come down on you for your ignorance. It's selfish, but it's the best single way to learn things I know. I insisted when I was still in the classroom that there are no bad questions, and being mistaken is nothing to be ashamed of.  Have at me with criticism for speaking too soon. If that's how you feel, you're quite likely to be right. I should probably have waited till I had more information to come forward with these questions. My only response is, "I don't have a lot of time left. People in my circle are dropping like flies. I have to take this learning route."

In the past few days I've been listening to a number of interviews with people who have been dealing with the transgender movement for many years and learning something about the extent of the literature out there. There is Janice Raymond's book The Transsexual Empire, which came out in 1979 and that's a lifetime ago. John Money and Richard Green's Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, the first medical textbook to be published on gender dysphoria was published a whole decade before that, in 1969. There is Riki Wilchins' Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender, 2015, Kara Dansky's The Abolition of Sex: How the “Transgender” Agenda Harms Women and Girls, 2021. Then there is Lierre Keith and her conviction that "(T)here's no such thing as a "transwoman." They are men. That's it. Men. And they don't belong in our word for ourselves or in our spaces."

And, please note, this is not a list compiled after doing a careful search of the literature; it's a sample I picked up from listening to just one trans person with strong views that differ from mine, somebody who uses "transgender" where I would advocate the use of "transsexual," and rolls her eyes at us pedants who still bang on about the distinction. Her name is Lily Alexandre and I know nothing about her other than that she has a vlog which apparently brings her $1,637/month. As I say, I have no idea how to judge the value of what she has to say other than that she sneers where I would expect her to argue.

And that brings me to my point. How are we to deal with people who find your views offensive? Do we back out of the dialogue? Nobody wants to talk with people who roll their eyes at your ignorance or naivete.  I'm still smarting at the first trans person I engaged with who insisted gay men were their biggest enemy because they were trying to hold trans people back from becoming trans. The linguistic can get political at surprising speed.

I remember the first time I called a heterosexual friend a heterosexual. He rolled his eyes. "What do we need that word for?" he asked. The honest answer is we didn't need it back in the day when the universal social attitude was "We don't have people like that." That was Ahmadinejad, the former president of Iran, referring to gay people. If you don't have gay people, homosexuals, you have no need of the word heterosexual to contrast them with. Likewise, these days, I've seen more than one friend roll their eyes at the word "cisgender." Didn't need the word before transgenderism became the hot topic it has recently become. Before people started fighting over whether they should be used as a third person singular pronoun or whether people got to tell you what pronouns they wanted you to use when referring to them.

Here's my dilemma. I don't know this Lily Alexandre person and don't expect to meet her (them? - I don't know which pronoun she/they prefer(s).) What do I say to her if she uses transgender where I would prefer transsexual? Or, even worse, if she disparages my use of transsexual. My suggestion is we should both be allowed to continue to work within the framework of our own arguments.

But then that takes us to another question. She/they is/are a transgendered (transsexual?) person. Does that give them more rights? A stronger leg to stand on morally? Do I not get to call her on what I think is a linguistic issue (she's not a linguist.) I grant you that linguists are not a disparaged category, at least as far as I know, and racism and sexism only has meaning when it involves a person from the more privileged class coming down on a person from the less privileged class. Does that apply here?

So much more work to do. I'm not sure we've even gotten this plane off the ground yet. Something tells me we're still working on the checklist before even starting the engines.

Just one thing before I leave. I'm being too cute in pretending I have trouble with the she/they choice. I don't. I've already accepted that they should be used these days for the third person singular. So much smoother than "he or she."  I made that decision back in the day when I first read that little girls, when asked to guess who the doctor was in a photo, almost always pointed to a man. I understand, on a practical level, the reason behind getting rid of the generic masculine - using he, as in Everybody should bring his own pencil to the test.

Everybody should bring his own bra, as well.

Keeping language apart from politics may be a lofty goal, but it's a battle nobody can win, in the end.

Getting a grasp on the transgender question - Part I: Language Usage

 L stands for people who identify as Lesbian, G for gay, B for Bisexual and T for transsexual or transgender people. Most of the time, when I talk to LGBT people, I talk to L and G people.  Many of them have had sex with persons of the opposite sex at some point in their lives and that would no doubt make others think of them as B people. In my experience, most were not. Not really. They were L or G people not yet ready to accept themselves as L or G people and trying to "go straight" at the time. I've met very few mature adults who identify themselves as B.  That's totally out of sync with the Gallup claim that over half of LGBT people identify as bi, and only underlines the fact that my personal sample is anything but a sample of the LGBT community; it's a function of the people I hang out with. I am aware that when I make generalizations about any group of people on the basis of their ethnicity or race or sexual persuasion, I am not describing them so much as I am revealing to the world the limitations of my own experience with it. Short of carefully constructed social science data collection, most of these generalizations are based on nothing more than anecdotal evidence.

But I'm still curious about these B-identified people.  Are they "really" B?  Or are they using the term as a mask?  And given the current state of the way we approach things in this country, can we ever trust the answers we might get?  Also, there is a whole set of more useful questions one might ask, if one is seeking to understand sexuality, such as "Did you always identify as L or G or did you once identify as B? If you are B is does your sex interest depend on the individual? The opportunity? 

We already know this applies to L and G as well. Kinsey generated a scale from Kinsey 1 (no interest in the same sex) to Kinsey 6 (interest only in the same sex). It's hard to be precise when dealing with such things as emotions, the sex drive, and in the way our environment has led us to identify ourselves and others sexually.

I've been trying to get my head around this newfound fascination with the world of T. And with the whole notion of identity and how we evaluate self-report data. I am convinced that in questions of sexuality, as with any other American fascination, getting clarity is likely to be beyond reach. Let me elaborate, using the current fascination with the political football that is transgender as a jumping-off place.

The first time I got into a discussion with a T-identified person it didn't go well. They were furious over the kind of questions I was asking. With good reason, no doubt. Naive questions can be charming, like when my niece - four years old at the time - crawled up in the lap of a black friend of mine and asked him, "How come your skin is brown?" But when one adult asks another, "How do you know you are gay, or trans?" the gay or trans person can be expected to think to themselves, "What rock did you just crawl out from under? Where the hell have you been all these years?"

What really pissed them off, though, was the revelation that I was coming from a starting point on the trans question that many trans people find really hard to take. I spent so many years coming to terms with being gay and have fought all my life trying to convince the world that gay men ought to be embraced regardless of how masculine or feminine they presented themselves as. And ditto for women. Whether homosexuality is inborn or nurtured later in life, we should be able to walk and talk in ways that come naturally to us without being considered some sort of freak. Nelly queens and butch lesbians have as much right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as anybody else, in my book. That's where I was coming from and I was convinced my convictions were established on a solid amount of life experience and therefore unassailable.

"If you find yourself waving your hands or crossing your legs in a way society associates with feminine behavior - if you are a man - and people look at you funny, recognize that it's society's problem, not yours," I would preach to my juniors in the LGBT world. "Don't go buying into the notion that you are 'a woman born into the wrong body.' That only gives bigots fuel for their fire. Stand your ground. Don't surrender your right to be whatever you are to another person."

I was what my T friend would tell me is a member of a class of T people's worst enemies: gay men. A man insisting that his experience with sexuality was universal. No better than the most arrogant and narrow kind of heterosexual, the kind likely to persuade your parents to lock you up in a mind-fuck Jesus reeducation camp to make you straight.

In Japan, in alternating semesters, I ran seminars on "liberation theory." The goal was to try to see if there was a common goal among the social movements around the world demanding political liberation, women's liberation, and gay liberation. And note, in passing, I'm talking about a time before the latter two got recast as "feminist movement" and "LGBT rights," respectively.  It was an uphill climb, since "feminism," many of my highly privileged students, both men and women, had decided, was a bad word, referring to those loud aggressive women who "called too much attention to themselves." And lesbians and gays were people suffering from gender dysphoria. I found myself seriously challenged, since I held the view that good teaching involved not dictating meaning and punishing people who thought differently from myself, but getting them to come around to my way of thinking through intellectual persuasion.  I don't know how far I got in creating feminists. With the gay liberation module, I cheated. I bypassed the intellectual persuasion bit and used emotion. I showed the documentary, "The Times of Harvey Milk." By the end of the screening, they were ready to accept that not all Ls and Gs are suffering from gender dysphoria. Many, they came to see, were "bien dans sa peau" as the French say: they "fit quite comfortably in their own skin," and simply want to be left to live a life free from discrimination and rejection.

Unfortunately, I still had a ways to go myself. While it's very much the case that lot of Ls and Gs need to get out from under the view that social rejection of them is proof that they were born in the wrong bodies - or otherwise need to "go straight," that does not mean gender dysphoria is not a real thing. Some dysphoria stems from bullying by people who simply need to shut up and mind their own business. These people you should ignore and not let them run your life. But there is also dysphoria that stems from a powerful inner conviction that life is expecting you to play from a stacked deck.  And are tortured by that expectation and deserve to be helped to get around it.

The line between inappropriate external pressure to think of yourself as incorrectly labeled by the doctor who birthed you and the legitimate conviction that you were incorrectly labeled is probably never going to be easy to find. We will, at least for the forseeable future, always have to do the best we can. My view is that, unless or until a time comes when we find a better way to proceed, we should simply ask the person involved to tell us what sex they want to identify with, embrace it and let them live life accordingly.

Before LGBT people came to find general acceptance in America, we had to listen to bible-thumpers tell us being gay was nothing more than a bad choice. Forgive me, but this gives me reason to think that here, too, this time with the Ts among us, the only decent response to such horse pucky is, "You don't tell me who I am; I tell you. Now piss off."

Unfortunately,  tragically, this country is now suffering from an outbreak of something on the spectrum between a simple outbreak of occasional authoritarianism and outright fascism. And by fascism, I mean, among other things, the twisting of facts for political gain. Roe v. Wade has been reversed, Republicans are trying to keep black Americans from voting because we all know they are very likely to vote Democratic, kids with same-sex parents are being told they cannot reveal that fact in many states when their teachers ask them to talk about their family lives, and in some places even a single parent complaint can lead to a book being removed from a school library. These are ugly times, politically. And T people are the latest pawns on the right-wing chess board.

OK. Buckle up. The next part is probably going to lose me some friends. Because I identify as a sociolinguist and I understand that to mean that I see word meanings as following the actual use of language in society, and not some idealized Language Academy or Dictionary Authority word definition, here's where I run into trouble: 

The T in LGBT stands simultaneously for "transsexual" and "transgender." I see those as two separate things: transsexual as somebody who moves, or intends to move from one physical sex to another, by means of things like puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgery; and transgender as somebody who sees themselves as no longer willing to play the social roles their society assigns their sex to play and asks you to stop using one set of pronouns and start using the opposite ones. Transsexual, I understand to be a biological category; transgender, a social category. The former as scientifically, objectively defined, the latter as socially, conventionally, subjectively defined. Or, to put it another way, your gender is what you and the rest of the world decide to call yourself, your sex is defined by things that can be measured by such things as chromosomes, gametocytes, hormone prevalence, and external and internal anatomy. The distinction in recent times has become blurred by usage, though, and now we read that "According to the APA Style guide, the term "transsexual" is largely outdated...." 

What? Say again?  That means to me only that the APA is buying into the blurring of the two terms.  Pay no attention to what you see, it says. Don't believe your lying eyes. The doctor may have called me a girl because he couldn't see the real me, but I tell you who I am; you don't tell me. It's not only my "gender" that is on a spectrum; so is my "sex."

Remember, I insist that people who identify as "transexual" or "transgendered" deserve to be treated with respect and the same degree of affection one would expect to give those who don't. But I find the political assertion that things can be whatever you say they are makes me uncomfortable because it lines up with those on the far right who speak of alternate facts. 

That, of course, just raises the question, "If that's the case, what do you care? Why are you making such a big deal of this?" The answer is I don't like people who make things unnecessarily muddy. What's called for here is a nuanced appreciation of the distinction between fact and fiction. The postmodern assertion that things are no more than what any person's narrative takes them to be is a big part of the current mess we're in, where we are being led to believe that there is a hidden cabal of people out to run the world. No. Distinctions matter. A proto-fascist president may call himself president and insist Biden stole the election. But that's a fiction. Which, in this case, is a lie.  Confusing transsexual and transgendered may be less consequential, but it's also not an innocent misuse of language.

You see my problem as a sociolinguist. My dilemma. On the one hand I want to use language the way the world actually uses language, and not the way some outside authority thinks it should be used. On the other hand, I want to draw a line when people call a liar a president. And when people are (in my view) too lazy to make meaningful distinctions. I'm a conservative in the sense that I want people to say "fewer people" and not "less people" and use the apostrophe-s for the possessive, and not for making nouns plural.

Am I wrong to see the transsexual/transgendered distinction in this light? Note that I'm hardly alone in this. Have a look at two eggheads I normally give a lot of credence to tearing down Richard Dawkins for saying essentially the same thing I just did - which, given his cred as a world-class biologist - should carry a lot more weight. Shame on these guys and their ad hominem attack on one of the great thinkers of our age.

We need to get this linguistic roadkill out of the road so we can get to the really important stuff of the transgender issue - how to help people transition if they need to and how to stop passing bad laws that get in their way.

But more on that later.

I'll stop here for now.