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Psychological Association, the gold standard for such things, "has determined that the term 'transsexual' is largely outdated."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.

*                    *                    *

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.