Why does PFLAG (originally: Parents and Families of Lesbians and Gay people) now promote so many trans activists? They don’t even stay true to their acronym anymore; their home page says they are “Parents, Families, Friends and Allies United with LGBTQ People.”
It’s not that…
Okay, so two things.
First, you’ve snuck in facts not in evidence (and you aren’t very good at being sneaky.) You go from saying “kids who are gender non-conforming often grow up to be gay/lesbian/bi” which is backed by science, to “there is a trend of parents identifying and treating kids who are gender non-conforming as trans.” You act as if this trend is significant, calling it “conversion therapy.”
CITATION NEEDED. Prove that this is actually a trend that is happening and erasing gay identities.Second, you seem confused about how and why trans* folks have hitched their wagon to the LGB cause. You intimate that this was some kind of hostile takeover (lol). You’re probably too young to remember ‘Paris is Burning’ and Brandon Teena and the zeitgeist that was going on in the early and mid 90s, when a lot of us realized that out struggles were the same and that we were fighting the same hatred and bigotry.
If you were actually curious, you could look it up and see why LGB folks like me welcomed trans* folks into our struggle. But I suspect you aren’t actually curious and and that it IS actually that you’re anti-trans.
I generally don’t interact with bloggers who use the pejorative “TERF” in their titles and tags, but I’ll respond to the reasonable points in your reblog and then we can call it a day. Anyone who uses that label is not, by my definition, someone interested in learning anything new. Also, you obviously haven’t read much of my blog, which isn’t about hating people–it’s about critiquing the current increase in the medical transition of gender nonconforming children.
You acknowledge that the science over many decades shows that most GNC children grow up to be gay/lesbian/bi. It’s easy to connect the dots, then, to see that the EFFECT of childhood transition is that it prevents that majority of kids from growing up to realize they aren’t straight (without transition). There doesn’t have to be an actual, organized conspiracy for the EFFECT to be the same.
That said, if you think homophobia exists (which obviously you do, from what you wrote in your reblog), it’s not much of a leap to realize that at least some parents would be more comfortable with a straight child than a gay or lesbian child. You asked for a cite? I wrote about this topic in the post here, which contains a link to a 2000 study which discusses homophobia as being a causal factor in parents’ and clinicians’ choice to see GNC kids as “disordered” and in need of professional help. It also notes that homophobia amongst clinicians is a real thing
“Regardless of the fact that homosexuality is not officially considered a disordered outcome, the prevention of homosexuality remains a significant reason for referral of children with GID. It would be naive to believe that prevention of homosexuality is not a motivating factor for at least some of the clinicians who work with children referred for gender-atypicality. Indeed, some researchers and clinicians in the area of GID in children are quite open about such a goal, writing books (e.g., Rekers, 1982, 1991) or belonging to organizations devoted to the prevention of homosexuality (e.g., L. Loeb: see http://www.narth.com/menus/advisors.html). Thus, although the issue of the risk associated with a homosexual outcome should be moot, it is not. It is crucial that researchers and clinicians in the area of GID in children recognize that the most likely outcome for children with GID, with or without treatment (Green, 1987), is homosexuality, and that homosexuality is a nondisordered outcome. Only a very few children with GID continue to have GID as adolescents or adults.”
Second, I was an adult during the Brandon Teena tragedy and many other events (and by the way, here is a very different take on Brandon Teena and the awful things she suffered in her life than the usual narrative). My saying that I think there should be a separate and distinct organization serving gay/lesbian youth and their families does not mean I am a monster who wants to see trans-identified people harmed or to have their civil rights taken away. But being an oppressed or harassed group is not a good enough reason to be represented by the same organization. I can see the reasoning behind the original joining of forces, but now the effect in particular for young lesbian identity and spaces is erasure under the umbrella term “queer.”
If you are interested in hearing anything else I have to say on this or other topics, you are invited to read my blog. But I’m not interested in a nasty back-and-forth with someone who rails at “TERFs” on their page, so if that’s all you want to do, I’ll just ignore you.
