A compendium of gender critical links and resources on the subject of the “trans’ing” of children. Well worth the clicks.
“Can we please get over this and just let kids be kids who grow organically into the only bodies they will ever have?”
“Young teens go into these communities with problems that are incredibly typical, like feelings of not fitting in with peers, or liking clothing or activities that are seen as being “for” the opposite sex. They are told that even questioning their gender means that they are trans, and to get on puberty blockers or hormones as soon as possible. Again and again, the idea that taking one’s life is a natural and inevitable consequence of not being able to get these medications is reinforced.”
“In jumping straight to the assumption of the statistically most unlikely outcome that a child is transgender, aren’t we just reinforcing those gender stereotypes, and in fact doing exactly the same as the parent who forces a child to conform?”
A rare find: A parent who dares to question.
From one of the comments on the article:
“It also seems to me that any concerns that are voiced about this topic are dismissed as prejudice. Personally I think there’s a very real difference between believing that transgender people should live their lives without violence and discrimination, and believing that children who like the ‘wrong’ toys are candidates for drugs and surgery.”
No, you don’t “care” about my child
So I have figured out a few things vis-à-vis the few (and they have been few, so far) people who personally attack me, claiming they only do so because they ”care” about my child. By “attack” I mean character assassination, not respectful debate.
First, they believe without an iota of doubt that there is such a thing as a “male” or “female” brain. And one’s male or female brain absolutely must dictate what sort of body it is attached to. Second, they believe that even a toddler innately knows which brain they have. When that child says “I feel like a girl” or “I feel like a boy” that subjective experience is objective reality, and no one—no one—has the right to question it. Ever. The only viable option is to support their assertion with all that modern medicine and pharmaceutical products can supply. Even questioning this orthodoxy amounts to child abuse.
The people who vomit their bile on me believe a child’s self-professed gender is as hard-wired and as objectively indisputable as their left elbow. They fervently believe this even if said child is of the age where they are also saying they are –or they wish they were–a dog or a tractor or Spiderman or a princess. They don’t think gender is a social construction. They don’t believe life experiences might mold a child’s idea of gender. No, the gender cake was already baked while they were in the womb. So if a kid is referred to and treated as the opposite gender–by parents, teachers, doctors, psychologists–from the time they’re 2 years old, if they’re on puberty blockers, if they are indoctrinated that this means they are “transgender,” those years of experience won’t have ANY influence on whether they choose to medically transition later. No pressure at all! Case closed.
For all their supposed knowledge of neuroscience, they never seem to have read anything from the decades of research pertaining to pediatric brain development, the years of childhood make-believe, of confusion of fantasy with reality…the relatively new knowledge that the frontal lobes of the brain—judgment, decision-making, awareness of future consequence, impulse control, self monitoring–don’t develop until age 25. None of that has any bearing on the Gender is Set in Stone at Birth dogma.
And their ideology is as impervious as granite. It’s all nature, no nurture. To these people, 15 years of a girl being told she is actually a “he” couldn’t possibly influence a biological girl (oops, I mean, “assigned female at birth”) to move on to medical transition when she’s older, even if, actually, she’s a girl who would have grown up to be a lesbian (which is what statistics say usually happens) if she had just been left alone to figure it out on her own.
The transactivists are not interested in any research that could cast doubt on their hypothesis . They only want to cherry pick studies that claim there is a male or female brain. Even though THOSE studies have been disputed, and generally have a subject base consisting mostly of trans people who’ve already transitioned and been on hormones for years. And, of course, the conclusion they draw from those flawed studies is that the brain dictates the body it’s attached to, period. Hell, I even saw someone crowing about an article touting head transplants in the future for trans people. Cut off your “male” or “female” head and attach it to a donated body of the opposite sex! Problem solved.
I’ve mostly engaged in civil dialogue online. I came here in the first place because there aren’t many people raising the questions I am, from the perspective of a parent who cares enough to dig deeper, and I want that point of view to be heard. And I want other lefty parents like me to have a place to go where they aren’t dismissed as ogres and transphobes. Where they aren’t told that–simply by questioning, by expressing doubts–they are personally responsible for the suicides of troubled teenagers.
In my short time here, I’ve learned a ton about what it is really like to have gender/physical dysphoria, to have the intense desire to transition to the other sex. I respect that experience. I’ve talked with people who have medically transitioned, and I’ve adjusted my views based on things they tell me. I’ve been humbled; I’ve learned, and I’ve opened a few minds myself. I’m doing this in good faith, and most other people seem to be doing the same. Those of us who are running “serious” theme blogs have a purpose outside entertainment. We feel like we have something important to say. Disagreements I’ve had are generally respectful. I have zero interest in making enemies of people I don’t even know. I have better things to do with my time.
But, like anywhere else on the Internet, there are a few haters. Because I am running a blog which dares to question the trans orthodoxy, I occasionally get drive-by vitriol, usually from kids who are angry at their own parents. I get told I am a terrible mother, an abuser even, of my daughter (except they always say “son” based on the sparse personal information I’ve shared here, if they’ve even read that, which I doubt). Apparently my “son” is exactly the same as all the other “sons” out there, despite the suddenness of all this, and how it only arose after a short time of binging on certain Internet snack bars .
They claim to “care” about my child, they are “scared” for her, they are “worried” for her; they automatically assume it’s “him” because remember—if anyone, anywhere simply says they might be trans, then that is the word of god from on high. It is sacrosanct.
I’m not naïve or stupid. I knew venturing onto Tumblr would be—let’s say, a rough and tumbl ride at times—and I’m not going to let myself be destroyed or derailed by the words of a hateful or unhinged stranger online. Haters gonna hate.
But I will say this to those few shit-throwers:
You don’t know me. You don’t know my family. You don’t know my daughter—hell, call her my son, I don’t care. You don’t have the slightest idea where we are in this process. You are clueless about what kind of parent I am. And most importantly: You do not “care” about my child. You don’t “worry” about her. You’re not “scared” for her. I’m the one who is doing that. Your feigned “caring” is just a way to lash out at someone who is daring to raise questions about a dogma you have imbibed, and it bothers you. You don’t want anyone upsetting your apple cart.
I’m not changing my Ask box policy. If you send me hate, you go straight to the trash bin. All you’ll get is the chance to briefly spew your cyber-bile onto a stranger. If that floats your boat, knock yourself out. But it won’t make me shut up. Most of all, don’t flatter yourself that you “care” about my child, so you might as well let go of that little self-aggrandizing delusion.
And to the ones who scream “Unfollow me!!!!” (which I invariably do): Did it ever occur to you that following a blog is sometimes a way to learn something new? Just something to consider.
And I imagine there are analogous giveaways of testosterone to teen girls whose parents aren’t bankrolling their “transition” to FTM.
Transgenderreality.com is providing a really important service. Please let parents of gender nonconforming kids know about this site.
In 2015, a “gender non-conforming” girl is someone who doesn’t want to look and act like a porn star
Just might make “transition” seem all the more attractive if you’re a teen with a brain, eh?
not that i still watch glee, but:
i heard a few weeks back that dot-marie jones’ character on glee, Coach Beiste, had recently been rewritten as a trans man for the show’s last season. after 4 years of playing a strong, tomboy-ish, very masculine cis woman who identified with womanhood and identified as straight, jones is now going to play a trans man (presumably gay) — which has also been a convenient excuse to write glee’s black trans girl character out of the show.
this development makes me really angry as a butch woman and as a feminist. Jones was quoted in People, saying: “I just didn’t want to let down the girls who are straight and tomboys that my character represented the last four seasons…But I got the script and I was, like, ‘Oh my God. This is amazing.’ ”
the problem is that this does let down girls and women who do not fit the stereotypical definition of womanhood or who don’t conform to the norm of compulsory femininity. coach beiste was an island of representation, especially for straight masc women who are frequently assumed to be gay because they don’t fit the boxes laid out for women. now that representation has been turned into something else, which has the potential to leave these girls and women confused about who they are and leaves them with no real media representation.
as a masculine woman, i often - so often - feel out of place, othered by my non-performance of femininity, by the ways i perform masculinity, and by what feel like my failures to ever achieve a masculine ideal. i share little with many feminine women with regard to social performance, but i cannot deny what i share with them in our identities, our attitudes, and often our experiences as well.
i have felt pressure to transition; i question my gender all the time and have felt a pull towards immersing myself in masculinity and coming out as a man if only to reduce my cognitive dissonance and others’ inability to put me in a box. i am made to feel like what i am cannot be what a woman is, even though i live as proof to the contrary.
when a person like coach beiste identifies as a woman, that helps to expand our definition of what women are, who they are, and from a feminist perspective helps to distance women from heteropatriarchal ideas of what they can and must be. same when someone like myself identifies as a woman.
part of why i think coach beiste’s coming out and transition are harmful is that glee is reneging on all of the mind-expanding work the character did as a straight masculine woman, who loved being a woman and loved being attracted to men. i know that many trans people do not come out or are not safe enough to come out until late in life, and that does not in any way invalidate their experiences. i know that many are resolutely and often self-destructively or defensively attached to their assigned genders at birth, and that this is a common cover-up for people who have yet to come to terms with their identities. but i think glee is doing this for ratings and PC brownie points, and in the process they are conveying that no matter what coach beiste said in the past about loving being a woman, that doesn’t make any sense and is forgotten in his coming out as trans; they make a mockery of coach beiste’s experience as a masc woman and stand to harm gender non-conforming women — and really all women — by tossing out beiste’s womanhood so cavalierly.
A great point worth remembering: not all “gender nonconforming” women are lesbians. I do watch Glee, and Coach Beiste’s transition was a letdown.