Like most good liberals, I was totally on board with transgender “liberation.” After all, it’s the next civil rights struggle, right? I’ve marched against war, racism, for health care, for women’s and gay and lesbian rights. In the 1980s, I surfed the Second Wave of feminism, loving who I chose, dressing as I chose, speaking my mind, and living the life of equality first wavers like Susan B. Anthony,Charlotte Gilman, and Emma Goldman fought so hard for. I was a two-time
election worker on President Obama’s campaigns. In the past couple of years, I celebrated
as homophobic laws toppled, state by state, and gay marriage morphed into mainstream
reality. And until recently, I’ve had the unexamined, vague conviction that the
“T” in LGBT was part of the same good trend: more inclusion for the
marginalized.
But that has all changed. I’ve shifted from the cookie-cutter
progressive vantage point I inhabited only a few months ago. It’s not a 180 turnaround. I believe in civil rights for all people, and I don’t think trans
people should face job, housing, or other discrimination. But I no longer see transgenderism
as a liberation movement. From where I now stand, I see it as a profound and
fundamentally conservative undermining of the gains of the Second Wave of
feminism. It’s the Third Wave, a tsunami of narcissism, of post-modernist
relativism run amok…a hall of mirrors, wave upon wave of shiny, YouTube transition
videos and Tumblr confessions… where subjective feelings and ideas always trump
physical reality.
Something has gone wrong. Very wrong. I’ve been asleep for 20
years, but now I’m waking up…because my own teenage daughter is being churned
and tossed in this very turbulent sea.
When my daughter announced to me that she is transgender a
few months ago, my initial reaction was basically positive—even though she had
never before expressed an inkling of any such identity. In fact, she
had always talked about how glad she was to be a girl. I’d raised her to feel
that, like me, she could dress, act, or be anything she wanted to be and until
very recently, that’s exactly what she did.
The change was abrupt. She admitted to binge-watching
triumphant and ecstatic FTM transition videos for days on end. She started
using jargon like “genderqueer.” But despite this turnaround, despite misgivings,
I made an appointment with a gender therapist, ruminating on what it would mean
to welcome a son into the erstwhile form of a daughter.
A researcher and scientist by profession and by avocation, I
dived deeply into the Internet and medical literature on FTMs. And the more I
read, talked, and emailed (and I delved a lot), the weaker my kneejerk-liberal “trans
ally” position became.
I learned that everything I had taken for granted about
women’s liberation has changed. A dislike of pink and traditionally (think:
1950s norms) female activities and interests now means a girl, a teen, is “actually”
a boy. Instead of acceptance if a girl wears
denim and button-down shirts, that’s called by the archaic term “cross dressing”
and the girl is pressured to “transition.” Gender role conformity is more rigid
than ever, which is the great irony of transgenderism. Girls who used to find
their home as “butch” lesbians don’t have anyone to identify with or look up to
anymore. Women’s or lesbian bookstores, discussion groups, bars seem to have
vanished from the face of the earth. Everything has been subsumed under the “queer”
label. And while nearly all FTMs start
out as lesbians, they disavow it after beginning “transition.” They were never
really lesbians, after all. They are really just crossdressers who yearn to
be male.
And when it comes to “transition,” the holy grail, the magic
elixir, is testosterone. It would be one thing if “T” could be used experimentally,
then abandoned, with only temporary and reversible changes to the mind and
body. Then you could say: Why not? Give it a try. But even a few weeks on “T” usually
results in forever-thickened vocal cords, forever-thickened body and facial
hair, and—by some accounts I’ve read—even brain changes that are hard to undo. If a girl or woman transitions and changes her
mind, she will forever live in a modified, androgen-altered body, whether she likes it
later or not. Sterility is another risk. And many FTMs on long term hormone
treatment are plagued by chronic infections, heart trouble, high blood
pressure, premature aging.
That the frontal lobes of teenagers’ brains are not fully developed
is now settled science, no more controversial than gravity or evolution. We now know that executive function–judgment,
impulse control, planning, and self monitoring skills–don’t reach maturity in
young people until at least the age of 25. Yet the medical and psychological
professions are allowing—no, they are pushing—surgical
and pharmaceutical transition as the “answer” for teens who are questioning
their identities. There’s a huge cognitive dissonance here: If adolescence is a
time of limited executive function, how on earth can we be encouraging, let
alone celebrating, such life-changing
decisions being made by teen (and much younger) people?
How can it be that surgery and testosterone are now seen as the
only viable solution to the feeling
that a female doesn’t fit conventional gender stereotypes? What happened to:
women can be anything they want to be? Shave your legs, don’t, cut your hair,
don’t….love who you want, work on cars, have a child, don’t….that’s liberation
as I’ve always understood it. But Second Wave feminism is considered stodgy and
old fashioned now. Despite its fundamentally liberating message to women.
A 4th Wave of Feminism. We need it. We need it NOW.
