The impact of transgenderism on young people
This review of an important volume on this much-debated issue was written past Rev Dr Michael Bird, Academic Dean and Lecturer in Theology at Ridley College, Melbourne. It was first published on his own blog and is reproduced here by permission.
What follows is a seven,700-word summary and review of a book critiquing transgender credo from an eclectic number of feminist, queer, disability, and psychoanalytic authors. It is a riveting read, one of the most illuminating and thought-provoking things I've read for a while, necessary for anyone wrestling with what transgenderism is and how to intendance for people with gender dysphoria. For a short summary, see the conclusion with my takeaway and my questions for the editors.
Heather Brunskell-Evans and Michele Moore (eds.) Transgender Children and Young People: Born in Your Ain Torso ( Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2018). Available at Cambridge Scholars and Amazon.co.uk
Introduction
Equally a lecturer in a theological college, evangelical by ethos, I train men and women for Christian ministry, normally with a view to leading a parish, but in other contexts also such equally chaplaincy, youth piece of work, and university ministry. One perennial issue of give-and-take among students is how do we make sense of trangenderism in a Christian framework and how do nosotros pastor and treat persons with gender dysphoria and their families? My students are usually informed enough to know that sex activity and gender are not the same thing, they grasp the social factors shaping gender, and empathise that glib responses like "God made yous a girl so simply be a girl" are naïve and simplistic. Just they generally want to know how to understand and treat people with gender dysphoria and their families. They desire to sympathize even while they harbor suspicions that the whole transgender credo is challenging the integrity of male and female bodies thanks to the evangelical zeal of transgender activists and through government-sponsored programs in schools that permit no room for question or criticism of transgenderism.
For those of us in such a position, triangulated between being curious, caring, and critical,Transgender Children and Young People: Born in Your Own Bodyis a much-needed book. Information technology is non a religious book, it is secular; information technology is not Christian, it is resourced in queer, disabled, feminist, psychoanalytic, and de-transitioned perspectives; simply information technology is necessary reading for anyone who wants to reasonably and responsibly grapple with transgender ideologies that are becoming increasingly present and often militant in our wider society.
This book is edited past two British academics, Dr.Heather Brunskell-Evans, a social theorist and philosopher and Prof.Michele Moore, a leading researcher in disability studies and disability rights, and they mount a comprehensive challenge to what has at present become accepted dogma almost transgenderism and the transgendering of children. The editors and contributors will undoubtedly be assaulted with all sorts slurs and derisive epithets because of their effort to challenge what are at present state-sanctioned dogmas nigh gender, redefinitions of biology, and experimental uses of drugs, every bit well equally to point out the immense dangers being done to children and wider society every bit a upshot of promoting the transgendering of children. To exist clear, this book does non deny gender dysphoria, nor that transitioning and even gender reassignment surgery is often an effective treatment for extreme cases of dysphoria. It is rather, a disquisitional and scientific critique of the transgendering of children every bit role of a discursive sociological project.
Overview
The editors begin by noting the transgender activist enterprise of normalising and valorising transgenderism and setting themselves up as champions of tolerance and inclusion against discrimination and gender binaries. A corollary of this activism is the transgendering of children who exhibit traits of declared gender dysphoria past gender reassignment, puberty blockers, and possibly even surgery. The rationale being that a child's concrete and psychological well-being is improved by transitioning and anything that resists or questions such a transition is inherently abusive towards the child.
Against this transgender activism and its enabling state actors the editors merits that "transgender childrendon't exist" (2, italics original) and their collaborative venture "examines the theories and politics of transgenderism, and the medical, psychological, legal and educational practices associated with information technology, for the ways they discursively construct 'the transgender child'' (2). Theirprima facieobjection to transgendering children are: (i) Transgenderism treats biological science as a social construct, while asserting that gender is a real matter located somewhere in the brain, soul, or body. To the contrary, they insist, it is gender non biological science that is synthetic. (ii) Transgenderism restricts children to traditional views of gender and the merely escape machinery is to reject pre-social notions of identity (two).
This volume thus tries to open the debate most transgendering children that has often been censored and dismissed for simply existence the prejudiced ravings of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). Quite predicably some contributors have already received formal complaints and even been warned that they are allegedly breaching the British 2010 Equality Act. The editors plead that this is no intra-feminist minority written report because while transgenderism is lauded as offer a new paradigm of thought and a revolution in values, the reality in their view is that "transgendering children is not progressive, but politically reactionary, medically dangerous, and abusive of children" (3). Not only that, but possible conflicts between women and transwomen are routinely ignored and unprecedented numbers of children are being transgendered with serious long-term medical, psychological, physical, and sociological consequences (4).
The editors "offer a call for critical resistance that contests the current status quo" (5). With a salvo of vitriolic criticism imminent, they protest that they are not transphobic, the proof of that is that they adhere to the overriding principle of "Practice No Harm" and they wish to open a contend near the difference betwixt "gender defoliation and intervention" in order to nourish to the welfare of dislocated children (xv).
Stephanie Davies-Arai writes a provocative essay on "The Transgender Experiment on Children" which exposes the incoherence of transgender ideology and its detriment to children.
Davies-Arai begins by noting the resident media narrative about courageous children daring to be their authentic selves and the brave parents who support them in a climate of hatred and discrimination (16). Of course, underlying this narrative is the view that sex is cognitive not biological, being a girl is an abstract i can choose to be, and not a matter of biology (27). Furthermore, it is claimed that sterilising children by blocking their natural sexual development, medically altering their bodies with cross-sexual activity hormones, often followed up with radical surgery and life-long medication, is necessary to prevent youth suicide (17). Against this view, Davies-Arai offers several penetrating critiques.
First, transgenderism is a socio-political move with the characteristics of a religious cult (16-17, 30-31). The heartstring pulling media narratives nigh helping children become who they truly are, in reality, requires activists "to sanitise the story and obscure the reality" of the complexities and trauma associated with transitioning (17). Davies-Arai points out that while gender dysphoria is a known status, yet "transgender" has become an incredibly broad umbrella encompassing things like gender questioning and being gender non-conforming. Consequently, what transgenderism represents is not a medical trouble or fifty-fifty a psychological status requiring treatment, merely a species of adult identity politics being applied to children whose identities are non fixed, simply are in development, and are therefore vulnerable to distortion and abuse (18). If, every bit Davies-Arai points out, fourscore% of children with gender dysphoria somewhen desist or abound out of it, then it beggars belief why children and early adolescents are being cajoled into transitioning through pharmaceutical treatment (19). It is highly apropos that transgender activists take been known to deny that children tin can and do outgrow gender dysphoria (31).
Second, the drive towards transgendering is driven past the normalization of crass stereo-types, boys like boy toys and girls like daughter toys, so if a male child likes daughter toys, and then the boy must exist a girl (19-xx). She points out that every media story about children transitioning has appealed to the toys they play with or the clothes they similar wearing as proof of their true gender identity. If gender norms are defined rigidly in terms of expectations for femininity and masculinity, children who do not fit into sure gender boxes will be susceptible to proposition that they are transgender. Transgenderism requires that "boy" and "girl" are insular and immutable categories with few shared traits betwixt them (19-21, 23). Davies-Arai believes this rests on the view that trunk must only and always match your personality and gender stereo-type (26).
3rd, a farther problem with transgender ideology is that it assumes a "kid-knows-best" model of parenting where children are accounted competent to decide their identity and medical needs (twenty-21). The consequence is that "children are seen as democratic mini-adults with identifies impervious to influence, and who come up ready-made in two varieties, pink or bluish" (21). The trouble is that nonetheless a six-twelvemonth kid knows themselves (which is unlikely to exist without parental influence) they only know themselves as a six-year-old, with the cognitive development and decision-making tools of a child.
Quaternary, instruction children that their true and authentic self is disassociated from their torso entails acceptance of a listen-trunk dualism that Davies-Arai regards equally a symptom of a psychological defect (24). (I disagree here with notion of mind-body dualism as a course of pathology, merely the indicate should exist taken, in transgenderism "identity" is basically a secular version of the soul, an invisible and incorporeal cocky, a personal essence beyond the senses and transcending whatever effort at definition).
Fifth, transgenderism has a negative affect on adolescent females in particular (23-25). If girls are taught that they have no right to boundaries every bit a sex, that the feelings of a biological male takes precedent over their own rights for safe, they will be less probable to speak up for their rights over and against male power. If girls are taught that they cannot resist male incursions into female spaces, then girls will believe that male person incursion is normal and resistance is inappropriate. What is more, to guild any protest risks having themselves painted every bit transphobic and fifty-fifty threatened with penalty by police.
Sixth, the phenomenon of teenage girls transitioning in clusters is more than of a witness to the pressures faced by female person adolescents than to a more tolerant social matrix which supposedly makes existence transgender safer (28-xxx). The emergence of "sudden onset gender dysphoria" (admittedly only a hypothesis at the moment and requires further written report!) is often associated with mental wellness atmospheric condition that have connections with a multifariousness of mental health disorders. These include discomfort or lack of confidence with one's own torso, disassociation, shame, anxiety, depression self-esteem, low, negative moods, negative body paradigm, eating disorders, cocky-objectification, and cocky-harm. The phenomena of adolescent females uncomfortable with their own bodies might have less to do with a body-identity mismatch than it does with a failure to imbibe adolescent females with confidence and security with their own bodies perhaps acquired past a civilization of endemic objectification and sexualization of women. Such girls pose "a market in waiting for transgender activists" (29).
Seventh, children on the autism spectrum are particularly susceptible to manipulation in the area of identity (30). Referrals to gender clinics can include upward to 50% of children with autism spectrum traits. Given that autism spectrum adolescents struggle to understand unstated social conventions and they typically engage in highly literalized thinking, for instance, boys are always X and girls are always Y, they are susceptible to be cajoled into identifying as transgender rather than simply having a unlike personality to the average boy or daughter.
Eighth, transgender activists claim that biological sex is irrelevant to one's true cocky and even so biological sex characteristics must exist prevented from developing and be cosmetically altered (32-33). If biological science and physical characteristics practice not shape who I am, then what is the point in changing it with pharmaceutical handling? Moreover, the effects of puberty blockers in the long-term are generally unknown but what is known is the negative impact that synthetic hormones accept in interrupting brain maturation and in causing long term wellness weather condition such as heart failure, stroke, depression, assailment, liver toxicity and infertility. Transitioning kids with drugs is conducting a medical experiment on children and nosotros exercise not know for certain what the long-term harm will be.
Davies-Arai concludes with bold pronouncement:
'Transgender kids' is non a scientific or medical term merely a political 1. There has been no scientific quantum over the last few years, no globally-trumped announcement of the discovery that sexual dimorphism in humans lies in their personal, subjective feelings and not in their male and female person biology; no new theory of mind which bestows on children the power to change reality by wishing hard plenty. What we have been witnessing is not only a medical experiment on some children's bodies only a psychological experiment on all children'due south minds. What volition happen if we tell teenage girls that their male person classmate is at present a 'girl' and that the reality that he is male is not true? How will deception and gaslighting of children affect their security and their trust in adults? What will be the cumulative effects of cognitive dissonance on the mental health of children who are no longer allowed to proper noun reality? In trying to protect a minority group we have redefined all boys and girls as 'identifies' rather than sexes. In that location is already plenty of evidence, non least in the confused words of children and adolescents themselves through the media, of the devastating bear on of this mass societal abuse of young people's trust (34-35).
Heather Brunskell-Evans's contribution pertains to "Gendered Mis-Intelligence: The Fabrication of 'The Transgender Kid'".
She begins by asserting that the transgender kid has a provenance in a particular narrative that derived from transgender activism in the latter decades of the twentieth century where gender is fixed and sex is constructed. But the transgender child is a social construct, she argues, since the transgender child is no more real than "the pathological homosexual" or "the macho-man" (41). Brunskell-Evans declares in adversarial fashion, "In dissimilarity to enabling freedom, by insisting gender is inherent rather than a social construct, the gendered intelligence offered past transgender doctrine to children, parents and society at large endorses the very gendered norms of 'masculinity' and 'femininity' it is purported to revolutionize. In dissimilarity to the idea that transgendering a immature person is a progressive and humane I argue it is politically reactionary and an egregious abrogation by order of responsibility to protect children from harm" (42).
Brunskell-Evans offers an anecdote to illustrate how deeply ingrained (or doctrinated) society has become with the notion that progressives back up transgendering children whilst bigots do not (42-43). This derives from a move she identifies whereby Queer politics inverse from analysing structures of oppression to the rights of gay people to redefining gender norms (44). In the networking of the 1990s the credo became clear: gender is inherent but sexual activity is constructed, then that information technology is possible to be born into the wrong body (44-45). Far from being progressive or revolutionary, Brunskell-Evans contends that transgenderism gives currency to the very gender myths and stereo-types that gay activists originally spurned (45).
Brunskell-Evans credits the organizations Gender Identity Inquiry and Educational activity Order (GIRES), Mermaids (another transgender instruction and support group), and Gendered Intelligence (educational back up and advisory group) every bit leading the charge of not only reifying gender and destablilizing the idea of biological sex, but also irresolute Britain medical guidelines for treating gender dysphoric children. The result is that wellness service guidelines began to urge parents to accept their child's purportedly "real" gender and filibuster in transitioning was considered a form of abuse (47). Brunskell-Evans claims that these new guidelines are based on little other than gender stereo-types, the insecurity of a child's identity, and some speculative neuro-science about how gender identity develops. Clinicians are at present beingness overtly trained to reinforce the very gender binaries form which a person is allegedly to be emancipated from (49).
Brunskell-Evans attributes much of the success of the transgender lobby to the efforts of Jay Stewart, founder and CEO of Gendered Intelligence. Jay is a trans-man who explicitly connects his transgender beliefs to Fredrick Nietzsche's volition-to-power, a foreign mis-reading of Simone de Beauvoire's existential resistance to gender stereotypes, and a baloney of the feminism of Judith Butler. The result, which Brunskell-Evans chastises, is that Stewart reinforces a gender binary where gender is pre-social and interior (51-52). According to Brunskell-Evans, Stewart further believes that assigning sex to a child based upon ballocks limits the possibilities of their human expression and the gender binary is cool, oppressive, and unsafe (53). Stewart'due south emphasis on sexual practice every bit non-binary and self-actualizing obtains is strange declarations that two women who place as male person can have gay sex (55).
The non-binary image notwithstanding collapses because: (i) It creates a new binary between the majority of people who are cis-gendered and the rest who are not-binary. (ii) If gender is a spectrum and no-i is purely male and female, so cis-gendered persons practise not exist, because everyone is not-binary to some caste or other. (iii) A handful of persons are allowed to opt out of the gender spectrum and define themselves equally non-gendered or a-gendered, withal cis-gendered people are not permitted this novelty or luxury of escape. (four) If in that location are more than 2 genders then we are faced with the problem of how many there are and how can nosotros possibly know (56).
Brunskell-Evans opines that if gender re-assignment laws get passed which allow persons to determine their gender past naked announcement rather than by medical certificate then there are host of negative corollaries for social club and medicine (57-58). Finally, Brunskell-Evans worries that a "futurity generations may look back with astonishment at the sheer moral and intellectual certitude that 'the transgender child' is real. Perhaps people will wonder why the obvious inconsistencies of the cognition on whose ground we accede children are 'built-in in the wrong body' were non questioned" (60).
A personal contribution is fabricated by the beardingGenderCriticalDad(GCD) on "I'grand not a hideously bigoted parent who doesn't 'get' information technology'". It is a deeply personal story nigh a middle-aged father desperately trying to love and back up his boyish girl when she has, in his listen, been poisoned by transactivism.
GCD tells the story of how his daughter evolved from beingness "butch" to identifying as "transgender," which in turn led him to investigate trans credo and beginning the GenderCriticalDad blog. GCD initially idea trans was just slightly more gay, but soon realized it meant spending a lifetime on an artificial and untested hormone authorities and the irreversible mutilation of his daughter's body. Against the trans-accepting prescription of the BBC, NHS, the Guardian, and public schools, he couldn't go along with the narrative (66-67). He was alarmed to learn that nigh male to female trans people practice not have surgery nor intend to; and most female to male person trans people started out equally lesbians and when put on testosterone supplements became attracted to men. Further discoveries included websites claiming that trans women are real women and straight women tin be denigrated for their cis-privilege. Plus, whatsoever mention of female biology, menstruation, or contraception was transphobic and could trigger trans-persons. Even the award-winning feminist playThe Vagina Monologues is at present viewed as exclusionary and banned because it hurts women without vaginas and men with vaginas. As well, lesbians who decline to take sex with people with penises are bigoted and transphobic (68-seventy). GCD's verdict after all of his research and reading was: "I plant out just how sinister and wide ranging the transgender agenda was, that other people had realised it was woman hating and the view that transgender activism promotes the opposite of gay and lesbian liberation is widespread. Transgender activism could eradicate gays and lesbians in a generation. Eviscerate feminism and reframe the reality of women'south oppression to a bad consumer choice" (seventy). But BCD as well discovered a world of critique and resistance to transactivism that challenged its dogmas and rhetoric (71).
The rest of the essay recounts GCD's experience of trying to parent his daughter, the looks of shock and revulsion he receives when questioning transactivists, the solidarity he finds with like-minded parents, and joining the feminist resistance against transactivism (72-78).
Chiefly, GCD talks about meeting other trans persons who recognize the extremism of transactivism, how many people transitioned because that was the best option presented to them, how porn culture has turned boys into violent misogynists, and the denigration of women and lesbian women by transactivism (78-80).
GCD offers riveting insights from a person who is at basis zero in the gender debates and on the forrard edge of the battle expanse of transgender activism.
The experiences and concerns of lesbian women is expressed inJosephine Bartosch'southwardcontribution "'Trans' Kids: LGB Adults Come Out." Bartosch, herself a lesbian, examines "coming-out" stories by women who struggled with non fitting into gender norms and discovering their same-sex activity attraction during their adolescent years and how they think the transgender movement affects them at present and could have adversely afflicted them if transactivism was around in their teenager years.
Bartosch's ain business concern is that a whole generation of LGB youth are being denied the chance to accept themselves for who they are, and rather than wrestle with gender confusion and the growing pains of adolescence, they are being pathologized by transactivists, the pharmaceutical industry, and ill-informed liberal adults into a potentially harmful manner of transgenderism. She is suspicious of any movement that applies social pressure level to women to compel them to modify their bodies to fit gender stereo-types and even things touted as progressive tin can be no more than a bolstering of the status quo (89).
The symptoms that the NHC Choices website suggests for being transgender in her listen are but evidence for being same-sex attracted, having body paradigm issues, or not fitting into gender stereo-types about femininity and masculinity (90). Even worse, gimmicky Pride marches have become "a hollow celebration of e'er more than niche identities and a marketing opportunity for rainbow-clad corporate sponsors rather than a political protest" (103).
The various stories and anecdotes that Bartosch narrates suggests that some parts of transgenderism are homophobic and anti-feminist. For example, there is the purported "cotton wool ceiling," whereby lesbian women who turn down to have penetrative sexual activity from a transwoman with a penis are considered transphobic (93). There is a claim that transactivism is eroding the number of lesbian women by cajoling them into being transgender (95-96). In each instance, Bartosch points to women who were aforementioned-sex attracted, gender non-conforming, had problems with their own bodies ranging from eating disorders to anxiety, generally did not fit in, only are glad that they did not live in the era of transgenderism otherwise they might have been seduced by it (102).
The essay ends with Bartosch'south own impassioned plea:
We owe it to children to be adults who are not afraid to speak out; protection of children from known harm must come earlier our own desire to seem progressive. Furthermore, professionals must cease colluding in convenient lies to boost their careers and find the personal integrity to think and speak critically about the ideologies behind gender identity. Information technology is sexism and homophobia that must change, not children's bodies. No child has the "incorrect" body, they have their own body and their trunk is their own (104).
Lisa Marchiano is an American clinical social worker and she provides a Jungian interpretation into phenomenon of children identifying as transgender in an essay entitled, "The Language of the Psyche: Symptoms as Symbols."
Marchiano proposes that some forms of neurosis happen when persons struggle to notice a place between the world of dreams/fantasy/imagination and the empirical world before us, an in-between location of liminality and metaphor. Furthermore, every neurosis is the attempt to find a cure for some underlying trouble. Marchiano proposes that "transgender identity may be just an effort to a cure on the part of young people struggling to find a meaningful initiation into adulthood" and "identifying as transgender is an attempt to transcend the limits of biology to live out an inner reality" (109). In which cases, the problem of gender dysphoria might not really be a mismatch between biology and psychology, but rest on an underlying internal trouble that a person develops a fixation about fixing by changing something in the external world including their sense of dress and/or physical body. Telling an eclectic story of several gender dysphoric adolescents nether the moniker Mikayla/Mitch, Marchiano suggests that identifying equally trans can sometimes acted as a "defence against unbearable nowadays reality and provided something transcendent to bridge the impasse" (118). According to Marchiano – if I'k understanding rightly – instead of gender exploration – a descent into an underworld of depression, anxiety, and rumination – teens need psychological tools to explore the metaphors of their experience, liminal condom-spaces we might say, to cope with modify and anxiety, rather than translate all pathologies into something literal or empirical.
Susan Matthews writes on "The Trunk Factory: Twentieth Century Stories of Sex-Change" where she argues that transgenderism is not an enduring facet of human history simply something enabled by medical advances and expressed in twentieth century story-telling, meaning that transgender identity is largely a product of our own cultural moment in history. According to Matthews, gender identity offers a type of transcendence ordinarily offered by religion past which one tin escape the travails of the trunk. Matthews besides laments how the tragic story of David Reimer (who was turned into a girl after a botched circumcision, and then transitioned dorsum to being male, then committed suicide) is utilized by Judith Butler for her own vision of a genderless utopia. For Matthews, intersex people are victims of transgender ideology considering the rightness or wrongness in intervening in their sexual make-upward becomes relativized past the conventionalities that such persons could be any gender that they desire to be, and so in that location never was a right or wrong gender for them. She concludes: "Escape from the body factory depends on recognising the fictional status of gender ideology" (136).
A particularly penetrating essay, "A Full Life Uninterrupted by Transition" byMiranda Yardley challenges the aetiology of much transgenderism and notes transgenderism'southward negative impact on the LGB customs.
Yardley begins by sounding the alarm over a 23-fold increment for female children and an 8.75 increment for male children being referred to treatment for gender dysphoria since 2010 in the United kingdom. She declares that "If this were as result of a pathogen, there's little dubiety information technology would exist treated every bit an epidemic" (140). Her thesis is that this increase is unrelated to the condition of children and the phenomenon is a direct result the suppression of scientific knowledge near the etiology of transsexualism (140).
Yardley finds it incredible that transgender activists profess to in that location beingness no discernible rhyme or reason why some people identify as 1 gender rather than another when sociologists have confidently plotted gender identity as something emerging from a cross-section of physiology and attitudinal influences from family unit and peers (141-43). Gender in the transgender lexicon becomes tantamount to "the internal sense of cocky' (143). In examining the commonalities in the "transkids" narrative, several patterns emerge, principally gender non-conforming boys and homosexual females are referred for transgender treatment. Yardley is concerned that we are witnessing a type of "gay eugenics" whereby gender non-conforming and same-sex attracted adolescents are being medicated to the signal of sterilisation to fit with gender constructs that girls like pink and boys similar blue (145-46). Yardley sounds the alert: "Should children continue to transition at the increasing rates nosotros have been seeing, in that location is a danger this volition annihilate our lesbian and gay population" (146).
Yardley refers to work in the field of sexocology that points to two types of male transsexuals: homosexual transsexuals (males attracted to other males, particularly to heterosexual males) and non-homosexual transsexuals (often experiencing autogynephilia, characterized by fetishist transvestitism, sometimes influenced by transgender pornography). She places this taxonomy over and confronting the "feminine essence theory" whereby male-to-female person transsexuals are neurological women trapped in physical male body. Such a theory fails since many of the traits of male-to-female person transsexuals, such as autogynephilia, are not coded as male person or female (153-54). For instance in indicate, irrespective of what differences in that location are between male and female brains, at that place is no known part of the human brain that will manifest itself in a preference for pinkish (156). In fact, the feminine essence theory "has been used for political purposes to subvert the scientific agreement of what lies backside transsexuality to the detriment of not merely transsexuals merely science itself with the result that autogynephilic transsexuals are central to the promotion of transgenderism to younger children, in spite of the 2 types of transsexual having picayune in mutual" (158).
Yardley concludes that treatment for gender dysophoric children should be based upon an agreed aetiology for transsexualism, scientific enquiry should no longer be obstructed or intimidated with harassment, inquiry should be done into pornography consumption and autogynephilia, and better inquiry should be undertaken into avenues of gender dysphoria desistance and not-interventional options before whatever form of medical intervention is attempted (159-60).
Carey Maria Catt Callahan offers a mettlesome essay with "Unheard Voices of DeTransitioners" noting how some trans people de-transition and come across themselves as finer seduced or led astray by trans credo.
After Callahan began transitioning from female-to-male she noticed that "The social expectations of performing 'transman' were not and so dissimilar from the social expectations of performing 'woman.' I had naively expected transitioning would enable me to navigate the world without performance" (167). She relates to how beingness female person or transmale felt like wearing a billboard pretending to be or to offer something that she was not. Afterward talking to other de-transitioned women she came to the decision that "I got turned effectually from sexual trauma and the soup of sexism I had been living in" (169-70). Callahan speaks candidly of how it was expected that loyal trans persons would exercise "sexual availability" by "attending the right sex parties, proving you would date or at least have sex with every gender in every kind of body" and had to "prove ourselves righteous standard bearers for a radical queer politic that more than than our activeness, more than our intelligence, more than than our solidarity, demanded sexual admission" (171).
She points out that the average age of female person transitioners is 17 while de-transitioners is 21 (174). Callahan provides farther anecdotal evidence from websites similar desisterresister.wordpress.com nearly those who accept detransitioned, people who now in retrospect see their original problem not as a body identity disorder, just as things like anxiety and autism. Persons who now face up the stigma of being labelled as traitors to the transgender cause for detransitioning.
Callahan's chief insight is, I call back, her comment that women can be cajoled into thinking that they are trans if they just don't fit the feminine stereotype, and it is here that feminism has failed women. She writes: "Young women trying to make sense of why their patterns of thought seem unlike from other women, why they can't office in the same style, why they can't perform femininity, why they are compulsive, why their bodies don't feel real, why they return to feeling sad again and again. Feminism now offers the narrative that if you feel uncomfortable with the stereotypes projected onto members of your sex, your gender identity is the culprit" (178). Instead, Callahan observes that what feminism needs is a view that prizes the wellness and well-beingness of the female body and not simply a physical sleeve for the ideas floating around in her head (178).
Another psychoanalytic and clinical view comes fromRobert Withers in "The View from the Consulting Room," which suggests that psychoanalytic psychotherapy can offer an alternative to medical intervention to resolve gender dysphoria. This is premised on the idea that, different being intersex, at that place is no evidence of an underlying biological crusade of gender dysphoria. In the very least it is "medically unexplained" (186). He proposes that some of the underlying causes can be things similar (i) fear of adult sexuality, (ii) mind-body disassociation, (3) identification as a substitute for dealing with emotions like grief (182-84). Post-obit Canadian psychologist Ken Zucker, Withers says we should not be surprised at the prospect of an underlying psychological or emotional crusade to gender dysphoria because "Gender identity in adolescence is not stable." So offer people irreversible medical treatment then is a fault. Nigh volition grow out of their cross-sex identification quite naturally and later on a period of experimentation are quite likely to get happily gay, bi-sexual, gender fluid or even straight" plus "adolescents with autistic traits sometimes self-identify as trans" and "aid with their autism would be more than advisable than irreversible medical handling for them too" (184). Withers provides notes from clients on why early medical intervention should be resisted even when at that place is a "powerful coercion to the medical road once it is embarked upon" (188). Questioning a biological cause of gender dysphoria and treating it psychoanalytically might even be preferably to "shepherding trans-people into mutilating surgery and lifetime of hormone treatment by closing that word downwards out of fear of stigmatising them further?"
The penultimate essay is byJen Izaakson concerning "Trans Utopias: Transhumaism, Transfeminism, and Manufacturing the Cocky" who identifies transgenderism within a wider philosophy of transhumanism which treats the body every bit an outdated and obsolete "pocketbook of mankind" to exist artificially augmented and improved (change that to "sack of excrement" and it sounds positively Marcionistic to us theologians!) (206). It is a philosophically dense essay that questions the use of medical intervention to create a kind of somatic utopia. If I'thousand reading Izaakson correctly, she worries that transgenderism sees androgyny as a path to a kind ofhomo deus existence that instantiates a item configuration of gender as the eschatological telos of human being life. As such, "the body becomes a centrally contested site and bodily intervention becomes construed as unremittingly desirable, to the bespeak of fetishism" (207). Izaakson points to how gender theorists have morphed in a mere 5 years from alert confronting self-proclamations of identity to enthusiastically embracing them as authoritative pronouncements. The upshot is a coercive process that mitigates medical maleficence because information technology is necessary in order to meet trans dogmas (207-9). It is here that de-transitioned persons are perceived as a threat to this gender identity credo because they show that gender is not essential or absolute (214).
In the last essayMichele Moore offers a bare-knuckled and startling challenge to the transgender movement from the perspective of disability studies in her essay "Standing Up for Girls and Boys." To begin with, Moore rejects the medical model for disabled children on the grounds that disabled bodies are non the problem, the trouble is social attitudes and physical obstacles to disabled bodies (225-26).
Further, transgenderism becomes a type of self-fulfulling prophecy whereby children are (led) into thinking that they are transgender, social and medical intervention takes place confirming the trans diagnosis, and parents and teachers are induced to affirm the transition (220). The trouble is that this entire process seems manufactured and artificial. She writes:
The growing number of children identifying as transgender occurs against a backdrop of the media, the internet, medicine, education, social policy and politics, including transactivism. These interconnected influences provide the groundwork to children's every day lives and currently combine to popularise and make gender transitioning socially adequate. This properties constructs for children an obvious and definitive set of 'truths' about transgenderism and about their own cocky-identification as transgender and is normalising gender dysphoria. Children and immature people with mental health problems such as anxiety or depression, living with trauma or diagnoses with autistic spectrum disorders are overrepresented amongst children who self-diagnose as transgender merely minimal attention is paid to the question of whether and how children'south interests are beingness destabilised by the agenda of transactivists (220).
Moore offers an anecdote of "Robert and her mother" to how an boyish can exist propelled into beingness transgender, the pressure state authorities and activists put on the parents to conform, and how in the end the boyish can simply grow out of it and wonder why she ever got convinced about trying to be a male child in the start place (221-23). This illustrates a pattern that Moore detects whereby a child is surveiled by his/her peers and lauded as trans, an approach encouraged by transactivists. After that, the kid policies his or herself by monitoring advent, behaviour, language, and reflecting on anxieties and reputation among peers. And then, one time a trans identity is established, public control follows to make sure the trans identity is allowed to be manifested without suspicion or question (226-27).
For Moore this is dangerous because the promise fabricated by transactivists is that changing a child'southward body will better fit their (or gild'south expectation) and it becomes irresponsible because it pits children against their own bodies (220). Research indicates a large number of teenagers desisting in their gender dysphoria and yet, "Transgender activism has a vested interest in making information technology difficult for trans identifying children and young people to change their minds in order to protect tis claims of gender as a biological phenomenon" (224). In add-on, "Transgender credo inducts children and families into the idea that contentment will elude them unless they hand their body over for social, chemical, and surgical experimentation. Such interventions – absurdly in my view – promise to bring children's minds and genitals in to line with other people's expectations of the clothes they like to wear and the things they like to exercise" (229). Even more than apropos, "The children and young people whose bodies are medically intervened in accordance with transgender doctrine are office of a speculative projection in social and biological engineering. Such interventions turn a healthy kid into a life-long medical patient dependent on endless doctor visits, claret draws, radioactive scans and permanent reliance on medication. In that location is no public argue near the serious issues involved in transitioning children" (228-29).
In her conclusion, Moore does not hold back, "As someone whose life work has been, and always will be to advance the agenda for inclusion, I cannot collude in the irreversible harm of children to conform to an incoherent ideology that actually excludes them from their own bodies" (230-31).
Decision
I tin can't say I read a lot of lesbian, feminist, and psychoanalytic literature these days. Just as a priest, I am concerned how to respond to the transgender miracle and how to intendance for people with gender dysphoria. Similarly, every bit a begetter of an autistic son, I'yard also interested because rates of gender dysphoria in autistic children are markedly higher, so it helps to know something about this.
For me at that place are several important takeaways.
Offset, on definitions, transgenderism is a broad umbrella term that involves the belief that gender and sexual anatomy are unrelated, an ability to disassociate thetrue self from the torso, and it includes a diverseness of epiphenomenon including beingness gender fluid or pangender, etc. Importantly, transgenderism is not the same affair as gender dysphoria, the psychological trauma of experiencing a perceived mismatch betwixt one's biology and i'due south psychological cocky-sensation. Consequently, transgenderism amounts to a socio-anthropological characterized by: (i) a radical androgyny, almost transhumanism, bent on erasing the distinction betwixt the sexes or augmenting them with add-ons; (ii) it operates on the supposition that a human is a biological blank sheet (upon which ane can create or project one's own gendered reality); and (iii) it entails gender fluidity and detaching gender from biological sex and rendering gender equally something abstract, plastic, malleable, and capable of sustaining hybridity.
2d, transgenderism is based on a quasi-religious view that the true and inner self that is removed from the concrete body. In the transgender lexicon, "identity" has the same function as "soul" in platonic philosophy. Transgenderism is therefore seen as a kind of solution to various social ills and psychological pathologies to enable the true cocky inside the body to transcend the problems posed by the concrete body. The tragedy of transgenderism is that it has possibly confused private personality with gender identity. Or else, transgenderism is a type of quasi-religion that enables persons to transcend the limitations and travails of the body.
Third, transgenderism is riddled with breathless claims:
- Gender is a purely a social construct,but transgender is an empirical reality to exist protected;
- Sex is irrelevant to gender,simply it is imperative to alter the sexual organs of bodies to match a person'south perceived gender;
- Information technology is claimed that in that location is no gender binary because no-1 is purely male or female, rather, gender is a spectrum and we are all forth information technology somewhere. All the same, information technology is possible to opt out of the gender spectrum, to become non-binary, but this in turn creates a new binary between those on the spectrum and those who are non.
- Science is the alleged footing of transgender ideology,but scientists who espouse a sexual binary based on biology or bespeak to evolution as shaping facets of gender behaviour are engaging in either biological essentialism or hetero-normative stereo-types.
Quaternary, transgenderism can exist dangerous in that:
- Information technology argues that children are autonomous miniature adults who can without aid construct their own identity and children are fifty-fifty competent to determine their own medical needs. Whereas children are taught, "Just you know who you lot are!" two problems emerge. Offset, that children know themselves equally children, with the cerebral abilities of a six, vii, or 8 year old's abilities. Precisely because of their limited cognitive capacity, no kid is competent to determine if he or she should receive pharmaceutical treatment or genital altering surgery to bargain with apparent gender dysphoria. Second, children exercise non know themselves in a vacuum or merely by intensely looking at themselves in a mirror. Gender identity develops from a child'southward awareness of their sexual traits, from observing cultural cues and tropes near sexual differentiation, and how they perceive themselves in relationship to others. In consequence, gender identity is the "You are Here" in a biological forest alive with a vibrant relational eco-system. As a direct upshot, while children tin can defy gender stereo-types and experience diverse psychological pathologies related to perception of their bodies, they will not immediately come to the conclusion of possessing a new gender identity without someone offset making it plausible, possible, or preferable for them, that is, without some kind of prompting. Certainly the cultural norms of gender tin be tested and broken, but that in no way equates to existence gender dysphoric or even existence gender non-binary. Resistance to cultural norms should not exist used to funnel children, usually LGB children, into transgender directions. In which case, nosotros must ask whether transgender children are found or whether they are (in many cases perchance) created by social environmental factors.
- The espousal of early on intervention in transitioning gender dysphoric children is non just premature information technology is pernicious given that 80% of gender dysphoric children desist in their condition. Transitioning children prematurely is further dangerous because: (i) There is no evidence for a biological cause of gender dysphoria, it is a psychological status as far equally we know; (ii) The negative long-term effects of puberty blockers; and (iii) the stories of de-transitioners, people who have experienced chemical or surgical transitioning, and take profoundly regretted it, are routinely dismissed or silenced past transgender activists.
- Every argument for transitioning children trades in gender stereotypes and weaponizes peer pressure and parental guilt. It is astounding how prevalent the credible selection of toys is in determining a kid's gender identity. Allegedly girls who play with boys' toys are actually boys trapped inside a girl'south body (rather than simply girls who don't fit the stereotype and like boy's toys). There are examples of peer and social pressure existence practical to children to either conform to gender stereo-types or to identify as transgender. Immature women are being told that if they experience sexism, don't match feminine stereo-types, feel uncomfortable in their bodies, then being female is only a bad consumer selection, and they tin escape it all past changing their gender. Transgender activists ordinarily equate symptoms of low, gender confusion, and autism in adolescents with gender dysphoria and thus industry or even recruit transgender persons. The reality of rapid onset gender dysphoria – all the same controversial we know – would be further proof that identifying equally transgender may have more to do with folklore than with a mismatch between psychology and biology. Parents are too intimidated with guilt or even with the threat of state intervention and legal action if they do not go along with a transgender activist's diagnosis of their child's new gender identity and the prescription for what to practise about it.
- Transgender activists overly espouse the colonisation of female spaces by those with whole or partial male person characteristic and thus create a social hierarchy in which women's spaces and safety are subordinated to an activist movement often armed with the capacity to inflict legal prosecution on dissenters and critics.
- Transgenderism tin even enter cool and homophobic propositions including the "cotton fiber ceiling." This cotton fiber ceiling refers to, for case, lesbians who are transphobic if they refuse to take penetrative sexual practice with a trans-woman who has a penis.
Questions for the Editors
That said, I did have several questions or potential criticisms for the authors of the book and its essays.
Beginning, while I appreciated the deconstruction of transgenderism as a type of mad-scientist anthropological experiment, I did wonder about the fate of children and adolescents who persist in gender dysphoria. When is transitioning a child or boyish a medically responsible thing to practise to alleviate the mental anguish of someone with gender dysphoria? In other words, we've heard a lot well-nigh why and when transitioning is bad, but I want to know when it is expedient or necessary for a person to transition. What about when transitioning seems to go well?
Second, if there is sexual fluidity (people evolve in their sexual orientation) and if gender is non the same matter as sex (hence the tacit possibility of gender fluidity too), exactly how much constraint does biological sex activity put on gender? I'm curious almost finding a heart path between gender as social construct and gender equally partially shaped by biology.
Third, if transgenderism has reified the experience of transgender people, what are the types of transphobia that we should be vigilant against even if we do not assent to the whole package of transgender revisionism? Removing the mad scientist running the transgender experiment still leaves u.s. with vulnerable, ostracized, and wounded persons, experiencing confusion, still victimized by homophobia, nevertheless in need of care. We still demand legal protections, pastoral care, and social etiquette for persons who are gender dysphoric and who do successfully transition to some other gender.
In whatever case, I warmly recommend this volume as necessary reading for anyone interested in a response to transgenderism and its negative impacts on children.
Rev Dr Michael Bird, is Academic Dean and Lecturer in Theology at Ridley College, Melbourne.
If you enjoyed this, do share it on social media, possibly using the buttons on the left. Follow me on Twitter @psephizo.Similar my page on Facebook.
Much of my piece of work is done on a freelance basis. If y'all have valued this mail, would you lot considerdonating £i.20 a calendar month to support the production of this web log?
If you lot enjoyed this, practise share information technology on social media (Facebook or Twitter) using the buttons on the left. Follow me on Twitter @psephizo. Like my folio on Facebook.
Much of my work is done on a freelance basis. If you have valued this postal service, you tin can make a single or repeat donation through PayPal:
Comments policy: Good comments that engage with the content of the post, and share in respectful contend, tin can add real value. Seek first to understand, then to be understood. Make the most charitable construal of the views of others and seek to larn from their perspectives. Don't view debate as a conflict to win; address the argument rather than tackling the person.
Source: https://www.psephizo.com/sexuality-2/the-impact-of-transgenderism-on-young-people/
Post a Comment for "The impact of transgenderism on young people"