Something that’s completely reversible is using the name and pronouns that your child wants. Maybe you’re already doing this, and that’s great! If not, this would be a good chance for your child to see if it feels right.

A “male” name is no problem. Wearing “men’s clothes” (I’ve often worn “men’s clothes” my entire adult life, having imbibed in the 70s-80s the then-radical-why-did-we-go-backwards-in-the-2000s idea that a WOman can wear anything she wants) is cool. But the pronoun thing feels like a slippery slope. I don’t think a person with two x chromosomes and a scientifically-verifiable female body is a “he” or a “him.” Transition is a conveyer belt, and certain things (like being called “he”) seem to me like they would increase dysphoria. Let me say I don’t doubt for a minute that the feeling and idea of dysphoria are real. I don’t question a person’s feelings. What I question is what to DO with that feeling.

While i certainly don’t think you should allow your daughter to transition at such a young age, you should consider the possibility that she legitimately transsexual and suffers body dysphoria. If she does, only then should she transition. But I am completely 100% in agreement with you on how stupid these new definitions of gender identity are.

But what causes body dysphoria?  Before transgender became a popular, hip thing, there were a relatively small number of people who were so unhappy in their bodies that they chose a sex change operation.  No one was celebrating and pushing them in subReddits and on YouTube and Tumblr. All of these young lesbians who suddenly become keen on “transitioning” seem to acquire the idea that they are dysphoric from watching OTHER lesbians who claim to be dysphoric on YouTube magically changing into straight boys high on testosterone.  I think this especially happens with shy, socially awkward teens who spend most of their time on the web, and who are having trouble with forming strong relationships in real life.  Not to mention that the latest push is to make it even easier to change genders.  In transactivist circles, it’s considered oppressive to have to wait at all, to have to get a letter, to spend time “living as a man.” The trans movement thinks even young teens should be able to get immediate access to hormones and surgery as soon as they want it. They decry the “gatekeepers” who won’t just let them start transitioning NOW. 

I have watched with horror as friends’ daughters marched down the slippery slope of the gender cult. First they were allies, guiltily reciting how much privilege they had – as teenagers! – over the poor MTF transsexuals who lived and worked as men until they were fifty. Then they declared they were “genderqueer”, which gave them a right to talk about women’s issues in those circles since they weren’t women (which is just a feeling, of course.) But FTM, genderqueer, and now one wants T …

It is so hard to be a girl nowadays. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined the pressures they’re facing now. I want to start an online support group for parents who are in this boat. This blog is a start. The big question is, how do we start turning the cultural tide? It’s in our hands. While I think there are a few rare individuals who really should go the medical/pharmaceutical route (intersex people, primarily) we are looking at massive medical malpractice on the scale of lobotomies in the middle of the last century. But there wasn’t a “movement” for people with lobotomies—they weren’t trendy and cool.

Yoo Hoo

4thWaveNow is a place for other open-minded parents of  “gender non-conforming” girls and women who are questioning the dominant trans-driven paradigm. Note please: It’s not a place for homophobes or religious zealots who think their offspring will go to hell for making the wrong choices. It’s for clear thinkers who aren’t afraid to call the trans agenda what it is: a regressive cult.

It’s lonely for parents like us. Nowadays, a mother or father who questions whether lifelong drugs and surgery—leading to permanent, lifelong physical and psychological changes—is the right thing for their child is vilified.

This blog is also a place for women-born-women (sorry—I’m
not really interested in hearing from transwomen) of all ages who are troubled
by the trans phenomenon. I especially want to hear from detransitioned FTMs, or
women or girls who are teetering on the edge, wondering whether to “transition,”
but at least open to the idea that they can continue to claim themselves as
female. I want to be a space where parents can help each other and help our
kids find another way, a community that will help them embody their identity in
the very body, the very DNA they actually are. To help them find their way home to
themselves, not an IDEA they have of themselves. We, and our children, have
been abandoned by the mainstream psychological and medical establishment. So we
have to do it for ourselves.

It is NOT a place for hate. I won’t post anything from people who attack me or others with words like TERF. “Cis” is not a real thing so don’t bother using that either…

 4th Wave. Now.

It ain’t a liberation movement

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 the tiniest 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, 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.