“I was your typical, gender atypical little girl. My friends were all boys. My favorite pastimes included rough-and-tumble play and running around the house while waving my he-man sword high in the air. I insisted on using the toilet while standing up. I hated dolls and the color pink. I dreaded puberty, and when that inevitable time came, I was relieved to find that my body didn’t undergo too many physical changes aside from a self-induced shaved head.” –Deborah Soh, M.A., York University
Deborah Soh, whose Twitter profile describes her as a “sex researcher, neuroscientist, freelance writer” at York University, just published a powerful piece in Pacific Standard magazine entitled “Why Transgender Kids Should Wait to Transition.” Not only is Soh a researcher; she is also a woman who experienced “gender dysphoria” as a girl, yet grew up to be happy in her female body. (Hey, she even stood up to pee, which today would be seen as a telltale sign that she was actually a “trans boy.”)
I stumbled on this highly unusual article (vs. the typical “look I’m transgender!!” media treatment) because it was tweeted as “highly recommended” by Alice Dreger, PhD., the outspoken former bioethics professor at Northwestern University and author of the excellent Galileo’s Middle Finger. Galileo is Dreger’s account of the battle between activists and scientists that resulted in not only the chilling of academic freedom of speech, but also the hounding of prominent sexology researchers, including Michael Bailey and Ray Blanchard. Galileo is required reading for anyone who wants to understand a crucial piece of the history behind transgender activism (seen through the prism of Dreger’s experiences as an advocate for the intersex community). Dreger, who tends to speak (and write) her mind, recently resigned from Northwestern, having had quite enough of censorship from her medical school’s dean.
Thank whatever deity you revere that researchers like Soh are speaking their minds. She’s a double gift: She works in the field and she knows what it’s like to be a girl who just didn’t want to conform to the stereotypes.
Update: Three hours after Alice Dreger tweeted the article, trans activists and their allies on Twitter have descended on an MD who retweeted it, accusing her, predictably, of “transphobia” and hurting trans kids and everything else you might expect. The doctor held her own for awhile, but eventually caved under pressure from the onslaught, backing down from supporting the author to thanking the activists for educating her. Such are the times we live in. Professionals like Debra Soh need support, and social media platforms are the battleground in 2015.
Soh starts her article with a statement that will be music to the ears of regular readers of this blog:
My point of view is controversial, but it is one that concerned parents need to hear.
I–and many of the parents who contribute to this online community–have been accused of being “unsupportive” of our teen daughters. But what gets lost in the rhetoric of trans activists is this key point: I support gender nonconformity. I don’t reject my child. On the contrary, I celebrate her (and other women and girls) who expand the definition of what it means to be female. Apparently, Soh had such parents herself:
I was lucky in that my parents were never troubled by my gender non-conformity. They allowed me to dress how I pleased and to pursue the interests I enjoyed. The only thing they remained firm about was my sitting down to use the toilet, but that was more about the mess I would otherwise make than any socially reinforced gender norms.
Soh is not anti-trans. She even refers to herself as “cisgender,” a term of deference to the trans community which concocted it. She only wants to provide an alternative to the pro-transition narrative we hear about nearly every day.
Now, as a cisgender woman in my thirties and a sex researcher, I follow the current discourse on transgender children’s issues. The predominant narrative is imbalanced and this must be addressed—for the sake of trans children, their families, and medical decision-making.
Popular opinion suggests that early intervention is the necessary approach in order to remedy a child’s gender dysphoria. This consists of early social transitioning followed by hormone blockers to prevent the otherwise irreversible changes of puberty, contra-sex hormones, and, if desired, eventual sex re-assignment surgery. Denying a child these interventions is viewed as antiquated and cruel.
But research has shown that most gender dysphoric children outgrow their dysphoria, and do so by adolescence: Most will grow up to be happy, gay adults, and some, like myself, to be happy, straight adults. There is a small proportion of trans kids whose dysphoria will persist and who would benefit from medical intervention, but the tricky part remains predicting whom these ideal candidates will be.
I have written about this “tricky part” several times, most recently when I questioned how gender specialists would winnow out the “false positives”–assuming, for the moment, as Soh does, that there are some children who would truly benefit from extreme medical intervention (including, by definition, lifelong sterility).
For a young child whose gender dysphoria would have desisted without intervention, these procedures amount to a needlessly challenging process to undergo—and that’s without considering the implications of choosing to transition back. Even a social transition back to one’s original gender role can be an emotionally difficult experience for children.
This is a point that pediatric transition proponents never address. They like to tout their supposedly iron-clad anecdotal evidence that 100% of kids who are put on puberty blockers don’t change their minds. But the difficulty of changing back–especially when the child feels the parent might be disappointed if they do–is never written or talked about by any gender specialist or trans activist I’ve run across.
Waiting until a child has reached cognitive maturity before making these sorts of decisions would make the most sense. But this is an unpopular stance, and scientists and clinicians who support it are vilified, not because science—which should be our guiding beacon—disproves it, but because it has been deemed insensitive and at odds with the current ideology.
Bingo. Here it is, a fact I’ve hammered so many times, and which should be completely uncontroversial: It has been settled science for at least a decade that cognitive maturity is not reached until at least the age of 25. Yet we are allowing young people with poor judgment, impulsivity, lack of insight, and a deficit in other aspects of executive function to make permanent medical decisions. All because we don’t want to be “insensitive and at odds with the current ideology.”
The elephant in the room has been spotted by Debra Soh.
I often wonder, as I review the myriad of editorials and magazine articles published every day on transgender kids, if I had been born 20 years later, would adults in my life be suggesting transitioning as a solution for me?
Indeed. It is the adults in the child’s life who are ultimately driving this. When left alone to shave their heads, play with swords, and eschew girly things, as Soh’s parents wisely did, girls of yesteryear were not carted off to the doctor or psychiatrist to figure out what was wrong with them. They were allowed to simply grow up. Lest the trans activists say, oh no, it’s not just about clothes and behaviors and toys, why is it that every story about a “trans kid” always mentions these things as proof that a child was “born in the wrong body?”
Even more alarmingly, with all of the information floating around the Internet and on mainstream TV, would I myself believe that I had an issue that would not eventually subside on its own?
Another elephant outed (though this one was hiding in even plainer sight). Young people are influenced by what they imbibe on social media and television. There was no “I am Cait” or “I am Jazz” 20 or even 10 years ago.
Outgrowing my discomfort resulted from the realization that gender does not need to be binary. To this day, I still feel that I am more masculine than most natal females, but also much more feminine than most natal males. We can have the best of both worlds.
I am so glad that Debra Soh is speaking out, and giving us a public example of a female who is living the best of both worlds. This neuroscientist, outspoken woman, writer, and adult female product of a “gender nonconforming” girlhood shows us–and our daughters–just how big our tent of womanhood really is.
“To this day, I still feel that I am more masculine than most natal females, but also much more feminine than most natal males. We can have the best of both worlds.
I am so glad that Debra Soh is providing a public example of a female who is living the best of both worlds. This neuroscientist, outspoken woman, writer, and adult female product of a “gender nonconforming” girlhood shows us–and our daughters–just how big our tent of womanhood really is.”
Why is this not beyond obvious?
Commonsense has nearly been outlawed. But it hasn’t yet!
Goldilocks! More masculine than most natal females, more feminine than most Mattel males. Juuuuuust right. 😊
I did not proofread my previous comment sufficiently. I meant natal males, not Mattel males. What the hell are Mattel males? Did Mattel make Barbie? Maybe trans is their fault! *she said in a perky voice*
That’s funny. I thought you did that on purpose, basically referring to Ken dolls!
” I–and many of the parents who contribute to this online community–have been accused of being “unsupportive” of our teen daughters. But what gets lost in the rhetoric of trans activists is this key point: I support gender nonconformity. I don’t reject my child. On the contrary, I celebrate her (and other women and girls) who expand the definition of what it means to be female.”
This. And, I’m not sure how this position makes us hateful people and abusive parents.
It’s really too bad that nowadays, Ms. Soh’s experience has to be described as some kind of “gender dysphoria.” There’s nothing inherently dysphoric about any of it — including standing at the toilet, which sounds more like one of those informal physics experiments kids tend to do with everything.
I also wish we could get away from this idea of having both “masculine” and “feminine” qualities, or “energies,” or having a “balance” (or “the best of both worlds,” as Soh puts it). Speaking for myself, as a woman who has been gender non-conforming from earliest childhood up to the present I find the idea of combining “masculine” and “feminine” whatevah in myself completely foreign. I happen to be female, and I have a personality and interests, end of sentence. The labels other people try to attach to that are arbitrary and have everything to do with them, nothing to do with me.
Language has been hijacked and too many people feel they must use these terms just to be understood. Including me.
I would also add that the language employed by Ms. Soh in her article is probably accessible to a mainstream audience. And that’s important.
Understood. But the hijacking itself has caused a lot of damage, and I think it’s important to try to undo it as much as possible.
I felt the same way about the pop-Jungian stuff that was popular c. 1990, and Carol Gilligan’s work when it was being cited all over the place.
Another helpful post. There’s a great TED talk by artist I O Tillett Wright which describes a childhood in which she lived as a boy without intervention from her liberal parents. I O says that she is lucky her parents did not take her to a therapist who would most likely have diagnosed her as transgender and put her on puberty blockers.
https://www.ted.com/talks/io_tillett_wright_fifty_shades_of_gay?language=en
Worth watching as it makes the case for gender fluidity beautifully
There’s a great talk by artist I O Tillett Wright in which she describes living as a boy as a child. Her liberal parents were not worried, and she says how lucky she was that they did not believe in therapists – who would most likely have diagnosed her as transgender and put her on puberty blockers.
https://www.ted.com/talks/io_tillett_wright_fifty_shades_of_gay?language=en
I love the message, and one of the major messages of this blog, that there’s a million ways to woman and they’re all awesome!! Too often femininity is reduced to cheerleader/prom queen and if you aren’t comfortable there, then you’re a dood. Young women in particular, need to be reminded in every possible way that there’s a whole universe of “woman” between cheerleader/prom queen and dood. Pick where you’re comfortable in that spectrum and rock on. Be you.
I always tell people that there’s no “how” to being a woman (or a man); that whatever personality, interests, and self-expression we have doesn’t change the biological facts of our sex, precisely because none of it has anything innate to do with one’s sex.
Glad to see someone in her profession finally pushing back against the trans kid phenomenon, even though she hasn’t yet repudiated the entire idea of transgenderism. At least she supports allowing children to grow up to cognitive maturity before consigning themselves to permanent sterility and a status as a permanent patient before they are old enough to make an informed choice.
Like Ms Soh, I was a childhood tomboy with a non-stereotypical personality with parents who allowed me to express that personality, and whose adult personality that remains mostly non-stereotypical (I absolutely refuse to use trans jargon such as “gender non-conforming” or saying that my personality is “more “masculine than feminine”, because to use such terms gives unwarranted legitimacy to these concepts). I never had the slightest whiff of dysphoria as a kid, never thinking I had to really be a boy because I had non-traditional interests, nor did my parents ever suggest such a ridiculous idea to me.
I’m quite convinced that some parents nowadays jump at a non-stereotypical child, planting the idea in their minds that having a non-stereotypical personality and interests more commonly associated with the other sex means that they actually ARE the other sex in the wrong body. Children are already quite suggestible and prone to magical thinking as it is before cognitive maturity, and it wouldn’t take much effort to turn a child’s mind into adopting such an wrongheaded notion.
Parents need to be educated not to get all worked up if they have a child who doesn’t have a stereotypical personality and interests and to just let them grow up to be themselves in their healthy bodies. I’m guessing a lot of the overreaction from parents stems from homophobia, with them erroneously thinking personality traits are innately linked to one’s sex and their sexual orientation. Many non-stereotypical children do grow up to be gay or lesbian but, as in my own case, many also grow up to be straight. It really boggles my mind that such parents would rather have a sterile child pumped full of possibly cancer causing cross sex hormones for the rest of their lives, with extensive, non-functional cosmetic body modifications rather than to have a happy, homosexual child with a healthy, body, with their fertility left intact. Why more people can’t see the trans kid phenomenon as a human rights violation, just boggles my mind.
Thanks once again to the blog author for providing this much-needed education to questioning parents, who are currently mostly getting only one-sided propaganda from trans activists.
Beautifully said.
It annoys the heck out of me that “gender non-conforming” has become part of the trans jargon. Not all that long ago, it was a handy way of describing one type of female experience without implying that you were somehow really a man.
About magical thinking — someone over on GenderTrender used the term “societally induced developmental delay.” I honestly believe that the current social and economic climate has created an environment that in which it’s easier to remain cognitively and emotionally childlike much longer than is necessary or desirable. In fact, I think there are a number of subtle but increasingly strong, society-wide pressures on kids and teenagers to grow up more slowly than they have in the past.
All these personal stories give me a lot more hope for the future. Thanks for continuing to post them, 4thwavenow. Good for Soh for having the guts. I don’t know if I’m really seeing more pushback or if I’m just paying more attention … but I was pleased to see what she wrote, and really pleased to see the “girls’ rights” protest at that high school in central St. Louis. (Transwoman teen — no hormones or surgery — was unhappy with the accommodation the school had provided and wanted to be in the girls’ locker room. There was a quite large protest by the girls and their parents.)
I was really heartened by that protest too. It was nice to see that the girls felt they had rights worth protecting. I will continue to seek out the voices of those who are pushing back against the dominant trans narrative. And I am always interested in hearing from people who would like to guest post on this blog.
This protest made me cheer as well. My daughter tells me that pretty much all kids her age accept the transgender narrative. At least in this Missouri school that doesn’t appear to be the case. Or, maybe the students were open to the idea until reality set in. Not fair for all the girls’ rights to be trumped by the one boy that feels like a girl. The school tried to accommodate him with a unisex bathroom, but he felt like it was beneath him to use it. He felt entitled to use the girls’ bathrooms and locker room despite his female classmates’ discomfort.
This boy (probably with encouragement from his Tumblr friends) likely believes he is a trailblazer for transgender rights. Too bad he has found so much “education” and encouragement online for this stance. There was one article I read that reported him spending a lot of nights over at a friend’s house while his parents tried to cope with his transgender identity. I feel a great deal for his parents (and for their son who I believe has been misguided). It feels like such an up-side-down world we live in.
A school in Troy, Ohio is going through something similar, although, in this case, it is a girl wanting to use the boys’ facilities. Understandably, some parents are very upset with this. The school district will be putting in unisex bathrooms in each of the school buildings, probably at quite a significant cost to tax-payers, but my guess is that it won’t solve the problem. http://wdtn.com/2015/08/31/gay-and-transgender-support-groups-to-rally-outside-troy-schools/
If this trend keeps going strongly, more and more people will realize that transgender rights actually take away the rights of others. No more right to privacy in bathrooms and locker rooms. Men in women’s prisons. Men competing as women in athletic competitions. Things that most people think can’t happen, but are happening.
I think that this trailblazing by transactivists may backfire. By bringing more attention to this issue, I think it will shed light on how much it doesn’t make sense.
Thank you for letting us know that there are indeed sane people left in America. Unfortunately they/we are engaged in an uphill battle against an entrenched leftist/progressive media.
I found this link via Google: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/us/teenagers-protest-a-transgender-students-use-of-the-girls-bathroom.html?_r=0
What the NY Times has done in what should be an unbiased reporting of simple FACTS, is to subtlety endorsed the transgender argument by addressing this young man as “she”, “Ms.’ and “her”.
Mr. Perry is male. No amount of chest padding, ugly wigs and pink eye shadow will make this function MALE, a girl. What I find most offensive about this “report”, (which also reinforces my point that the NYT is pushing the “trans” agenda”) is this less than subtle endorsement of these TG’s being “victims”: “I was concerned about my own safety,” she said….“It feels really awful that people are going to these extremes against me, not just in school but all over the Internet,” Ms. Perry said.
Also: The school offered him access to a unisex bathroom and he refused. Wasn’t good enough for him. When all any male has to do is say he “feels” like a woman to gain access to women’s restrooms and locker rooms, we have a problem on our hands. Rapists can and do pose as women. It’s not a new thing. I’m not saying this young man is a rapist, but this is a terrible precedent to set. Transsexuals (male to female) used to be very rare. Now anyone can simply “identify” as female and that’s it. And laws are beginning to be passed to codify this. It’s good the girls in the school stood up for THEIR rights. That’s the only thing that will stop this: people pushing back, in groups.
Yes. That is my point. There has to be an organized resistance to this madness. Right not the battle is being waged in our schools where our children are the ones who are being fought over.
School boards, (supposedly elected and subject to the collective will of the parents who pay the taxes that pay their salaries), are the vanguard; they are the front line. They are backed and supported by the Federal Dept. of Education….
“Districts that refuse to allow students to use a bathroom for the gender with which they identify could run afoul of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, said Kelli Hopkins of the Missouri School Boards’ Association.
“The Office of Civil Rights has issued an opinion that says, if you do this, you have engaged in gender discrimination,” Hopkins said. “At the same time, there is no case law or statute in Missouri that says this is against the law.”
Here, in the courts is where this battle will be fought. The next step is to reassert control over our schools and colleges where our kids are being indoctrinated.
“Schools found to have violated a student’s civil rights are at risk of losing some of their federal funding, Hopkins said.”
~From the St. Louis Dispatch-Post
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/hillsboro-high-students-walk-out-over-transgender-dispute/article_be488fab-d239-5944-9733-32f569dcdc32.html
To worried
1) holy crap!
2) If “gender” is going to mean any damn thing that any random person says it does at any random moment in time then there’s no way it would even be possible to enshrine that in law. Trying to do so would be the point at which all the cheerleaders would have to admit that it’s THIS changeable, random and undefined. You can’t put undefined things in the law. The genderists have screwed themselves with their reality denying, everybody’s feelings are as real as factual biology garbage. They won’t get what they want from the law, they’ll howl ‘discrimination’ and then a bunch of bland-o law professors will come out and explain what objective reality is. And people who’ve been silently going along with this, in part because they’re confused since it doesn’t seem like anything could be this crazy AND have this degree of respectability, will finally get to exhale. And say OkayINeverReallyBoughtThatAnyway. All hail the bland-o law professors. 😊
3) mind you political organizing is still a very good idea.
Sad to say that the schools don’t feel like they have any other choice. They need to uphold these regulations or be accused of discrimination and the lawsuits and reduction of federal funding that would follow. The Ohio school article that I linked to advised people to call their lawmakers if they were unhappy. To me (and maybe I am interpreting this wrong) it almost seemed like a plea to do so.
The message you hear from the US Dept of Ed’s Office of Civil Rights has no legal foundation whatsoever. The problem is that people conflate gender identity with sex. That is precisely what the Office of Civil Rights and trans activists are counting on. US civil rights law — specifically Title IX, which mandates equality and non-discrimination against women and girls in education — specifically forbids discrimination on the basis of *sex*. As far as I know says nothing about “gender identity.” The new Obama Administration rules are trying to finesse that distinction.
So school districts and schools are following the law when they provide equal accommodations for members of the two sexes. There is nothing in the law mandating any particular treatment for people based on self-reported gender identity.
Women are a “protected class” in US civil rights law because of historical discrimination against them – sex discrimination. Not gender identity discrimination.
We need to hammer this distinction home, and get the message out.
The president and vice president of the American College of Pediatricians and a psychiatric consultant to the ACP have issued a strong statement titled, “Puberty is not a disorder.” Excerpt:
Wow! Thank you for bringing this to our attention. This is excellent news and hopefully will give courage to others who want to speak out.
This is so awesome!
Just read down a bit further. Not quite as awesome. Sigh.
I understand. But I appreciate the break from “Caitlyn Jenner Just Wore Your Perfect Fall Date-Night Outfit.”
The blog “The Truth about Autogynephilia” posted about the letter here. https://autogynephiliatruth.wordpress.com/2015/09/03/top-pediatricians-reject-puberty-blockers-ideology-driven-social-experiment-on-vulnerable-children-and-their-families/
But it may not quite be time to break out the champagne. One of my readers just sent me information about these three doctors. While their statement is laudable, apparently they are also supporters of anti-gay “reparative” therapy.
Not to be too gloomy, though. Another reader just wrote this bittersweet note to me: “Homophobes ironically wish to protect gay children from trans-reparative therapy”
I wondered about this – I recall reading about the “American College of Pediatricians” which despite its grandiose name is really a small organization of extremely socially and religiously conservative (and homophobic) physicians. Nevertheless, what they’re saying sounds eminently reasonable.
It’s a sad thing that it’s largely homophobes who are speaking common sense on this issue. And it is bittersweet indeed, since decades of research show that the majority of “gender nonconforming” kids grow up to be gay, lesbian, or bisexual adults. The irony–it burns.
Here is the thing and it is being alluded to here: “The problem is that people conflate gender identity with sex. That is precisely what the Office of Civil Rights and trans activists are counting on. US civil rights law — specifically Title IX, which mandates equality and non-discrimination against women and girls in education — specifically forbids discrimination on the basis of *sex*. As far as I know says nothing about “gender identity.” The new Obama Administration rules are trying to finesse that distinction.
So school districts and schools are following the law when they provide equal accommodations for members of the two sexes. There is nothing in the law mandating any particular treatment for people based on self-reported gender identity.
Women are a “protected class” in US civil rights law because of historical discrimination against them – sex discrimination. Not gender identity discrimination.
We need to hammer this distinction home, and get the message out.”
I’ve been reading through the Title IX law this morning as well as explanations of the law on the Dept of Justice website – and it seems to me that were a school district to capitulate to the demands of an alleged male-to-trans student (like the one in Missouri) and allow him to use the facilities designated for members of the female sex, girls themselves could make a strong case using Title IX that their civil rights were being violated. The (school-approved) naked, phallic presence of a male in the girls’ changing rooms would constitute sexual harassment insofar as it created a hostile educational environment, which is a violation of the law. Many girls would simply stop using the changing room, participating in p.e. and sports, etc., which would be evidence of harm caused by the school’s actions, and it would show that the school was failing to provide equal facilities as the law requires.
Note – I’m not a lawyer.
Hoping the courts do get involved and make it VERY clear that it is SEX (not gender) discrimination that is unlawful. Shame on the Office of Civil Rights for muddying the waters, confusing the school officials who want to avoid lawsuits and even further cuts in their budget. The majority of the public think gender and sex are different words meaning the same thing. School officials don’t know what kind of weird world they have stepped into.
Imelda, this and your above comment on this are fantastic! The system doesn’t accept my ‘likes’. I have been pressing it. What you described in this one happening, with the girls doing a title IX lawsuit is exactly what should happen.
People, including the wretched TV news, keep using gender as if it were a synonym and a euphemism for the word sex. This has to end. The TV news does the same thing with disability using the word ‘debilitating’ as a euphemism/synonym for ‘disabling’. I’ve heard them talk about “debilitating blindness”. Debilitation means exhaustion. It only applies to some disabilities.
Also, if gender and sex WERE the same thing then title IX wouldn’t protect boys, like this young man in Missouri with the barrettes. That’s another one of the inside out and backwards things in trans land. Like how sometimes trans is heterosexual men who like to put on costumes. And sometimes it’s ‘trapped in the body of the wrong sex’ which if sex changes were really possible would just be the preamble to the person actually being changed to the other sex. Imagine some science fiction or magic spell thing where for the sake of argument changing to the other sex actually is unambiguously possible. The male person gets into that Morpho-Changeo Machine and comes out the other side female. Only now do the title IX protections of girls apply to them. The only argument that has a hope in hell of making sense is males who have completed transition should not be treated differently from other females. Which is hardly the situation with biologically unaltered males “identifying” as females.
Which is another way of saying “gender identity” is not a protected class under the law. How anyone can think it is I do not understand. (And we’re probably going to find out at some point that one person in the Obama Justice Department, some long time autogynephile, has been pushing this whole thing. And other people at Justice have gone along with it because they think it’s something to do with either homosexuality or a medical problem, so it’s icky and they don’t want to think about it.) Was there not some legal process by which women and girls came to be a “protected class”? Like a court ruling? We need a lawyer. Not that Imelda didn’t do a marvelous job. 😄
We may need to start setting up groups to oppose “gender identity” getting protected status. And one of the reasons it shouldn’t get it is because it’s someone’s subjective feelings. The law can’t have separate civil rights legislation for every bloody individual person. Another reason is that “gender” is a concept so fuzzy and internally contradictory that it raises the strong possibility that it’s not a real thing. In the history of science there have been times when scientists believed in things that turned out to not be real. Phlogiston, ‘the ether’ (a magical gas that filled up the vacuum of space). The current model of the concept of “gender” is a prime candidate for joining them.
“School officials don’t know what kind of weird world they have stepped into.”
Actually, they do.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2227562/Colleen-Francis-Outrage-transgendered-woman-permitted-use-college-womens-locker-room-exposing-himself.html
https://gendertrender.wordpress.com/tag/colleen-francis/
http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/top-stories/college-allows-transgender-man-to-expose-himself-to-young-girls.html
The conservative National Review has an interesting piece up about Soh’s article that’s worth a read. I particularly appreciate the author emphasizing how difficult it would be for a kid on blockers to change their mind. Take a look.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/423452/common-sense-part-ii-not-every-sex-researcher-thinks-young-kids-should-transition
And the Wall Street Journal’s featured it in its “Notable and Quotable” section: http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-transgender-children-1441406728
I think critical perspectives and discussions are very important. However, I do feel they can also fuel phobia and discrimination. That’s why the pushback is so strong. One can be a critical ally – but too many are not, and so will try to use her article as ‘proof’ to attack anything transgender. It’s already happening, so yes, people will be on the defensive.
The understanding of sex and gender and all of the discussion is ongoing, as we learn more and as we adapt our society to understand the science. Unfortunately, people cannot wait for science and society to figure it all out and have to find the best way to live their lives. No, not every kid should transition. Only in the rare cases should they, where the individual has been observed their entire lives and already ‘naturally transitioned’ before time for hormones should it even be considered.
But it is interesting in Soh’s article when she says that SHE can have the ‘best of both worlds.’ This is true. Which is why so many less women feel the need to transition. While women do not have many of the ‘privileges’ as men in our culture, dominant women can often achieve close to equality in that regard, even gaining other privileges. And socially, women have far, far more flexibility in gender expression that do men allowed to them.
A large part of gender, sadly, is social. And as society will not change drastically any time soon, people can maladjust and be unhappy or adjust themselves and be happy. If that requires physically altering the body in such a drastic way – don’t address the symptom or reaction – look to the sickness – society itself.
Actually, more and more women are transitioning now.
http://4thwavenow.com/2015/07/10/why-are-more-girls-than-boys-presenting-to-gender-clinics/
I would also question the idea of “natural transition” (which I would take to mean the same as “social transition.” There is no reason why children who wish to be the opposite sex cannot be encouraged to see themselves as unusual, perhaps, but not in need of alienating themselves from their own bodies…
“Society isn’t going to change drastically anytime soon”. Thanks so much micji for the counsel of despair. How old are you? Society has already changed drastically in my lifetime! There’s no reason to think it’s going to stop now. The whole trans way of thinking about things is completely indifferent to social change. It’s deeply conservative and obsessed with 50s style sex roles behavior. And of course appearance.
Children and young people who 10 years ago would’ve just decided to become artsy oddballs today are being told that they are broken. That they have a weird medical condition. Even without the drugs and surgery that would simply be evil.
There is not now and there never will be one shred of science to support the idea at the heart of transgender. Science doesn’t just suddenly pop out of a cake with brand spanking new knowledge no one ever anticipated. Before something is known it is suspected for years and years within science. The proffered scientific *justification* (not explanation, which is what science is supposed to do) for transgender has already failed utterly.
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