by Carrie-Anne Brownian
Carrie-Anne is a thirtysomething historical novelist, historian, and lover of many things from bygone eras (except for the sexism, racism, and homophobia). She can be found at Welcome to My Magick Theatre, where she primarily blogs about writing, historical topics, names, silent and early sound cinema, and classic rock and pop; and at Onomastics Outside the Box, where she blogs about names and naming-related issues. Her only “child,” an 18-year-old spider plant named Kalanit, has thankfully never had any issues with her gender identity!
Carrie-Anne has written two other pieces for 4thWaveNow: “The boy with no penis” (about the case of David Reimer) and “Transing the dead,” a companion piece to this article.
She can be found on Twitter @Anyechka
As trans activists have demonstrated many a time, propagating their ideology takes precedence over accurately representing history. They have a long track record of posthumously declaring famously gender-defiant people (many of them LGB) to be trans, despite a complete lack of evidence (from either primary or secondary sources) to support such an extraordinary claim. Many have also declared old works of literature about LGB people, and women who posed as men to live freer lives and have more opportunities, to be part of a trans canon. Seeing as the modern-day trans umbrella is so broad and vague, trans activists feel confident in including anyone who wasn’t or isn’t one million percent a collection of rigid stereotypes.
Enter the latest trend in this misrepresentation of history: Genderqueering the dead.
In December, Katie Byford, a photographer, filmmaker, and poet, started a Twitter thread about nineteenth century female photographers, such as Eveleen Myers, Emma Barton, Constance Fox Talbot, Minna Keene, and Clementina Hawarden. After this wonderful celebration of female pioneers in photography, Ms. Byford made another thread, this one holding up Claude Cahun, Marianne Breslauer, Florence Henri, and Annemarie Schwarzenbach as “transfemale,” “genderqueer,” “trans,” and “queer.”
These lesbians were referred to with “they” pronouns, in spite of never having claimed to be anything but women, and no other evidence pointing to a trans identity. Like many other lesbians and gender-defiant women throughout history, they had short hair, wore stereotypical men’s clothes, and shunned the role of dainty little ladies immersed in all things domestic and stereotypically feminine.
Before these women’s true stories are presented, let’s look at the history of the term “genderqueer,” and the concept of claiming to be neither male nor female.
According to anthropologist April Scarlette Callis, in “Bisexual, pansexual, queer: Non-binary identities and the sexual borderlands,” people only began “identifying” as homosexual in the nineteenth century, when sexuality was medicalized in the wake of modern scientific developments and the decreased influence of religion. She quotes George Chauncey, a Yale history professor, as saying that gender roles, not sexual partners, were used to determine sexual orientation in the early twentieth century. E.g., only butch lesbians and effeminate gay men had labels attached to themselves, not lesbians and gay men who had less gender-defiant style and behavior. Only in the mid-twentieth century were people officially labeled homosexual or heterosexual.
The first recorded use of the word “genderqueer” is in an article from August 1995 by Riki Anne Wilchins, published in In Your Face: Political Activism Against Gender Oppression. Ms. Wilchins used this word to describe those with unnamed or complex gender expressions. In her 1997 autobiography, Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender, she identified herself as genderqueer.
In June 2001, in The Village Voice, E.J. Graff used the word in “My Trans Problem,” in which she pondered whether trans people belong in the LGB movement:
“Many of us who are homoqueer, or queer in our sexual desires, are also at least a little genderqueer—more butch or sissy than we’re supposed to be…For lesbians as well, genderqueer (a masculine woman) has at times trumped homoqueer (a woman who has sex with a woman) as the defining stigmata…As many gender-passable homos win a place at the Thanksgiving table, our genderqueered sibs are still beaten, fired, harassed, and murdered not for the sex they have but for the sex they appear to be.”
Also in 2001, “GenderQueer Revolution” and “United Genders of the Universe” were founded to fill a perceived gap in the representation and celebration of people who considered themselves neither male nor female. In 2002, the term went mainstream with the publication of GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary, a collection of thirty-eight essays edited by Joan Nestle, Clare Howell, and Riki Anne Wilchins. Ever since, usage of the term and identification with the concept have been steadily rising.
While Ms. Wilchins may have had sincere intentions and a specific identity in mind when she coined the word, as had those who were early adapters of the concept, the explosion of identity politics, queer theory, and postmodernism over the past 5–10 years have rendered it as meaningless and catch-all as “queer.” Today, many consider “genderqueer” an umbrella term which includes identities such as “non-binary,” “demigender,” “trigender,” “bigender,” “agender,” “neutrois,” and “pangender.” Some people involved in identity politics even consider the word offensive and archaic nowadays, and have supplanted it with “non-binary.”
Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun, Self-Portraits Reflected in a Mirror, ca. 1920, Jersey Heritage Collections.
Thus, this concept didn’t exist when the abovementioned female photographers were alive. Claude Cahun, the first cited, was born as Lucie Renée Mathilde Schwob in 1894, and adopted the unisex name Claude sometime between 1917 and 1919. She experimented with several different surnames before settling on Cahun. Historically, it’s hardly been uncommon for lesbians to adopt male names, but this did not mean they were trans men or “genderqueer.”
In 1909, at age fifteen, she met seventeen-year-old Suzanne Alberte Malherbe, who later adopted her own new name, Marcel Moore. They quickly became friends, creative partners, and lesbian partners. In 1917, Moore’s widowed mother married Cahun’s divorced father, making them stepsisters. Their creative partnership may have diverted attention from their lesbian relationship. Both were active in the anti-Nazi resistance movement on the island of Jersey during World War II, and were imprisoned and sentenced to death after being discovered. They were saved by the island’s 1945 liberation (“Acting Out: Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore,” Tirza True Latimer).
Claude Cahun Jersey Heritage Collection
Cahun described Moore as l’autre moi (the other me), and they remained partnered until Cahun’s death in 1954. After Moore’s 1972 suicide, she was buried next to her lifelong partner at St. Brelade’s Church on the island of Jersey. Over the course of their lifetimes, neither claimed to be anything but women; they were gender-defiant lesbians.
The second photographer to be posthumously genderqueered was Florence Henri, born in 1893. Though she was a very prolific, well-known avant-garde photographer in her heyday, her name is largely unknown today. “Meet Florence Henri, The Under-Acknowledged Queen Of Surrealist Photography,” a Huffington Post article by Priscilla Frank, claims she “toyed with gender binaries, using her personal appearance to emphasize the performative nature of gender.”
Florence Henri © Centre Pompidou, Paris
Henri’s 1928 self-portrait is cited as an example of this, because it features herself “dolled up almost as if in drag” (i.e., short hair and a so-called man’s shirt), and two silver balls reflected against a mirror, “equivocal symbols of both testicles and breasts.” Posthumously identifying Henri as “genderqueer” on account of this is a huge stretch. She was bisexual and at times adopted a tomboyish, androgynous style. She never claimed to be anything but female!
Marianne Breslauer Estate/Fotostiftung Schweiz, 2009
The third and fourth photographers cited, Marianne Breslauer and Annemarie Schwarzenbach, were close friends, though not romantic partners. While Schwarzenbach was a lesbian (who entered into a lavender marriage of convenience with bisexual Achille-Claude Clarac in 1935), Breslauer appears to have been heterosexual. Breslauer was born in 1909, and rose to become one of the leading photographers of the Weimar Republic. Her anti-fascist activism and Jewish background eventually drove her out of her native Germany. After World War II, she and her husband became art dealers (“Beautiful Tomboys of the 1930s”).
Schwarzenbach was born in 1908, and dressed and acted “like a boy” from a very young age. She also adopted the name Fritz. Neither of her parents ever forced her to adopt a more stereotypically feminine role. Her own mother was also bisexual, and had a long-running affair with opera singer Emmy Krüger, as well as other women, which her father raised no objections to (“Swiss writer’s life was stranger than fiction,” Isobel Leybold-Johnson).
Annemarie Schwarzenbach, © Marianne Feilchenfeldt-Breslauer
Throughout her life, Schwarzenbach continued dressing and behaving “like a man,” and exclusively had relationships with other women. Many times, she was mistaken for a man. Her attempted suicide, not her personal style, caused a much greater scandal among her family and their conservative circle. Breslauer described her as “neither a man nor a woman, but an angel, an archangel.” She travelled all over Europe and Asia as a prolific photographer and journalist, and tragically died from a bicycle accident at age thirty-four (“Beautiful Tomboys of the 1930s”).
On a related note, LGBTQ Nation and Ha’Aretz recently reported the discovery of alleged trans or “third gender” burials in a 3,000-year-old grave in Hansalu, Iran. This ancient city was almost continuously inhabited from the sixth millennium BCE till the third century of the Common Era. Among its claims to fame are the Golden Bowl of Hansalu and the Hansalu lovers, two male skeletons who seem to be embracing. The city was violently sacked and burnt around 800 CE, possibly by Urartians, which froze one of its layers in time, much like the eruption of Mount Vesuvius did to Pompeii. Thus, researchers have found a wealth of incredibly well-preserved artifacts, buildings, and skeletons (“Iran’s Pompeii: Astounding story of a massacre buried for millennia,” Catherine Brahic).
Biologically female skeletons were typically found with jewelry, needles, and garment pins, while biologically male skeletons were usually found with weapons, metal vessels, and armor. Simply because 20% of skeletons were discovered with objects associated with the opposite sex, or a mixture of objects, art historian Megan Cifarelli has presented this as evidence of “non-binary individuals” and “a third gender.”
Predictably, the Ha’Aretz article goes on to appropriate and misunderstand known “third genders,” such as India’s hijra and the Two-Spirits found in various Native American cultures. The evidence of such social categories doesn’t negate the reality of being male or female, nor does it have anything to do with post-modernist, queer, trans activist theory. On the contrary, they’re based upon a sex binary. People who don’t fit into either role find a place in these “third genders,” and thus are freed from the expectation of heterosexual marriage and sex, childbearing, having to wear certain clothes, accepting certain social and familial roles, and so forth. Most importantly, everyone around these people understands they’re still the biological sex they were born as.
Native Americans have repeatedly asked people to stop claiming to be Two-Spirit when they haven’t any Native American blood. Not only does this appropriate their culture, it doesn’t take into account how diverse Native American culture is. Not all tribes had/have Two-Spirits. For example, the Iroquois, who kept a much more extensive documentation of their people’s history and daily lives than many other tribes, never recorded Two-Spirits among their ranks. The Apache likewise have no records of them, though they were kind and respectful to Two-Spirits from other tribes (ibid).
Both the Apache and Iroquois had very egalitarian societies, in different ways. Apache adults typically had sex-segregated roles, but children were raised to do things associated with both sexes. Because their tribe was almost constantly at war with other tribes, it was essential to know how to do basic life tasks (e.g., sewing, cooking, hunting, construction) in the event of a sex imbalance either at home or in the trenches. Meanwhile, Iroquois women enjoyed great amounts of political power and authority. Hence, there was no need for Two-Spirits (ibid.).
One tribe that does have Two-Spirits is the Lakota Sioux. Their record of such a category extends as far back as their written history. They also had extremely sex-segregated roles from a very early age, and permitted polygyny. Lakota Two-Spirits were always men, never women. Men who didn’t conform to their tribe’s rigid rules about “proper” behavior were put in the camp with women and children, which didn’t enjoy as high a quality of life or social standing as the men’s camp (ibid.).
Another tribe with Two-Spirits, the Dene of Alberta, Canada, historically treated their women horribly. To give just one example, Dene women were forced to go hungry, if their husbands dictated it, during famines and food shortages. They were among the most mistreated, oppressed women among all North American tribes. Thus, the evidence makes it clear that progressive tribes had no need for Two-Spirits, while ones with the harshest, most rigidly-enforced sex roles required this social category as a way to deal with gay and gender-defiant men. In spite of not being regarded as “real men,” they still had the social power to opt out of manhood. Women weren’t allowed to opt out of womanhood. And again, none of these Two-Spirit men ever claimed to be women, nor were they seen as such (ibid.).
To get back to the topic of the grave, it seems more logical to conclude that the presence of stereotypically male or female objects with the opposite sex is evidence of gender-defiant individuals, possibly lesbians and gay men. If there were indeed a “third gender” in this society, it had nothing to do with modern-day views on the subject. It just goes to show that society may have had great acceptance towards non-conformity, so much so they buried these people with said objects. There also may have been other reasons they were buried with those objects; e.g., a soldier wanting to mend his uniform, both men’s and women’s clothes using garment pins, or women passing themselves off as men to fight in a war or rise to a more prominent social position.
The most recent paleoanthropological evidence reveals that our Neanderthal cousins had a very egalitarian society, with women as well as men hunting dangerous game face-to-face and taking equal part in all aspects of their daily lives, far more so than our own direct ancestors in the Homo sapiens sapiens line (The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science Is Rewriting Their Story, Dimitra Papagianni and Michael A. Morse). Does that mean Neanderthals were all “genderqueer” themselves?
By declaring all these people “genderqueer,” part of a “third gender,” and automatically under the trans umbrella, young people who are gender-defiant themselves are being done a grave disservice. When they see no role models from history, in whichever field they may be passionate about (art, photography, music, writing, acting, science, medicine, mathematics, etc.), in addition to a dearth of gender-defiant examples in their own real lives or modern society, they’ll be more likely to believe they must be trans or “genderqueer” themselves. There are almost no available counterexamples to convince them otherwise — to help them see that it’s very possible to be a perfectly normal, happy woman or man who doesn’t behave like a walking, talking stereotype.
Youth in previous generations, not all that long ago, had high-profile gender-bending examples like Annie Lennox, Boy George, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Prince, Marlene Dietrich, and just about everyone with a New Romantic style in the Eighties. Today, however, young people are being sent the message that preferring short hair, trousers, boxer underwear, button-down shirts, and no makeup; or pink, makeup, long hair, stereotypically feminine clothing, and jewelry, means they must be trans or “genderqueer,” instead of simply a normal tomboyish, effeminate, or androgynous person.
Calling strong, proud women and lesbians “genderqueer” and using “they” pronouns erases, insults, and demeans who they truly were, in addition to doing a disservice to today’s young women. Respect for the dead is a common value across cultures and eras, and this is a painful example of the exact opposite.
Excellent!
This is an important narriative firstly because it shows the post mortam transing of individuals who were most certainly lesbians and gays and also it shows young people that a queer diagnosis is only a very recent occurrence and open to abuse by the trans lobby. Homosexuals are not a dying breed, as trans would suggest. They are merely being subverted by straight men who form the basis of transgenderism. They are transing gay and lesbian youth with cult like zeal causing a cultural genocide of homosexual youth. People need to know this and understand the consequences for our youth so affected. Trans are homophobes who cause real damage to those unfortunate enough to come under their sway.
This is really great. I’m going to reblog on my blog. I don’t see a reblog button but I’m going to do it anyway. I hope this is OK.
Pingback: A great read. “Queering the Dead” – aunt polly's rants
Thank you, Carrie-Anne.
It’s always a treat to read your historical pieces.
When is it OK to tamper with history? When new evidence arises, new sources?
That is not what is happening with the trans activist movement.
Ideology should never override the facts. There is no new evidence.
These women from the past should not have their lives retold or distorted.
I’m always suspicious of movements that tamper with history. They never have present-day facts on their side, hence the looking back.
Agreed. It is dangerous and immoral to tamper with history. Another example of history being tampered with in the name of transgender politics is transactivist groups pressuring governments to allow birth certificates to be changed at will. Birth certificates are historical documents; allowing anyone with a “feeling” or a desire to be the opposite sex to change the sex recorded on their birth certificate, is allowing them to falsify a historical document. Birth certificates document a person’s birthdate, birthplace, parents, and sex, not their feelings or desires.
Ya know, I have a very strong feeling in my heart and soul that Debbie Harry of Blondie was supposed to have been my mom. I just know I should have been born to her; in fact, I truly believe she IS my mom. I know it. I feel it in my bones. I identify with her. I just know I was meant to be the child of a cool, beautiful, talented and rich rock star. I have even dyed my hair and had a nose job, cheek implants, eye lift and lip injections to more closely resemble her. So can I change my birth certificate to show that Deborah Harry is my mom? Of course not, that would be ludicrous, as it would be ludicrous to change my birth certificate to reflect that my birthplace is not the dumpy, uninteresting, small American town where I was born, but somewhere that I identify with in my heart and that speaks to my soul — let’s say, Milan or Marrakech.
Society relies on accurate record keeping not just for historical purposes, but also for statistical purposes, many of which are directly tied to the safety and well being of our communities. For example, criminals have gotten wise to the tactic of changing their sex and name on their birth certificates, which allows them to effectively disappear into the public and more easily commit additional crimes against the unsuspecting public, as the criminals’ new identities are unlikely to show up on offender databases. When male criminals present a female birth certificate once caught and found guilty, they can be placed in women-only prisons, to the terror of actual female prisoners who have nowhere to run or hide if the male decides to physically or sexually assault them. It is also useful and necessary for governments to keep accurate records of crimes and victims by sex in order to better prevent and solve crime. These are just a few examples. Anyone can come up with more, as the problems created by allowing individuals to rewrite their birth certificates — history — at will are quite obvious once a person thinks about it for a minute or two.
Thank you, Carrie! I always love reading your work. You are a very good researcher in addition to your writing skill.
I find this retroactive assignment of sexual identity/preference to historical figures to be such a “problematic” undertaking (to coin a phrase). While certain facts may jump out at us as having more or less significance, given the passage of time, it’s also true that in the past people had different understandings of those facts and assigned different social categories and meanings to them. It seems particularly useless to assert that someone from, say, 200 years ago, saw him or herself as “transgender” or “non-binary” when that category simply did not exist at the time.
The larger point is also that this seems to be part of the relentless chipping away at women’s accomplishments. I don’t think I’ve read of virtually any prominent female historical figure who has not been speculated about as possibly having been transgender. What kind of understanding is this meant to impart to young women? I rarely read of any prominent male historical figure as to whom there is a suspicion that he was “actually” a female. I wonder why that is.
Very interesting, especially the part about Native American culture. I had always suspected they weren’t as hippy-dippy as some activists like to portray them.
Thank you so much for this post.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if therapists actually had pulled in information from the past. Sharing these examples with confused and hurting youth could make a difference in how they see themselves now.
These dubious “studies” of trans figures from the past read like angst-y fanfiction. Who needs academic rigor? Clearly not the gender studies people. My ex used to mock the social sciences, years ago, and I thought he was being too harsh. He was on to something. I guess university research papers these days are opinion pieces. Sad that these people have any influence whatsoever. Nice rebuttal! I’d find it difficult myself to respond in as measured a manner.
consider writing a Quilette piece on this topic! would be great to see broader exposure of the poor state of gender studies.
What a splendid essay!
This my first time commenting. I’ve been following this blog for about a year now but haven’t been able to work up the courage to post anything until now because of the guilt that had been heaped on me by trans activist (mostly transbian) peers. I wish I had known that women like Claude Cahun, or even Alison Bechdel, existed when I was growing up because it would have spared me the agony that transitioning has brought on my life. I grew up a tomboy and I began puberty blockers at age eleven, and testosterone at age 14. When I began detransitioning at 20, it was discovered that the years of taking blockers and testosterone had shut down my ovaries, meaning that I’m on estrogen supplements for the rest of my life. That was three years ago. I’m living now as an open butch lesbian, and, let me tell you, my life has never been better! I never dated anyone when I was living as a trans man! Not one person! I felt so much discomfort and shame around my body that I refused to date any women. The idea of being physically intimate with anyone made me feel like a liar and a fraud. I couldn’t hide my birth sex in the bedroom! But now, slowly but surely, I’m beginning to integrate with the lesbian community and research radical feminism. Just this past summer I read Mary Daly’s “Gyn/Ecology” and was blown away. It was written forty years ago but feels so relevant to today! We’re sterilizing children! You can’t get any more anti-life (or “necrophilic” as Daly would say) than that!
Thank you so much for sharing these women’s stories. Young lesbians today need heroines like these. They need to know that their bodies are a blessing, not a curse. They need to be spared the hurt that women like me have endured. I may be more confident in my womanhood now, but the pain is still there. My body has been wrecked by the medications and I have to come to terms with that as I come to terms with my womanhood. If only I had realized sooner.
Bless you all! And keep fighting the good fight!
Welcome. Look forward to hearing more from you!
Thank you so much for sharing. You may not realize how much your story helps those of us trying to save our sons and daughters from going down the same painful road. If you are able, please post your story to gendercriticalresources.com and help further.
dear Crescent28
on behalf of young people like one of my young adult sons, who suddenly announced himself as a transwoman last year and is now on hormones, on behalf of all the children in K-12 who are now being taught that having a penis doesn’t mean you are male, who are declaring themselves transgender in droves (eg in my son’s high school, last year there was one transgender person, now there are 20), etc I urge you to make your voice and those of like-minded colleagues heard loud and clear–across academia, in public forums, etc.
Science is a process of learning, and it is a positive step forward to say, look, we thought about this, we worked on it, but now we realize we were wrong. And further, we are horrified as to what it has turned into.
a voice like yours, from the field, has a special legitimacy. I urge you to use it!
thank you.
Glad to read your comment. Good you found Mary Daly. Would you believe that book stores in the fifties and sixties had no women-entered books to one, then another, then were flourishing, overflowing with books directed towards women who were thirsting to find their history and and stories. Women’s Studies was once powerful for young women because they could explore literature, art, religion and go back and back, not to change history but to absorb her stories. Now we have Gender Studies and poof! gone, are women’s literature, theories, feminism disappears, absorbed by castles-of-air ideology.
So many thoughts about this great piece!
Firstly, how important it is to get a deep understanding of someone’s historical context. For example, I recall reading an article about 15 years ago (can’t remember author) challenging the idea that women like Radclyffe Hall were outlandishly masculine and arguing pretty convincingly that in the 1920s quite a lot of that style was just seen as modern and artistic. (Of course, back in c.2000 people still saw Hall as basically a butch lesbian – I can’t bear to check what words TRAs use about her now.)
Another thing is that even if a woman does really struggle with the experience of being a woman in a sexist, oppressive world – even if she passes as a man or wishes she was a man or enjoys being mistaken for a man – she’s still female. Indeed that very experience is by definition a female experience; no man has ever been through it. It shouldn’t be terribly complicated to acknowledge that.
A thing that makes me sad and angry is, I was a junior academic about the time that queer theory started to lift off (early 2000s). Back then it was much less aggressive and dogmatic than it is now – the people involved still had one foot on the planet earth – and at first it was deeply attractive because it seemed playful and “fun” (lots of engagement with pop culture) and seemed like it would let us honour the lives of people often written out of history, like butch lesbians. (Oh the irony.) We were also at this weird moment in academia when old fashioned histories and studies of material life had been deemed too dry and boring – this included Marxist and second wave feminist scholarship – but people didn’t know what to replace them with. So many became obsessed with analysing “representation” and “identity” instead, probably cos that stuff is naturally interesting to young adults (who comprise most junior academics), and because it’s cheap to do and lets you avoid having to take a committed stance on anything – which in the neoliberal 2000s was also frowned upon! Plus queer theory back then (and probably even more now) used heaps of convoluted, confusing in-language, which in retrospect was highly elitist, but made young academics and students feel like they were part of some extra clever “club” that old fogeys couldn’t understand. Also, because it was all so confusing, it shut down frank conversation about real lives – no one wanted to say “but I don’t know what any of this means…” All pretty typical stuff for young people, but twenty years later it casts a long shadow.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that a lot of well meaning people, from junior idiots like myself all the way to great figures like Joan Nestle , went along with the start of this stuff when we really, really should have known better. Now we turn around and see the butch women we’ve loved being erased yet again, more forcefully than ever. Breaks my heart and makes me very angry with myself.
dear Jen Miller,
I meant this comment (edited a bit) for you, sorry Crescent28!
on behalf of young people like one of my young adult sons, who suddenly announced himself as a transwoman last year and is now on hormones, on behalf of all the children in K-12 who are now being taught that having a penis doesn’t mean you are male, who are declaring themselves transgender in droves (eg in my son’s high school, last year there was one transgender person, now there are 20), etc, I IMPLORE you to make your voice and those of like-minded colleagues heard loud and clear–across academia, in public forums, etc.
Science is a process of learning, and it is a positive step forward to say, look, we thought about this, we worked on it, but now we realize we were wrong. And further, we are horrified as to what it has precipitated.
Don’t just be angry with yourself; put that anger to good use, and join us in fighting this!
I’ve been out of academia for many years now, but starting to speak up quietly in my own little corner of the world. Would be louder if there weren’t so many ugly repercussions for doing so! Thank you for your comment, a powerful reminder of why this is needed.
Jen
thank you for anything and everything you are doing. I think there are many people like you and us–eventually together our voices will be heard.
I also, in my own little corner of the world. What blowback – reminds me Nazi ideology and the salute when the Great Leader passed by or music played on intercoms, such as in a banks, where all were required to pause, mid word, snap to attention and salute, as described by Victor Klemperer.
I voiced my concerns about my child transitioning to the gender clinic, she is being prescribed hormones on the 2nd appointment, no time at all to assess her. The clinic passed on my email to her and now our relationship is ruined. I cannot believe how irresponsible they have been, i only want them to do the right thing by her and now i dont know what to do, she is 19 and wont listen to me at all.
I appreciate that individual teachers and other professionals caught up in this craziness need to preserve their jobs. Ones income and career are important on many levels. Not the least of which is your income. But if teachers could maybe find a way to ban together..talk in your faculty lounges and at professional organizational meetings. We REALLY need caring professionals like teachers to stand up against this nonsense going on in our schools. It is hurting children, families and our society. Please consider taking action against this transgender ideology hurting our kids. If the people our children spend the whole day with and look up to tell them they can “choose” their gender than we are fighting a very difficult battle. Please help us desperate parents.
Polly. I am so sorry for what you are going through and I know firsthand your frustration and desperation. I don’t know if this helps but in my experience I had to let go of the transitioning part and just focus on our relationship and mental health. Believe me it eats away at me that no one knows the long term effects of testosterone use and that my young adult child may very well become sterile but I won’t let this ruin my relationship. What has helped me is realizing that I don’t have to agree with the ideology but I can still be a part of my child’s life and a safe space for her at all times. My child has a very stubborn streak and it became apparent that nothing I said was going to slow things down. This is where I was hoping a therapist could help but all they do is affirm. I got some very good advice from someone very wise…. they said I don’t have to think of my child as my son but I also need to be careful not to see her as ruined. This really helped me because all the therapists told me I had to mourn the loss of my daughter but learn to accept that she is my son now. To me that is an impossible task for a parent to do. I can only see my child as my child. Also many many detransitioners have spoken out about their frustrations with people calling them ruined or mutilated. So be careful with the words you choose because I feel like that would just lock someone into a trans identity even if they aren’t happy with it. I gently try to bring up gender related issues in a very roundabout way that shows that there is no right way to be a man or a woman. Gender ideology makes gender roles more restrictive in my opinion and that is part of the reason I cannot agree with it. We need less labels not more. There are some very excellent writings by detransitioners that really help me to try to understand things better and believe me these people are amazing and brave insightful and a testament to human resiliency. In my opinion it is better to focus on getting your relationship strong and working on building your daughters life outside of transioning. I really and truly do wish my kid would have done this first but i also feel like they are given no other options. I hope this helps a little. I know this is very hard and I really do hope that our children can one day learn to accept themselves as they were born and just value their health and what their bodies do rather than what their bodies look like. Stay strong!
I don’t like labels either. Whatever my interest, I did it because I wanted to, not because I was force-fed gender expectations. The young people today are increasingly forced into the binary, not less.
I’m a gay guy and I just turned 20. I am not “genderqueer” or effeminate or nonbinary or any of this other stuff and neither are my friends. I’m pretty sick of having this shoved down my throat. It’s boring and annoying and the people who are caught up in it never shut up about it and seem to have bad mental health. They were writing about this crazy stuff in 1995 and 2001 and they are still writing about it. Why should LGB people be linked to it? It has nothing to do with my life. Anyway, it might be better for LGB people to let these folks be considered the opposite sex or a 3rd sex or whatever. Even if it’s not biologicially true, its better than having us be associated with them.
Thank you very much for your article. The young are out of this world – swamped – in ideology and idiocy, in a language that creates a belief that what is, is not and what is not, is, and that history of literature, art, religion, is worthless and must be reinvented to suit their purposes. Your article would be so helpful to so many – why not get it on Medium? Don’t know how that works, but the audience is wide.