Gender Health Query (GHQ) is a new organization started by Justine Deterling (@thehomoarchy on Twitter). Its focus will be research and political action from the perspective of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans-identified people who question the current LGBT zeitgeist around youth medical transition. GHQ is also on Twitter @genderhq.See the last section of this article for how to join and/or support this important new effort. Your support can be as simple as signing this statement.

Justine Deterling is a 50-year old bisexual woman who is happily married to the woman she has been with for the last 21 years. She believes, from personal experience, that one’s feelings about gender and sexuality can change drastically from the tweens to young adulthood. This reflects her own experience as someone who didn’t understand her own same-sex attraction until age 22, as well as the experiences of people in the LGBT population she has been around for years. Her personal philosophy is influenced by stoicism, Taoism, Enlightenment values, and most importantly, skepticism.

 This 4thWaveNow interview with Justine was conducted via email.

Justine, why did you form Gender Health Query?

I started researching the subject of increasing numbers of children and teens being socially and medically transitioned for gender dysphoria, under the now popular affirmative model, about four years ago. I had noticed that gay men and lesbians were beginning to express worries and even outrage about this. Their worries were not surprising to me and shouldn’t be to anyone who has spent time among LGBT people. Gender dysphoria has always been a part of the gay and lesbian community and has existed without medical transition, even though medical transition has been an option for a few decades now.

Justine’s wife Tara in her girlhood (on left)

To take a very personal example, my spouse was very masculine-identified as a child, including using male nicknames, and having exclusive “male-typical” interests. As for myself, I was a tomboy. I don’t claim that I would have been diagnosed with DSM-5 gender dysphoria, but I had some gender dysphoria as a small child and again as a tween. At the time, it felt very depressing I wasn’t born a boy, but I grew out of what was really a female inferiority complex and now have no desire to be male. Understandably, some older lesbians/gay men are actually horrified by what is happening now because they feel that this would have risked their own journey to self-acceptance without being permanently medically altered.

GHQ will be a medical and censorship watchdog organization focused around the increase in minors being socially and medically transitioned for gender dysphoria. It’s also intended to be a platform for the increasing numbers of LGB, and even trans people, who feel there are serious risks involved with this. This is happening under the now popular affirmative model that states a child’s/teen’s expressed gender should simply be supported, and any attempt to help the youth avoid or delay hormones and surgery is considered unethical. This is also happening in the context of postmodern ideologies about gender being widely promoted in many areas of society. GHQ also critiques this relatively new gender ideology in the way it affects how LGBT youth–and society at large–view identity, sexual boundaries, and trans versus female rights.

Most of the existing research on gender dysphoric youth, as well as gender clinician observations, has found that children with even serious gender dysphoria may outgrow it and are more likely to grow up to be gay or lesbian. And now more stories are accumulating (partly thanks to 4thwavenow) about lesbian, as well as increasing numbers of bisexual and heterosexual youth, who are desisting from trans-identification. Some are also detransitioning after being medically altered.

There is an activist mantra that gender identity and sexual orientation are two different things. This is repeated by affirmative model MDs and PhDs. However, if you look at this closely, the line between gender-nonconforming same-sex-attracted people and trans in minors is blurry.

What is your opinion of the affirmative model, which validates trans-identification in children and teenagers, and defines encouraging coping skills and waiting as “conversion therapy”?

At this point people can’t deny there are going to be young people who will be medicalized unnecessarily with the rise of what I call the “child/teen medical transition movement.” This begins as young as nine or ten years old with hormone blockers or even cross-sex hormones. This also includes unnecessary sterilization, loss of sexual function, castration, and double mastectomies. It’s already happening and there is historical precedence for harm arising to young people even in environments with less lax gatekeeping than what we are currently seeing in the United States.

I initially thought that people’s worries were likely overblown. I assumed there would be a lot of concern and caretaking by the mental health and medical professions to ensure a proper screening process. I was wrong. In fact, I now believe this isn’t a priority among many of these professionals or even organizations like the APA or AAP. This may sound like hyperbole, but it is my opinion, as someone who has read most of the relevant research, attended gender conferences, listened to hours of presentations, and read all the articles by affirmative model advocates. In my view, it has simply already been decided that false positives are morally acceptable collateral damage when it comes to trans-positive social support and access to medical treatments.

I actually support the right of people to make this argument and I point to positive data (de Vries 2014), (Olson, 2016) around the affirmative model on the GHQ website to try to be fair. Decisions involving collateral damage are made all the time in society. There are trans youth who self-harm and seek hormones on the black market if not treated by doctors. I don’t think it’s helpful to deny the seriousness of this by saying things like “there is no such thing as gender” or this is all just the result of “social constructs,” easily abolished by cultural changes. Affirmative model advocates sincerely believe they are doing more good than harm by promoting early social and medical transition. I believe the hormone-blocker protocol is child abuse regardless of what the youth’s adult identity will be. I view any unnecessary alterations providing hormones and surgeries to cognitively immature minors as child abuse.

Others believe standing by and not helping a distressed youth who may be sure they want to transition is child abuse.

This view is being reinforced by inducing suicide terror in parents and the public, by avoiding mentioning desistance altogether in articles about trans youth, and by removing links, (something done even by research universities), to information that reveals data that looks disturbing. And by extremist activist behavior that prevents people from questioning the affirmative model.This is why Gender Health Query is necessary. If LGB people want someone to be invested in caring about the negative impacts of this on immature LGB youth, they will have to take responsibility for caring themselves. There is already harm happening from the affirmative model. It’s only a matter of what the extent of it will be. And I believe there will be a concerted effort to ignore it, or even suppress it, in liberal media, by LGBT organizations, by universities, and by people in the mental health and medical professions in the United States. I expect increasing numbers of desisters and detransitioners to be treated horribly within the “queer community,” where gender and sexual fluidity are now esteemed, and you’d better not interfere with anybody’s easy access to hormones and surgery or else. They already are.

Our site also addresses risks to heterosexual youth (with more seeking transition now) who may be on the autism spectrum, have BDD or BPD, or be victims of trauma.

So, GHQ will mainly be tracking harm arising from the increase in minors transitioning and the ramifications to youth who are harmed. What about the young people who will medically transition, no matter what?

I can’t object to people arguing that good things are coming of the affirmative model or that making a young person wait to transition may be very distressing to them. I try to make data-based arguments and there is data to support these positions.

But “false positives” (for lack a better word) are an inevitability of the affirmative model or “child/teen medical transition movement.” Transition is starting in childhood now, at age nine or ten, not even the tweens. Studies on regret rates are generally of poor quality, with many lost to follow-ups, and mental health issues persists. While reported regret rates are very low in research on adult cohorts who transitioned under a gatekeeping model, they still are not zero. But adult regretters are adults with agency.

Young people cannot truly consent to the serious consequences of these actions until around age twenty-five. This means that affirmative model advocates, LGBT organizations, and now society as a whole, are making a conscious decision to perpetrate a major human rights violation on at least some children and teens, by drastically subverting their maturation process. This could be considered an atrocity if a youth has been sterilized and/or has their sexuality permanently destroyed. It’s just as bad as what has been done to intersex babies and those who’ve undergone surgical genital mutilation. The level of harm to over-medicalized minors could possibly dwarf what was done to intersex babies via surgical “correction,” in terms of sheer numbers, as thousands of children are being put on hormone blockers (and other medical interventions) in the western world.

As more and more people who transitioned as minors start to express regrets under this new approach, as things are going, society will put the responsibility for that on the child or teenager (now an adult), as the affirmative model necessitates a “let the child lead” narrative. This creates another ethos: It absolves adults of moral responsibility. We are seeing affirmative-model advocates make statements to the public that detransition is “no big deal” or just part of their “gender journey.” In my opinion, this is being done to acclimate the public to this coming new reality of sterilized youth, with destroyed sexual function and pointless double mastectomies; to make it morally acceptable. Detransition is not a harmless ordeal based on the multiple accounts I have read from people who transitioned as minors or young adults.

Justine (left) with wife Tara.

There is also a risk this protocol may be used to “correct” effeminate pre-gay boys and masculine pre-lesbian girls in homophobic countries like Iran, China, and Russia, once the child medical transition movement is fully normalized in the West. Dismissing this worry as paranoia is very naive. Much worse has been done to LGB people. Iran already prefers transgenderism and forces homosexuals to transition. And accusations of homophobic parents fueling a child’s transition have already been made in relatively gay-friendly England.

Affirmative model advocates should be upfront about all this, in my opinion, rather than make lengthy red herring arguments about how methodology has inflated desistance statistics. It’s possible that they may have been inflated. But these arguments do nothing to prove the numbers are so small they are irrelevant.

Johanna Olson-Kennedy has argued that regretters shouldn’t stop all youth from transitioning. If a confused, likely same-sex attracted young person, who transitioned as a teen has regrets, she can “just go and get” fake breast implants later.

But our grief over watching detransitioned, medicalized young people, who haven’t even reached full-cognitive development, matters. We are no less justified than the trans activists whose angry protests against Dr. Ken Zucker caused USPATH to cancel his lectures. Those of us who are concerned should not apologize and anyone who tries to intimidate us out of it is acting oppressively. We aren’t trying to shut anyone else down. But until affirmative model advocates prove early social transitions and early medical treatments only rarely prevent desistance, this is as much a homosexual/bisexual human rights issue as it is a trans rights issue.

If they are going to argue that perpetrating a human rights violation (sterilizing and creating other permanent changes) on other vulnerable minorities (as children and teens) such as LGB youth, autistic youth, and traumatized girls, they are morally obligated to justify these acts with much better data than they have now, because in all other cases, these medical interventions would be considered highly unethical.

GHQ will demand data that justifies this and a right to know what the costs are specifically. “Apples. oranges, and fruit salad,” Diane Ehrensaft’s diagnostic explanation, is not acceptable proof in my opinion. Control groups are considered unethical but there are probably back-end ways to determine social influence. For example, a researcher could study a population of trans-identified children and teens in a country where giving youth hormone blockers isn’t occurring. Or how about recruiting some of the desisters (and perhaps their parents) who have begun to speak up on social media and personal websites?  But at the same time, I reject the idea that any type of control group not employing enthusiastic transition is unethical, which affirmative model advocates argue. Parents could lovingly raise their dysphoric children to view themselves as an outlier “third gender” type of male or female, rather than lying to them that they are literally biologically the opposite sex. There are already parents who treat transition as something that will be safer if done when older. Children have no understanding of the ramifications of transition at that age, and there are ethical questions around promoting harsh medical treatments as a panacea to their struggles.

There currently appears to be a culture of apathy throughout the affirmative-model mental health and medical professions about the impact of their approach on grey-area nonconforming children and teens. This is despite the fact that there is a lot of information that demonstrates gender dysphoria is influenced by the environment and culture. These influences include homophobic bullying, family stability, trauma, and what appears to be social contagion.  Environment and culture now are extremely pro-medical transition.

This apathy permeates much of liberal society, media, and all other LGBT organizations, despite the fact the data to support all of this is minimal. In fact, I would say there is open hostility towards LGB youth and other teens with issues who may be harmed. There is an explosion of trans-identified females. Many are promoting the idea this is due to positive increasing acceptance. They are refusing to acknowledge some of it looks very disturbing and similar to other body dysmorphia contagions. Brown pulling down the link to Lisa Littman’s ROGD study is just one example.

The abuse the journalist Jesse Singal has received, enabled by actual liberal media outlets, is another example. His articles are perfectly reasonable and well-balanced, and there is much evidence on the GHQ site to support the validity of the issues raised in them. There are leftists who are criticizing all of this (I am center-left). But many liberals appear hostile towards the concept of caring about youth who may be hurt because they are used to “hurt the trans community,” something Johanna Olson-Kennedy said at a 2017 Gender Odyssey conference I attended. It’s why I believe my argument that affirmative-model advocates view LGB youth simply as morally acceptable collateral damage to trans-positive healthcare is a very fair opinion to have of them.

You have mentioned that the site will also critique postmodern influenced gender ideology, a subset of “queer theory.” So, the site is more than just a medical watchdog site?

I originally wanted it to be a dispassionate analysis of desistance statistics but realized all of this is happening in a larger cultural context of society beginning to believe biological sex is irrelevant; even to the point that school teachers and scientists are repeating these ideas.

The GHQ site actually includes data that supports biological explanations as to why trans people, as well as gays and lesbians, have some characteristics that align with cross-sex controls. So, in this regard a “gender spectrum” argument is not totally unreasonable (but only for a very small percent of the population).

Unfortunately, the current way this ideology is playing out in this time and place is actually doing some harm. And I believe this harm is tragic and totally unnecessary, but currently very real. LGBT people have been completely turned against each other over it. Women have been turned against each other over it. And people on the left have been turned against each other over it. I believe support for the “LGBT community” is going down significantly because of it, as recent polls show a decline.

LGBT youth culture has become very obsessed with pronouns, labels, body dysmorphia, and identities to the point of being unhealthy. There are many people who agree with me, particularly GenX LGBT people, like myself, who believe current “queer youth” culture seems angrier, more sexually confused, and more gender confused than ever. Some young people cannot tolerate people deviating from their views on gender even slightly. They have difficulty functioning without the validation of the outside world, which is now increasingly bowing to demands for pronoun verifications before all social interactions. Research by people like Jonathan Haidt points to harms coming to young people from identity-politics-obsessed environments. Yet affirmative-model advocates, and I mean psychologists and doctors here, actually are encouraging these problems.

Also on the GHQ site, there is anecdotal evidence that queer/gender identity politics doesn’t promote positive mental health. There are some studies that show people with non-binary identities have poorer mental health than binary trans as well. There isn’t even really proof all of these non-binary-identified youth, mostly females, really have gender dysphoria and not some other mental health issue or body dysmorphia.

And disturbingly, some people are acting as if others owe them emotional and sexual access to validate their gender identity. LGBT organizations and mental health professionals, in some ways, enable this by uncritically pushing the idea that your sex is merely what you declare it to be and that multiple genders are real. I would expect these people to be more critical and assess possible externalities or even negative impacts on these individuals. And I would expect them to prepare young people for the real world of genital-preference-centered sexuality, and to teach them respect for others’ sexual orientations, which these professionals increasingly don’t respect themselves.

I cannot stress enough the harm this has done within the LGBT community and particularly between lesbians and trans people. I don’t think large numbers of lesbians, who previously embraced the rainbow, will ever trust any concept of an “LGBT movement” ever again. Starting in 2015, I tried to warn lesbians in LGBT media how destructive this would be. And I am a latecomer compared to other women who were smart enough to anticipate these problems years before I even knew they existed. I disparaged some of them and now have to apologize and give them credit.

Your organization is trans inclusive. Why did you choose to make it an LGBT organization, since trans people are front and center everywhere else?

At this point all LGBT people need to have some stand-alone organizations. The issues are all actually different in many ways. Gay men need HIV prevention outreach programs. Bisexual women(and LGBT organizations expend almost no energy on bisexuals), have higher abuse rates than gay men or lesbians. Sometimes specific groups have a better understanding of their particular issues and more motivation to address them. Trans activism may be hurting aspects of the homosexual rights movement that has nothing to do with surgeries on minors or pushing girls out of winning sports positions. Lesbians definitely need their own activism as that tiny population is getting overtaken by trans and “queer” activism that values gender and sexual fluidity.

But I have tried to raise concerns about the overmedicalization of gender nonconforming young people and some of the negative fall-out from gender ideology with hundreds of LGB people in academia, in LGBT orgs, and in LGBT media. And I have watched other gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals attack, and viciously at times, other LGB people for raising perfectly reasonable concerns. I’m not going to blame everyone in the trans community for the toxic discourse around this whole issue any more than I am going to excuse some lesbians who I have seen abandon their own youth in ways I think are really appalling and profound.

Trans people are not a monolith and GHQ is ideologically-based, not identity-based. Youth medical skeptics, postmodern gender ideology skeptics, and other acknowledgers of biological sex are welcome. The current extremism in trans activism may have unintended consequences for trans people too. Some trans people don’t believe that early transition, without emphasizing patience and coping skills, is ultimately the healthiest outcome for all youth who will go on to transition. You can find serious consequences to that here. People may be feeding into an obsession addressed with quick fixes and “passing” at the expense of desistance, proper brain development, fertility, bone health, and cardiovascular health. Many trans people have children or say they want them or never even get bottom surgery. The ethical questions of medically transitioning youth who will have a trans-identification no matter what are just as relevant as the effects of all of this on desisters.

Certain trans people–some dub them as “truscum”–are not supportive of concepts of multiple genders and resent being lumped in with people who don’t medically transition. They receive a lot of abuse and get censored by the most powerful social media companies in the world like Twitter and Facebook. They are reasonable people and we all share in common some harm from this. I hope that we can all find a way forward.

There is so much censorship around these issues on the left. Some people opposing aspects of gender activism are turning to right-wing venues and right-wing activists. Do you plan to do that?

From what I have seen, I don’t blame people who feel so desperate that they are aligning with the right-wing around fall-out from gender activism. Sometimes dialogue can actually increase tolerance if people avoid existing in these increasingly cult-like ideological states. So I don’t condemn that.

But I make it clear on the website that this is a place that supports inclusion of LGBT people in family and public life. I’m not interested in enabling people who want to enforce bible or conservative ideology-based gender or sexuality norms on people. In fact, they are part of the problem at times, in my opinion. I sometimes tell them that when I engage with them superficially. I reserve the right to be quoted or write something for a conservative newspaper, since there is a liberal media blackout on these issues. But I don’t want GHQ to ever coordinate activism with the right-wing in any official capacity. I’m too concerned it endorses some of their motivations that I oppose. And beyond that, alliances with the Right upsets people I care about and want to be a part of the discussions around the safety of all of this.

There is 4thwavenow and Transgender Trend and other child/teen transition skeptic orgs. How is GHQ different?

Information from these sites have been instrumental in increasing my understanding of some of the downsides to what is happening with more young people transitioning. I think the GHQ site spends more time highlighting pro-transition arguments for context than some other youth medicalization skeptics sites and discourse. In addition, it is specifically geared towards the LGBT perspective on the issues. That said, although I spent a lot of time launching GHQ, I consider my efforts a community project as my knowledge, analysis, and viewpoints have been helped immensely by the whole community of LGBT people, parents, desisters, detransitioners, therapists, social scientists, and doctors who are discussing this and how safe it is.

The GHQ site is also organized systematically for easy access to multiple areas of interest. There are 17 topics with multiple subtopics. So if parents, or journalists, or LGB people, or whoever, wants to access information such as medical consequences, gender clinician quotes, science article quotes, and the references that go with them, they can read things based on subject matter listed in a long outline you can find here. The information in these sections is pretty extensive and should contain most of the important information that has come out over the last few years. As more news comes out, it will be tagged at the end of each of these topics. That way people can access information accumulated from a few years of data collection, as well as any new information that comes out, and this will be updated regularly.

For example, this blog post on a recent Swedish documentary that features transition regret was tagged to the GHQ “regret” topic, as well as the topic of increasing numbers of female teens coming out as trans. Opinions will also occasionally be featured if they can be supported by evidence, real-world observations, or personal experience.

Comments won’t be open on blog posts. It’s a better use of our time as activists, at least for GHQ, to spend energy in raising awareness among LGBT organizations and media, than moderating comments for trolling, brigading, or hateful comments. We are on Facebook and Twitter so plenty of commentary will happen there. But anyone can contact us with comments, questions, or blog post ideas anytime. In fact, I would like to encourage that now.

Can you summarize your activist agenda?

This is a huge issue with so many unintended consequences that need to be addressed. Initial main goals will be as follows:

1) To be a database of extensive information, including peer-reviewed research and real-world observations, to support rationally defensible reasons for concern, coming from the perspective of LGBT people. The site will also cover the increasing numbers of heterosexual youth who are dysphoric. And to show LGBT support for educators, mental health professionals, and doctors, who are frankly terrified for their jobs to express any skepticism about the affirmative model.

2) To spread this information, particularly to LGBT organizations, mental health entities, and educators. There is a real lack of awareness that first and foremost needs to be addressed through outreach and face to face interactions whenever possible. This will be done via mail campaigns, press releases, requests that these entities meet with concerned individuals, communications via organized speaking panels, and if the current refusal to address harms here continues, organizing protests.

3) To try to create dialogue with other LGBT organizations, such as the Trevor Project, about downsides to youth medical transitions, and the harmful effects of blurring the lines between sex and gender that all of these organizations participate in. They need to reiterate respect for sexual boundaries with young people, who are increasingly feeling entitled to sexual access to others (as well as being targeted themselves, sometimes by older people).

4) To create an activist push, as many trans activists have done to achieve their goals, to remind the mental health and medical professions that the onus is on them to prove they are not harming grey-area, dysphoric youth. And to address the damage when they do harm. The first priority should be to find ways to collect data that prove early social transition and use of hormone blockers don’t increase persistence. If it does, as some gender clinicians fear, the affirmative model has a side effect, unfortunately, of also being an unintentional gay and lesbian eugenics movement. In teens, the picture is more complicated. There is little evidence these entities in the United States will care that much unless they are made to care through activist pressure (our area) and ultimately lawsuits (not our area).

5) LGBT organizations such as GLSEN and entities such as the LGBT centered Division 44 of the APA need to include people who handle and study detransition. There will be more detransitioners. These entities enthusiastically encourage youth transition. We are going to demand they help when it goes wrong.

How can people join your organization? Are you looking for other LGBT people to help you in your efforts?

There is a statement on the site for people to sign if they agree with our mission. This isn’t a petition and will be ongoing. It helps demonstrate support for raising these issues from people who are not generally against basic LGBT social inclusion and rights. The statement can be found here. There will be a mass email statement sent out to many LGBT organizations, medical organizations, mental health organizations, and media soon. So, adding your name will be helpful.

Please contact us if you have a blog post idea you would like to contribute if the information can be supported by science research, an informed opinion, real-world observations, or personal experiences.

Also, please contact us if you would like to get more directly involved in public outreach, research, or anything else that is relevant or have any ideas to contribute.

I can travel to speaking events and can present this issue with arguments that can be morally and rationally justified. The same can be said for appearing on a podcast or YouTube channel. There is a plethora of issues not delved into in this interview that are very interesting and currently relevant. I can discuss this issue from most angles; the medical consequences, issues regarding affirmative model health professionals, desistance statistics, gender activist extremism, and the conflicts around identity politics within the LGBT community.