“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.

My point of view is controversial, but it is one that concerned parents need to hear.

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.

This comment was submitted by a reader today. Thank you.

Thank you for your blog, which makes me feel sane again. It’s so hard to escape from a world policed along very narrow, and in my view, very dangerous lines.

I am the mother of a young adult who decided two years ago, in the wake of a series of traumatic events, that he is female. He is being supported by two gender doctors who, he says, have ‘diagnosed him as transsexual’. This ‘diagnosis’ is merely an echo of his own interpretation of his own narrative. They say that he is transsexual because he says that he is transsexual. Yet, he hears this diagnosis as confirmation of his own belief that he must transition to survive.

His belief in the absolute necessity of transitioning is based, I believe, on the trans narratives that he has encountered on the internet.

By contrast, when his adolescent sister developed an eating disorder and then self-harmed,  she was supported to challenge her beliefs, support which allowed her – after a long two years – to recover. Only a belief that you are the sex that you were not born to is unchallengeable, lest you be charged with bigotry.

For my part, I have become increasingly convinced that gender dysphoria is a maladaptive coping strategy, prompted by very real distress, but not necessarily stress focused around gender. Yet our culture, which for the last century, has been obsessed with gender, cannot see the distress underlying these claims.

I think that the supposed parallel between gender transitioning and homosexuality is particularly unhelpful and misleading. Both narratives share a story of coming out, and of liberation from prejudice. But both are not necessarily the same.

Gay culture, despite – or because of — the suffering and persecution homosexuals have often faced,  revels in humour, which rests on lifting taboos and telling the truth. But trans culture is humour aversive, maybe because humour threatens to crack the fragile identities, uncovering a truth which cannot be spoken, a truth which threatens to launch the self into terrifying chaos. I think it is for this reason that trans culture cannot countenance questioning or debate.

On the sidebar to the right of my blog posts, you will find the following:

COMMENT POLICY:
The purpose of this blog is to give voice to an alternative to the dominant trans-activist and medical paradigm currently being touted by the media. I give preference to commenters who are also gender-critical, though respectful questions and comments countering this view will be considered. Please feel free to comment on older posts. This will often stimulate new discussion.

Some bloggers see their sites as a place for brawling, free-for-all commenting with no holds barred.

This blog is not that sort of place.

The Internet is bristling with cat fights about transgenderism (and yeah, I do consider it an “ism), about feminism, and increasingly, about the growing trend to medicalize “gender nonconformity” in children, teens, and young adults. If what you’re after is a place to castigate and shame the people who’ve found a voice here, look elsewhere. I moderate all comments. My primary goal is to provide a place where left-leaning people who are critical of the dominant transgender paradigm–especially as it pertains to young people–can have their say.

Does that mean I won’t consider publishing views counter to my own? No, but it does mean I’m not interested in hateful vitriol aimed at parents and family members who are supporting each other, and their kids, in finding an alternative to the trans narrative.

If you want to see your comment published here and join the discussion, be constructive. You don’t have to agree with everything you read here, but I’m not interested in providing a platform for finger wagging, holier-than-thou transactivists. Nor will I put out the welcome mat for the tiresome scolds who have nothing better to do than try to convince us they know our kids better than the intelligent and caring parents who form a community in these pages.

I make no guarantees to anyone that a particular comment will be posted. But if you’re a parent, family member, ally, or friend looking for an alternative to the galloping trans-kid meme, you’ve come to the right place. Welcome.

There is an interesting new comment up on the Guardian piece about the mother with the mentally fragile daughter who wants to transition. In fact, there are many good comments that have been posted since I blogged about the article the other day. The commenter–a woman who has been to hell and back–provides excellent advice to parents of girls who are engaging in self harm.

For anyone who is not yet familiar with it, I recommend a stroll over to the Gender_Critical subReddit to enjoy a visit with its ever sharp and snarky denizens.  It’s primarily a collection of gender-related media stories, which the hungry subReddit piranhas attack with incisive zeal.

The moderator deirdreofthegaians has a special knack for creating snappy headlines that capture the sad absurdity of the gendered dystopia we find ourselves in today. Tonight’s selection is particularly interesting, in a brutal sort of way.  “FTM teen will just have her partner carry her babies, no big!” “MTF caught with huge cache of weapons and explosives.” “Internalized homophobia leads lesbian to identify as genderqueer after family stages intervention.”

Enjoy? Or not…

This is big news. Children who have been diagnosed as “transgender,” who are currently being experimented on with hormones and surgeries, will finally be studied in (one hopes) a systematic way at several clinics across the U.S. over a 5 year period.

The good news? Someone will actually be collecting data and publishing research studies on these kids. The bad? The children are still the same guinea pigs, being treated experimentally with outcomes still to be determined.

The studies will run for 5 years, which will be enough time to yield some important information. But the real litmus test is what life will be like for these children when they grow up to be adults.  The younger children will still be adolescents when the studies end. One can only hope that the NIH will fund further longitudinal studies to follow these people–some of whom will be permanently sterilized–well into their lives as adults.

The study – which will begin enrollment in fall 2015–will include 280 transgender youth with gender dysphoria–those who are persistently distressed by the incongruity between their gender of identity and the gender they were assigned at birth. Participants will be those who seek medical intervention to align their physical bodies with their gender identity and alleviate gender dysphoria and its associated negative effects, including anxiety, depression and substance abuse.

The study will include youth from two age groups: younger children in early puberty, who will receive hormone blockers, called GnRH agonists, used to suspend the process of puberty – preventing the development of undesired secondary sex characteristics; and older adolescents, who will begin use of masculinizing or feminizing cross-sex hormones that allow them to go through the ‘right’ puberty – consistent with their gender of identification.

For the cohort in the earliest stages of puberty, the study will evaluate the impact of treatment on mental health, psychological well-being, physiologic parameters and bone health, and will document the safety of hormone blockers. In the older group, the study will document the safety of administering cross-sex hormones for phenotypic gender transition, as well as evaluate its impact on mental health, psychological well-being, and certain metabolic/physiological parameters.

Who will be conducting this NIH-funded research? The doctors who have made the biggest names for themselves in the new frontier of pediatric transgender “treatment”:

The multicenter study will be located at four academic medical centers with dedicated transgender youth clinics. The co-investigators and their institutions include:

Johanna Olson, MD, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California

Stephen Rosenthal, MD, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco

Robert Garofalo, MD, MPH, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

Norman Spack, MD, Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School

These doctors have a lot at stake to prove that their experimental treatments will produce positive longterm outcomes for these kids–over the lifespan. Can and will they design studies that will truly be unbiased and well controlled? Will they end the studies and treatments early if negative outcomes start piling up? Will they be motivated to apply for more funding after 5 years, or will they declare 16-year-olds who began transitioning  at 11 successes and cease following them? Will they look closely at how natal males and females differ in their response to hormones and surgeries?

Time will tell. For the children’s sake, we can only hope these doctors will use the NIH research money ethically and wisely.

But given how much these doctors have already invested in administering hormones to kids and publicly touting the unmitigated good of “transition” and “trans kids,” it’s hard to see how they can approach this research without bias. If long-term evidence ultimately shows more harm than good resulting from this, they will be seen as providers who hurt innocent children–a much bigger stigma than harming adults.

It’s a cliché now: Teens barely talk to each other in person anymore, nor do they call each other on the phone. Even when together in groups, they seem to be constantly looking down at their smartphones, absorbed in their separate little cyberworlds.

And many of us adults do much the same thing. We bemoan it at times, longing for the pre-Internet days, but it’s what we do. It’s just the way life is in the early 21st century.

But the findings from this new survey of 753 Canadian teens (grades 7 – 12) make it altogether clear: too much Tumblr and Twitter (and other social networking sites–SNSs) are very, very bad for the mental health of youth.

This study found that students with poor mental health are
greater users of SNSs. Results clearly show that youth who report use of SNSs for more than 2 hours per day have also reported poor self-rated mental health, psychological distress, suicidal ideation, or unmet need for mental health support.

And the dose very much makes the poison.

The numbers are stunning. Compared to their peers who were online 2 hours or less per day, teens who imbibed over 2 hours of social networking were:

• over twice as likely to self-report “poor” mental health (29.3% vs. 13.8%)
• over twice as likely to answer “yes” when asked “In the last 12 months, was there a time when you wanted to talk to someone about a mental health or emotional
  problem you had, but you did not know where to turn?’’ (45.6% vs. 21.3%)
• over twice as likely to score high on a standardized measure of psychological distress, i.e. depression and anxiety (42.4% vs. 18.6%)
• nearly three times more likely to answer “yes” when asked ‘‘During the last 12 months, did you ever seriously consider attempting suicide?’’ (24.9% vs. 9.1%)

And, as you can see in the table above, the differences are even more extreme when compared to young people who report “infrequent or no use” of social networking sites.

How ironic is it that the more teenagers use “social” networking, the worse their psychological (and therefore social) well being?

As SNSs are increasingly becoming an integral part of life
today, especially for children and adolescents, parents need to be more aware of the pitfalls of SNSs and actively engage
with young people in making it a safer and enjoyable experience for them. Parents should consider frequent use of SNSs as a possible indicator of, or risk for, mental health problems among children. Youth with mental health problems may be  frequently using SNSs to seek interaction or support.

For a depressed, socially isolated kid, it’s a lot easier to stare down at your phone and interact with your cyber”friends” than to deal with the stresses of social interaction at school.

Students who spend more time on SNSs also likely have less time to invest in other health-promoting activities … The cross-sectional nature of the data precludes evaluation of temporality and causality of the observed relationship between use of SNSs and mental health problems. Indeed, excessive use of SNSs could contribute to poor mental health and may be bidirectional. Use of SNSs can lead to poor mental health and poor mental health may be a reason why youth use SNSs.

In other words: heavy use of social networking and poor mental health appear to mutually reinforce each other. The worse the kid feels, the more they retreat into the Internet. It’s not a stretch to say that would likely mean they have fewer meaningful relationships IRL (“in real life”)–including, perhaps, those crucial early romantic or even sexual relationships that might ground them in their real-life bodies. Instead, they have a virtual existence as whatever online identity they have constructed on Tumblr or Reddit.

Is it a coincidence that the explosion of social media in the last several years is correlated with the steadily increasing number of girls identifying as trans, “genderqueer,” “demiboy,” or some other identity permutation? If desperate-to-transition-or-I’ll-kill-myself were not a social trend, the pre-21st century medical literature would be full of reports of such suicidal patients. Young women would have been saying to doctors and psychologists that if they could not live as the the opposite sex, they might as well be dead. But we find no such record in the clinical literature.

What do you get when you combine

• a socially isolated, “gender nonconforming” teenage girl–perhaps one on the autism spectrum–who is “seeking interaction and support” on the Internet, with
• a heaping helping of YouTube FTM transition videos touting the magical powers of testosterone and top surgery to solve all ills, and add
• a dash of suicide contagion to teens already more prone to suicidal ideation and poor mental health, with a spoonful of
• “counseling” by strangers on the Internet, and the constant
• pressure to “identify” as somewhere along the gender spectrum?

You connect the dots.

The Guardian is generally known for its rigid adherence to the politically correct paradigm, so it was a surprise to see this (albeit in an advice column) from an anguished mom, whose situation sounds a lot like that of many of my regular readers. [Update 8/17/15: The comment section is still open, and the pro-con comments are far more balanced than I originally noted in this post.]

My daughter, who is 16, has a history of mental health issues. Her father is an alcoholic who left the family home when she was very young; she hasn’t seen him for some years and finds meetings with him upsetting. I am sure that this perceived rejection is at the root of her troubles as she suffers from very low self-esteem. She is overweight and was bullied at school, finally refusing to attend. She has been out of education since she was 12.

We have had some input from the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), but nothing has helped and she will no longer engage with them. She has never slept well and was prescribed melatonin. Then, last November, she was prescribed medication by a GP for persistent headaches and took a month’s supply in one go. To the family, this was the strongest example yet of her self-loathing and tendency to self-harm, albeit also perhaps a cry for help.

Following this, I had a telephone consultation with her psychiatrist, who raised the issue of autism – this has been a concern of mine, as she does display a number of traits associated with autism.

However, she is now convinced that she needs a sex change. Given that she has never previously shown any inclination to be anything other than female, it would appear that this is yet another form of self-harm and/or a cry for help.

I am worried that because of the amount of time she spends on the internet, she is being influenced to believing her intentions are correct.

She needs someone she respects sufficiently to listen to and open up to, who will dig deep enough to uncover the underlying issues, and help her to resolve them. I feel that, without such help, she will continue down her unhappy path, perhaps pursuing gender-change (without realising that this would not resolve any of her underlying issues), or leading to an even worse conclusion.

This worrying story has all the familiar plot points: painful childhood, mental health issues, self-harm, the sudden idea that “transition” is the answer from a girl who never mentioned it before. And let’s not forget the influence of the Internet…

As of this writing, many of the commenters (in so many words) either accuse the mother of transphobia, or insist that the gender dysphoria is the root cause of the teen’s other problems, although, interestingly, not a few do acknowledge that a trans identity seems to be pretty common in people on the autism spectrum–particularly natal females.  This comment is typical: