Acts of love

by Inga Berenson

It was a hot summer morning. I was nine or ten, riding my pony from our farmhouse toward the barn where my father was working. This was the first time I had gone riding since a string of bad falls had caused me to lose my nerve, but I loved riding, and was determined to be back in the saddle.

So far, things were going well. The gravel road between our house and the barn was about a mile long, and I was halfway there. My usually cantankerous little mare was being perfectly docile, but I was approaching the house of a quirky neighbor who kept a menagerie of animals – donkeys, zebras, buffalo, and a gaggle of dogs that barked at every passing car. I was mostly worried about the dogs and how my pony would handle the barking – it sometimes made her nervous, but there was no dog in sight as I rode past the house.

I was thinking I was home-free until I heard a commotion from the paddock across from the neighbor’s house. I looked around and saw a giant draft horse push through a dilapidated wire fence and come galloping toward me, neighing and grunting in what I later understood to be equine lust. In an instant he was beside us, rearing and pawing his great, hairy hooves in the air near my face. I thought that was the end of me and my pony.

Then all of a sudden I heard my mother’s voice. I looked around and found her running toward us, yelling and hurling gravel at the big horse. She distracted him just long enough for me to hop off. My pony raced off into the safety of some low-hanging trees, and the neighbor came running out of his house to capture his oversized horse.

As I stood there, weak-kneed from my near-death experience, I saw my mother’s car parked a few yards down the road, the driver’s-side door still open, and I knew what had happened. She had been worried about me, so she had followed from a distance, just to be sure I made it okay.

rearing horse

Illustration by Chiara (Twitter: @chiaracanaan)

I’ve been thinking about that story a lot lately. It was about four years ago that my daughter first told me she thought she might be trans. I believe her story is a classic example of social contagion, since she had never expressed any discomfort with her sexed body until she got Tumblr and DeviantArt accounts and began spending all her time on her phone. Since then, I have felt a bit like my mother, standing in the middle of the road, hurling gravel, trying to protect my daughter from an ideology that has sought to convince her that she was born in the wrong body.

I am fortunate. Unlike some of my friends with kids who became convinced they were trans, I feel reasonably confident that my daughter will not medically transition. She desisted from a social transition more than a year ago, and she told me recently that she no longer identifies as trans. However, she still has many friends in the gender-queer community, and I know we’re not out of the woods. When she turns 18 in a few months, she may exercise her right as a legal adult to start medical transition, and there won’t be anything I can do to dissuade her. This worries me greatly. So, as a matter of self-preservation as much as anything, I’ve been asking myself, what if she does transition? How will I cope?

The short answer is I don’t know, but I certainly won’t disown her or ask her to leave my home. In fact, of all the many gender-critical parents I know who have trans-identified children, I know absolutely no one who has disowned their child or kicked them out of the house. I’m sure it must happen, but I don’t know any. Of course, all parents say things they regret – especially during the highly charged arguments with teens who are demanding immediate medical interventions. In one such argument, one of my best friends even told her then-trans-identified daughter to get out, but she immediately regretted it, took it back, apologized, and asked her daughter to stay (which she did). I also know at least three mothers who have lost contact with their trans-identified children, but in those cases, the kids themselves severed the relationship, not the parents. In fact, the mothers continue to try to reconnect with their children, despite being repeatedly rebuffed.

Although I know I won’t disown or reject my daughter, I also know that I won’t affirm her decision to transition. It’s not really that I’m deciding not to; I simply cannot bring myself to do it. It would be dishonest for me to call her my son when I don’t believe she’s male. Plus, I don’t think it’s helpful for me to allow my daughter to dictate how I define words like “male” and “female.” Does this mean I love my child less than the mothers who affirm their children?

Since I cannot occupy the mind of any of these other mothers, I guess I’ll never know. But I do know that my love for my child is so deep and strong that the idea that she has been misled to believe that her body is wrong depresses me to no end. I am angry — bitterly, bitterly angry that this ideology has taken up almost four years of her life so far and god only know how many more years it may take.

Maybe the reason some parents affirm their children’s transgender claims and some parents question them lies in the parents’ own experiences of puberty. When my daughter felt embarrassed about shopping for bras at 13, I was not surprised because I remembered that feeling vividly. I hated it. I hated knowing that people could see my developing breasts and the outline of the bra straps under my shirt. I especially hated the very feminine bras – the ones with lots of lace and little pink bows where the cups joined in the middle. They made me feel vulnerable and exposed and miserable.  I also know I got over it – for the most part, anyway.

Trans activists claim that the number of trans-identifying people has increased so rapidly not because there are more trans people today than in the past but because society has become more accepting and they are no longer afraid to come out. But if this were the case, why are the greatest increases occurring in the population of female teens? Why aren’t middle-aged women like me queuing up for hormones now that we can come out? To me, the answer is clear. Women like me had a chance to come to terms with our bodies and accept ourselves as we are. My daughter didn’t have that chance because an insidious ideology was waiting in the wings to convince her that her feelings about her body meant that it was wrong.

But maybe the mothers who readily affirm their children’s trans self-diagnoses didn’t have this experience at puberty. Maybe they were lucky enough to sail smoothly and happily from childhood through puberty, unambiguously pleased to watch their bodies go from child to woman – so, when their children expressed unhappiness about their developing bodies, they were genuinely puzzled and could only agree their kids must have been born in the wrong body.

Whatever the reason for the difference between those parents and me, I resent the fact that the mainstream media will tell their stories, but they won’t tell mine. I resent the fact that my daughter looks at those parents and wishes I could be like them — because I never can be.

If my daughter does eventually decide to take hormones or undergo surgery to medically transition, the only way I could fully support it is if I had clear scientific evidence that she had a condition requiring such an invasive treatment. If there were a definitive medical test – a brain scan, for example – that proved my child’s distress arose from an incongruence between her brain and the rest of her body that could only be alleviated by transition, I think I could go along with it. But there is no such test because individual brains don’t break down neatly into pink and blue categories. Sexually dimorphic brain features are subject to averages just like other physical characteristics. In general, men are taller than women, but if you plot their height on a bell curve, you will see lots of overlap between the sexes. You’ll also see outliers on the “tails” of the bell curve—6’4’ women, and 5’1” men. This is true with psychological and neurological traits, too. Also, trans activists justify their born-in-the-wrong-body claims by pointing to a few studies which indicate that the brains of trans-identified people are more similar in some respects to the opposite sex than their natal sex. But these studies do not control for many factors, including sexual orientation, and we know already that people who are same-sex-attracted have some brain features more similar to the opposite sex.

Without tools to reliably predict who will benefit from transition, I simply cannot support medical interventions for young people whose brains have not fully matured (generally understood to be around age 25). I want desperately for my daughter to accept her body and to avoid the irreversible changes and the many health risks that are inherent in medical transition. But she will soon be 18 years old, and she will have the power to transition no matter what I want – even though she is still at least seven years away from brain maturity. There’s a real chance that she could. Would that be the end of the world?

No, I know that it wouldn’t. As worried as I am about this outcome and as fixated as I’ve been on preventing it for four years, I do have to remind myself that her transitioning would not be the worst thing that could happen. Plus, I will still be able to hold onto the hope that she will detransition before the hormones can cause too much damage to her long-term health. Every day it seems that I read about a new detransitioner. More and more young people are saying enough is enough. They are reclaiming their bodies and their lives, and I find their stories inspiring.

A few days ago I watched a video in which four young women, who formerly identified as trans, answer questions about their experience and share their insights. Their video gave me hope for a couple of reasons. First, they acknowledge the role that social contagion plays in driving the huge increase in kids (especially girls) who are identifying as trans today. It takes real courage to speak up and share stories that contradict the popular understanding of why people transition. These stories not only challenge the narrative of why people transition; they also show that, for many young people, transition does not make their lives better.

But another reason that video gave me hope is that I can see these girls are all okay. In fact, they’re better than okay. They are strong and smart, and they are living with purpose and a sense of future. They reminded me that transition – even medical transition — is not the end of the world. Three of the girls were on hormones for more than a year. Their voices are changed, but they are healthy and well, and that’s a beautiful thing.

Detransitioners have been giving hope to me and other parents for many years, but the relationship between the groups has been difficult at times. Some detransitioners have understandably resented how parents sometimes try to use their stories as cautionary tales to warn their kids about the dangers of medical transition. A big part of the problem is the language people sometimes use when talking about medical transition. For example, referring to the bodies of detransitioners as “mutilated,” their voices as “broken,” or their stories as “heart-breaking” has not been helpful.

One of the most powerful and positive messages of the gender-critical movement is that no one is born in the wrong body. Gender-critical parents like me are constantly trying to encourage our kids to accept their bodies just as they are. Yet I believe we need to extend that same acceptance to all bodies – even bodies post transition. To feel good about themselves and their lives, all people need to be able to accept themselves physically and mentally, and words like “mutilated” don’t help them do that.

Online, the interactions between detransitioners and parents has also been a little rocky at times because parents sometimes overstep boundaries that detransitioners need to be healthy. Parents often reach out to detransitioners for help with their personal situations – to seek parenting advice and guidance. But most detransitioners who speak out publicly are quite young; they don’t have children and they aren’t parenting experts, nor is it fair to saddle them with the responsibility of helping us. They’re dealing with their own issues, are often most focused on helping each other, and they don’t (and can’t be expected to) understand the situation and struggles of parents. What’s more, many have written or vlogged about their own, often fraught, relationships with their own parents, so when other parents reach out to them, they can feel “triggered” by being reminded of their own family relationships. These young people are still maturing and processing what their transition and detransition mean to them. They need time and space to be able to do that, and desperate appeals from parents they’ve never met, for help with kids they don’t know, could interfere with that process.

Also, detransitioners are not a monolithic group. Not everyone who detransitions regrets transitioning. Deciding that transition is not right for you and regretting transition are not necessarily the same thing. Detransitioners who do not regret their transition naturally resent it when people use their stories to make a case against medical transition.

At the same time, those detransitioners who are willing to speak out about the harms of transitioning and the power of reidentifying with your birth sex can be powerful allies in the fight to raise awareness about the regressiveness of gender ideology and potential harms to other young people – whether we’re trying to raise this awareness in the culture at large or just in our own homes. I hope my daughter will listen to the stories of some of these detransitioners and decide to first try some other strategies for becoming comfortable in her natural body.

If, however, she does eventually transition, I hope she can be honest with herself about it and accept that she can never be male – however much she may be able to look like one. I follow several gender-critical trans women on Twitter. Although they have sought medical intervention for palliative reasons, they acknowledge they are male and support sex-based protections for women. They don’t demand that the world repeat the mantra that trans women are women. They have a healthier outlook on the world and a healthier sense of self because they aren’t trying to change anyone’s perception of material reality (like male and female).  I appreciate the courage they are showing. Their stance as gender critical has cut them off from the support of the larger trans community, which regards them as heretics and traitors. And it must be noted that they’re not universally accepted among women who are gender critical, some of whom regard them with suspicion.

Of course, my daughter may never come to recognize the bill of goods she’s been sold. She may transition, remain transitioned, and remain committed to an ideology I find regressive. If that’s the case, it will be my life’s task to love her and support her in spite of these things. But that doesn’t mean I will ever abandon my own sense of reality, because doing so would be inauthentic, and parents should not have to subordinate their own authenticity to their children’s quest for it.

What I can do is look after her, help her financially to achieve non-transition-related goals, cook her favorite foods, hold her hand when she’s feeling down. I can even go out of my way to avoid gendered language so as not to provoke or upset her, but I simply cannot utter beliefs I don’t hold. Our relationship needs to be based on mutual respect. I must respect her autonomy, but she must also respect mine.

Also, I want my daughter to understand that it’s ok for other people (even her parents!) to disagree with her and hold different views; that doesn’t mean we don’t love her. Far from it. I want my daughter to be strong and resilient enough to face the reality that life will be full of other people who disagree with her for any number of reasons. I’d rather she learn resilience than fragility that is triggered whenever she encounters disagreement or disapproval from others.

I feel such a sense of solidarity with the other gender-critical moms I’ve met here on 4thWaveNow, on Twitter, and in real life because they’ve seen what I have seen – that this ideology has made our children less resilient, it has alienated them from their families, their former friends, and, worst of all, their own bodies. Most of us have watched as our children went from well-adjusted kids to teens preoccupied with online worlds, feeling oppressed and seeking medical transition.

For our efforts to call attention to the regressive nature of the ideology, we have been called “bigots,” “transphobes,” even “Nazis.” So-called gender therapists gaslight us and pretend to know our children better than we do. And some journalists, blind to their sexism, have dismissed us (in one case, as merely a “bunch of mothers”), despite the advanced degrees and professional careers many of us hold, not to mention the voluminous research we have done to educate ourselves about this particular subject.

And, yes, we have made mistakes. We are certainly not perfect. There are so many things I have said to my daughter that I wish I could unsay or at least say differently. There are so many times when my strong emotional reaction to things she was telling me created a barrier and shut down communication between us. Of course, she has said things that hurt me too, but as her mother and the adult in the relationship, I rightfully bear a larger share of the burden to try to make things right between us.

I can’t change the past, of course. What’s done is done. But I do know this: My mother has been dead for more than 20 years, but I think about her every day. She was far from a perfect parent, but she loved me fiercely. The love she gave me in the first 30 years of my life still sustains me today. I know that now, in a way I didn’t fully understand when I was younger.

I don’t know what the future holds for my daughter. My fervent hope is that she will reject the idea that she needs to change who she is, but whether or not she does, I hope one day she will look back on my resistance to her transition as the act of love that it is. I hope that her knowledge and memory of the fierceness of my love will sustain her, as my mother’s sustains me.

No menses, no mustache: Gender doctor touts nonbinary hormones & surgery for self-sacrificing youth

This is another in a series of posts examining statements made by top gender specialists at the inaugural USPATH conference in Los Angeles in February 2017.  (See here and here for more.)


Not so long ago, unremitting distress about one’s gender was the one and only reason for medical transition. Those days are over. With activists clamoring for a change from “gender dysphoria” to “gender incongruence” in the next revision to the international register of diagnosis codes, the ICD-11, the push is on for insurance-paid hormones and surgeries for anyone who believes their body is in any way “incongruent” with their “gender identity.” And this effort includes medical intervention for children and adolescents.

In this clip, excerpted from a USPATH symposium entitled “OUTSIDE OF THE BINARY – CARE FOR NON-BINARY ADOLESCENTS AND YOUNG ADULTS,” pediatric gender specialist Johanna Olson-Kennedy MD, discusses her views on medical interventions for “nonbinary” youth.

As always, we recommend that you listen to the recorded excerpt yourself, as well as reading the transcript included in this post. Time stamps are indicated by square brackets. []

 

According to Dr. Olson-Kennedy,

There are still people who want to embark on phenotypic gender transition—hormones and surgeries—who don’t meet this criterion [for gender dysphoria]. Well, what are we to do?

…And it’s great. I love this. I don’t like the word “pass” at all. Passing as a member of the other sex is not a criterion for treatment, whereas achievement of personal comfort and well being are. And that is really the crux of what should guide our care, as medical providers, as professionals in the mental health role.

How is this any different from elective cosmetic surgery? Trans activists will say it’s “medically necessary” because it is a guaranteed suicide preventative, a dubious claim at best. But how about a teen girl who hates herself and is self-harming because her breasts are (to her) too large or too small? What about her “comfort and well being”?

[:52] So, there are a lot of medical intervention possibilities for folks who have nonbinary identities. And again, this is really not for me to determine. It’s really for me to work with a person to determine what it is they’re interested in.

As we all know by now, the idea that a medical or psych provider should use diagnostic skills to determine whether a young person ought to undergo permanent drug or surgical treatments is so 20th century.

[1:06] Some people are like, oh! no menses, no mustache. You know, assigned female at birth, “I really don’t want facial hair, I don’t want [inaudible], I’m super dysphoric about bleeding.”

So, there’s lots of options, certainly for menstrual suppression. I love—I was so excited to be in one of  the first sessions that I went to, which was gynecologic care for trans-masculine folks, this “leave a gonad” thing.

So, it was this idea of, you know, maybe you don’t wanna have bleeding but you still want estrogen, and you want that support from a medical perspective. Or you just don’t want to go on testosterone.

It’s 2017, and designer endocrine systems are all the rage. Human beings should tinker and tamper with their delicate hormonal balance, because it’s what they want right here, right now. Mix and match–why not?

[1:48] There’s lots of these different things.  Maybe a central blocker and low dose testosterone. I had a young person who went on testosterone for a year, and it was like, that’s enough, I’m fine with it.  I’m masculinized enough, and that’s good for me. Or no medical intervention at all.  That’s absolutely possible.

The slide below,  from a different talk at the same USPATH conference, pretty well encapsulates this “treatment” approach:

nonbinary medical pathways slide

So we see the mindset of “affirm-only gender doctors here; why so many of them don’t acknowledge there might be permanent harm done to young people who eventually detransition. There are no mistakes. It’s all part of the gender journey.

 

[2:06] So, for nonbinary assigned males, maybe just Spironolactone [an androgen blocker] or using a peripheral blocker only. That might be something that people opt for. I had a young person who really [inaudible] nonbinary identity, but kind of, very very huge fear of a large nipple areola complex. Like, “I just can’t even deal with that.”

All you women with large nipple areolas that you just can’t even deal with, maybe you can get Medicaid to cover that in your state? Worth a try.

It would be one thing if these people were arguing for elective, cosmetic treatments on demand, for adults. But activists and gender specialists not only want to retain a medical diagnosis, gender incongruence in the next version of the ICD-11;  they want insurance to cover all trans-related treatments, for nonbinaries and anyone else who wants them.  In fact, some public and private insurance policies (such as that of the San Francisco Department of Public Health) already provide such coverage.

wpath-karasic-cultural-humilty-and-sfdph-cropped1

Back to Olson-Kennedy and her areola-avoidant patient:

[2:33] So, we put them on Spironolactone for a while, and then eventually she came back and said I wanna go on estrogen.  So there’s selective estrogen receptor modulators for people who do not want breast development. That could be a possibility.  Maybe hormones, no surgery. No medical intervention, another possibility.

No medical intervention: Just one of many dishes in the smorgasbord of options for nonbinary, gender fluid youth. Who’s to say (certainly not a medical doctor), which is the least harmful of those possibilities in the long run?

[2:51] My observations: Sometimes nonbinary identities are strategic…to protect themselves, to protect their parents. What I can tell you for certain about trans kids, youth, is they do a lot of taking care of the people around them.

Here we see a theme we’ve heard from other affirm-only genderists: Trans youth are more mature than “cis” kids. They are extraordinarily prescient about their future; they know for certain what they will want at age 20, 30, 40.

winters-trans-kids-are-more-mature

Prominent gender therapist Diane Ehrensaft lauds her tween clients for having the wisdom and foresight to opt for adoption in the future—unlike their balking parents, whose only reason for objecting to sterilizing a 12-year-old is a selfish desire for grandchildren.

But there’s something else crucial to note about Olson-Kennedy’s comments: After initially lauding her young enbies for pursuing smaller nipple areolas, or choosing to halt their menstrual periods without sprouting a beard, she is now implying to her audience that nonbinary is only a stopover for many of these kids. They are only claiming this identity to “take care of” their parents, when what they really want is to go whole hog to a binary transition.

[3:18] “I will sacrifice my own comfort for the comfort of the people around me, who I know I’m making very uncomfortable with my gender.”

What an extraordinary assertion. Trans kids aren’t just mature beyond their years when it comes to making irreversible decisions about their bodily integrity and fertility. They also emanate Buddha-like concern for the feelings of others, especially their woefully ignorant parents. How long before we have religious sects led by trans kid gurus, like Tibetan child lamas on steroids?

And how does the claim that trans kids are precociously mature square with the accumulating evidence of a strong correlation between gender dysphoria and autism? Young people with autism are not exactly known for their self-sacrificing nature or their ability to reflect upon the feelings of others.

[3:33] And so, marking that out is really important. Because again, because expressing that [they are nonbinary] is often used as evidence that they are not trans.  “No, well they don’t want to do this. Clearly, they’re not trans.” And having that conversation, and making sure that someone isn’t taking care of someone else at their own sacrifice.

 Are they “taking care of someone else” or perhaps listening to a family member who just might have the best interests of the child at heart, more than a gender doctor who hasn’t known the kid their entire lives?

So, on the one hand, we hear that nonbinaries need treatments “to feel more comfortable,” and at the same time, we’re told that a significant number of martyr-like trans kids are “sacrificing” themselves by feigning a nonbinary identity for the comfort of their parents. Which is it?

The Guardian recently produced a mini-documentary on nonbinary milennials and their quest for comfort. Meghan Murphy dissected this bit of puffery, and took on the living nightmare of feeling uncomfortable in this article.

Well worth a look.

meghan murphy enbie tweet.jpg