Originally featured on PITT, A New York mother delves into the arguments in support of and against gender transition.
Transcript
I am a parent from New York City.
My daughter announced her belief that she’s really a boy at age 13. She’s now 15.
As a lawyer, I boil things down to pro and con arguments, debating the merits of each after researching the facts. After researching and thinking about this for over two years, I’ve come to understand the arguments in favour of and against what I’ll call early transition. Here’s a summary.
Arguments pro early transition: Gender identity is a sense of one’s gender, male, female, both, neither. It has nothing to do with masculinity, femininity, sexual attraction, stereotypical behaviours or preferences. It can be realised anytime and once realised, never changes or might change but it’s unlikely. Nobody regardless of age or circumstances is confused about their gender identity as it’s an innate knowledge. The relative stability and reliability of gender identity justifies serious actions.
If gender identity doesn’t match biological sex, this causes gender dysphoria, a normal response to the mismatch, not a psychological ailment.
While some call the huge increase in gender dysphoria complaints a social contagion, it’s really the result of more readily available information and a more welcoming climate, giving people freedom to express their gender identity and a name for their discomfort. Many, without this freedom and knowledge in the past, committed suicide. Gender Dysphoria unchecked drives people to suicide or at best leads to a life of misery. Thus, the distress must be remedied with social and/or medical intervention immediately.
Attempts to help people come to terms as biological reality are really attempts to change gender identity, which is improper conversion therapy, like pushing gay people to be attracted to the opposite sex.
Arguments against early transition: In gender identity male and female are defined independently from biology and socially created stereotypes. What then does it mean to be male or female? One could speculate that biological boys and girls feel different but in what ways? And are any of those ways not related to their bodies? Every female or male experiences being female or male differently. So there are billions of ways to feel like a girl or a boy, the idea that one can feel male or female, separate and apart from biology and from stereotypical preferences and behaviours is nonsensical. Gender identity is really socially defined femininity or masculinity. Essentially, stereotypes.
Gender Dysphoria is really just a fear of gender nonconformity or desire to obtain some social status associated with the opposite sex, or just a problem with your feelings about your body. There’s no precedent in medicine for medically altering healthy bodies to treat such psychological phenomena. It’s ironic that society calls itself accepting and progressive for encouraging medical transition when society could simply accept gender nonconformity.
Even assuming gender identity was inherent, why must it match biology? Why can’t someone have a male gender identity in a female body, or vice versa? The mismatch isn’t inherently wrong, and gender dysphoria isn’t a normal response to the mismatch but would be a psychological ailment of fretting over that mismatch, which need not, again, be treated by medically altering a healthy body.
Detransitioners and desisters are emerging in droves. Desisters change their minds about gender identity before medical transition, detransitioners change their minds after. They prove that even if gender identity exists, it’s not stable and can’t justify early transition.
Further, kids and teens are exploring their identities and changing their preferences and opinions daily. The brain isn’t fully mature until around age 25. It’s irrational to make permanent bodily changes with negative health risks, based on teenagers feelings. It’s also irrational to socially transition four year olds, based on self-described feelings of being male or female, essentially meaningless terms.
Studies show that about 80% of dysphoric children ultimately outgrow it, without intervention. By contrast, a good 96% of children put on puberty blockers go on to synthetic cross-sex hormones. These statistics show that early transition causes some children to medically transition, when most would have gone on to be comfortable in their own skin.
If untreated, gender dysphoria frequently begets suicide, and if we’ve always had about the same number of people suffering from gender dysphoria, where are the historical suicide statistics of all those silently suffering from dysphoria? They don’t exist. Conversely, the few studies on early transition have not shown a decrease in suicide rates. Plus, there’s almost no suicide among four year olds to justify their social transition.
Gender Identity fosters confusion in gender non conforming teens, those with body issues, autism, anxiety, social struggles. By giving an explanation and a solution to feeling different. Gender nonconformity is used to justify social transition in young kids, which may be subconscious homophobia or fear of gender nonconformity by adults who willingly see their kids as the opposite sex. If the adults in their lives gaslight gender non conforming children with social transition, there’s little hope for them to accept themselves as they are.
So fostering a fiction turns gender-nonconforming kids into trans kids.
After considering the pros and cons of early transition, I’ve concluded that there’s no basis for a rush to socially or medically transition kids and teens.
What do you think?