(Note: if you’re in email and click on the headline of this page — Are You Still Okay with “Gender Affirmation” for Kids? — it will link you to a better-looking format.)
I’d guess there are about 11 kinds of adults out there who are just fine with the widespread trend of indoctrinating adolescents into gender ideology. By that I mean they are cool with the “gender-questioning/gender-fluid/non-binary” part of the TQ++ movement’s ideological capture of children — which leads to “gender affirmation,” which in turn encourages vulnerable kids to transition.
(I’m leaving same-sex attracted adults, the LGB ones, out of this, because they are not TQ++, and most of them are over this shit. Many lesbians have been for years. The narcissistic demands of aggressive trans/queer/gender people are undermining decades of goodwill toward garden-variety homosexuals, which is a disaster for them.)
The following are categories of grown people who go along with the idea of sterilizing and mutilating children, medicalizing them for life, and robbing them of their sexual function forever. See if you see yourself in any of these.
You consider yourself kind and compassionate and you have very little understanding of what’s actually happening out there; you’re where I was on this stuff about three years ago, and you’re not tuned into the fact that kids are being indoctrinated (or being chemically castrated and having body parts removed). You may be smart, but on this topic, you are low-information. You wonder if it’s merely wider “acceptance” that explains the explosion in youngsters who are transitioning.
You are terrified to cede any ground on any aspect of progressive identity-based politics because you think if you do, it will be an admission that many of these ideas stink, and Dems are hemorrhaging voters over it — which will mean losing to conservatives in the coming elections. You feel it’s best to agree that questioning gender ideology is “bigoted.”
You are in college, or you graduated in recent years, or you are faculty. Identity politics/social justice is your religion. You use the words “cis” and “Latinx.” You are certain that “lived experience” trumps science, facts, and data, and even children should get to honor “their true selves.” You want to “burn everything down.” You will replace this “everything” with something that maps onto totalitarianism. Also: be kind!
You have a kid who claims to be gender-fluid, non-binary, or trans. You are living with so much cognitive dissonance that you are emotionally shut down, or trying to talk yourself into thinking it’s “great!” Or, your back is against the wall (maybe even legally) and you must affirm your kid or you will lose them to the machine. (I feel the most sympathy for you, number 4.)
Your employer will fire you if you don’t go along with coerced language and DEI initiatives, or if you ask any questions, you will be cancelled and lose your reputation and livelihood. You don’t even have school-age kids, so what’s it to you? You go along to get along. (I get it. I was once in your spot, too.)
You are a man and you have a girlfriend or wife who is all-in with the gender people (she is likely 1,2, or 3 on this list) and if you push back at all on “all the great stuff they are teaching kids in schools these days,” she will not suck your dick. So, to hell with kids’ wellbeing. It’s not like you have a daughter who had to compete against Lia Thomas or anything.
You have a personality disorder, i.e. you are Cluster B. You may in fact identify as trans yourself. Or at least “queer.” “Polyamorous” counts, too. You don’t believe in the gender binary, or gender stereotypes, and you also don’t believe in biological sex, and yet you do believe in children’s “need to transition,” at lifelong cost to them, from one gender to the other — which when you think about that for ten seconds, genius, it makes no sense whatsoever. (THINK ABOUT IT.)
You are on the autism spectrum, and you are into at least some aspects of this very online culture (hentai/anime porn, transhumanist and/or AI discourse, cosplay, obsessive subreddits, fantasy universes and games), and you don’t get why so many people are so upset about these matters. Why all the emotions? Let’s go to Comic-Con!
You have secret fetishes that overlap with trans ideas/aesthetics/concerns and so trans stuff kind of turns you on, even though you’ll never admit it to anyone. If it means kids are carved up in this wave — meh.
You have pedophile tendencies and think this is all pretty great. Why question a movement that teaches kids to keep secrets from their parents and stops them from going through puberty?
You are making bags of money in this industry. You are either a disinterested sociopath, or you are a well-positioned pathological person who needs the world to validate your fantasy of your transed and/or “evolved” self. (Even though you didn’t transition or get into any of this until you were an adult). Get ‘em while they’re young, you think. You sense that if you can get the larger population to even act like 2 + 2 = 5, then you can control everything. You are correct.
I shouldn’t dismiss the majority of mental health and medical professionals and educators who don’t like this gender wave at all but are genuinely cowed for legal and/or reputational reasons. But what happened to “Do no harm”?
Also, much of this has shaped up to be a straight Men’s Rights Movement. Plenty of men are happy to punish women for #metoo and feminism and all that. Some will self-ID “transition” to access female spaces and bodies. And (this is true) some men get physically aroused when violating boundaries and abusing women in public. For them, if some distressed kids are mutilated in the process . . . ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
If any of you can think of any other type of adult who celebrates or accepts this needlessly damaging thing that’s happening to confused youngsters, please chime in.
All this is to say that if by now you are still supporting or tolerating the indoctrination and sterilization of children, you may need to start coming up with some better excuses for why. Or don’t, because this cat ain’t going back in the bag anytime soon. You’ll continue to have plenty of company. The current President of the United States, asleep to the realities of this issue, comes to mind.
But you aren’t him. You can think for yourself. And if you believe that today’s American 15 year olds — in this case ones who are primarily autistic, or same-sex attracted, or anxious and depressed (or all of the above) — should be able to diagnose themselves as being the “wrong” gender or “in the wrong body,” and demand to have their body parts chopped off and organs removed while going on a torrent of cross-sex hormones that will alter them forever, then I suppose, following that logic, you might also encourage today’s 15 year olds to do things like get a face tattoo, rent a Ferrari, drop out of life to play video games, and sink their family’s savings into an alpaca farm. In other words, there may be something off about you. Carry on. You are allowed to believe anything you like. But I hope you don’t teach school, moderate a Reddit forum, write YA lit, or vote.
Conversely, if in this country we wanted to establish the age of legal medical transition to be somewhere between 18 and 21, or even 25 (when people’s prefrontal cortices are fully developed), then in order to avoid blatant hypocrisy, we need to also agree on the legal age of voting, military service, drinking, marriage, and buying guns. We can’t legally order a beer until we’re 21—but at age 15 a girl who’s dealing with peer contagion and porn trauma can get a doctor to cut off her breasts. A teenage boy who hates his growing body and his sex drive because it’s been drilled into him that “cis white men” are the root of all evil can get a doctor to cut off his penis.
Officially, we call this body dysmorphia. You know what else is body dysmorphia? Anorexia. Should an anorexic teen who is starving to death be able to demand that a surgeon perform weight-loss surgery on him or her? (We may be heading there. Feelings over facts in all spheres.)
I’m one of the countless women who is grateful to be a woman (I love it), and yet who knows that when I was nine years old, if adults had suggested to me the option of “changing into a boy,” I likely would have done it. I was an unyielding tomboy, though into books and music rather than sports. Being forced to wear a dress felt akin to having my skin burned off. (I didn’t understand a thing about sex and didn’t want to know anything about it. What kids encounter now, in school and online, would have felt like an insane boundary violation to me.) I did carry internalized misogyny when I was a kid. I would have taken the opportunity to transition as soon as I was allowed, and it would have wrecked my life.
I don’t care what legal adults do with their bodies. Some of my favorite thinkers, performers, and YouTubers are male-to-female and female-to-male transgenders/transsexuals—who transitioned in adulthood. A good number of them are horrified about what’s happening to kids.
Transgender and “queer” adults: I will support your full and equal rights and protections under the law. You already have them. I ask in return that you don’t infringe upon the hard-won, sex-based rights of biological women, or project the needs of your egos onto children. So to speak, I am asking for a separation of your church (your gender religion) and my state (and the kids’ innocent state)—just as you would ask this of me. I know many of you are on board with this. It’s called live and let live.
I should have led with this piece when I launched my Substack back in January, because “self ID” and gender affirmation for kids turned me nihilist by 2020. And I was late to the asking-questions party. Late late late.
Postscript: RIP Magdalen Berns, a beloved bullshit-detector. [b. 1983-d. 2019.] Video from way back in 2016.
In the UK, kids seeking gender reassignment: "In less than a decade there has been a 1,460% increase in referrals of boys and a staggering 5,337% increase in girls."
https://www.transgendertrend.com/surge-referral-rates-girls-tavistock-continues-rise/
Here, from The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (a pro-medicalizing org that issues guidelines to nations):
"WPATH will make a number of changes to its recommendations for adolescent care in the new chapter. The group will lower the minimum recommended age that providers can prescribe hormone therapy to 14, from 16... . The association will also lower the minimum recommended age for some surgeries such as chest masculinization and breast augmentation to 15 and 16, respectively, down from 18 in the previous guidelines.
"WPATH’s new chapter on adolescence also states that there has been a 'sharp increase in the number of adolescents requesting gender care,' and that anecdotal evidence... of people who have changed their minds about being transgender shows that some young people might believe they are trans due to 'social influence.'"