Pose: A Look at Transsexual Realities
My husband and I have been watching a great new drama show on FX, POSE. I don’t normally watch shows with a transgender theme. They usually either misrepresent us, make fun of us, or we are the designated tragic losers. But Pose is different. As Janet Mock, one of the writers for the show and an important voice in how the show was developed and what issues it covers, said, the show “centers transwomen of color”. Yes, it does that, and a whole lot more. It also, by the simple statistical reality that transwomen of color in the US are far more likely to be exclusively androphilic early transitioners, the show centers “homosexual transsexuals” (HSTS). I love the mix of black, puerto rican, and white transwomen in the show. This being set in New York, that fits the local demographics. (Here on the west coast, our mix also includes meso-american hispanic, Filipino, and chinese.)
I haven’t seen a single “late transitioner” being portrayed. Even better, they don’t make the oft mistake of conflating the two types. No, we see only one type, as they really are.
This essay is less a review than an educational exposition. Because the show focuses on HSTS in a realistic way, in a way that I have never seen a TV show actually do before, it offers me an opportunity to connect the science, sociology, psychology, history, to a show that you can watch and connect the dots.
Not all of those dots are flattering. In the very first episode we see Electra Abundance, a house mother of a collection of trans & gay youth, lead her crew on a caper to steal 18th Century court dress from a museum just so that they could outshine their competition at a Ball. At least one of the crew, Angel, is a sex worker on the street. In a later episode, we see a bisexual young man, one of House of Evangelista is a street drug dealer. Yes, it was like real life, but it still hurts to see stereotypes of street kids, gay and trans alike, as petty criminals. Electra and Angel have sugar daddies that help get them off the street. On the other hand, we see Blanca, the mother of the House of Evangelista working a real job at a nail salon. This too is very realistic. Very few transwomen who end up on the margins of society when young ever climb very far on their own.
Speaking of throwaways, the show opens with heart wrenching scene of a gay teen being thrown out of his family by homophobic parents. Blanca and Angel both relate ugly stories of being rejected by their families as kids. (Been there, done that!) The show gives us a glimpse of how transwomen form houses and in essence are the social workers that provide group homes for throw away queer kids. They have been doing this for a very long time.
As the show is set in the late ’80s, there is an ever-present pall hanging over the characters, “the plague”, HIV/AIDS. At the time, being HIV+ was literally a death sentence. There is a powerful reminder that though thousands of people were dying, then President Reagan couldn’t even bring himself to mention it. Homophobes literally saw it as ‘God’s Punishment’ on queer folk. In the opening scene of the first episode, we meet Blanca as she learns that she is HIV+. She is a strong woman and decides that knowing that she may get sick and die soon, she is determined to make the world a better place by creating her own house built on love and encouragement for her charges. She hides that she is HIV+, but works to educate others on safer sex practices. In another episode, we see AIDS patients in the hospital being treated as pariahs; in one case hospital staff refused to enter the room to deliver their meal. In another vignette an older gay man cajoles three younger men to get tested at a clinic. We see three of them joyful that they tested negative, but the older man is first devastated, then puts on a brave face to lie about his own HIV+ status.
Allow me to switch to a few personal anecdotes. I’m 61 years old now… I lived through all of this. We first began to suspect something was wrong with the first hints were a rash of young men getting a rare cancer. I vividly recall reading a cartoon in the gay press, must have been 1980 (?) that read, “I’m glad I’m middle-aged… too young to get old man’s Karposi’s carcinoma and too old to get young man’s Karposi’s.” I remember standing in line to see a movie at the Castro Theatre and recognizing Karposi’s lesions on a man’s face. Then, gay men and HSTS transwomen started dying of lots of illnesses that shouldn’t have been killing them. I remember talking to one of my childhood friends trying to explain all of this, including the various theories, some of them incredibly homophobic such as the notion that gay men were dying because of too much partying, drugs, and of course, sex. But then it became more obvious that this was an infectious agent that was sexually transmitted. The fear was palpable.
My own sex life took a very steep nose-dive. I was then recently post-op, but I had been having unprotected sex with men as an exclusive bottom for years before that. I had never even seen a condom. Why should I? It wasn’t like I was going to get pregnant, more’s the pity. Sure, there were STDs… but antibiotics could take care if it. I learned about and how to use a condom at a safer sex house party hosted by members of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance at Stanford. Like the men in the show, I was too afraid to learn my HIV status when testing became available; but my good friend and sister transactivist, Joy Shaffer, M.D. then a medical resident working with HIV/AIDS patients in the hospital when many others refused, insisted. Joy and her girlfriend Patricia went with me to the clinic. They were obviously not in a high risk group, but got tested alongside me to offer encouragement. I was negative. I felt relief… but the fear was still there. My sex life remained much more restrained for a good many years later, until I got married.
Public Service Advertisement:
Practice Safer Sex! Keep and use condoms. EVERY TIME!! Learn about and take PrEP medications to reduce your chances of becoming HIV+.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled show.
Because this show has writers that are themselves early transitioners, we see some intimate details that aren’t usually portrayed. For instance, we see in one episode that not only are HSTS obligate bottoms, but that they are also “avoidant”. That is, that they would prefer not to have their pre-op genitalia touched during sex. Just to make sure the audience understands that this is universal, both Electra and Angel have discussions with their sugar daddy boyfriends about it. As Electra’s boyfriend puts it, “What?! You didn’t think I noticed you grimace when I touch you there?” This detail, of course, is almost never discussed or portrayed elsewhere because most of those shows wish to portray young transwomen as sex toys for “chasers”. In this same show, we learn that Electra’s and Angel’s boyfriends are both chasers, gynandromorphophilic. That is, they both prefer pre-op transwomen and want to touch their lover’s pre-op genitalia. Electra is faced with the prospect of losing her man if she has SRS, but decides to go ahead, for her own sake. Angel, upon learning that her man is a chaser, is repulsed and loudly orders him to leave.
The writers seem to know their history. In one of the episodes, we see Blanca angered by the blatant transphobia from the ‘straight looking – straight acting’ gay male crowd at a local bar. She attempts to use civil rights style counter sit-in tactics to force the bar to accept her presence and to serve her. But that bar uses bouncers and even the police to enforce their ‘no queens’ policy, deliberately insulting and misgendering her. The gay men at the bar cheer as Blanca is arrested for no real reason. I see this as a metaphor for the way that much of the larger gay and lesbian community mistreated the transcommunity from the early ’70s through the late ’90s.
The show is singularly refreshing and I look forward to viewing the rest of the season.
Further Reading:
Essay on correlation between non-white ethnicity and HSTS
Essay on HSTS being ‘avoidant’
Essay on historic transphobia in the gay and lesbian communities
External Further Reading
‘We’re More Than Capable’: Pose Stars Push Back on Cis Actors Playing Trans Roles by Maiysha Kai
Pose Writer Janet Mock on Making History with Trans Story Telling by Janet Mock
“When Are Trans Actors Allowed to Act?” by Hannah Giorgis in the Atlantic
The FX drama Pose is the rare example of a show that actually gives trans actors top billing—an effort made all the more urgent by a recent controversy that saw Scarlett Johansson cast as a transgender man.
“POSE” IS A TESTAMENT TO THE SELFLESSNESS OF TRANS WOMEN by Dr. Jon Paul
Detransitioners Are NOT The Enemy
Transgender folks should not fear or loath detransitioners.
When I was 18 years old, on my own, effectively disowned by my family. (I say effectively, as I was given a meagre allowance with the stipulation that I was NOT to come home or be seen by any of the family’s connections. That is to say, that I was treated as a “remittance man” for a while.) I was fully socially transitioned and was just beginning HRT. I had found a room to rent with kitchen and bathroom privileges. The owner, a young divorced mom with a young daughter and her twenty something brother lived downstairs. Two other women rented rooms upstairs. Oh… and they often had boyfriends spend the night… so this wasn’t some female only space by any means. In fact, I even had a date with the brother, went to a Jr. College dance together. I couldn’t really afford the rent, so I did babysitting of the daughter in exchange to lower it to what I could afford. I should mention that I couldn’t afford to eat either! I went hungry for weeks at a time. One of my high school friends found out about that and organized a food drive for me. I ate a lot of strange stuff from cans for a while ! After several months of this… well, disaster struck. I got read and outed. No one in that house wanted a transsexual in the house, I was forced to leave.
So much for the theory that if people know an LGBT person, their hatred will be reduced… not in 1975 it didn’t.
So, I had to find a new place, fast… and I didn’t have enough money to rent my own space, no matter how humble. I didn’t know a single transperson. I had never met a transperson. I was completely alone, no community, no mentors, no one I could turn to. I can’t properly express how lonely and afraid I was.
I was told about a place called the Alternative Community Center, where they had a bulletin board listing housing. I hoped that I could find an LGBT friendly space. I inquired at a goodly number of situations… While I found plenty of L friendly spaces, some G friendly spaces… there did NOT seem to be any T friendly spaces… In fact, in one mixed house I got quite the cold shoulder, openly hostile and vile comments. But as I walked out, one of the straight men, ran after me and excitedly talked to me, actually trying to flirt with me, then admitted he was a closeted cross-dresser (i.e. a gynandromorphophilic autogynephile)… and while he clearly wanted to be my buddy, he also wouldn’t stick his neck out to support my joining the house-hold. I was becoming depressed and disparate. Then, my luck changed.
A very butch lesbian had a room available in a rented house near the beach. She explained that it was temporary, it being winter, the off-season, so she had rented it fairly cheap. I could have the room dirt cheap. Her name was Curly Hummingbird. She was totally cool with me being MTF trans. I couldn’t believe my luck.
Living there was comforting and I felt more than welcome. Curly even set me up with a man she knew. She loved sharing with me that all her lesbian friends had the hots for me. She didn’t tell them I was trans. She also made it VERY clear that she too found me attractive.
As time went on, we had many late night discussions. It turned out that she was a detransitioner. She had lived for three years passing as a man. Yes, when gays, lesbians, and straights were all horribly transphobic when confronted by an actual transperson, a detransitioner was my savior.
The God Jupiter pretending to be the Goddess Diana to seduce / rape Callisto
After several months, winter turned to springtime weather and the house rent went up. Curly was moving on (to live in a wymyn’s land commune up in the Santa Cruz Mountains) and so must I. I thought I had found a new savior, a mid-twenties, self-described “straight” transwoman I had met at the Stanford Clinic’s “Grooming Seminar Series”. She was very keen on me moving in with her. But she turned out to be a sexual predator instead (as I wrote about years ago in another essay). So, I learned that transwomen could be just as dangerous as straight men, perhaps more so for being wolves in sheep’s clothing.
But interestingly, at that “seminar”, Dr. Laub, Sr., the surgeon of the clinic made an announcement that one of the popular members of that little community of autogynephilic transwomen had decided to detransition AFTER having SRS. This sent shock waves through most of the attendees, save for one twenty-something lesbian identified post-op who philosophized that “he” had found what he needed on his life’s journey and that no one should feel sad about the situation.
Thus, the earliest lessons I learned in the transcommunity… detransitioning was real. It happened. It was not tragic… and they were not my enemy.
Having said that, I will admit that there is one very loud asshat of a detransitioner who clearly is our enemy, Walt Heyer. But notice that he seems to be the lone voice, beloved by the transphobic alt-right and the homophobic Xtian Right alike. He is the exception that proves the rule.
Finally, I want to point out that someone who begins social transition and/or HRT but backs away from that in a short period of time should perhaps not be considered a detransitioner? After all, we used to have a consensus in the caregiving community that there should be a “Real Life Test” period sufficient to determine if such transition and medical interventions were the right thing for a given individual. Perhaps we need to view such “detransitions” as not being detransitions so much as having conducted the medical / social / psychological tests and found that they were not right and count that as also a win? I’ve learned a new name for such folk, as they call themselves, “re-indentifier”.
Oh, Curly, if you read this, please contact me? It would be great to catch up after all of these years.
Addendum 5/21: Sadly, I will never get the chance to talk to Curly again. A straight woman who had also known her saw my essay here and wrote a lovely letter telling me about also knowing her kindness, etc. She had also wanted to know where she was and had found out that Curly had died a few years back at age 70.
Further Reading:
Essay on Tranwoman as Sexual Predator
External Further Reading:
“I Wanted To Take My Body Off”: Detransitioned
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Shameful History of Reparitive Therapy of Transsexual and Gay Children & Youth
There is an ongoing ‘war of words’ concerning the best course of treatment for gender atypical & dysphoric youth. Lately, as our society has learned to accept and even celebrate LGBT youth, there has been a reaction from religious and reactionary bigots who would wish to return to the days when parents and medical caregivers could treat gender atypicality as a serious psychiatric disorder that needed drastic interventions in and of itself, rather than a non-pathological variance found in all human societies. So, perhaps its time to review the history of such interventions in the light of more recent scientific and humanitarian knowledge.
First, one must understand that historically, gender atypicality concerns were mostly focused on male children, ‘sissies’. It was often assumed that ‘tomboys’ would outgrow it, but sissy boys would all too likely (and statistics bear this out) grow up to be homosexual or transsexual, both equally considered as disordered, criminal, and to be avoided at all costs.
To understand the nature of a given intervention one must first understand the underlying assumptions about the etiology of gender atypicality, dysphoria, and sexual orientation that a given intervention was designed to address. During the mid-20th Century several competing theories vied with each other but there was a common thread, that of a disturbance of nurture. That is to say, that they rejected the role of biology and focused on the environment. So, if the environment is broken, so will the child be. From there, several theories emerge, first up, faulty family constellation, lack of “appropriate” role modeling, and the “Smother Mother”.
The faulty family constellation theory is from observations that many children grow up in so-called “broken homes”, where single mothers are raising children on her own, with no man in her life. The theory is that a boy child simply has no male role model and thus learns only feminine behavior and identification. But, this wasn’t true of all feminine boys. So, another term was added, the “emotionally absent” father. This was a man, who though physically present in the home, rejected his son and thus failed to mold the young boy’s behavior toward the “healthy” masculine norm. Of course, a modern understanding would be that the boy’s femininity had been the cause of the rejection by a homophobic father, not the other way around. Also, many masculine heterosexual boys had grown up in single mother households, so they had to add the term “vulnerable” to the description of the boys, that is to say, only those who were “vulnerable” to this absence developed into sissies.
The theory also holds that the mother in these families tends to ‘smother’ a boy, hold him close to her body for excessively long periods, ‘tie him to her apron strings’, etc., such that he can’t form a separate gender identity, or even any identity, of his own.
The intervention designed to ‘fix’ the faulty family constellation is to introduce a “healthy” masculine heterosexual male role model to the boy and encourage identification and subsequent modeling upon that man. Since it isn’t always practical to require a single mother to find a suitable husband willing to take on the task of ‘toughening up’ the sissy boy, the goal is to place the boy in therapy sessions with a suitable role modeling therapist. For a pre-teen this would often mean “play therapy” with sex typed boys toys. Ideally, there would also be family therapy where the boy’s father would be encouraged to take a greater role in the child’s upbringing and similar withdrawal of the mother’s involvement. Playing with girl’s toys is to be actively denied and punished, taking away beloved toys and dolls, often lampooned as “Drop the Barby” therapy. Another aspect would be to restrict the boy from having female friends and require them to participate in single sex activities such as scouting, etc. where they are often exposed to peer disapproval and even bullying, as a means of providing negative (aversive) “natural consequences” to their feminine demeanor. It sounds almost gentle and acceptable (compared to electro-shock or emetic drugs then in use in adults)… but underneath, the message to the child is that they are not “ok”, that there is something deeply wrong with them, that they are not lovable as they are, leading to reduced self-esteem and increased loneliness.
While we can all applaud the idea of family intervention to encourage more paternal involvement and bonding, the idea of decreased maternal involvement is simply not justified given that we now know that the faulty family constellation theory is just plain bogus. Further, if a homophobic father can’t step up and bond with a feminine boy, that boy will need his mother’s acceptance all the more. Further, placing the blame upon the mother for having “encouraged” the boy’s femininity in this manner is just plain evil.
{Personal Note: At the age of ten, during the ’67-’68 school year, I was sent to such “play therapy” with Dr. Peters (you can’t make this stuff up), a tall bearded man in a large room filled with toys. I don’t remember seeing any girl’s toys in the room, ever. According to my parents, separately, since they divorced when I was a teen, I trust that they were both being candid with me, it had been the school psychologist who had insisted that I be refered to Dr. Peters and only Dr. Peters. This would also explain why my teachers interfered with my female friendships and forced me to interact with boys in class, and there was nothing subtle about it, why I was required to join the Scouts where I hated by the boys, harassed, bullied, brutally beaten, and eventually kicked out by the Scout Master, sneeringly, as “not Eagle Scout Material”. My father was mortified! — What I find saddening about the episode is that in my case, the faulty family constellation theory is completely reversed. My mother, though an amazingly capable and caring parent, was the one who became emotionally unavailable and rejecting. It was my good fortune that my Dad was always a very warm, loving, caring, and devoted father to all four of his children… though, if we are all honest about it, I was likely his favorite.}
Another intervention that gained some currency in the mid to late 20th Century is, in effect, to place a child into a Skinner Box, that is to say, create a deliberate reward & punishment system, in therapy, in the home, and in the classroom, in which gender typical behavior is consistently recognized and rewarded, perhaps with tokens redeemable for desirable privileges, while gender atypical behavior is penalized. This type of environment is often used in cases of extremely “disturbed”, aggressive, or violent children and teens where cooperative behavior is rewarded and aggression is penalized. Here, the theory is that child is held to be “gender disturbed”, expanding the definition used for one class of children requiring extraordinarily harsh and controlling interventions to another. There were a number of ‘therapist / researchers’ who have published and recommended such interventions using just this pathologizing language.
One of these, George Rekers, a self-hating closeted gay man, not content to label gender atypical boys “disturbed”, not satisfied with the stigmatizing term “effeminate” boy, coined the even more powerfully pathologizing and stigmatizing term “feminoid” in the manner of the racist stigmatizing of those with Down’s Syndrome as “mongoloid”. One of Reker’s recommendations included abusively “spanking” (beating actually) young feminine boys when they committed some feminine behavioral infraction. Interestingly, Rekers own research showed that such feminine boys were essentially like gender typical girls,
“The amount of feminine play by the feminoid boys was found to be significantly greater than that of normal boys, but not significantly different from the predominantly feminine play patterns of the normal girls.”
Imagine putting a gender typical girl through this… yes, that’s the moral and psychological equivalent. I can’t even begin to express how evil I find this so-called “therapy”. And this is what some parents and pundits wish us to resume?
Special Note:
One of the most important and yet at the same time, distressing aspects of this shameful history is that these abusive interventions came out of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in the late ’60s and ’70s. It is important to understand that at the begining of this program, they believed that they were treating transsexual children and had not yet realized that many of these boys would grow up to be gay men. At the very heart and center of this was Robert Stoller and Richard Green. It was Dr. Green who gathered together these vulnerable gender atypical children to allow graduate students to conduct this shameful “research”. Rekers, in his published paper on the “treatment” (read: torture) of Kirk Murphy (aka Kraig), thanks Dr. Green for providing him his victim. Further, Dr. Green was personally involved in the research. Knowing this has certainly lowered my esteem for Dr. Green who I had previously held in high regard.
Breaking News:
The Rekers paper is being flagged by the journal that originally published it as being of questionable value:
Journal flags — but does not retract — decades-old paper on “correcting” gender identity
External Reading:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Alan_Rekers
http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/06/07/sissy.boy.experiment/index.html
A TransHistory of Conversion Therapy
https://transsafety.network/posts/marcus-sue-evans/
References:
Rekers, G., Yates, C., “Sex-typed play in feminoid boys versus normal boys and girls”, Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00917600
GEORGE A. REKERS AND 0. IVAR LovAAs, “BEHAVIORAL TREATMENT OF DEVIANT SEX-ROLE BEHAVIORS IN A MALE CHILD”, Journal of Applied Behaviorial Analysis (1974)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311956/pdf/jaba00060-0003.pdf
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Transphobic Propaganda Aimed at Parents of Transsexual Kids
Kay Brown with her adopted daughter Liz
I’ve been interacting with parents of transkids for many years now. What they go through is heart wrenching. I’ve talked to both supportive and non-supportive parents. I’ve talked to even more transfolk, both those who were transkids and those who were adult transitioners. Each was impacted either positively or negatively by their parents attitudes… but none were hurt more than those transkids who had been emotionally abused or abandoned by their parents as teens.
Until the advent of ubiquitous social media, the main means of “trashing trannies” was mass media and churches. But now, with social media, parents of transfolk are bombarded with conflicting messaging from all sides and can have difficulty knowing which information to trust. Just as in politics, there is now a great deal of “fake news”, propaganda, misinformation, half-truths, even outright lies to be found online. Some of it from people whose only interest is to hurt transfolk because of religious or socially formed trans- and homophobia. Some of it is from transphobic parents of transkids themselves. There are even websites and discussion fora created by these very same parents bringing together such like-minded folks to create a wave of disinformation, fear, uncertainty, and doubt in others so as to bolster their own decisions to deny their own children the respect, agency, and medical services they so clearly need.
In this post I will actively gather such propaganda and explore how it works and why it is wrong. My goal is to help parents recognize when others are trying to manipulate their emotions to effect their decision-making. This will be an ongoing effort so this essay will be updated whenever I see or remember an issue that needs to be addressed.
With popular celebrities like JK Rowling of Harry Potter fame now spreading much of these lies and disinformation, it is more important than ever to separate what is fact from what is fiction.
Everything I write here is not “my opinion” but facts based on peer reviewed science, often covered in other essays on this blog, with reference citations to the research. For the sake of brevity and readability, I don’t cover the data and evidence here. Interested readers may use the search function to find them, or may start by reading my FAQ, which has links to the most relevant essays.
If this essay seems overly long, blame the voluminous amount of such hateful propaganda that has been created and spread.
Quoting Transfolk Out of Context
This is so classic that it needs only to be mentioned in passing.
Putting Words Into Transsexual’s Mouths
A classic of propagandists of all stripes is to falsely represent the positions of their victims. In the case of transsexuals, they come in many forms. Here are a few common ones:
“Transsexuals deny that Same Sex Attraction exists.”
“Transsexuals deny biological reality.”
“Transsexuals insist that all Gender Non-Conforming children are trans.”
Amplifying transphobic transgender voices
One of the classic propaganda tools is to find the rare voice of transphobic, regretful, transgender people that are badmouthing transsexuals. It lends seeming credibility to the propaganda, “See, even they agree with us!” However, in the case of anti-transkid propaganda, if one digs a little deeper, one nearly always finds that they are either “late transitioners”, to wit, autogynephilic transgender people who simply can not speak to the experience of transkids because they never were transkids themselves or they were never gender dysphoric to begin with. Autogynephiles have a sexual paraphilia which transkids DO NOT. Please see my FAQ to understand the difference.
Such “late transitioners” will use their own memories of their childhood and youth and project it upon transkids, falsely speaking for and over them, often saying that transkids are “too young” to chose to pursue transition. No, THEY were too young, as at that age, they had not yet developed gender dysphoria.
Bad History
One sure fire propaganda tool is to set out a revisionist history of the treatment of Gender Dysphoria. Those who control the memory of the past, control understanding of the present.
One trick is to lie and say that the term ‘gender dysphoria’ is new and replaced the older (and presumably more accurate) Gender Identity Disorder for political reasons under pressure from “transgender rights activists”. The real history is that “Gender Dysphoria”, a medical term coined by Dr. Norman Fisk at Stanford University in the early 1970s, was included in the Stanford Gender Dysphoria Clinic name and was incorporated in the name of the professional organization, Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association formed in the late ’70s (more recently renamed World Professional Association for Transgender Health {WPATH} ).
Another trick is to falsely claim that transsexuality / transgenderism was only about adult sexuality and that children were never part of the picture until very recently. They sweep under the rug such books as Green’s 1974 Sexual Identity Conflict in Children and Adults. Children and teens, transkids, were being seen from the beginning. Teenagers were being seen and very quietly transitioning, either as run-aways, throw-aways, or for the lucky few, living at home with supportive family. Sadly, its also true that some kids were treated abominably in futile efforts to “cure” them (more below). Transkids, then called “primary” or “true” transsexuals, have always been with us, but they (we) were largely invisible, a despised underclass, criminalized by the law, pathologized by psychiatry, problematized by society, church, and family.
“Transgender Ideology”
The moment you read or hear someone use that term, the material that person is going to share is propaganda. Those familiar with the culture war against gay rights and marriage equality will recognize its propaganda equivalent “Homosexual (or Gay) Agenda” . Of course that agenda was social and legal equality. “Transgender Ideology” is a search for social and legal recognition, and access to medical services, nothing more. Any other claims are just disinformation. Both of these terms are meant to invoke nebulous distrust of the motives and actions of the LGB & T communities. For example, appending disparaging terms like “toxic”, etc.
We also see people making calumnious claims that transgender people are trying to “indoctrinate” or are “grooming” kids into being transgender. This is very much in keeping with the old anti-gay equivalent of “recruiting” young people into the “gay lifestyle”. Sadly, such false claims are even being made by transphobic gays and lesbians (no group is too small or too oppressed that it can’t turn and do the same to an even smaller and weaker group).
When organizations support transsexual people, the propagandist claim that they have been “infected” and “captured” by ‘transgender ideology’ a way of suggesting that they don’t have good reasons for their support.
However, when you read claims of “Transgender Ideology”, there is an ideology that may be at play… theirs!
Another variant is “Gender Identity Theory” that appears to be an effort to use the (falsely) negative associations attaching to “Critical Race Theory”.
Another loaded term in vogue is “industry”, as in “medical industry”, “transgender industry” or just “gender industry”. The term falsely invokes the concept of a large and uncaring medical industrial complex out to make as much money out of poor hapless kids and their parents, destroying lives, rather than the deeply caring doctors and therapists that actually exist.
Another means of subtly invoking distrust of transfolk is to describe various elements of the quite disparate transgender communities as the “transgender lobby”, likening them to powerful business groups that gain disproportionate power through chummy relationships with lawmakers and regulators. This is a classic trick whereby one falsely paints a marginalized group as secretly powerful.
In the same manner, every transperson who speaks out is labeled an ‘activist’ (often shortened to the acronym, “TRA”) with a smug undertone that ‘trans rights activist’ means a person with a not to be trusted self-serving “agenda”. Some even go as far as to describe transsexuals defending ourselves, our civil rights, and our access to medical care as “transgender extremists”.
A very recent and subtle twist is to use the term “transgender movement”, as though the existence of transfolk itself was a “movement” or fad, rather than the correct term “transgender RIGHTS movement”. Consider that the push for equality under the law for non-white people was not called the “Colored Movement”, but the “Civil Rights Movement”.
A popular term meant to subtly disempower transkids and transsexual adults is “gender confusion” to replace “gender dysphoria”. It implies that transfolk are just “confused” and likely mentally challenged and should just “look in their pants!”. When you see that term, you know that the speaker / author is no friend of transfolk.
The single most common term is to describe transfolk as being “mentally ill”, when in fact, gender dysphoria, though painful and real, in no way affects rational thought or decision making, at any age.
I recently saw a man post a whopper of a lie on a website telling parents that childhood gender dysphoria was an early sign of developing schizophrenia!
More recently, likely because of this very essay pointing out such disinformation and propaganda, some key anti-trans activists have been labeling efforts such as this blog as ” real propaganda”. It’s a clever “Catch-22” style trap to silence transfolk.
One clever rhetorical trick is to create a false comparison by showing that their propaganda can’t be labeled “transphobic” because true / real ‘phobia is when people are physically abused, beaten, tortured, etc. Transpeople aren’t being lynched or gay bashed (actually, we are…). But they fail to acknowledge that dehumanizing language sets the stage for that treatment. While working against one’s civil, legal, or human rights is just another tool of the bigot. And in the case of transfolk, working to deny access to reasonable and affordable medical care is just as damaging and cruel.
Blaming the Internet and Other Transkids / Adult Transsexuals
A recent meme to question the validity of gender dysphoria in teenagers is the concept of “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” (ROGD) in which being trans is described as a “social contagion” and a “craze”. Gee… that’s just saying this is a “fad”… and like the old “phase” claim that transkids were discredited with in the past.
Of course, there is the problem that it has become trendy to claim a “trans” or “non-binary” identity, but these kids and young adults are NOT gender dysphoric. I’ve written an entire essay on this.
The existence of these non-gender dysphoric teenagers and young adults falsely claiming a “trans’ or “non-binary” identity is easily weaponized to discredit the existence and sincere social and medical needs of transkids, especially as these non-gender-dysphoric teens and young people drop their claim to being “trans” to claim a new identity as “detransitioners”. Detransitioning does exist. It is usually found in adult transitioning autogynephilic males who later regret having attempted transition when they find it doesn’t actually help them. But such post-operative regret with detransition is RARE at only 0.15%.
However, post-operative regret and detransitioning is extremely rare in actual gender dysphoric teenaged transkids and former transkids (transsexual adults who were gender dysphoric as children).
A classic trope is to falsely claim that transsexuals (or people in general) are telling kids that aren’t trans in any fashion that they are in fact transgender. They may also use emotionally loaded, sexualized language like “seduced” into being trans. (See classic trope of gay and lesbian people “recruiting”, above.) One way of making it (falsely) seem especially evil is to claim that the kids being targeted have some special problem, a vulnerability that can be exploited (e.g. claim that the “victims” are autistic, have “untreated trauma”, or have Borderline Personality Disorder), implying that these teens don’t have self agency. Transphobic propagandists have recently been using the term “transing” to falsely suggest that transsexuals are forcing these kids to become transsexuals. Please note, transsexuals are the LAST people who want other people to be living in a gender that doesn’t suit them.
One of the ugliest strawman I’ve seen cast about is deliberately misconstruing the known high rate of depression and distress found in transkids who live in unsupportive environments is claiming that transkids ‘blackmail’ or ‘manipulate’ others by falsely threatening to commit suicide if they don’t “get their way”. The claim may be further amplified by stating that transkids (or transsexual adults) teach other transkids to use this threat. By making this claim, they paint transkids / adult transsexuals as manipulative monsters. Of course, this is actually an indication of their own lack of empathy and of their virulent hate. Shocking and impossible as this may seem, this claim really does make the rounds of social media.
The most libelous of the most extreme propaganda aimed at transsexual adults (former transkids & others) is that they are supporting access to affirming medical care for teenagers is a form of “grooming” so that those kids can be sex trafficed, a la PizzaGate. Increasingly, transsexuals and gay people, even just liberals, are being falsely labeled “pedophile” and “groomer”. Another term used by transphobes to imply that transsexuals are a danger to children is “safeguarding”, implying that their efforts to hurt transsexual youth is just keeping them “safe” from those evil transsexuals, our medical care providers, and our allies.
Creating False Testimonials
One of the easiest ways that anti-trans propagandists can create a false testimonial is to claim a bogus hypothetical harm, “If this transgender ideology had been around when I was a child, I would have been wrongly diagnosed as transgender.” This is typically claimed by a mildly gender-atypical woman, a “butch lesbian”, but sometimes claimed by a typical heterosexual woman that liked to do a few “boy” things when young. Given that perhaps a third of women were somewhat “tomboyish”, quite a few such transphobic women can make this false claim. Occasionally, transphobic gay men will also make this claim.
I’ve even seen claims from heterosexual cross-dressers making false testimonials about how they would have been seduced into the being “transsexuals” if they were teenagers today. (No they wouldn’t. Transvestism is common, with estimates of between 3~5% of men. Yet less than one in a thousand such become transsexuals later in life. Their developmental arc doesn’t generate sufficient gender dysphoria until a decade to two decades later.)
These false hypotheticals have the unique advantage that they can’t be tested, challenged, or proven right or wrong. So they just exist, creating doubt, which is the goal.
This false testimonial feeds off the hyperbolic misrepresentation that people are claiming that any child who shows any gender atypical interests, is labeled “transgender” and is “transed”, forced into a medicalization. The typical description goes something like, “a boy who likes dolls is labeled a girl”. No, they are not. While transkids are gender atypical, merely showing some mild interest in cross-gender activities does NOT get one labeled transsexual, nor is any child or teen “forced” into social or medical transition.
This term, “transed” is another classic transphobic dog whistle. When one sees it, one knows that the person using it is not a friend to transkids or adult transsexuals.
Blaming Parents
An ugly, malicious, trope that has been around for years, especially from transphobic gays and lesbians, is that parents push their gender atypical, gay or lesbian, child or teen into falsely believing that they are transsexuals so that they won’t be labeled gay or lesbian. The logic is twisted, but relies on the false notion that parents are more likely to be far more homophobic than transphobic. Ironically, many transkids actually experience the opposite, that transphobic parents, as they wrestle with their grief upon learning their child is transsexual, plead with their child to “just” be a CLOSETED gay or lesbian so that they, and their family, won’t have to experience public embarrassment.
There are some who claim that parents of transkids are guilty of “Munchausen By Proxy”. It’s a clever lie, but remains a lie non-the-less.
There is also the nasty lie that parents are abusing their children by “modifying their bodies”. I’ve seen the lie that parents and doctors are prescribing such medications and conducting surgeries on pre-teens as young as three years old! No, that is NOT happening. No pre-teen is being given any medication (save possibly puberty blockers if they present with precocious puberty, which can and should be treated regardless of gender dysphoria).
Blaming Child Protective Services
There is a conspiracy theory style lie that occasionally makes the round that CPS is taking kids away from parents who don’t approve of their child’s gender atypicality and won’t allow treatment of their gender dysphoria. When challenged to provide data to prove this outrageous assertion, some change the story to “social workers are telling kids to emancipate themselves if they can’t get surgery”. This is simply not true.
However, it is true that the law makers in the State of Texas tried and failed to pass a law that would require the opposite to occur, to require CPS to take children away from parents that DO support their transsexual child in their social and medical transition needs, falsely defining such support, “child abuse”. After the law failed, the Texas governor and attorney general illegally ordered CPS to conduct “investigations” into families with transkids anyways.
Blaming Gender Clinics and Therapists
It has become fashionable to target specialized clinics that see gender atypical youth with false accusations. This has escalated to bomb threats against hospitals and bigoted politicians to call for “investigations”, not of those making the threats, but of the clinics, based on the false allegations.
One also sees comments that call into question the membership, leadership, ethics, and Standards Of Care recommendations of WPATH, the leading professional society for those providing care for gender dysphoric individuals, just because some (but not a majority) of the members are transsexuals themselves. This is rather like dismissing the American Lung Society because some of its members survived lung cancer.
As some of these clinics have attracted new clients (not all of whom will persist), there is the hand-wringing over how rapidly the “epidemic” of gender issues has grown. Let’s be real, going from zero to any number of clients is an infinitely large growth. Most clinics treating transkids today are fairly new, since the older university based clinics closed. Almost none are over twenty years old and most are less than ten. Even those who are only only provided medical services to those who were over age 16 until more recently. For example, the GIDS and the Pediatric Endocrine Service under the UK NHS didn’t start providing puberty blockers to carefully screened candidates until 2008. If they have seen a large increase in younger clients since say, 2009, of course there has been an increase! They weren’t offering actual services to those under age 16 until then!
We expect that an under served market should respond with high growth when services become newly available.
If zero to something sounds too obvious, the propagandists pick another, but still early date to start, say 2009, before puberty blockers were available, with the same seemingly startling growth. A common figure tossed about takes the form of 4400% which sounds really high… until one remembers that 100% = 2 times = double. So, 4400% growth is going from some really small number, say ten kids, when just opening such clinics, to 45 times that low starting number to make it only 450 kids (out of hundreds of thousands of kids in their multi-city/regional service area). But “4400%” sounds soooo much bigger and alarming! (Or climbing to 2,500 kids for all of the United Kingdom !!!)
The other way to make it sound really bad is to talk about how many children are REFERED to a clinic. But a referral does not mean that they were DIAGNOSED as being gender dysphoric… and it certainly doesn’t mean that they are being tracked toward “unnecessary medical treatment”.
Another gambit is to point to transphobic medical providers who leave a given large institution because they have recently begun to provide services to transkids, as though it proved anything nefarious. But transphobic attitudes have always been found in the medical community, at about 50% (which is about the same number in the general public). Thus one expects to find such transphobic medical providers to jump ship as they find other employment and for propagandists to publicize it.
A more subtle propaganda gambit by anti-trans individuals and organizations is to describe themselves as merely concerned with “over” or “unnecessary” medicalization of gender variant youth. That sounds so reasonable, until one understands that ANY medical intervention is considered “over” or “unnecessary” medicalization by them.
A corollary false claim is that many teens are being prescribed hormones with no “medical oversight”. That would constitute medical malpractice and as such is not likely to be common as doctors are as a group unlikely to risk that.
One of the lies put out is that therapists and clinics aren’t providing full disclosure or “objective” advice. What they really mean is that the therapists aren’t telling these kids and their parents what the transphobic people want them to tell them, including disinformation I discuss here. The simple truth is that the Standard of Care for all patients, gender dysphoric or not, is informed consent, giving full information, by both ethical and legal requirements. Claiming that these kids and their parents aren’t being given this information is slander and libel.
A recent tactic is to claim that such clinics and therapists “never tell a kid that they are not trans” as though that was somehow nefarious, falsely implying that they are encouraging / pushing gender atypical youth to be transsexual and also falsely implying that they know which kids are ‘true’ transsexuals (or implying that no one is actually gender dysphoric) and who isn’t. The real truth doesn’t matter to them. There is no external test. No blood work, no magic words spoken in therapy. Only the individual, as they consider their own feelings and real life options, can make this determination and ultimately their life direction. No clinic or therapist, can from the outside, determine and say to anyone that they don’t experience gender dysphoria.
Another classic technique is to sow doubt about the integrity of medical care providers of young people by claiming that performing any medical procedure is a form of medical malpractice as these individuals are “too young” to provide informed consent, or are “too young” to know their own minds. There are even those who claim that legal ADULTS under the age of 25 can be “too young”. This is a lie on two fronts. First, if they are minors, the law specifies when such minors may consent, or they are required to have their parents consent, along with the care providers considered opinion that the procedure is warranted. The second, decades of experience with medical care for transsexual youth have shown that post-op regret is extremely rare, below 0.15%, which amazingly, is below the regret rate for common cosmetic procedures.
Blaming Science
One of the classic bug bears thrown around by transphobic propagandists is that there are no, or not enough, “high quality” science / medical studies investigating treatments of transkids. First, there ARE studies. However, considering that transsexuals are very rare at only one in 11,000 people, and that counts all transsexuals, both types, both “early onset” and “late onset”. Second, the number of transkids is only about 10% of those transsexuals, thus only one in 100,000 kids is an “early onset” transsexual. There simply aren’t that many young people to study. Further, the definition of “high quality” study requires a double blind study randomly assigning study subjects to two groups, one treated and the other not treated, but no one knows who is and who isn’t being treated. But we can’t do that with transkids. Seriously, can not be done. Further, it would be both cruel and unethical. Thus, by definition and medical ethics, there will never be any “high quality” studies.
Creating Bogus Medical Societies
Doctors are not immune to bias and bigotry. Research has shown roughly half of doctors and psychologists are biased against LGBT people. So it would come as no surprise that a hateful minority ignore their professional duties to invest their time in creating alternative organizations specifically to create and spread false or misleading information about gender dysphoria. Some are part of older organizations, such as the tiny American College of Pediatricians, who historically attacked gay rights, pushed abusive ‘therapies’ to “cure” homosexuality and with it, transsexuality in children and teens. However, there is one very small band who specifically have targeted transsexuals and transkids, falsely and ironically naming themselves the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine whose members are notorious for spreading much of the anti-trans propaganda I list in this essay.
Blaming Schools & Educators
Schools are often the worst place for transkids, gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth and indeed anyone not in the majority in a given community. Bullying, most often by classmates, but all too often even by adults is a serious concern. That concern has been addressed by anti-bullying campaigns that may include empathy building by teaching youth in the school to be aware of and respect LGBT peers. But that has met with opposition from homophobic and transphobic parents and others. They decry that “Gender Ideology” is being taught in the schools. They demand that like sex education, it should be left to families, which in practice provide tacit approval for the continued bullying.
Another area of contention is access to gender appropriate bathrooms and changing facilities. Propagandists have seized this issue, looking to inflame the public with false stories or just insinuations that “boys will claim to be trans to molest girls in the locker room”. Or worse, that MTF transkids ARE just boys who want to ogle girls in the locker room.
Just to be VERY clear. Gender dysphoric youth do NOT want to be seen naked by others of either sex. That’s one of the key presenting symptoms of gender dysphoria in children and teens, extreme dislike and embarrassment of their sexed body. (This may or may not be true in adult / older transitioners, who have a very different form of ‘gender dysphoria’. See FAQ for more information.)
Therapy
In the past, it was near universal for therapy of gender atypical children, most often male, to mean attempts to “fix” them so that they were no longer gender atypical, as that was seen as a disorder in and of itself. It was also believed, falsely it turns out, that if they could get these boys to be gender typical in their behavior, they wouldn’t develop into transsexuals or gay men. Therapies ranged from gentle “play” with a masculine role model to direct punishing and shaming children (up to and including corporal punishment; i.e. beatings) for atypicality on one hand and rewarding gender typicality on the other. Both philosophies encouraged parents to remove any and all cross-gender toys and activities, to deny cross-gender friendships, and to shame children, especially boys, for such play. Therapy for gender dysphoric teens was to “talk” them out of wanting to transition, usually by shaming them. Today such therapy, along with therapy meant to “talk” gay & lesbians out of being homosexual, is recognized as being both ineffective and abusive. Some states and countries have outlawed such practices. Professional societies of therapists and physicians have declared them to be unethical.
{Personal note: I was sent to play therapy as a ten-year old with Dr. Peters (you can’t make this stuff up) a tall bearded man as a role model. While at home, my mother would jump down my throat if I so much as looked at a girl’s toy. And at school, the teachers disrupted my friendships with girls and forced group activities with boys. Of course, that didn’t work, so I was sent to talk therapy at 15/16, but knew enough not to talk about, nor answer his repeated questions about, neither my sexuality nor my gender behavior and identity so as to avoid any opportunity to shame me. Thus, I know about these practices first hand. Fortunately, in early 1975, at age 17, I was evaluated at the Stanford Gender Dysphoria Clinic which recommended social and medical transition.}
The new form of “therapy” advocated by transphobes is to try to find and treat the “root cause” of their gender atypicality and dysphoria, usually under the misguided pseudo-Freudian notion that there must be some unresolved sexual trauma. If they just had therapy to find this “root cause”, they could cure it. But most gender atypical and dysphoric people have never had such a trauma, and most people who have had such trauma do not become atypical nor dysphoric. There simply is no correlation, much less a causative connection.
Today, most caring therapists and other caregivers recognize that gender atypicality is not in and of itself a disorder. They also recognize that most young mildly gender dysphoric children will desist on their own as they near adolescence, so there is no need for drastic measures either way.
However, extremely dysphoric children need outlets for their gender expression and that attempts to suppress or change their innate behavior is abusive and will only result in low self-esteem and shame. They also know that such children need reassurance that they are loved by their parents. If punished for gender atypicality and/or expressing the pain of dysphoria, the bond between parent and child is put at grave risk. And yes, some therapists and their caring families recognize that some pre-adolescents and adolescents are better served by social transition.
This new kinder and gentler approach to gender atypicality and gender dysphoria has led to disinformation put out by those who wish that they could continue to offer abusive reparitive / conversion ‘services’, falsely claiming that such therapies do work. Some propagandists point to case history notes of reparitive therapists claim that their therapy is responsible for the ‘resolution’ of pre-adolescent gender dysphoria when in fact, they are falsely claiming credit for what is a natural process that would have happened without such abusive therapies. Transphobic parents and members of the public also lament this situation and put out the lie that “affirming” therapists are “forcing” gender atypical children and teens to become transsexual.
The basic truth is simple… just as it is not possible to “fix” LGBT people, it is not possible to force them to be LGBT against their nature. Saying otherwise is an outright lie.
Another tidbit of disinformation is claiming that therapists regularly “ok” teenagers to get hormones with only one visit. In over four decades of experience and discussions with literally… oh I can’t even guess the number of transfolk of all ages I’ve met or corresponded with. It would have to be the hundreds now, the fastest I’ve ever heard of for someone to get their “letter” approving HRT from a psych professional was five one hour sessions. And when others hear of that low figure, they are incredulous because most adults were required to have at least several months of weekly sessions and most had more, some over a year or more. There’s a reason why therapists and psychiatrists are called “gatekeepers”. For minors, it might be faster to get onto puberty blockers if they are seen in longer more intense sessions with at least one second opinion since the clock is seen as “ticking”, but to switch from blockers, or for an older teen, one already past puberty? That will take longer.
Social Transition
Transkids after social transition
I see over and over claims that merely allowing a child to cross-dress or socially transition is a form of “child abuse” in and of itself. I’ve even seen transphobes complaining that letting non-transkids know that transkids and transadults exist and should be accepted and respected, is a form of child abuse! These claims are usually from the most virulently transphobic and homophobic members of the public. However, there is a more subtle form of this parental shaming in that people claim that because many pre-teens who are gender atypical will not be gender dysphoric, that they are “forcing” their kids to be transgender. This meme even floats in the gay and lesbian community claiming that parents do this because they are homophobic and would rather have a transgender child than a gay or lesbian one (!). My own experience has indicated that homophobic parents are universally also transphobic, so the logic of this assertion is faulty and groundless.
Parents should be advised that many pre-teens who are gender atypical will in truth grow up to be gay or lesbian. Given this, loving parents should be open to listening to the needs of their children as they grow up and be flexible in their hopes.
A recent meme making the rounds is that if a child is allowed to cross-dress as a pre-teen, to use a new name etc. they will have social and personal difficulty later when they desist from being gender dysphoric. Some go as far as to say that this will cause them trauma, having spent years growing up presenting as the “wrong sex”. But this only shows their own transphobic bias, valuing the lives and welfare of desisting children over persisting transkids. Consider this from the viewpoint of persisting transkids, if having to grow up presenting as the “wrong sex” is traumatic and that transitioning is a social and personal difficulty at that later age, won’t these kids have had a similarly bad experience if they are not allowed to socially transition earlier? Either both are true or neither is true. Actually, the truth is that children who will desist later are still in pain now. And desisting children detransitioning is no more traumatic than either type transitioning in the first place. But the transphobic propagandists aren’t interested in nuance and dealing with things in such a way as to reduce pain for everyone on a day-to-day basis. Remember this. Their goal is not to help your child be happy and emotionally healthy. They are only interested in frightening the parents of transkids into NOT allowing them to socially transition in the hope that denying them this at a young age will force them to not get puberty blockers, which will them force them to endure a puberty which will make it that much more difficult for them to transition successfully as adults, which will keep them from being “one of those people”.
A more subtle and insidious bit of propaganda is to point out that in speaking of the likely hood of a child desisting or persisting that a pre-adolescent social transition “predicts” persistence. The sneaky part is, while there is a correlation between such a pre-adolescent social transition and persistence, the way that the word “predicts” is interpreted is one of causation rather than merely being a successful test of the level of gender dysphora that already exists and the natural affinity / social comfort that a child experiences post social transition. That is to say, attempting social transition is a great diagnostic test that persisters will take to like a duckling takes to water, while desisters are likely to find social transition does not help them.
One of the ugly issues I’ve seen thrown around is that of impugning the motives and values of various researchers and clinicians, on both sides of the issue of pre-teen transition. Most professionals have nothing but good intentions. Each has nuanced views because this issue is not black and white. But many insist that it should be black and white… and thus will smear those who don’t agree with their own position.
After the age of twelve, social transition is, or at least should be, a no-brainer. If a teen was gender atypical and dysphoric as a preteen, their desire and need for social transition is one that they should decide for themselves. In fact, attempting to socially transition is a great “test” since if it doesn’t help them, it will be an obvious fact.
Surgery
Perhaps the most common propaganda seen bandied about is the oldest. In the mid-50s, as the public began to learn about transsexuality and its medical treatment, many were quick to note that “there is no such thing as a sex change”, as though that proved something profoundly debunking. Well, this is both a true and yet misleading statement. It is true in that no surgery, then or now, can take a fertile individual of one sex and result in a fertile member of the other sex. What is misleading is that the goal of surgery was never fertility, but palliative. It is to allow individuals who suffer, and suffer greatly, from somatic gender dysphoria to inhabit a body that approximates that of the opposite sex to a close enough degree that it alleviates their dysphoria. Although many transfolk would love to be fertile in their new gender, they are willing to accept this trade-off to enable a good enough life.
A common ploy is to point out that surgeons are paid to perform these procedures and are “getting rich”, insinuating that they are evil and greedy. I do hope those that say this never need a life saving operation so that they won’t have to pay an evil and greedy surgeon.
A very common ploy is to paint medical interventions as “destroying healthy bodies”, totally disregarding the emotional pain of gender dysphoria as worthy of medical treatment. The underlying message that they are trying to implant is that there was no medical necessity, and thus it was monstrous to treat it. This is especially used to create disgust at the idea of “young girls” having double mastectomies removing “healthy breasts”. They conveniently ignore that far more non-transsexual boys get such “top surgery” removing “healthy breasts” from boys with gynecomastia (=female breasts) because these breasts, though healthy, cause extreme gender dysphoria. Yes, gender dysphoria, in non-transsexuals exists. Why is it OK for non-transsexual boys to get such “gender affirming” health care and surgeries to reduce their gender dysphoria but not transsexual FtM transboys?
Also consider that nearly no one bats an eye when women have breast augmentation, rhinoplasty (cosmetic nose surgery), or even that there is no medical reason for the vast majority of male circumcisions (genital surgery) that baby boys are subjected to years before they can give informed consent.
Some people will point out that SRS sterilizes transfolk as though that were in and of itself medical malpractice, even incorrectly invoking the Hippocratic oath “to do no harm”. This is a puzzling attitude since many medical issues are treated in such as way that also results in sterilization and no one calls that malpractice. In fact, many healthy men and women chose voluntary permanent sterilization which is an accepted practice. For young adults (even if under the age of 18) to knowingly make the trade-off of continuing to suffer somatic gender dysphoria vs. accepting voluntary sterilization is a personal choice for them and them alone to make.
A common bit of propaganda is to claim that surgeons (and by extension, parents and allies) are “mutilating” children.
The next bit of propaganda is to describe the result of surgery as ugly, monstrous, or diseased to invoke visceral disgust. Mary Daly, an extremely transphobic author in the 1970’s described post-operative transsexuals as “Frankenstein’s Monsters”, invoking the image of people hacked together by rogue mad scientist doctors. Other comments focus on and exaggerate the potential for surgical complications. Very recently, I’ve seen an outright lie repeated and amplified in social media in which the result of Male-To-Female transsexual surgery is an “open wound” which is easily “infected”, rather than a functional neo-vagina. What loving parent would want their child to experience such iatrogenic trauma?
A more subtle bit of misleading disinformation is to combine the two memes above, to describe the result of MTF surgery as taking functional male genitalia and turning it into “dysfunctional male genitalia” in an attempt to invoke disgust on one hand and parental concern for their child’s future happiness on the other. The lie depends upon parents not being familiar with the cosmetic nor functional results because, lets face it, that’s not something to be bragged about in public. So, I will attempt here, while remaining within socially acceptable bounds, to answer that, given that I myself have such “dysfunctional male genitalia”… Ummmm… well… I’m VERY happily married to a straight man… and neither of us is unhappy with the results… ‘nough said.
Another reason these particular talking points work is that parents hang onto the false hope that their child will desist and be heterosexual. While it is true that pre-teens who are gender atypical but not particularly dysphoric are more likely to desist than persist, such boys will most likely grow up to be gay, the girls may or may not be lesbian, given that many tomboyish girls are mislabeled as gender atypical. These tomboyish girls will most likely grow up to be straight. However, those teens who had been gender atypical AND notably gender dysphoric as pre-teens will not likely desist after age twelve. Besides, one doesn’t perform surgery on pre- or even early teens. One is required to wait until the late teens at the earliest and by then, it’s pretty obvious that surgery is right for those who know the trade-offs… and rationally chose to exchange genitalia which they will never use for those that they will joyfully use.
Another bugbear thrown around is the specter of post-operative regret. I won’t lie in turn; this is a real phenomena. However, what is not often discussed in the parental fora is that the vast majority of those who later regret SRS are “late onset”. (If you are not familiar with this term and its implications, please see my FAQ.) These are usually males who have successfully lived as adult men, very often married to women, fathering children, etc. They previously had extensive sexual experience as men, enjoying their ‘original equipment’. In female individuals, gender dysphoria that first present in adolescence has been associated with later detransitioning and regret, but in fewer individuals and certainly far fewer than in the public imagination. (I’m referring to actual gender dysphoric individuals, not those girls who falsely claim a ‘trans’ or ‘non-binary’ identity.) Post operative regret is nearly absent from “early onset” transsexuals. And those few who were regretful weren’t regretting the loss of their ‘original equipment’ but complained of the rare complications that may occur with any surgery. Post-op regret w/ detransition is very rare at less than 0.15%.
For parents of Female-to-Male (FtM) teens and twenty-somethings, there is often fear that “top surgery” to remove/reduce unwanted breasts will be regretted as well. This fear is especially potent in the mothers of FtM transkids because of the natural empathy one feels, of putting themselves into their child’s position and feeling angst at the thought of the loss of their own breasts. Of course, this is putting their own shoes onto their child, instead of walking a bit in theirs.
The notion of regretting surgery is so powerful as propaganda because non-transsexual people are terrified of the bodily horror of being left with permanent physical changes, or as transsexuals know it, gender dysphoria. Stop and imagine that horror, then imagine growing up with it, as transsexual kids do.
There has been a recent blitz of disinformation and propaganda about FtM transmen chest binding being “harmful” with little to no clinical evidence. I’ve even seen binding being described as ‘barbaric’ and likened to Female Genital Mutilation. Except, no one is forcing transmen to bind. Further, there have been those who (falsely) equate binding with “breast ironing”, a destructive practice that actually does damage tissue. But consider that this binding provides no more flattening / compression, and indeed often far less compression of the ribcage and internal organs, than many feminine fashion undergarments in recent history such as corsets, girdles, etc. Also, transmen are likely not concerned with any alleged harm to breasts that they revile and expect to surgically remove. Finally, I have to point out that no one seems to be upset about pre-op transwomen “tucking”, which would seemingly come closer to the description of “genital mutilation”. This is likely because the anti-chest-binding lobby is mostly lesbian whose natural, if misapplied, sympathy is for female bodied gynephilic people (which most transmen are) and have very little sympathy, and often great antipathy, for transwomen.
Puberty Blockers
One egregious lie that I’ve seen bandied about, even by physicians, is that puberty blockers cause permanent sterility, often with the misleading term “chemical castration”. They do not. In fact, that was the whole point of puberty blockers, to reversibly delay the onset of puberty and its effects to allow young teens some time to emotionally mature before making more permanent changes in the course of their sexual maturation. Without such blockers, their bodies will make the decision for them… and this may be very much against their wishes (it certainly was against mine!). Cessation of the blockers allows the natal puberty to resume, with no loss of fertility, unless other medical intervention is begun (such as cross-sex hormones).
Some commenters falsely assert that puberty blocking is dangerous and experimental, often going so far as to profess that doctors who prescribe it and parents who allow it should be imprisoned. They fail to note that puberty blocking has become a standard of care for precocious puberty and that the medications used are FDA approved for blocking puberty. Recall that one child in 5,000 will have precocious puberty, so that at any one time tens of thousands of children are on puberty blockers for it. All medications come with the possibility of adverse reactions or side effects. The FDA carefully monitors these and has a reporting system to inform doctors of these rare conditions. Thus this is NOT “experimental” nor any more dangerous than many other medically indicated prescriptions.
A recent example of such reporting is a tiny number of children (six out of tens of thousands) who developed a very rare reaction where they experienced brain swelling and vision problems. This reporting is so that doctors can monitor for signs it might develop and take the children off the meds to see if that stops the condition. Of course, true to form, transphobic propagandists have WAY over exaggerated the issue in order to make it sound like puberty blockers are going to hurt all transkids. In reality, the odds that it will harm even one transkid is low, and the odds that it would any particular transkids is even more remote, as the incidence of actual gender dysphoria in young teens is on the order of only two per hundred thousand kids, over ten fold fewer kids than those who experience precocious puberty. (Further, we don’t actually know if the blockers caused the problem, given that precocious puberty is in fact caused by a brain disorder in itself. The hormones that cause puberty to happen are produced deep inside the brain.)
The next level of insidious misinformation is to claim that such medication hasn’t been specifically “approved” for gender dysphoric kids. This is a fantastic Catch-22 because no matter how long its been standard practice, it will NEVER be so listed by the FDA because to do so, the drug company would have to spend huge amounts of money to conduct the study, which they have no need nor incentive to do; Gender dysphoric transkids are a tiny minority and not worth a drug company’s notice.
For instance, a cancer drug that was studied and approved in colon cancer that is later discovered to treat skin cancer would not need to be specifically ‘approved’ for that use. Doctors would simply prescribe it “off label”, a well established and legal practice, as long as it meets established standards of care in the profession.
Use of puberty blockers to delay puberty is an established and recommended practice in this field.
Then, I read a whopper on social media that one can’t use the safety and efficacy data from precocious puberty studies with transkids. Wow! Who knew that transkids respond to medications differently than non-gender dysphoric children? Are they a different species? Seriously, one has to take much of this kind of propaganda with a sense of humor.
One misleading claim I’ve seen on social media is that puberty blockers interfere with brain development. This has not been found. But it certainly sounds scary, which is the real intent of making the claim.
One notorious transphobe is using the term “life limiting chemicals” to frighten parents, with no further explanation, knowing that using a propaganda slogan is often enough to have an effect.
Another outrageous lie that I’ve seen recently is the assertion that Lupron (puberty blocker) directly causes suicide. I guess if one is going to lie, one may as well make it a whopper. Depression is unfortunately common and people who are prescribed Lupron as adults are often under severe stress due to their underlying illness, typically terminal cancer, leading to reports of depression.
To be clear, there is NO reported direct association between puberty blockers and depression / suicidal ideation in transkids. However, if a child who is extremely gender atypical and dysphoric experiences negative social and familial attitudes, that may be an independent source of stress leading to depression.
A very recent bit of wild lie is to say that “thousands have died on Lupron” insinuating that it was the cause of their deaths. The truth is that these adults died of prostate or other cancers and were taking Lupron as treatment to slow (not stop) the cancer.
I’ve also seen a rather strange assertion that having been on puberty blockers then switching to cross-hormone replacement therapy somehow leaves the child in a prepubescent state. In the sense that the child won’t experience the changes that would have occurred had they not been on blockers, namely for natal females breast development or for natal males, enlargement of the penis and testicles, voice deepening, beard growth, along with increased upper body strength, this assertion is true… and indeed is the desired effect. So why the strange assertion that this is somehow a problem? The meme is also sending the false message that somehow the child will remain forever looking like a prepubescent child, never to appear to be as a sexually mature adult. The fact remains that cross-sex HRT will allow the child to mature with all of the cross-sex secondary sexual characteristics in a manner closely approximating that of the opposite sex which is, after all, the goal.
In a bid to create confusion and doubt, one recent meme I’ve seen, mixed in the the usual disinformation, is that taking puberty blockers will leave MTF transkids with a penis that is “too small” to form a proper ‘inversion’ neo-vagina. This is of course an effort to convince parent to refuse blockers so that their child will suffer all the damaging effects of a masculinizing puberty and fail to pass successful later. They don’t actually care if transgirls have big enough vaginas for comfortable sex as adults. Just to be clear, decades of transkids who have had successful SRS surgeries, etc. after having been on HRT from a very early age put the lie to this absurd meme. Not to be too indelicate, but the inverted skin is very easily stretched over time, from both dilation and from coitus (as I know very well from personal experience). Another factor that this meme fails to take into account is that even if we could fabricate a blocker that allows genital growth while eliminating all other unwanted effects of a masculinizing puberty, the genital growth in and of itself will dramatically increase gender dysphoric trauma and should itself be avoided.
Perhaps the most bizarre bit of misinformation is that somehow, if an MTF transkid doesn’t go through the typical natal male puberty to sexually mature, they will never be able to experience sexual satisfaction. While testosterone does cause human male brains to develop at puberty, estrogen and micronized progesterone, both part of HRT protocols, will do much the same. In fact, though never published, there is very strong anecdotal evidence that MTF transkids experience very strong libido development on natural estrogen (E2) compared to other sources (e.g. premarin or estinyl-estradiol). If you think about it for a moment, this makes sense… given that women have sexual drives as much as men do… and they never went through a male puberty!
It could be argued (and indeed I have so argued), that it would be better to switch from puberty blockers to HRT earlier than some clinicians insist upon waiting, so that the final results are better and so that the teens will appear to be maturing on the same schedule as their peers, for better social functioning. There are also concerns about bone strength later in life which may be impacted by extended use of puberty blockers. This is an argument for earlier HRT, NOT against the use of puberty blockers.
Moreover, I’ve seen a very clever bit of misdirection suggesting that MTF transkids, when they begin HRT bone density “fails to catch up” (oh dear!). Fails to catch up with whom we should ask, but they don’t tell us that they don’t catch up with BOYS, who have larger bones. These MTF transkids don’t want to “catch up” with boys, they want their bones to be female-like so that they can pass as typical girls, not big lumbering boys.
One of the most illogical arguments I’ve seen against the use of puberty blockers is twisting the statistics that most transkids who go on puberty blockers will persist and require HRT and perhaps surgery… as though being on puberty blockers caused them to persist (!). This is a failure to note that desisters do so before puberty. The fact that most persisters in puberty who go on blockers continue to be gender dysphoric is a non-causal correlation, in the same sense that taking antibiotics during infections does not mean that antibiotics caused the infection! The fact is that persisters who are unable to obtain blockers or HRT at that age will also remain gender dysphoric and will seek out and obtain HRT at a later age (either on the street or legally when they reach majority as I did). Refusing to provide blockers or HRT in puberty will not increase the rate of desistance but will increase the need for more medical / cosmetic interventions later on (e.g. mastectomy / electrolysis) and likely leave such an individual “funny looking” as an adult (e.g. wide hips on a transman, androgynous face and low pitched voice on a transwoman).
A recent lie I’ve seen is to talk about parents putting their children on puberty blockers as early as age eight (or even age six in one recent agit prop piece in the Federalist !!!) (age five in Breitbart – they keep pushing the age down)(Wow! Age three in another Breitbart piece). Of course, this was a deliberate distortion of the truth that some children ARE placed on puberty blockers at age eight or nine. But NOT because they are gender dysphoric, but because they have precocious puberty. These children are on puberty blockers because entering a precocious puberty at age eight or nine is not good for their long term health, regardless of whether they are gender dysphoric or not, and most children placed on blockers at such a young age are NOT gender dysphoric.
One argument I’ve seen against the use of puberty blockers for MTF transkids is that they shouldn’t be started until she has stored sperm in a sperm bank for later use! This one is a true head twister, as that would require a transgirl to undergo an unwanted, physically and emotionally devastating masculinizing puberty, by which time, blockers are metaphorically shutting the barn doors, too late to do their intended job. The argument also completely misrepresents transgirls who will grow up to be transwomen. Early onset MTF transkids are universally exclusively sexually and romantically attracted to straight men. Storing sperm? To what end? So that they can use it to impregnate their future wives?!?! That’s the definition of unclear on the concept. Transgirls will grow up to marry men. And if they and their husbands chose to build a family with the aid of a gestational surrogate, they will use their husband’s sperm. (Can you imagine the damaging psychological issues raised by suggesting that one use a transwoman’s stored sperm, for both partners?)
A recent bit of agitprop is to claim that puberty blockers don’t instantly improve the mental health of gender dysphoric teens. Why would NOT changing the body IMPROVE mental health? The goal is to not make things worse by putting a pause to an unwanted puberty. The real test of the utility is not what happens in the first weeks to months, but what does NOT happen in years. And, we should not expect major improvements in self-image and esteem until positive changes occurs when switched to HRT for a number of years.
Finally, I’ve seen comparisons of using puberty blockers by teens to NAZI medical experiments in concentration camps. When such hyperbole is invoked, one knows it is propaganda.
Hormone Replacement Therapy
The most common bit of propaganda about hormones is that their use will be “life long” as though that was somehow an evil in its own right to be avoided at all costs (even including living a life of unhappy gender dysphoria and social awkwardness). A common myth thrown out is that transsexuals on HRT have to have their blood drawn constantly to check their hormone levels, lest dire things happen. Some even speak of having to have frequent bone scans lest we develop osteoporosis.
To make a personal digression, swallowing a few pills each day has never been a major issue for me these past four decades and some. Far more impactful in my own life is the fact that I’ve been dependent upon asthma medication since I was five years old, medication which has far more harsh side effects (theophylline caused insomnia for years, rescue inhalers cause the heart to race and the lungs to itch uncomfortably, steroid inhalers increase the risk of fungus infection in the mouth and throat… and if the meds fail to control the asthma, a trip to the emergency room is needed or one could die, no joke) and far more expensive. Further, having been on HRT since 1975, I’ve had my blood drawn no more than the average person and for the same reasons. And I’ve never had a bone scan, even though I started HRT as a teenager and am now a senior.
Those who have diabetes are similarly dependent ‘life long’ upon insulin, a life saving medication.
However, forgetting to take one’s hormones for a short period of time is NOT life threatening, nor even very uncomfortable. A few weeks of not taking them, if one has not had their gonads removed, they will begin to produce steroids again. If they have had their gonads removed, they may experience ‘hot flashes’. While not comfortable, they are not life threatening. The greatest danger of ending HRT long term is the potential risk for osteoporosis. But this an increase in the risk, not a certainty.
A number of individuals point to HRT as being inherently dangerous, increasing the risk of blot clots, etc. These risks are no greater than girls taking birth control pills and if one is seriously worried about it, one can simultaneously take baby aspirin as a blood thinner. A recent study showed that estradiol, today’s preferred protocol, had NO increased risk of blood clots.
Another bit of propaganda is to grossly exaggerate the risk of breast cancer from estrogen. However, with decades of HRT use by transsexuals, we have only seen a small handful of cases which were certainly NOT indicative of increased risk compared to natal females. In fact, the risk seemed to be at about 30% lower than natal females. But is higher than natal males who were not transgendered. (Yes, men get breast cancer too.)
Interestingly, the risk of some cancers is significantly reduced in transsexuals due to surgery and HRT. For example, top surgery reduces the risk of breast cancer prophylactically. Radical hysterectomy (as part of ‘bottom surgery’) eliminates the risk of ovarian cancer and endometriosis. For MTF folk, SRS eliminates the risk of testicular cancer and reduces the risk of prostate cancer, as does HRT itself.
As well as claiming risks of cancer, I’ve seen outright lies that HRT causes mental illness!
We’ve heard stories of young transmen being discouraged from taking testosterone because it “shortens” lives. This is based on the statistical fact that men have lower life expectancies. However, they fail to note that most of those deaths occur early in life, as male children are more likely to die than female. Then, there is the increased death rate among young men due to violence and misadventure. Finally, males carry only one X chromosome, so if there is a bad gene on it, they won’t have the extra copy to compensate. Combined, all of these issues lead to men having a lower life expectancy, none of which are mediated by testosterone.
On the other hand, it is known that castrated males do live slightly longer. So by this logic, all men should be medically castrated as teenagers!
Another gambit is to point to a couple studies that show that estrogen “causes cognitive deficits” in MTF transfolk, specifically reducing their mental rotational abilities, while also saying that testosterone reduces FTM transfolk’s verbal fluency. The HORROR, HRT causes mental problems! Actually, what they are measuring is the very tiny subtle differences already found in men and women in which men are very slightly better, on average, than women at mentally rotating three dimensional figures and women are very slightly better, on average, than men at verbal fluency. These turn out to be influenced by hormones in the brain, so no surprise that they should influence transfolk on HRT. But the effect is so small as to be almost impossible to detect in any one individual.
I think the silliest claim I’ve heard is that “Big Pharma” is pushing the diagnoses of gender dysphoria so that they can sell more hormones. Given that gender dysphoria is extremely rare… but even if it is silly on the face of it, officials in the UK actually investigated that claim and debunked it.
Parents deserve accurate information, not propaganda and lies — from either side.
NOTE: If you see anyone spreading these memes, please respond with a comment and a link to this post? If you have seen other examples of false propaganda directed at the parents of transkids, please share them with me? formertranskid@gmail.com
Further Reading:
Advice to Parents of Transkids
Shameful History of Reparative Therapy of Transgender and Gay Children & Youth
Further External Reading:
When Children Say That They Are Trans by Jessie Singal
Sacred Bodies: A rebuttal to Jessie Singal by Alex Burasch
“Young Trans Children Know Who They Are” by Ed Yong
Transphobic Parents Activists Target Journalists With MisInformation About Pediatritricans by Tara Haelle
Media’s ‘detransition’ narrative is fueling misconceptions, trans advocates say
They say the current narrative makes “transition regret” seem more common than it is and contributes to misconceptions about transgender people in general by Liam Knox
External Examples of Transphobic Propaganda:
https://www.kelseycoalition.org
https://www.ihmistenkirjo.net/blog/psychiatrist-gender-dysphoria-spreads-like-an-epidemic-online
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/the-origins-of-the-transgender-movement/amp/
https://nypost.com/2020/06/27/how-peer-contagion-plays-into-the-rise-of-teens-transitioning/amp/
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/netflix-transgender-children-the-baby-sitters-club/amp/
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Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria
Is this a newly emerging etiology?
Unless you’ve been under a rock the past few years, you will have heard of what many are describing as a new phenomena affecting natal female teens, “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” (ROGD) to join the old duopoly of “Early Onset” and “Late Onset” gender dysphoria seen in natal males. The description of the putative phenomena is that gender TYPICAL and not at all previously gender dysphoric girls learn through the internet and perhaps from friends at school about transgender issues and then suddenly, because of ‘social contagion’, seemingly out of the blue, declare that they are trans. There have been a number of speculative hypothesis regarding the putative phenomena which I will explore here.
One hypothesis with a lot of weight of evidence is that this is merely the outsider’s term for “Tucutes” / “TransTrender” / “TrendsGender” in which teenaged girls with no real gender dysphoria take on the social position of “transgender”, from identifying as a pre-transition transman to more recently as “non-binary”, a social position that doesn’t require one to actually have to socially, and certainly not medically, transition. Without doubt, this is happening. I first met such an individual in 1980. Their numbers have grown in the intervening years. But this phenomena, annoying as it may be for some gender dysphoric transmen, is not a major cause of concern to medical professionals in that they rarely seek medical intervention.
Some within the transcommunity have argued that these young people, including those labeled “Tucutes” are in fact the female equivalent of “Late Onset” natal males in that they are autoandrophilic. This too certainly exists. While some sexologists and therapists will deny that autoandrophilia exists, I know for a fact that it does, as I had a very close friend since high school who clearly experiences it. Absolute proof of existence N=1. We have more evidence than just my one anecdotal one from the years of reports on the sexuality of androphilic transmen. Such individuals do experience gender dysphoria, but of a notably different character and developmental arc than autogynephilic transwomen. But just as with autogynephilia, not everyone with autoandrophilia will develop extreme gender dysphoria and thus a range of accommodations occur.
Of course, there is another hypothesis coming from the gay and lesbian community in which they claim that these teens are simply gender atypical lesbians who have been falsely convinced by “Transgender Ideology” that they must be transgender. At the heart of this is a misunderstanding or deliberate disinformation about the nature of transgender etiology and experience. Either there are true transsexuals and true lesbians and they shouldn’t be confused… or there are only lesbians and transgender ideology gives them a false sense of gender dysphoria. The evidence suggests that neither is wholly the case. Gynephilic natal female people exhibit a range of gender atypicality and gender dysphoria. How they accommodate these within a given culture is variable. However, when extreme gender atypicality and dysphoria are accommodated by social and medical transition, these are typically labeled “early onset” even if they transition in their 30’s. If with changing attitudes more such individuals are seeking to address their gender dysphoria at an earlier age, we would expect to see just what we are seeing today.
The question is, are all of those who are labeled with ROGD actually either tucutes or autoandrophilic? Are some actually gynephilic gender atypical and dysphoric natal females who were simply not recognized or acknowledged as such? I’ve come to suspect that many may be.
Consider that pre-adolescent tomboys have always been given greater latitude than sissy boys. In today’s climate of empowering girls to pursue sports and allowed to wear jeans and t-shirts… just like boys, but over scheduled and constantly under parental supervision, with little time for personal choices and expression by privileged helicopter parents, the type that are active on social media, these girls may not have been acknowledged as being gender dysphoric… until the social pressures of adolescence to be heterosexual and feminine.
Consider also that nearly half of these parents acknowledged that they knew that their daughter was attracted to girls BEFORE they had confided being gender dysphoric. (Gynephilia is a key co-presenting factor in transmen.) These parents also point to their children having other emotional problems, which for them mean that their gender dysphoria is just another symptom, failing to note that gender dysphoric youth living in transphobic households typically experience such problems. One out of seven of these parents state homophobic attitudes while the rest say that they support LGBT people. (Really? Recall that support for same-sex marriage hovers at only 50%… yet 85% of these parents say that they support LGBT rights? Anyone remember the 60’s cliche “We’re not racist… but our daughter will never marry a black man.” ?!?)
In recent interactions via social media that I’ve had with parents of teens who they claim have ROGD and further claim that means that they are “not really transgender” and they should NOT be encouraged, acknowledged, nor affirmed, I’ve had an extreme sense of deja vu. What I sense is not that these teens are tucutes or ‘non-binaries’… as most of them have very laid back parents who allow their children to explore their place in the world, knowing that kids do that. No, I sense both angry denial, genuine concern for their child’s welfare, combined with homo- and trans- phobia, saying “my child is not one of those people“.
Deja Vu
About that deja vu. At this point I have to switch from academic exposition to personal anecdotal mode:
In very early ’75, at the age of 17, I had “come out” to my father about being transsexual (the word “transgender” did exist at the time, but it was reserved for heterosexual lifestyle cross-dressers = autogynephilic men and specifically excluded androphilic gender atypical MTF transkids). The time and place had NOT been my choice, having been forced to do so by my mother. (That’s a whole other story. My parents were divorced and my mother had custody, as was usual back in the ’70s.) He seemed calm and concerned, no anger or lamentation. Instead, he suggested that we should seek professional advice and help. I recognized an opening.
I had for some months been in contact with the Stanford University Gender Dysphoria Clinic. I literally had in my possession, in my pocket, the contact information for them. I gave it to my Dad who said that he would be contacting them. I was astounded. The clinic had told me that they would love to help me but that I had to have my parents make the arrangements. But my mother had made it abundantly clear that she would never help me transition. Now my Dad was opening the door for me!
I had several intake interviews with Dr. Norman Fisk, the man I would later learn had coined the term “gender dysphoria”. At the time, I had no idea how influential and expert he was in the field. He was just a guy who might be able to help me get medical help. He asked about my sexuality. I told him about the boy I had a crush on. He asked me about my dreams for the future. I told him about how I hoped to find a husband and adopt children. I told him about my summer job as a nanny and of the two summers I volunteered teaching little kids to swim. And sadly, I told him about how unhappy my parents were about my behavior and how I had been sent to therapists (who had been anything but affirming).
Then I had a joint interview with my mother and a week later another with my father.
During the interview, my father made it abundantly clear that he thought transsexuals were sick perverts. Dr. Fisk assured my Dad that transsexuals were NOT mentally ill and that social and medical transition was the typical course of treatment. My father then became very agitated, objecting, “My son is NOT transsexual. I’ve never seen anything feminine about him. This is just a phase! It will blow over!” Dr. Fisk knew better, having talked to me and more importantly talked to my mother.
My father focused on the fact that he and I had over the years gone fishing and hunting together (ignoring that during their courtship, so had he and my then teenaged mother). That we spent hours working together on projects (that he usually chose). That I was a Boy Scout (ignoring that he had insisted I and my two brothers join since he had been a Scout as a boy… and the deeply mortifying incident in which I had been kicked out of the first Troop though I had done nothing objectively wrong in any sense… but none of the boys wanted the “faggot” around… and that the Scout Master declared to my Dad with a sneer that I was “not Eagle Scout material”… and that my Dad had to find another troop for me to join that accepted queers). At the end of the interview, my Dad stormed out making homophobic references to Dr. Fisk to me in the parking lot. (Dr. Fisk was straight, married, and had a son near my age. I learned that they lived only blocks from my mother’s house.)
The interview with my mother the week before was quite different. Far from being in denial, she was petulantly resentful that she had such a child. “I have known for years that he wanted to be a girl. But I thought that was [morally] wrong. He was very different than his brothers. All their friends were boys. His were always girls,” naming several of my friends over the years, but couldn’t remember my friend who had been my only guest on my tenth birthday. “Marian,” I interjected for the only time during the whole interview. “He was always very prissy. He would walk clear around even the shallowest puddles. When he was little, I would put him in clean clothes on Monday and on Friday they would still be clean.” She confirmed that I had been sent to a therapist about my behavior when I was ten years old… and again when I was 15/16. She came away under the impression that she had spelled out all of the things about me that needed to be fixed, that Dr. Fisk and the clinic would endeavor to make me a normal, healthy, masculine heterosexual man and had shared that impression with my father.
So, it was a shock to my Dad that Dr. Fisk was recommending to him that my family accept that I was never going to be a masculine straight man. That I was going to transition. And when my Dad objected, offered this bit of advice,
“Denial will not serve. You will win a few battles but lose the war.”
At home my mother began sharing comments such as sweetly asking, dripping with obvious false concern, “What will your friends think of you when they find out?”
“They already know,” I replied honestly, having grown used to the twisting knife within her tone.
“I could understand it if you were petite like your sister (at 12 years old, not yet fully grown she was 5’2″ – our mother was 5’5″ – I’m 5’7″ – our brothers were closer to 6′).”
“That’s funny, Cassie (school friend) is 5’9″ and she has no problems,” I demurred.
“No man will ever love you,” she taunted. I couldn’t answer back, it hurt too much, but I could feel my eyes smouldering with suppressed anger.
My father came over to see me and begged me not to transition, “You’ll be throwing away a chance for a career. No one will hire you.” I couldn’t answer him, having the same fears. He also tried to shame me, telling me that I was embarrassing the family, that we all have our “cross to bear” and that I should think of my siblings and how they might be treated at school and by friends. I replied that it was unfair that they should ask that I be extremely unhappy my entire life so that they could avoid some mild embarrassment. In that same conversation he begged me to live as a closeted gay man, promising that the family would look the other way when I had boyfriends. My thoughts on this were bitter, as that would put me in the same position as his gay brother, the one we weren’t allowed to meet or talk about. He then tried to sweeten the deal by offering to pay for vacations in which I could dress up as a woman (!).
I lost my temper at that and loudly replied, “I am NOT a part-time woman!”
Conclusion
I hear that same combination of denial, anger, embarrassment, resentment, desperation, and socially & religiously motivated transphobia in those parents who now describe their teens as having ROGD. Which to them indicates that they are “not really transgender” and should not be allowed to socially transition nor allowed to use puberty blockers much less actual HRT. These parents sound suspiciously like my parents.
Epilog
I think it worth describing how things went down after the events above, as a sincere warning.
Kay Brown in college
I had already been in the process of social transition, presenting as a girl after school but continued to dress as a boy at school until graduation day. But had already made arrangements for my high school records to be changed to my new name, female gender, and even to have it say that I attended girls P.E. It became very apparent that my family, led by mother, was going to do everything they legally could to stop me from successfully transitioning. Although I had been accepted at a four-year college, I was made to understand that I would not be supported if I continued to present as a girl, so was unable to attend. I was kicked out of the house by mother and my father was not to take me in. I started HRT right after I turned 18, forgoing food to buy them. Using documents from the clinic, I was able to have my driver’s licence and social security ID changed to my new name and gender that summer. I was given a meagre allowance for about a year with the proviso that I was NOT to show my face anywhere near home. I attended community college part-time, as they were nearly free the next few years. I became, in the modern vernacular, a housing and food insecure student. It took me a few years, having no financial or social support or capital. But I managed to climb back out of the hole that being effectively disowned had thrown me. I established a career in Silicon Valley, first as a secretary at age 19, then working my way up. At the age of 23, I had saved and borrowed enough for SRS.
After SRS, it was perhaps ‘barn doors’ and all… but slowly my folks then began to extend more social and financial capital to me… perhaps also in embarrassment when comparing how they had treated me compared to my siblings. One had gone to Stanford as an undergraduate and was then attending Baylor Medical School while living in a condo provided by my mother’s family money. Another was working as an engineer in Silicon Valley, living in a condo also provided by her money. My sister was going to a small private college… oh… you get the picture. I had earned a BS soon after SRS, on my own resources, combining credits from four different community colleges and all of my upper division credits earned entirely by examination. I was then admitted to Stanford Graduate School. At that point, my father began offering emotional and logistical support and a couple of years later, my mother’s family provided the down payment on a condo for me.
Kay, Jeff, Liz, & Reese
Over the years, my mother never really accepted me and we haven’t spoken in decades now, just as I haven’t spoken with any of my siblings. Oh… and she was wrong. One man does love me… and we’ve been married these past two decades and I did become an adoptive mom.
And my father was wrong. My career took off. I rose to executive rank and even founded and raised venture capital for a start-up which I sold to Samsung. My father and I speak often… and he makes it clear that he loves and is proud of me.
So, if you are a parent of a transkid or a so called “ROGD” teen. Please recall Dr. Fisk’s advice to my Dad.
“Denial will not serve. You will win a few battles but lose the war.”
Addendum 9/3/2018: The past week and some has seen renewed publicity regarding this putative phenomena of ROGD since the Littman paper was published. I have been following this issue for much longer. I chalked it up to standard parental denialism which I have written about for a decade now. But I became disturbed by it when champions of MTF transkids approached me urging me to in effect throw FtM “ROGD” transkids under the bus. They had been bamboozled by these parents in denial and what I now see as growing anti-transkid propaganda. The Littman paper does NOT document a new phenomena of social contagion among teens… it documents parental denial and rationalizations. If there is any new social contagion phenomena occuring it is that the internet allows transphobic parents a means to create memes that can be used to bolster their denial and obtain social approval among their “transgender critical” peers for obstructing their teens.
Further Reading:
ROGD As An Expression of Parental Greiving
Essay on TransTrenders & Tucutes
Essay on Androphilic Transmen being Autoandrophilic
Advice to Parents of Transkids
Essay on Transphobic Propaganda Aimed at Parents of Transkids
References:
Lisa Littman, “Rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults: A study of parental reports” (2018)
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202330
External Further Reading:
Brown University Statement regarding the Littman study controversy
Comments Off on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria
On the Science of Changing Sex 
Comments Off on Pose: A Look at Transsexual Realities