I want to write about the right’s attack on transgender kids and the people who provide them medical assistance, but I have to be honest with you. I’m depressed about it. It feels like, for a vast swath of us, words have no meaning. So it doesn’t matter which words I arrange how — it’s not going to matter. Doctors and therapists who are trying to help trans kids are still going to be called “groomers” and “mutilators.” Parents who live every day with their distressed kids and who are trying to find some way for them to be in the world and thrive are called “abusers.”
It’s not true. And we all could take the time to refute it, but the whole point of them doing this kind of thing is to cause us to waste our time doing so. Well, not the whole point. I’m sure right-wing activist and media personality Matt Walsh’s intention — and Tucker Carlson’s for that matter — is to put people in danger.
I’m not sure how you even respond effectively to it. You say nothing, ignoring it and hoping a lack of fuel smothers the fire, but trans people hear your silence and feel unsupported. But saying something isn’t going to change the minds of the people now determined to shut down the Pediatric Transgender Clinic at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital.
Do you think Gov. Bill Lee or any of the Republicans quoted in Scene reporter Hannah Herner’s story from the other day are persuadable? Do you think they care about contradictions in their worldviews? Every single Republican legislator in this state serves with a dude who admitted to behaving inappropriately with children, and none of them care enough about children to do anything about it. So miss me with this “we must protect the children” bullshit. They’re all hypocrites and grifters, and Tennessee continues to vote for them because other grifter hypocrites tell us that God told them to tell us to.
But I’m going to say what I’m going to say anyway, because silence — the appearance of neutrality — favors the jerks. They may win, but they shouldn't get to say everyone was OK with it.
It is OK to initially be confused by the idea of transgender people. On the one hand, once you know to look for transgender people, you see them throughout history. On the other hand, our medical knowledge about gender has been very rudimentary until very recently. Women have been described as having hysteria — basically a blanket term for anything wrong with us that doctors couldn’t fix — for thousands of years. We were susceptible to all kinds of mental and physical conditions because we have uteruses. (Hysteria has at its root “hystera” — the Greek word for uterus.) As recently as the Victorian era, people knew that hysteria was caused by a woman’s pissed-off uterus wandering around her body.
It was basically a mixture of Freud’s work and the trauma of World War I that led medical professionals to decide that men could also have hysteria. You’d think this was a victory for feminism and common sense, but some people argued that this was because, through mesmerism, angry uteruses could affect anyone they wanted to, regardless of whether the uterus was housed in that person or not. Hysteria was not removed from the DSM until the third edition in 1980.
I don’t know — bitches (and some men) be crazy, am I right? was a legitimate medical diagnosis until 1980. A huge portion of medical knowledge about cis women was the equivalent of the shrug emoji until I was 6 years old. Even now, there’s so much we don’t know about cis women because we just studied cis men and assumed it was applicable to all people. Hence why we’re just learning, for instance, that cis women have different heart attack symptoms than cis men and may not recognize that we’re even having a heart attack.
Even the conventional categories of “woman” and “man” aren't some fixed, easily definable thing. Most of us grew up being taught there are two genders — men have penises and women have vaginas, but there are intersex people. Then we’re told that women have XX chromosomes and men have XY chromosomes, but there are people who have XXX chromosomes and XXY chromosomes. There are people with XY chromosomes who don’t know it because they were born looking female, grew up looking female, and experience themselves as female and so have no reason to see what sex they are by chromosomes. There’s even a well-documented case of an XY female getting pregnant and giving birth twice. There’s a lot of variety out here we’re discovering. Let me be clear — it's a variety that we’re only just now studying. And what we’re finding is challenging to our conventional understanding of sex and gender.
All this is a long way of saying that, if medical science has been “men = important to study; women = ?” for the past thousand years, you can bet that anyone who is somewhere between those two categories or who slides from one to the other has not even been a blip on the radar as patients worth studying. At the beginning of the 20th century, Magnus Hirschfeld made huge inroads into the study of the experiences of transgender people. We would be much further along into our understanding of the phenomena, except the Nazis destroyed his research.
So here we are in new territory. People have only been able to openly live as trans for a short time. Kids being accepted as trans is a new thing. What does it mean to be a transgender kid who is able to live as their authentic self? We don’t really know yet. But if kids have the support of their parents and access to therapists and doctors who specialize in transgender health care, this is great! This is the best-case scenario. You don’t need to understand it or approve of it. It’s not your business.
Of course, Gov. Lee doesn’t see it that way. Back to Herner’s story, where she writes:
“The ‘pediatric transgender clinic’ at Vanderbilt University Medical Center raises serious moral, ethical and legal concerns,” Lee said in a statement to The Daily Wire, which recently relocated to Nashville and where Walsh hosts a podcast. “We should not allow permanent, life-altering decisions that hurt children or policies that suppress religious liberties, all for the purpose of financial gain. We have to protect Tennessee children, and this warrants a thorough investigation.”
This should go without saying, but we let kids make permanent, life-altering decisions that hurt them all the time. It's called “football.” If you have top surgery and later regret it, that’s a hell of a lot easier to repair than a brain riddled with chronic traumatic encephalopathy. We see what happens to people with CTE — the memory loss, the suicides, the violence against family members — and we all know it’s caused by bashing your head, and how many of us spend our weekends watching kids bash their heads?
Part of being a teen — one of the scary parts of being a teen — is that they will make grown-up decisions with grown-up repercussions without the perspective that comes with being a grown-up. And some of those decisions will be hard to live with. This is why we are lucky as a community to have a pediatric transgender clinic in town. We have a place where kids who are dealing with huge decisions with far-reaching implications can speak with medical professionals. They can find support and have their questions answered. They can hear from adults who have perspective they don’t have.
This isn’t like those “pray-away-the-gay" camps or the wilderness child-torture programs where kids are lied to by their parents and sent off to strangers who abuse them into conforming to their parents’ wishes. This is a place where families and kids and medical professionals with appropriate training come together to help trans kids figure out how they’re going to live in the world.
You can think it’s weird. You can think it’s gross. But those thoughts are for inside your head, in the privacy of your own mind. But out here, in the real world, if people are trying to help kids find ways to live happy lives, it’s not your job to come along and make it as hard for them as possible. Your judgment is not needed.
Once, a long time ago, I knew a guy who told me once that, if feminists wanted to end rape, we should push for the legalization of prostitution, so guys could just go to them and take out their urges. I think prostitution should be legal, but not so that men have a subsection of women it’s OK for them to rape. That’s really gross. But the longer I pay attention to people, the more I think that a lot of us want a similar bargain. We want to hurt people, but know that, if we hurt the wrong people, it could go badly for us. So we keep trying to make deals with the rest of us for there to be some segment of the population it’s OK to hurt.
Right now, these folks are saying, “Give us trans kids to hurt and we’ll leave you alone.” They’re asking for child sacrifice — let them have trans kids to destroy and our society will be better. But no. Fuck that. If Gov. Lee is going to demand the sacrifice of the health and well-being of trans children, no words I say are going to stop it. But I can say that I recognize his barbarism as that — barbarism.
And I ask you to recognize it as such too.
