A Tale of Two Conferences, Part 1

War or Reform? That Is the Question. (The answer is very long.)

I’ll be publishing this in two parts. Today’s edition, about EPATH, is partially beyond a paywall. The next post, about Genspect, will be free for all readers. There’ll be a free part III, fully synthesizing this wild experience, as soon as I can get to it! Here’s a discount if you want to subscribe for this series.

Killarney, Ireland is a charming village of 14,000, near the waters of Lough Leane and along the scenic route known as the Ring of Kerry. Horses and carriages clomp along the narrow streets lined with quaint hotels, as the McGillycuddy Reeks mountains rise dramatically in the near distance.

Three hours from Dublin, it’s not so easy to get to, even from within Europe. But this was the setting for the European Professional Association of Transgender Health (EPATH) conference, called “Strengthening the standards: communities and research.” The organizers professed to have been charmed by the region, hence setting the conference there, but a few skeptics wondered if they’d chosen the remote location in order to make it hard for activists to infiltrate.

I’d come there to see how European clinicians’ approach to treating children with gender dysphoria, or trans kids, might be shifting, in light of the evolving situation there. While some European countries like Spain have been expanding self-ID laws and access to medicine, trans-tolerant countries like Finland and Sweden have recently changed guidelines to be much more strict. The National Academy of Medicine in France, meanwhile, urges that “a great medical caution must be taken in children and adolescents.”  

Just under two miles down the road from the EPATH, Genspect, an “international, non-partisan, interdisciplinary professional and educational organization devoted to advancing a healthy approach to sex and gender,” was holding a conference of its own; the remote location hadn’t swayed them, perhaps because Genspect’s director, Stella O’Malley, is an Irish resident herself. “The Bigger Picture,” as they called the gathering, was intended as a counter to EPATH’s conference, which, Genspect alleged, “brooks no debate and incorrectly insists that the ‘science is settled.’” The Bigger Picture conference would offer “eminent scientists, researchers, lawyers, doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, sociologists, educators, feminists, and some well-known detransitioners,” to challenge the evidence and highlight the damage that gender affirming care has done.

I wanted to see how the same data might be interpreted differently in each of these settings. I wanted to see what was included—or ignored—and where these two seemingly miles-apart delegations overlapped. And most importantly, I wanted to see if, in theory, as each group assembled its troops and armed constituents with knowledge—no matter how skewed such knowledge might be—there might be any possibility of a cease fire. Or at least a discussion.

In 2018, as I set out to research my last book TOMBOY, I did something similar. First, I attended the Gender Development Research Conference, in which I learned about Sheri Berenbaum’s work on girls with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH). Girls with this disease are exposed to male-levels of testosterone and other androgens in utero, and grow up to be more male-typical in some ways, both in terms of interests—playing with trucks, building things—and sexual orientation: they were much more likely to be lesbians than non-CAH girls, and slightly more likely to not identity as girls, but not in a statistically significant way. Berenbaum concluded that testosterone influences activity preferences a lot, sexual preference a little, and gender identity barely at all. (Side note: the control group of tomboys was more masculine than the CAH girls they were compared to.)

At the Gender Spectrum conference I attended nearby in 2018, that same research was trotted out to show that gender identity is influenced by hormones and is therefore innate, natural, and unchangeable. That is, at the academic conference, the research suggested complex ideas about gender. At the activist conference, that same research was misinterpreted to satisfy a narrow narrative about biological factors of gender identity—a narrative not supported by the research.

I wondered if the same thing might happen in Killarney.