Dear Council Member Shahana Hanif: Gender Nonconforming Kids Do Not Need to Be Medicalized

The new acronym: TGNCNBI

To: Council Member Hanif: district39@council.nyc.gov

Dear Council Member Hanif:

By way of introduction, I have been a member of what is now your district for more than 30 years. I am the parent of a gender nonconforming girl, and author of a forthcoming book about the youth gender culture war, and battles over trans kids, gender identity, and gender-affirming care.

I read with great concern about your “Affirm Act,” which you describe as aimed at “trans and gender non-conforming people.”

This bill would expand a person’s private right of action for interference with reproductive or endocrine medical care when a lawsuit is commenced against the person on the basis of this care, to explicitly include all forms of gender-affirming care. Along with expanding this private right of action, the relevant chapter of the Administrative Code is redesignated to correct the issue of an identically numbered chapter.

To lump the categories of transgender and gender nonconforming together is to reveal a misunderstanding of the very issues which your law seeks to address. I fear that you, like many other Democrats, have elevated the talking points of advocacy groups over not just science but the complexity of gender, and are making decisions out of partisanship, rather than evidence. Good policy, as you know, is made by consulting multiple stakeholders and weighing costs and benefits. Allow me to try to explain the position of many silenced or ignored stakeholders, who are far too aware of the costs.

Gender nonconforming people are those who do not hew to the stereotypes or normative behaviors associated with their sex. Some emerge this way as young as two years old—as was the case with my own daughter. The majority of these kids, as we know from centuries of recorded history, from experience, and from a dozen prospective studies, grow up to be gay—that is, if they are not socially transitioned to identify as the opposite or neither sex. But nobody knows for sure who they will become based on their differences as young people.

The term “transgender” originated from Virginia Prince, who used “transgenderist” as a way to distinguish between transsexuals—who underwent genital surgery—and transvestites, generally, heterosexual men who enjoyed wearing women’s clothing. Transgenderists were somewhere in between, some taking hormones, others not, but all identifying as the opposite sex. Prince disparaged gay people and did not want these categories lumped together, so would have been quite shocked to find that not only did “trans” become an umbrella term for all those categories and more, but that it would, in the 21st century, be inextricably linked to L,G, and B.

Or I thought it was inextricable, until your use of an acronym that I’ve never seen before: TGNCNBI. Presumably that means transgender, gender nonconforming, non-binary, and intersex. What medications do each of these groups need or have the right to?

Intersex activists have lobbied for years to stop the medicating of their sex nonconformity, especially during childhood, as the scar tissue from genital surgery often leaves them with sexual dysfunction. Non-binary medicine is extremely new, and there is almost no research about what, essentially, mimics intersex conditions in otherwise healthy bodies, through altering secondary sex characteristics and hormone balances.

“Gender-affirming care” for young trans people—puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones—are the same as those used to chemically castrate sex offenders and once used to “treat” or punish homosexuality. If children do not go through their natal puberty, and leap straight from blockers to cross-sex hormones, they will almost certainly be infertile, and may not develop sexual function. That is, the medical protocol used to liberate trans people is the same as what was once used against gender and sex-nonconforming people against their will.

You wrote that “No one should face legal repercussions for receiving medically necessary treatment in our City.” I agree. But we don’t know that these interventions are medically necessary.

There is no medical consensus about gender-affirming care, and several progressive, liberal European countries have severely restricted its administration, including banning puberty blockers—not because of politics, but because of science, and because of listening to detransitioners and others injured, emotionally and physically, by these interventions.

I’ve fought for years for people in my own liberal bubbles to better understand these issues, and to leave gender nonconforming kids alone. There is nothing wrong with their bodies. There is nothing wrong with their predilections. Nobody knows exactly who they will grow up to be, and they have a right to an open future, which may get foreclosed when we assume their identities are permanent, when we medicate them, and when we lump them into categories with people who have medical or psychological conditions, or who have gender identities (which not everyone does.)

It’s imperative that those making policies and laws understand the issues they legislate around. Please, I beg you, unlink GNC. Help me to send the message to masculine girls and feminine boys that they are perfect, just the way they are.

I’d be delighted to meet and talk to you further about these issues. Thank you for your time, and for caring about children in New York City’s District 39.