From the Rejection Archives
From the Rejection Archives
A never-accepted pitch
Dear readers,
My HOUSEWIFE manuscript is due Friday (!) and I have many half-written pieces I look forward to finishing and sharing with you after. In the meantime, please head on over to the Boston Globe and celebrate a little opening in the mainstream/left media’s bulwark against nuance and accurate science reporting; they decided to adapt and publish a [much better] version of an earlier Broadview post. It was a fantastic editing experience and they deserve kudos for going against the grain—even though we should hold the media accountable for consistently misreporting this story.
About 14 months ago I decided I would try to report this story better/differently/more accurately. I imagined it was just a matter of me being willing to stick my neck out. I had, over an almost 20-year career, worked for many large media outlets, and assumed that the biggest barrier to telling the truth was my own fear of repercussions. Never did I imagine that, once I screwed up my courage, no one would take my pitches. So I thought I’d share with you the first real pitch about this issue that I sent.
I interviewed about 30 people (very few of whom made it into the pitch) to try to understand this issue in a more complex way—and have ended up interviewing many dozens of people since, and look forward to someday sharing their stories. I worked on the pitch off and on for six weeks. Then I sent it first to The New York Times magazine, where I had a contact; they told me they’d already assigned someone to work on something similar—which was true. Eventually, Emily Bazelon did publish a piece, which was different from what I would have written but was…a start. (Here’s my polite critique of it). From there I sent it to The Washington Post magazine (no response, despite sending it to someone I’d worked for in the past); Time: The National Review (they said maybe and then no); Harper’s (no response).
Eventually, I gave up and did what one does these days: I came to Substack, where of course I am speaking alternately to the converted or to those who are monitoring what I write to add it to their dossier, as happens to anyone who tells the truth about this complicated issue. My hope is that I can start speaking to a wider audience soon, and that we can come to a place where we both understanding the science and continue to create room for and tolerance of gender diversity. Apparently that looks like this:
The pitch:
Melissa watched as her 17-year-old son was hooked up to a feeding tube, the long snake of pale plastic inserted into his nose, a patch of fraying white tape splotched over delicate skin. The look of terror that had crystalized in his eyes subsided, and Melissa, too, found herself letting go of the guilt and fear, allowing one small seed of hope to germinate. He had been hospitalized for anorexia at a well-respected residential facility for kids with eating disorders, where they promised to make her son well.
The next day, Melissa (not her real name) received a call from the therapist making the rounds on the ward—not about her son, but about her daughter. “Your child is transgender,” the therapist said. “She needs to start hormones right away.”
Melissa was flabbergasted. Her child had not only never come out to her, but had shown no signs of gender nonconformity throughout childhood. There was never a single sign of gender dysphoria (GD)—distress at a perceived mismatch between your body and your sense of self as boy, girl, or neither. Her child was bright but socially awkward, quirky, desperate to be liked by peers, but was often shunned. She suspected her child was on the spectrum.
Melissa wanted her child to stabilize first, to get the anorexia under control and deal with their underlying family trauma. Then they could investigate the gender issues. But the therapist, who had talked to her child for less than an hour, insisted it was the other way around.
“They said gender dysphoria can cause the eating disorder, so if he does not transition right away, he will not get better,” Melissa told me. No one discussed, with Melissa or her child, any possible health complications from cross-sex hormones, that the medication might cause sterilization or create a life-long medical patient. Another psychiatrist told her, in front of her child, that if she didn’t consent to the hormones, her child would commit suicide. When she said she needed more time, a staff member later told her, the team discussed calling child protective services, suspecting she was transphobic.
The media often reports on barriers to gender-affirming care, and the legislative efforts to ban it in some right-leaning states. But some of the most experienced gender clinicians in the country say that there are enormous misunderstandings that have infiltrated not just the press but the medical and mental health fields about how to treat kids with gender dysphoria. “Having gender dysphoria does not necessarily mean that you will be persistently trans, or that you should have medical interventions,” says Laura Edwards-Leeper, founding psychologist of the nation’s first pediatric gender clinic, in 2007.