Tangling with the Florida "Don't Say Gay" Bill

Parental rights matter, too

The Snapper/Creative Commons

Because I’ve found the reporting on kids with gender dysphoria to be particularly one-sided in the left and center press, I have taken to subscribing to independent media that pushes past political polarization. That includes Tangle, written by journalist Isaac Saul. Last week, he published a piece on Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, covering what both the left and right are arguing and then giving his take, his signature—and very effective—approach.

I have been reaching out to journalists whenever I can and saying, “There are more sides to this story than left and right.” Only three have ever responded, including Isaac. This time, I asked him if I could write not a rebuttal but an addition, adding some nuance and depth to a discussion that really should transcend political boundaries. The reason we think the left is united when it comes to gender issues is because so many people on the left are afraid to publicly dissent.

FYI, I also wrote an op-ed about this and sent it out to CNN, NYT, WashPost, USA Today, Time and several others. I pitched features about secret social transition to several publications. It’s one thing not to take a story from me; it’s another to ignore these facets of a story altogether. It doesn’t serve us as a nation to be poorly informed.

Here’s what I wrote for Tangled:

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Until I read Tangle’s take on Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, I—like many liberals, I would imagine—wasn’t familiar with the bill’s language. I didn’t even know the actual name of the bill, HB 1557, or that its sponsors refer to it as “Parental Rights Legislation.” Much of the liberal media I consume was using the judgment-filled moniker “Don’t Say Gay,” which tells liberals and lefties how they should feel about the legislation: bad.

I very much appreciate Tangle’s open-minded reading of both the left’s and the right’s arguments. I hadn’t realized that the language the bill presented, on first reading, was really pretty moderate: “Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

But just because the language is moderate doesn’t mean that it can’t be used for extreme purposes. One hopes that all educators are interested in delivering material in an age-appropriate manner, but the problem is, as Isaac noted, that that language is vague and open to interpretation, and could be used to promote repressive ideologies and censorship, which has no place in education. What should we tell kids about sexuality and gender identity, and when? Who gets to decide what appropriate content is, or appropriate age?

And that’s where some disagreements crystallize, because those questions are generally answered based on what ideology you subscribe to. Many people might think it’s reasonable to delay conversations about gender identity and sexuality until, say, grade 4. But others believe that children express their gender identity —especially if it’s one that doesn’t align with their biological sex — at a very young age, and generally those who believe that also think that it’s critical to affirm that gender identity, allowing a child to socially transition and live the gender role of the opposite sex, or to declare themselves as a member of neither category and live accordingly. If you believe that, then you might think putting a gag order on teachers talking about gender identity is causing real harm to a child.

While it’s true that the legislative push is coming from the right, beliefs about gender identity and affirmation aren’t just the province of the left, just as concerns about gender identity ideology and medical interventions for gender dysphoric youth aren’t just the province of the right. There are conservative people who have affirmed and socially transitioned their children, accepting them as trans. And there are liberals who object to the very idea of gender identity: a term coined in the 1960s to describe a kind of gendered soul, independent of the body. The issue is, most of those who object or want to speak up on the left are afraid to do so. Check out this thread about detransitioners — those who medically transitioned and regret it — being afraid to share their experiences because they will be perceived as anti-trans and unemployable.

I have dedicated almost all of my professional time for the past eight months trying to diversify the mainstream media narrative around this issue and make room for these voices. Earlier in my career, I wrote many articles about health care for trans kids, and talked to experts who asserted that the research was clear. They told me that interventions can be life-saving, that there was medical consensus, and that those who objected were bigots, transphobes and right wing—and that those three things were interchangeable. And I believed them.

Then people started contacting me to tell me other stories, stories that weren’t being shared in the left-leaning outlets I worked for. Some urged me to take a closer look at the medical literature. I listened, I looked, I read. And I found a far more diverse story than what is presented just about anywhere in the mainstream media.

I have talked to dozens of liberal parents concerned about their children coming out unexpectedly as trans and demanding medical interventions. CPS has investigated some of them for not partaking in gender-affirming medical interventions for their kids, just as parents in Texas who are partaking in them are being investigated now; each practice is shocking and vile. I’ve watched as prominent lefties declared the neutral descriptor of this group — rapid onset gender dysphoria, a term coined by liberal health researcher and doctor Lisa Littman—as an invention of the right. The one book about this rapid-onset cohort, Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage—accurately reported, whatever you think of it —was attacked by the left rather than considered as part of the whole.

I’ve watched as research on gender diverse people in other cultures—research which almost always shows that extreme gender nonconformity in childhood is connected to later same-sex attraction—is promoted in liberal publications as being evidence of trans people around the world, even if there is no concept of gender identity in these cultures. I’ve seen publications dub legislation as anti-trans without considering that the bills may have other functions: to protect the fairness of girls’ sports, for instance. And I’ve listened to children and parents who have been physically and emotionally hurt by gender-affirming care and its accompanying ideology, desisters and detransitioners whose stories the mainstream media has largely refused to acknowledge, focusing solely on those whom such care has helped. In other words, most issues related to gender identity are presented as one-sided, when they’re multi-faceted.

Isaac notes that, “The bill mostly codifies parents’ rights to information about their childrens’ lesson plans and health records and requires schools to give updates on changes in their child's mental, emotional and physical health.” Many of the people I’ve talked to—mostly lefties—are deeply concerned about their parental rights. And they should be!

Parents have filed lawsuits against schools secretly socially transitioning children in California, Wisconsin, and two in Florida, one in which the school hid not only the child’s gender identity from parents, but a suicide attempt. Social transition is a major psychological intervention; performing such an intervention without parental consent is a violation of parents’ constitutional rights.

I have little doubt that bills like this one in Florida, proffered by Republicans, are ideologically motivated and calculated to garner political support. And yet, at the same time these bills, no matter their substantial flaws, are responding to some real concerns of many parents, conservative and liberal alike, born not of hate but of concern for their kids. It’s jarring when you are a liberal and you find yourself nodding along to ideas espoused by someone whose beliefs you generally shun. But that’s because the politically polarized climate we are living in has us serving ideology over humanity, party over people. It’s exhausting and sad and hard and counterproductive, and it’s something we in the media must push past.

I think we need to ditch the political framing and acknowledge the cases where a child transitioning to a gender matching their gender identity was beneficial to the child as well as those where it was harmful, whatever the politics of their parents.

We need to look at the scientific evidence for and against social and medical transition—which, contrary to mainstream pronouncements, is deeply controversial and contested, both for medical and social transition. As an article in the Journal of Adolescent Health noted, “No consensus exists whether to use these early medical interventions.” Social transition was “Relatively unheard-of 10 years ago,” according to a 2019 paper, which notes that “early-childhood social transitions are a contentious issue within the clinical, scientific, and broader public communities.”

What to teach in schools should be determined by educators, just as how to treat gender dysphoric youth should be determined by the medical and mental health communities. In countries less choked by politics and where nonpartisan evidence reviews of medical transition for gender dysphoric youth have been conducted, like Sweden, France and Finland, it was determined that the case for the safety and efficacy of these medical interventions was unclear, and they’ve largely pulled back, advocating to treat gender dysphoric youth with therapy.

But I’m not sure Americans can wriggle themselves free enough from their politics to figure out the best course to take, and certainly Florida’s push toward censorship is not the answer. If anything, these conflicting ideologies—believing biological sex is real and immutable, or believing that each person has a gender identity—are an opportunity to teach that we have different belief systems and ask how we, as students and humans, can accommodate each other to navigate them. In the meantime, Americans have, in theory, a free press.

And those of us who work for it, especially in independent media, have an obligation to move beyond the politics to honestly portray the whole messy, complicated, contradictory, diaphanous, impossible story.