What’s going to happen? That’s a question many of us in the gender world ask one another, and ourselves, regularly. We look at reforms in Europe—tenuous, in some cases, tentative, but sometimes bold—with envy. At least they’ve acknowledged the low quality of evidence, the existence of detransitioners, and the patient population that veered wildly—and increased exponentially—from what clinicians had expected. Here, we’re so busy arguing that there’s a person called a woman, or a thing called truth, that we haven’t quite gotten to have a conversation about The Issue: how to treat youth gender dysphoria, and what that relationship is or should be to medical or psychological transition. Shorthand: trans kids.
So what will happen here? One prediction: it will be a never-ending culture war. Completing a trifecta with guns and abortion, each state will dictate what reality it subscribes to, medicalizing (or not) accordingly.
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Another: The Supreme Court will eventually strike the whole thing down, and some adolescents and adults will seek hormones on the black market, as they used to. Now that they’ve agreed to hear a case about Tennessee’s bans, we’ll get an answer on this scenario soon. Will United States v. Skrmetti’s argument, that the bans are discriminatory because they outlaw interventions only for transition, and “leaves the same treatments entirely unrestricted if they are prescribed for any other purpose”? Or will Tennessee lawyers successfully push back on the idea that this is “healthcare for transgender children”—as opposed to treatments that create juvenile transsexuals, as their way of coping or soothing their suffering? Will the lawyers be able to successfully disrupt the talking point that these treatments are evidence-based and life-saving? Considering the US’s only real long-term follow-up study of transitioned youth shows a shockingly high suicide rate, it’s possible they will.
But here’s one more option: the elites will reject gender identity and its accompanying belief system, leaving the plebes and the masses to navigate its wake. That is, gender will be the new smartphone.
In the past couple of decades, as wealthier kids accessed laptops, iPads, and smartphones, we heard a cry for equity: We must get one of these highly addictive, attention-draining, mental health-ruining devices into the hands of every child, no matter how disadvantaged! Cut to: We have a decent amount of data about how bad this tech revolution has been for children—enough to suggest warning labels on social media. Thus, the wealthiest kids, especially offspring of tech execs, now increasingly have analog childhoods.
Perhaps something similar will happen with gender. Rather than follow England’s lead by prohibiting the teaching of the “contested theory of gender identity” in schools, we will segregate those teachings by class. The most privileged children will go to schools where, in place of social justice teachings, they learn critical thinking, math, literature, life skills, and job skills. And perhaps those lower on the totem pole won’t. Parents will have to pay thousands of dollars for things like academics and sports, and our tax dollars will cover training the most advantaged to see themselves as such, with no path to redemption or improvement, no social or financial mobility, no possibility of accruing power. It will fade in popularity among the elite, but these ideas will reverberate among the masses for years to come.
What will a gender-analog childhood look like? My hope is that it’s not a return to “traditional” gender roles, with girls in white dresses and mary janes and finger curls and football-toting boys spouting locker-room talk. I hope that “gender-affirming care” and “gender-inclusive curriculum” turns into somewhere between one and three sentences a year, starting in kindergarten. Some iteration of this: “Girls and boys can look and act all kinds of different ways.”
Of course, my hope is that this version of a gender-analog childhood can make its way to all kids–and that all kids have access to schools that teach critical thinking and math. Is that possible? Maybe. But it feels so far off that I haven’t been able to conjure it.