The Feminists, Gays, and Lesbians Who Support the Bans

Stop framing the battle over "gender-affirming care" as left versus right.

This was the last op-ed of the year that I tried to get in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Time, Persuasion and several others. It seems like part of the problem is that I no longer include much personal in these pieces. Sure, I’d love to talk about my family’s experiences, but I’ve done that, and honestly, there’s nothing new to report. My kid is how I started this work. What I learned in the gender rabbit hole is why I continued it.

This piece, like many others I’ve written intended for mainstream media, attempts to explain to liberals why they have permission to dissent. I hope some of you with family members who disagree can send this to them.

-LD

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Earlier this month, outside the Supreme Court building, two parallel rallies took place. On the left side was an ACLU-sponsored gathering of those against Tennessee’s ban on youth gender medicine—the issue being heard inside the court. They wore lavender hats and scarves with the words “Freedom to be ourselves.” They carried signs that read “Let Trans Kids Bloom” and “Trans Health Care Saves Lives.” Speakers ranging from trans activist MC Peppermint to actress Annette Bening, mother of a trans kid, passionately declared their support for trans kids.

On the right side of the divide were familiar right-wing names, crooning the greatest hits of youth gender medicine opposition. Matt Walsh vowed to keep fighting until “trans ideology is entirely erased from the earth.” Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke of “demons in those that worship evil, that are abusing our children.”

But also there, among Republicans and Christian conservatives, was an oft- overlooked cohort, Walsh’s and Greene’s strange bedfellows: gays, lesbians, and feminists holding signs like “Moms Against Mastectomies for Minors,” “Democrats Against Puberty Blockers,” and “Puberty Blockers = Anti-Gay.”

That’s right, these LGBs and liberals were there to support Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender surgeries.

The heated battle over gender-affirming care is often portrayed as left versus right, but the truth is far more complicated. Even as LGB and T have been huddled into one complex coterie, and then teamed with Q for queer, I for intersex, and A for asexual, we’re told that gender and sexuality are separate: one is whom you go to bed as, the other whom you go to bed with. But that’s not what a robust body of evidence suggests.

Studies show that most people who suffered from childhood-onset gender dysphoria found it resolved by the end of puberty. The majority of those kids, especially the boys, grew up to be gay. There’s an established relationship between childhood gender nonconformity and later homosexuality. As psychiatrist Richard Green, author of The Sissy Boy Syndrome, noted back in 1987, feminine boys “are far more likely to mature into homosexual or bisexual men than are most boys.”

The biological development that these controversial drugs delay—puberty—may be correlated to the resolution of gender dysphoria, though we don’t know if time or the physical changes account for the improvement. The one thing that seems to profoundly change that trajectory is social transition, in which children and adolescents live as the opposite sex. This may lead to worsening gender dysphoria at puberty and increase the likelihood of medicalization—that is, social transition may ease immediate suffering, but later result in worse suffering and the most invasive treatment.

Because puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones have been used in the past to chemically castrate gay people—and are still used to chemically castrate sex offenders—some see these interventions as a continuation of that abuse: chemical castration of kids who would grow up to be gay. To these gay adults, many of whom were gender nonconforming children, telling feminine boys and masculine girls that they don’t belong in their biological category, that they can or should be the opposite (or neither) sex is both deeply sexist and a form of conversion therapy. It’s changing nonconforming kids into conforming kids, they say, and changing gay kids into straight kids.

Hence the signs many carried before the Supreme Court: “Gender Medicine = Conversion Therapy,” and “Stop Transing Gay Kids.” One lesbian’s sign read “I Am a Childhood Desister.”

The writer Ben Appel stood in front of the Supreme Court on December 4^th and said in a speech, “I’m angry that organizations that were founded by and for gay and lesbian people are now backing medical practices that attempt to medically engineer young gay people into straight adults.” He calls youth gender medicine “the new homophobia.”

Jamie Reed, a former anarchist organizer, married to a trans man who has since detransitioned to live as a lesbian, blew the whistle last year on “permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care” at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital. “I was able to see what so many have been able to see from the start, when they are not distracted by the ideas of kindness and civil rights,” she said at the rally. “Children do not have the capacity to make a decision to try to pretend to change their sex.”

Roy Eappen, a gay, Canadian endocrinologist, spoke of the 50^th anniversary of declassifying homosexuality as a mental illness, and of medical associations’ repeating past mistakes. “Stop helping to trans gay kids,” he said at the rally, directing his comments at the Endocrine Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Psychiatric Association. “We should support kids to become who they are and let them decide when they get to an age when they can decide for themselves.”

The majority of Americans, regardless of party affiliation, agree. In a 2022 poll, almost 70 percent opposed puberty blockers, and 60 percent opposed cross-sex hormones, for youth. More Americans think health insurance companies should be allowed to decline to cover these medical interventions. And despite supporters’ claims that gender-affirming care is life-saving and evidence-based, all around the world, government health agencies have evaluated the unsettled science behind these medical interventions and found evidence of their efficacy to be anything but clear. Much of the UK has banned puberty blockers, as Republicans have—for scientific, not political reasons.

One rallying cry of youth gender medicine supporters has been “No debate.” Attending to the arguments of those against pediatric and adolescent gender transition has been dismissed as “bothsides-ism,” or “false balance”—decrying one side as unfalsifiably correct and the other as unfailingly hateful.

The gathering in front of the Supreme Court on December 4^th should dispel that notion. There are not only two sides; there are many. There is, in fact, a debate. The argument isn’t over rights—it’s over the safest and most effective way to treat gender dysphoria. It’s over the relationship between gender nonconformity and homosexuality. It’s over how to understand kids who are different from their same-sex peers.

The objections of liberals, lesbians, gays, and feminists must now be heard. Youth gender medicine is—or at least should be—politically nonbinary.