The Whole Point Was Invisibility
Youth gender medicine and the irony of TDoV
The reason youth gender medicine began was not because adults fared so well after transition, but because they didn’t. The first time I heard this startling fact was when SEGM’s Zhenya Abbruzzese said it on Gender: A Wider Lens. Clinicians attributed post-op transsexual adults’ high rate of suicide and poor mental health to their inability to pass. Therefore, “Lowering this age might increase the incidence of ‘false positives’, but should also result in higher percentages of individuals who would more easily pass into the cross sex role than if treatment commenced well after the development of secondary characteristics,” per a 1998 Dutch paper. “It may therefore result in a lower incidence of transsexuals with postoperative regrets.”
In other words: Sure, we may have regretters and detransitioners, but more of those who do transition will fare better. Hard to understand the math on this. But anyway: the whole point was to allow people to pass, to fit in and fade into the background, to swim in the mainstream (and whatever other metaphor I can extend). Thus, a day of visibility is actually anathema to the entire project. If trans people are to be visible, then passing is no longer either a requirement for happiness, nor a suicide deterrent—not that anyone has successfully provided evidence that early intervention is linked to either of those things.
There were other problems with the whole “passing into the cross-sex role” aspect of this experimental protocol. It required those who transitioned to withhold the truth, even if it protected them from getting harassed in public. And it certainly did nothing to increase our understanding of and tolerance for gender diversity; if anything, the path to passing undermines it.
I don’t think those people who have transitioned should have to stay invisible, but I do think that what we’re grappling with is the imposition of the subjective reality of a small group onto the masses. In a sense, it makes the rest of us invisible, makes objective reality invisible, makes the truth invisible, because we cannot name it. Though it was a coincidence that Trans Day of Visibility fell on Easter this year, there is something that makes sense about the overlap to me, something about rising from the dead, defying the laws of nature and physics, the mysticism, the willing of something into reality.
TDoV began in 2010, to counteract negative press about trans people. A person named Rachel Crandall, head of Transgender Michigan, “hoped to create a day where people could celebrate the lives of transgender people, while still acknowledging that due to discrimination, not every trans person can or wants to be visible,” per GLAAD, that bastion of high-quality information.
A lot of people would like to be more visible, including women getting trounced by men in sports, women getting assaulted by men in prison, parents having their children turned against them by interfering therapists and school professionals. A lot of people have slinked into invisibility against their will, and most liberals have no idea what’s happening because these stories are so underrepresented or distorted in the press. I’m not asking transgender people to hide themselves. I’m asking for the whole complex story to be seen and understood.
And most of all, I’m asking us to consider this possibility: If visibility is the point, then perhaps youth gender medicine is no longer needed.
Trans activism, in this era, is a genuinely tragic case study in how social media can undermine the goals of a movement while pretending to serve it. The people in the trans activist space who seem to get the most oxygen from "allies" are people who pursue goals that are out of step with the needs of ordinary trans people--but they keep getting the oxygen, because social media runs on attention, and you will get either no attention, or only negative attention, from signal-boosting the trans activists who challenge the narrative.
If the medical scandal around youth transition breaks, and it renders performative support for trans people toxic, that radioactivity may (in the long run) be good for trans people in general, because one of the things damaging the group is the dominance of their activist wing by people who have attention-getting goals that HARM THE REPUTATION OF THE GROUP. Every success for youth gender medicine, every "win" for direct unfettered competition between women and trans women, is a loss for trans people.
The activists are an albatross for that cadre, but if the chickens come home to roost on this stuff, then the smart, reasonable activists may have a shot at flushing them out.
Thank you so much for this post.
There is so much that is backwards about the ideology.
Several years ago, the Nigerian (feminist) writer who wrote Half a Yellow Sun was asked about feminism and trans women. She refused to parrot the line that transwomen are women.
Instead, she said that transwomen and transwomen.
She said that she respected this journey as a unique experience that comes with its own challenges. She went on to say that she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to deny that experience by suggesting that transwomen were the same as biological women (my words for the last part).
How naive!
It wasn’t enough and there was a controversy at the time. I’m pretty sure she has kept her mouth shut on this topic since. Not to criticize her for that.
Thank God for JK Rowling!!