What I Wish I'd Said

If I'd had the courage, the knowledge and the support I have now

This week, Stephanie Davies-Arai, founder of Transgender Trend, received the British Empire Medal in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. The importance of such recognition cannot be overstated. Long before many of us realized that some children and families were being hurt by a movement that sells itself on rescuing them, Stephanie was sounding the alarm about overmedicating gender dysphoric kids. For her tireless campaigning, Stephanie was called many names, but it never deterred her, and now she’s been recognized as helping children get proper, evidence-based care.

I was among the many, many journalists either ignoring the alarm people like her were sounding, or drowning it out with other voices. When I, too, was called many names for my own writing, I took a different tack. I sat down with some of the people who critiqued me and asked them to explain what they thought I got wrong, and then I worked their ideas into my book TOMBOY, about the science, psychology and history of gender nonconforming girls, and about where our ideas of normal for boys and girls come from—the book Stephanie is holding in her hands (!) in the Daily Mail article about her.

In the book, I was mostly, though not completely, ignorant and/or uncritical of the ideas and malpractices she’s worked so hard to expose. My pushback was gentle, asking experts, for instance, how to tell the difference between a tomboy and a trans boy (evaluation, distress, time), and wondering casually about how many non-binary people seemed to be responding to stereotypes as if they were biological, not, for the most part, cultural.

The book was not an exposé. My goal was to understand gender nonconformity and help other people accept it, to see it as a normal variation and not make decisions about a child’s trajectory based on how much they hew, or don’t, to stereotypes in childhood, or how much they perform their gender role, or the gender role of the opposite sex. I used language like “sex assigned at birth,” because, like many people, I had come to believe that this was the appropriate and respectful terminology. I hired two trans sensitivity readers out of my own pocket. Thus, as one person who recently read it said, “It has genderwoo.”

My editor, to her credit, said at the time, “This is your book. Write what you want.” But what I wanted was a truce in the gender culture wars. What I wanted was to be agnostic. What I wanted was to respect the talking point of trans people offended by the presumption that it was worse to be trans. I’m an old fashioned liberal. I like pluralism. And I assumed that there was a way to determine which kids were trans and what they needed, because I know adults who medically transitioned and are happier for it, feeling it’s worth the risks.

But I was also, admittedly, seeking approval on some level from those who’d criticized me. They told me that I couldn’t be too nuanced because my words would be used in right wing attempts to oppress trans people. They listed the points I should hit: that sex is complicated. That perhaps the rise in numbers is the result of more acceptance. That everyone has an innate gender identity. I didn’t push back much, both because I didn’t feel emotionally strong enough and I didn’t have the scientific knowledge to do so. Nor, as a freelancer, did I have any institutional support. That is, I neither had the words to say, nor the courage or support to utter them.

But I knew the story wasn’t quite what it seemed. After my New York Times op-ed in 2017, several people reached out to me to tell me they felt proto-gay kids were being misidentified as transgender and pushed into medicating. Or, as they put it to me, “Gay kids are being medically experimented on by pharmaceutical companies.” It sounded like right-wing conspiracy theory but, well, it also sounded… plausible? When I announced I was writing TOMBOY, and wanted to interview people of all backgrounds and all identities, some people demanded I include detransitioners. I consulted a friend who’d written a book about trans teens. She urged me not to use that word, and said the numbers were so small it wasn’t worth the bother. So did the people I’d sat down with, the ones who’d critiqued me. I didn’t know then what I know now: We have no idea how many detransitioners there are. (But plenty have spoken up, and I’m certain more will.)

Look away, they all said. So I did. I looked away.

And then, last year, I peeked. And then I peaked. By the time the paperback of TOMBOY was coming out last December, I had spent months inside a rabbit hole I had both ignored and hadn’t really known existed when I wrote the book (yes, these contradictions can coexist). And what I saw was jaw-dropping, frightening and sad. But I couldn’t rewrite the book, or even write a new foreword. I could only make slight changes that wouldn’t shift the pagination, and I did the best I could. Thus, please read the paperback edition!

Since then, I’ve gone even deeper down the rabbit hole. I found out about the low-quality of the research on what we now call gender affirming care for children, but were once called sex changes. Or that some of the drugs we prescribe to gender dysphoric children are those once used for chemically castrating gay people, and still used to chemically castrate sex offenders. I found out that we have no long-term research on kids who transition, that we have new cohorts of adolescents never before seen, many with complex psychological or neurological issues, and that the suicide statistics are overblown and that the vast majority of children with gender dysphoria desist and a majority grow up to be gay. (For more, check out my piece in Skeptic).

None of that is in TOMBOY. If the publishing industry, and the media which has refused most of my pitches, become more open to telling complex stories about this subject, it will be in the next book, a proposal for which I have ready.

But that book, too, will be nuanced. I’ve come to know many more trans people since I’ve begun trying harder to tell a complicated story—mostly adult transexuals (yes, many use this word) who changed their bodies either to alleviate their dysphoria or satisfy their autogynephilia-fueled desires and who object to the tenets of trans activism and gender identity ideology. That is, they accept their biological sex. Many are concerned about what children are being taught about sex and gender and the rush to medicate kids identifying as trans. My embrace of these people angers some purists on the right or the gender-critical left. But I’m used to being a square peg, and I can’t be neatly slotted into one ideology. I will not stop listening to many points of view, even if occasionally I lose track of my own.

I have no one position on how gender dysphoria should be treated, or on trans kids. My position is that we in the left/center media, myself included, have been remiss in how we’ve reported this story. My duty, now, is to try to get all the information out to my fellow liberals, so that we can work with the same material, from the same knowledge base, to figure out how to help both gender dysphoric children and gender nonconforming children; sometimes those categories overlap, and sometimes they don’t.

When TOMBOY first came out, one review in a conservative publication sneered that it was an apology to the Brooklyn neighbors I’d offended with my NYT op-ed. I didn’t see it that way. I was proud of myself for reaching out to people who disagreed with me, for learning to see things from their point of view. And I know some of my new readers will disagree with what’s in the book now.

TOMBOY was not an apology, and neither is this. It’s an explanation of my evolution, not just in terms of the knowledge I now have, or the courage I’ve developed, but the support that’s now out there for those of us wanting to speak up. The medal Stephanie Davies-Arai has received will help more of us have courage, knowledge and support, and allow more of us to raise our voices.