What Should the Future Look Like?
An open thread
I just spent several years writing a book about what went horribly wrong with gender-affirming care—about how our society didn’t have room for, or understanding of, gender nonconforming children, and how we overcorrected in ways that did serious damage.
An early reader of the manuscript asked me: What now? She noted that I’d spent all this time documenting how people and institutions failed, and even what should have been. But here we are, with Supreme Court rulings and executive orders and Democrats and medical associations still digging in and the first detransitioner to win a lawsuit and silence from the mainstream media and…it’s not clear what needs to happen now, or how to make it happen, when likely thousands of kids have transitioned, and families still believe their kids needed to. She wanted me to envision the next iteration of the world, reckoning with what was and what should have been.
I have always advocated that “gender education,” if it needs to exist, should be this: “Boys and girls can look and act all kinds of ways.” That’s all a teacher needs to say. But we’ve got a generation of kids trained to believe in gender identity and to interweave sex and sex stereotypes, and a generation of professionals trained to believe that if they don’t affirm those ideas, they’re causing harm.
That’s why my long-term solutions have focused on viewpoint diversity, critical thinking, free speech, and constructive disagreement. Rather than teach what I think about gender identity, I’d like teachers to educate about the controversies around it. I don’t want to replace one ideology with another that I agree with. I want to move away from ideological education and medicine.
I wrote a school guide to gender controversies for schools that never got tested (please, if you’re interested in taking it for a spin, DM me), and I’d like to see more of that. HRC and Gender Spectrum and many other advocacy groups created curricula and guidelines and norms. We have to pull some of those back, or replace them with those of our own design.
But I don’t see many groups doing that.
So I put it to you. What’s the future you want to see and how would you get us there—not based on what you wish the world was like, but based on how it is, today, right here in this crazy country? Knowing that some states have created sanctuaries and others bans, that we’re deeply divided, that we’re in a time of tumult: what could and should rise, Phoenix-like, from these ashes?
Comments are open to all.
Good question!
Personally, I don't like that this had to come to state-level bans and litigation and whatnot, but the upside is that more people feel empowered to speak openly against gender ideology--and are secure in doing so. The power of the gender jihadists to take away people's jobs, housing, and educational opportunities, although still too strong in my mind, is waning. The more of us who can express opposition, the fewer of us who will suffer censure for doing so.
And that's how I want the future to look. Robust discussion and examination, subjecting gender ideology to the scrutiny that should have been applied fifteen years ago. Late is better than never.
My perspective is shaped by five years of intense clinical work with trans identifying teens, young adults, and their parents. Another very important aspect of my work has been in teaching and mentoring other clinicians who are willing to do this work but haven’t had the kind of support that it takes to sit in extreme tension with these very fragile (and brittle) kids day in and day out.
What I think of as “traditional” psychotherapy (neither gender affirming nor gender critical, but rather inviting and embracing complexity) requires ongoing study, supervision, and peer support. The mental health professions need to take a serious look into how and why these supports eroded because when vacuums get filled by ideologies the most vulnerable people end up paying the price.