Yes We CAN-SG!

Notes from inside the building

via Jane Symons/Twitter

BROADview in Brief will be less brief this week, covering last week’s and this week’s news because I’ve been traveling so much—driving on the “wrong” side of the room while jetlagged and under-slept—that I haven’t gotten to it. You’ll get a double-dose later in the week. In the meantime, here’s a dispatch from one stop on my voyage.
—LD

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I walked past a small group of protesters and thought, with relief: Seems like a reasonable crowd. It was about 9:15 on Saturday, March 23, and some angry youngfolk were snapping pictures of anyone who walked into the First Do No Harm conference, held by the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender, or CAN-SG. I guess the protestors were trying to shame us or warn us that we’d forever be associated with this hate-fueled and hate-filled gathering of transphobes parading as a medical conference, though perhaps they hadn’t read the group’s self-identification: “a coalition of clinicians to campaign for clearer dialogue, better data collection, rigorous science and improved treatment options for gender dysphoria.” Where’s the hate? I figured I’d go out later and interview a few of the objectors, since I’m perennially interested in multiple sides of this polygonal story.

Upstairs, we were settling in to hear about things like child safeguarding and how to train clinicians, when my friend checked her phone and discovered that the protest had grown, and those who’d arrived later couldn’t get in the building. We took the elevator down to the ground floor to see what was happening.

At first, I thought I was smelling my own hair, perhaps a tad singed from my American hair dryer, which had sparked when I’d plugged it into the powerful British electrical outlet (as I’ve now learned you’re not to do). But it turned out the protesters had thrown smoke grenades, and the smoke was now billowing through the lobby. Outside, I heard, were now 150 protestors—about the same number of conference attendees, per my completely unscientific estimation. They chanted and drummed and screamed that inside people were doing harm, and then the blocked the entrances. The police had to push past to make a path for attendees.

It was so strange to be sheltered in the building, safely watching. It was even stranger to be the person on this side of the protests—with the protestees. I’d always been the one with a homemade sign marching on Washington for abortion rights or against the Iraq war or pussy hat-less at the Women’s March after Trump was elected. (I hadn’t gotten the memo about the hats—but I don’t hate them as many women I admire do.) On the other hand, I’d never been violent toward the people I protested, or tried to prevent them from speaking.

Perhaps strangest of all was the difference between the accusations of the protestors and the reality of the conference. CAN-SG is doing harm, protestors asserted, but four flights up, they were talking about evidence-based medicine, supporting gender diversity, giving children room for identity exploration in adolescence, and creating an environment where concerned clinicians could speak up—in order to do best by their patients and clients. If only the protestors had actually listened. But one can’t drum and scream and listen concomitantly, can one?  

England figured out before America did that something was wrong. As Hannah Barnes detailed in Time to Think, several clinicians tried to blow the whistle on their pediatric gender clinic GIDS’ practices—not properly evaluating children, fast-tracking them toward serious psychological and medical interventions. That happened not so long after America expanded on those same practices. There are many reasons for the Brits’ prescience, including centralized and socialized medicine, and the fact that the bulk of these practices took place at two clinics. It was easier to keep track and see the harm.

In America, institutions from mass media to medical associations have prevented much of the public—at least the liberal half of it—from seeing those harms. Protestors are welcome to argue that we should look away, and to keep their own blinders off. But they have no right to stop others from speaking about what they’ve already seen.

Back to the conference: A few moments, however small, really touched me. One was when a presenter said that most of us know that many kids self-diagnosing as gender dysphoric or self-IDing as trans are repeating scripts—but whose scripts? The implication—the thing we know but it’s a bit hard to prove—is that these scripts originated with and mostly benefit autogynephiles. Who benefits from a society in which the boundaries of sex and gender are blurred, in which not passing is no impediment to identifying into a category? AGPs.

Another moment: Stella O’Malley talking about some detransitioned women looking into surgery to shave their thickened vocal chords: the endless seeking of cures, of interventions, the inability to ever recover from the feeling that your body is wrong. O, how we need to learn to tolerate these unpleasant feelings and move toward radical acceptance. But who’s helping young people learn such things?

In some ways, the most poignant moment came near the very end of the day, when a middle-aged woman with polycystic ovarian syndrome, or PCOS, told her story. She’d been a real tomboy kid, which was fine. Then, during young womanhood, whiskers bloomed on her chin; the hormonal imbalance had caused her to grow a beard, and with it a forest of shame through which she’d wandered for most of her days. She’d tried to hide it in various ways throughout the years, but eventually she’d found a partner and had children and had decided to just own her difference and move through the world with it, other humans be damned! It was hard. Every day it was hard—to see the cognitive dissonance she caused in others, to have to defend herself as a member of her sex. But she was so glad that no one had interfered with her body when she was younger.  

In some ways, she experienced what many trans people report: having to convince others that your reality is theirs, too. The big difference being: there is such thing as reality and she is actually female! But we created a generation with pseudo-intersex conditions, who will be mimicking her experience for life. How will we reckon with that? How will we help them—emotionally, physically? Because they, too, will eventually have to arrive at radical acceptance if they want to suffer less.

The conference reiterated for me how this movement hasn’t actually made space for gender nonconforming people; rather, it’s tried to put everyone in the same uncomfortable position, to weaken us all so no one is stronger. Gender nonconforming kids, and adults, have a harder time navigating the Western world, it’s true. We still have no cultural understanding of them, some way to acknowledge them and move on, as is my hope. I want it to be No Big Deal. In the meantime, we’ve got to strengthen these kids, not weaken everyone else. Yeah, you’ll be given a hard time in the bathroom. You can handle it.

I’m under-slept and jet-lagged and overwhelmed and slightly over-Guinnessed, but I just kept thinking about how the acronym TGNC is the culprit in all this: transgender and gender nonconforming. Their linking pushes T into the mainstream and also makes all gender nonconforming related to it, as Colin Wright eloquently demonstrated. It makes meaning of gender nonconformity when we can’t forecast the future from the way a child hews or doesn’t to stereotypes and norms. Shouldn’t it be GGNC—gay and gender nonconforming? Actually, shouldn’t it just be GNC, with no associations? Actually, shouldn’t it just be boy or girl and no reason to categorize people because of their haircuts or clothes or the sex of their playmates?

Shoulds and oughts, my gramma used to say, tsk-tsking at me with a finger wag. Not useful words. There is only how it is, and how we want it to be, and how to accept the former while trying to move toward the latter. Don’t stop moving, everyone. Don’t let anybody block your entrance or silence your voice.