Alice Dreger has, with effort, learned to accept that historians are always too late with advice; people don’t listen until after it’s all over.
A group of transgender activists has achieved a major victory—the shutting down of the Child Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). Even better from their point of view, they got the head of it, psychologist Ken Zucker, fired.
The activists didn’t like Zucker because he never did subscribe to the “true transgender” model of identity, wherein you simply accept what any child (no matter how young) says about his or her gender. The transgender activists who called for his ouster insisted that Zucker was doing “reparative therapy,” trying to talk children out of being transgender when they “really” were.
I don’t doubt that these particular transgender adults look back and see that, from very early on, they had been assigned a gender that didn’t make sense for them. The mistake they make is then to assume that every child who expresses doubt about his or her birth gender assignment should simply be “affirmed” by parents and clinicians in their “new” gender.
It’s the other minds problem, as always. You can’t ever know that other people are thinking exactly what you thought in what you take to be the same situation. You just can’t. It’s all guesswork and extrapolation, and it’s inherently fallible.
This is an unbelievably simplistic understanding of what’s going on with these children. Yes, some of them will grow up to be transgender; Zucker and others have documented that, over and over again. But if history is a guide, the majority will not. Trying to make sure they all get the best care they need is the goal of clinics like Zucker’s, as well as the clinics run by other good folks at the children’s hospitals of UCLA, Northwestern, Seattle, and on and on.
Why not just go ahead and transition everyone who expresses doubt about his or her birth gender assignment? Because physical transition is a big deal. On the other hand starting early with kids who won’t later regret it is much better than waiting. There are reasons both ways. That’s why it’s important to get it right.
For many years, there was pretty heavy medical gatekeeping around sex reassignment. This had some to do with homophobia, heterosexism, and so on, and some to do with defensive medicine (fear of being sued if a patient later regretted transitioning). Today, the pendulum has swung really hard in the other direction. It is now much, much easier for children, adolescents, and adults who signal that they are transgender to gain access to social gender changes, hormone therapies, and sex changing surgeries. This has a lot to do with political rejection of homophobia, heterosexism, transphobia and so on, and some to do with defensive medicine (fear of being attacked as anti-transgender).
In other words, it’s still pretty damned political. Whereas before, some people who would have benefitted from transition were denied it, today some people who might benefit from alternative clinical help (alternative to transition) are effectively denied that help and are instead being “treated” with transition.
Dreger links to people who have later changed their minds about transitioning.
There are more and more of these, and they are typically not written by people who are anti-transgender by any means. They are written by people who realize transition isn’t what they needed after all. They are written by people who urge caution.
Many people today are afraid to urge caution, because when you do, you get labeled anti-trans, and sometimes coopted by genuinely anti-trans people. But some people are willing to talk in private or to speak pseudonymously. So, earlier this year for WIRED magazine, I interviewed a thirty-something woman I called Jess. She had been a gender nonconforming female child and was skeptical about sending children too quickly down the road of transition.
Today, in the clinics presumably the transgender activists want, a gender nonconforming, gender-questioning child like Jess would simply be transitioned over and sent out into the world. But Jess told me that, today, “I’m very happy having the body I have, with just some changes in how I express it.” She identifies as a genderqueer gay person with a female body (the body type she was born with), and works on LGBT rights issues professionally. She’s not anti-trans.
Not a bad outcome, is it?
The transgender activists who demanded and ultimately achieved the shut-down of Zucker’s CAMH clinic said that Zucker’s approach was full of stigma. That’s because he didn’t simply “gender affirm” every child that came by. He worked with them to figure out what they needed psychologically. For some, that was transition. For others, it was coming to see that you could be gender nonconforming without changing your sex, or dealing with depression or bi-polar disorder, or dealing with the mental health needs of parents who were not well enough to really care for their children as their children deserved. It was a pretty idiosyncratic approach, designed to help each individual child be the most healthy in the long run, no matter which label she or he came to inhabit. Again, for some children, that meant transition (becoming “T”), and for those children, Zucker arranged puberty-blocking hormones and then hormonal and surgical transition.
The trouble is, Zucker didn’t do the community education and outreach that was needed.
I so wish Zucker had done the “community education” that this review called for. Now it is too late. For years, I and others advised Zucker to be far more proactive in terms of the politics in which he was caught—to reach out to the public to directly engage them in conversation about the methods and reasoning of his clinic’s approach, the same approach used in many top clinics around the world. As late as this summer, I gave him a lot of the advice I also recently gave to the International Society for Intelligence Research about how to work to protect yourself in politically difficult fields (see video).
But Ken seemed to believe that he didn’t need to deal with the activists coming after him. He disregarded my repeated advice. As a consequence, what has happened to him reminds me very much of what happened to Napoleon Chagnon, as recounted in chapters five and six of Galileo’s Middle Finger. It’s the Galilean personality, stuck on the belief that truth will save you. Wrong. The Church of True Gender doesn’t give a crap what science shows.
But people don’t listen to historians until it’s too late.
Comments
61 responses to “Stuck on the belief that truth will save you”
I’m in Ken Zucker’s camp on this. We’re supposed to be a few centuries past the days when a church not only got to ignore reality but could also meddle in it.
He shouldn’t have to spend time or money on PR. This BS shouldn’t even come up. How did liberation and anti-bigotry get so twisted while I wasn’t looking for a decade or two?
Isn’t that where puberty-blockers are useful? If the kid realizes they were cisgender after all, they just go off the blockers.
@ #1
No, he definitely shouldn’t have, but real politik or whatever demands a pragmatic approach.
The bizarre thing for me is that these beliefs (which seem to run something like ‘if a child likes something traditionally associated with the other gender, they are that other gender’) quite blatantly buy into the most antiquated ideas on gender. A child that puts a dress on is a girl! irrespective of the fact that e.g. a five year old is too young to really know whether they are ‘supposed to’ like dresses or not. And yet I have seen it said that ages as young as three should be taken at their word when they do ‘girl’ or ‘boy’ things, and should begin physical transition as soon as possible. Being that such physical changes can be hard or impossible to undo, it seems that the cautions approach is best: talk it over, try to differentiate between say a boy that has an early interest in [traditionally female hobby] vs. a boy that is genuinely trans.
And yet, I get the distinct impression that these types also oppose gender essentialism in terms of interests; that they would balk at such statements as mathematics is more of a guy thing and such. Which strikes me as contradictory.
Holms, they’d probably encourage people who don’t act according to gender essentialist stereotypes to label themselves “gender-nonconforming”. Most of the people trying to claim trans advocacy will help feminism apparently think what will work best is for everyone to have their own gender label.
The Owl Of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.
@4 Holms
You seem to not have the faintest idea of what transgender children actually experience; but worse, I don’t think you want to know.
I know one 4 year old who wasn’t too young to tell his parents, after 3 months of preschool, “We need to talk. I need a boy name. And I don’t mean pretend, I mean a boy name for real.” (quick backdrop – from the time this child began engaging in imaginary play, every single imagination session – often a dozen or more per day – started with the same template phrase, “Okay! My name is [Michael, Collin, Jake] and I am a boy [dog, hamster, teenager, etc]). When this 4 year old’s mother responded to the request with, “What do you mean? How long do you want a boy name?” he replied, “Forever, mommy. I want a boy name until I am dead.” And this same 4-year-old, after one day of “okay, we’ll let you use a boy name, but let’s just try it around the house to see how you like it”, sat his parents right back down “You need to talk to my teacher. She isn’t letting me use my boy name.”
I think you read the above and wonder how truthful it is. That perhaps I’m lying (or delusional), because child-development expert that you are, you believe 4 and 5 year olds are all simpletons with brains too underdeveloped to understand such a deep question as “Are you a boy or a girl?”.
I don’t think you care how miserable my son was for the 2+ years he had to fight against every aspect of his life that caused others to see him as a girl. That “good parents” would’ve forced their child to continue fighting those battles every day of his life; that, if anything, we didn’t make him fight hard enough, or that we should have coupled those battles with intense clinical therapy (i.e. to cure him of his delusions).
From the Zucker review
Zucker’s clinic was the place parents sent their trans kids to be “cured”; an idea no less out of touch with human nature than clinics where parents could send their gay kids to be “cured”.
I don’t think you care how much better my son’s life got with his transition; using no clinical intervention whatsoever. How the daily tantrums and outbursts just *evaporated* when we finally started respecting what he was actually asking for. I don’t think you want to know how much happier and unstressed his day-to-day life became when we abandoned the strategy of letting him live as a “boyly” girl named Marcy (with “handsome” short hair and “awesome” androgynous girls clothing); and just let him be a boy name Mark (note – not my son’s actual name).
If I’m mis-characterizing your views, please let me know. Call it cynical, but I’ve just come to expect that those who believe “Sex is just biological reproductive organs and/or chromosomes; Gender is just a social construct; There is nothing else.” deliberately avoid confronting anyone’s actual experience that suggests otherwise. The enthusiasm for Zucker’s treatment paradigm stems from this: “If gender is just a social construct, then *something* must have talked these transgender kids into their trans-identity; thus it’s sensible to think they can be talked out of it.”
You are using the accusation that people are ignoring and devaluing your kids experiences to ignore and devalue the experiences of others. You should probably stop doing that.
I have a friend who has, in recent memory, claimed to be:
1. A heterosexual cis woman.
2. A lesbian.
3. Ok, some men are ok. Bisexual maybe?
4. No, just a lesbian.
5. Definitely not a lesbian, they’re the worst. Straight woman.
6. A man, interested in women probably? But, you know, open?
She’s also moved long distances repeatedly to start up a new life, each time aggressively adopting the cultural identity of the area to which she moved (she being the pronoun in use at the time). And she’s adopted a variety of sub cultural identities, and then moved on.
I don’t believe gay conversion therapy works. But at some point around (4), my friend probably would have benefited from non judgmental therapy that rejected the “what you say you are is what you are, full stop, anything else is bigotry” model.
He’d probably have benefited from it way back at (1).
From my perspective, my role is to be vaguely supportive and non judgmental. But I can’t help but notice that every identity shift before this one has been fully reversible. I really, really wish that I was confident that this time decisions were being made based on sober, calm self analysis and reflection.
With all due respect, from your comment, your child has been alive for less years than my friend spent as a straight woman in between being a lesbian and a man.
Here’s hoping your extremely young son got everything right on the first try. I mean that sincerely, I wish my friend had as well. But I have nothing but disdain for efforts to use your son’s story to condemn others for acknowledging that other people’s lives aren’t always like his.
FFS Kevin please read the OP. And not just to find something be angry about. Your child is not the only child on the planet.
@Patrick
I was responding directly to the comment “which seem to run something like ‘if a child likes something traditionally associated with the other gender, they are that other gender’”; and making the point that this does not accurately describe what most transgender kids experience. I was not trying to make my son into a representative sample of what all transgender individuals experience, so much as a tangible example of the pattern of trans expression (a pattern common to just about every other gender-transitioned child I’ve met or read about). Conversations with parents has convinced me that trans kids’ experience with gender much more closely aligns with what I described; and goes way beyond “I do [or do not] like wearing dresses”. I’m unaware of any case, ever, of parents changing a child’s name & gender identity based solely on “Jimmy sure does like playing with dolls and wearing tu-tu’s; heck, he must be a girl, let’s call him “Sallly”. And yet that is the exact caricature that seems to be so unshakable among transgender-dissenters.
The broader blogpost pertains to youth treatment facilities and the debate is over the healthiest way to treat/raise transgender kids. In that context, yes, your friend’s adult experiences could matter ever bit as much as my son’s. But the contextually pertinent points would be along the lines of:
How did your friend experience gender at a young age?
How did your friend express his gender at a young age?
How was that expression received by his care-givers (Was it respected/accepted? Treated / “cured”? Discouraged/suppressed? Dismissed/ignored?)
How did that reception impact his gender, sexuality, and health/happiness later in life?
If it were the case that
1) your friend (presumably born with female anatomy) had expressed a masculine gender identity early in life
and
2) that expression was received openly and respectfully (i.e. leaving him an wholly uncoerced decision of whether he’d prefer to identify as a boy or girl)
and
3) he now feels that a direct interventional approach such as provided by Zucker’s facilities (overriding his desire to go by masculine referents through intense cognitive therapy designed to compel him to accept that he was actually a girl) would have been better for his long-term health & happpiness,
Then I’d consider his experiences to be a 100% applicable counter-point to my case that the shutdown of Zucker’s facilities was merited.
As it is, in no way do I think of your friend’s experiences as trivial or unimportant; but I fail to see how you think they apply to a discussion of treatment facilities for transgender youths.
Heart-warming anecdotes, or chilling horror stories, are NOT enough to base medical/scientific/cultural policy upon.
The activists, who seem to demand instant surgery after the First Cupcake or the First Toolbox, are engaging in an absolute cartoon version of gender essentialism. And the power that adults wield over children is so insidious and extreme that parental reports and wishes MUST be evaluated for what they mean about the parents first. How else can the child’s real needs ever be addressed fairly?
Kevin – please from now on make your point without saying things like “I don’t think you care how miserable my son was.”
@amrie
This bit?
That strikes me as spin. This wasn’t a lack of transparency or community education; this is what happened when an independent review was conducted. When reviewers dug into what was going on, they found the facility’s medical practices to be wanting in key areas.
It’s disingenuous to claim the facility was shut down due to insufficient transparency or outreach, when the facility was actually shut down in response to independent medical reviews bringing its practices to light:
Or were you referring to some other aspect of the OP?
@12 Ophelia
Noted. That was uncalled for; I’ll try to avoid using such rhetoric.
Thank you.
Me, three comments prior:
@11 John the Drunkard
Rarely does a phrase so cleanly fit as “Unshakable caricature” does here.
Kevin- you wrote:
“3) a direct interventional approach such as provided by Zucker’s facilities (overriding his desire to go by masculine referents through intense cognitive therapy designed to compel him to accept that he was actually a girl)”
Substantiate please. Substantiate that this was the approach of this clinic.
The article pretty clearly says that this was NOT the clinics approach, and the material you’ve quoted so far doesn’t substantiate your accusation. The article does say that part of the clinics process was making sure children understand that being gender non conforming doesn’t inherently make you trans, and making sure kids know not to jump to that conclusion. If that’s what you’re referring to, or in fact if you oppose that at all, then I think we’re done here. The LGBT experience has established the importance of that insight (the tendency of kids and teens to treat traditional gender roles and sexual orientation norms as iron clad rules from which any deviation makes you gay is well established; the turmoil this sometimes causes kids and teens is well established; and the importance of recognizing that these categories don’t work like that is as well), and I feel no need to re-litigate it.
John the Drunkard, do you know of instances where sex reassignment surgery is performed on young children? (It used to be commonly performed on intersex children, but there has been a shift to delay such surgeries to a time when the individual involved expresses a view about which genitals are appropriate for them.)
To my knowledge, the first medical intervention in children is puberty blockers (I personally think that if shown to be safe everyone should be getting those so that people would only undergo puberty when they are ready and willing). This treatment is completely reversible.
Care for transgender people is moving towards an informed consent model, just like the rest of medicine. It is part of the move away from the paternalistic model. The age at which one is considered capable of consenting is obviously a factor, and this is going to vary by locale as things tend to do when applying a boundary to a continuum.
@Patrick
From an NPR show:
http://www.npr.org/2008/05/07/90247842/two-families-grapple-with-sons-gender-preferences
I’ve bolded the part that makes me especially amazed to see signs of solidarity from feminists for the termination of his practice..
Kevin Kirkpatrick @19
At face value that does seem damning. I’d be interested to hear from Zucker (or someone familiar with the concepts behind his treatment) why he did that.
Was it because he didn’t ‘believe’ in trans-ness and wanted to force children away from it, because I think that would be both silly and harmful. Or was that action a defined stage in a wider course/view of his treatment. Is it possible that, presented with a nominally trans child, his first action was to remove potentially confounding and reinforcing external behaviours and props from the child’s life and observe what happened? If their behaviour reverted to their assigned sex with no apparent ill effects that might lead to quite a different set of interactions than if they were visibly unhappy and kept trying to express gender differently than expected.
I think we have to be very cautious either attacking or defending Zucker based on public reports. Even the ‘independent’ review. Exactly how independent was it? Who appointed the reviewer(s), what brief were they given and what was their own professional and personal view of best practice which they took into the review with them? Others will know this information but I certainly don’t and I suspect no-one taking part in this discussion does I suspect. I’ve been close to enough independent reviews to have formed the view that while most participants are committed to doing their best work, often the set-up is so flawed 9intentionally or not) that a given outcome is often inevitable.
In Australia and New Zealand one of the largest newspaper publishers is Fairfax. They have an aggregation site called “Stuff”. In the last year there has been a noticable increase in the number of articles and profiles about trans people (almost all trans women). I’ve been very happy to see these articles as generally they have been quietly positive, showing the subjects of the story in a very human and ordinary manner. Often, although not always, family members and friends are quoted and these comments reveal the obvious struggles that came with accepting the desire to express gender differently. There are nearly always muted references to bullying and attempts to force generally accepted behaviour before final acceptance that ‘they are who they are’.
There is one almost universal thread that does make me cringe though, that relates to the trans women stories. At some point there is always a variation on the theme of ” I always knew I was a girl. I liked long hair, make-up, wearing dresses and high heeled shoes and boy bands.”
This just doesn’t ring true of my experience of what it means to be a women through interacting with the women in my life, or indeed the women on this and other fora. It’s performative gender essentialism that is adopting societies blueprint of what being a girl is all about. It’s putting on a cloak and using the cloak to prove that you have skin.
I have no doubt that being trans is a thing. I support trans rights. However, this refusal to allow feminists to question gender and its expression is bullshit that has to stop.
Exactly.
Rob, how does allowing ‘feminists to question gender and its expression is bullshit’ fit with a policy of restricting a child to toys, friends, props etc of their assigned sex to test if they are ‘really’ trans?
How does claiming that his therapy involves prohibiting play with “girlish” toys fit with the claim that he endorses gender reassignment?
I’ll be frank- I consider trans activists to be in a “trust only when you can verify” zone. I’ve been burned enough, and worse, I’ve watched the ever evolving nature of trans discourse for too long to take it at face value. See, eg, the rise and fall of the gender bread man (google it). One parents description of their child’s care means little to me.
Patrick, it fits very well with the ‘jumping through hoops’ model of transgender care. If after jumping through all the hoops presented the kid still insists on being trans, OK, let them.
Anat, I don’t know. That’s because, as I said, I don’t know enough about the totality of the diagnosis and care Zucker offered. All any of us can do is speculate as to his motives and how to interpret that claim until such time as we have quality information from which to judge. As I said @20
and
Sorry about yet another post from me…
Anat, rereading your comment I’d add a couple of things I missed. Zucker wasn’t reported as restricting access to friends of the childs assigned sex, he was reported as saying that under certain conditions the child may not be able to play with girls, who I assume were of the childs trans gender expression. Secondly, surely you are not implying that it is a feminist position to restrict toys and friends to only those of the assigned sex? Because I haven’t done so, neither have I seen any feminist do so. Zucker is reported to have done so in at least some cases, but for reasons we do not actually know or understand and in a context to which we are certainly not privy. Refer to my 26 above.
Forbidding playing with the children of one’s trans gender expression amounts to limiting one’s friendships to kids of one’s assigned sex.
I can tell you that if a therapist seeing my child at any age and at any gender identity had recommended any kind of gender-based restrictions regarding toys, fantasy play, or social activity that therapist would have never seen my child again.
And if a therapist said that to you sans any other context whatsoever your reaction would be entirely correct. No argument from me. I do feel you are being purposely obtuse to my point though. We don’t know the context. maybe Zucker, as part of his assessment of incoming children, feels there is a need to ensure there is not some kind of chameleon response going on. Maybe his further interaction/treatment of the child then takes quite different paths after that point is established one way or the other. If you know for certain one way or the other speak up and cite your source. If not, stop being so indignant about assumed behaviour.
Kevin, I was not saying all kids need to be ignored because they are too stupid to know their gender or anything similar. I hap hoped it was clear when I said “…talk it over, try to differentiate between say a boy that has an early interest in [traditionally female hobby] vs. a boy that is genuinely trans” that some kids were indeed trans, and should not be ignored. I was opposing the idea that all kids are trans simply because they have said something like that; some are truly just kids being uninformed kids, and hence opposing the rush to transition the lot of them.
@ 29 Rob
The whole OP is Alice Dreger being indignant about assumed behaviour. Apparently Zucker had “activists coming after him” from the purported “Church of True Gender” who don’t “give a crap what science shows” (what “science” they don’t give a crap about is completely unexplained).
You’ve said you don’t trust the professional review of Zucker’s facility. Who do you trust? Dreger? Why? What’s her source? (I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s primarily Ken Zucker.)
@ 30 Holms
As Anat said upthread, that’s the whole point of puberty blockers – not to jump the gun. Nobody thinks all gender-nonconforming kids are trans.
Also I don’t get the panic about “early transition”. My understanding is nobody performs any irreversible procedures on children. Nobody advocates any irreversible procedures on children. “Transition” for a pre-pubescent child means a different name, different clothes, maybe a different haircut. What’s the big deal?
…eeeeeesh.
This is so disingenuous and slippery. While it’s true that Zucker is willing to provide hormone therapy for adolescents, Dreger completely neglects to mention that for younger children (<10 years old), Zucker actively discourages them from being transgender. His method of doing so is the "drop the Barbie" approach, suppressing anything that is a "deviation" from typical gender role-playing in order to encourage the child to be "as comfortable as possible in their biological body” (while typically blaming the mother for her child’s “deviation”). He has painted the prospect of transgender adults as "a negative outcome" to be preferably avoided. It is heinous:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110708090921/http://www.brainchildmag.com/essays/fall2001_wilkinson.htm
advocate.com/commentary/2015/02/11/op-ed-finally-some-reliable-research-trans-kids-mine
npr.org/2008/05/07/90247842/two-families-grapple-with-sons-gender-preferences
theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/a-boys-life/307059/
(That article above has problems of its own, like invoking Brizendine’s book about “chattiness” and “poor spatial reasoning” being “hardwired into the female brain”. That…really doesn’t seem to be true.)
A 2003 report in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry called the “preventative” therapy advocated by Zucker and his colleague Susan Bradley as “disturbingly close to to reparative therapy for homosexuals.” I agree. The highest comments on Dreger’s Wired article advocating gender conversion therapy (wired.com/2015/06/big-problem-outlawing-gender-conversion-therapies/) really sum up my feelings for me:
I am not inclined to take Alice Dreger’s word on anything related to transgender issues given that she’s such a close friend of Zucker, Bailey and Blanchard – and especially not if these comments on the families of transgender children attributed to her by The Globe and Mail are accurately reported (the insinuation that transgender children are the result of the parents being mentally ill is nasty and factually untrue):
theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/transgender-kids-have-we-gone-too-far/article16897043/
(That deeply transphobic Globe and Mail article has been thoroughly criticized and debunked by numerous people online, naturally.)
Silentbob @32. If you read what Is aid above it’s pretty clear that I don’t automatically trust anybody in this case. I don’t know the case or the people involved well enough to trust any of them.
I am suspicious of independent reviews because of opportunities I’ve had to sit on the periphery of them. they rend to straddle a very uncomfortable line between expert/technical and political. Maybe this one was different. If anyone actually has quality information about the terms of reference, participants and review process – share.
Falcon @33, there is a lot of stuff there. Luckily I’m on holiday as of tomorrow, so you’ve just given me some reading. Thanks, I think.
PS, comment at 21 – I still totally stand behind that.
@Falcon, quoting a comment on Dreger’s Wired piece:
That commenter missed Dreger’s point, and so did you, Falcon. Her point was that had a young Leelah denied she was transgender–perhaps under pressure from her parents–under Bill 77, caregivers would have been required to take her at her word and treat her as “cis.” She is not advocating “reparative” therapy; she is advocating letting kids present as they like without labeling them, instead adopting a “wait and see” attitude:
Alice Dreger has done as much as anyone in the world to stop genital surgery being performed on intersex babies and small children. She has pushed for such children to be allowed to grow up unaltered, to be allowed to choose their own gender identity, and to elect or refuse surgery, when they are old enough to choose for themselves.
She has also reported in depth on the Trans Wars, and spent considerable time getting to the bottom of competing narratives. She’s seen, and called out, bad behavior on all sides. She knows quite a bit whereof she speaks.
One thing I know: denying a child their friends and interests will not help them. If they are chameleon-like thinking they should be the same sex as their friends, let them know it’s perfectly fine and healthy to have opposite sex friendships (in fact, it will HELP them have healthy relationships if they become hetero cis adults). If people are telling them their toys and hobbies are for [the opposite sex], let them know it isn’t true.
I think a questioning approach is a good idea, but a controlling approach certainly isn’t. The idea should be that the child knows all their options.
Kevin: This isn’t my blog, but you’ve worn out my patience. I don’t believe you mean to, but what you are doing is emotional blackmail. It’s causing you to argue dishonestly, and with people who aren’t actually your enemies (really). Naturally you are very emotionally invested in the wellbeing of your children. But your emotional commitment to a particular, rigid narrative involving your son is so excessive it overrides your good sense much of the time. I realize you probably dislike reading that, but I hope at some point you’ll look back and see some of the participants in this conversation have given you a lot of leeway, and some cautions you might pay a little more attention to.
As a guy who grew up gay in a time when coming out at the age I did was unheard of, I’ve plenty of experience with gender policing and personal identity. About four decades more than your son, and I’m pretty sure quite a few more than you. Your son, and you, are not the only people in the world who have an experience worth listening to.
And as the uncle of a young niece who believes she’s trans (she may, or may not, decide on this permanently) I also have a legitimate interest in this issue. I too care about my young family members.
If I see one more instance of you lashing out at other people by setting yourself up as the One Parent Who Really Cares and treating everyone else like they’re evil, I’m not going to hold back on you.
OK, let’s say some kid is mistaken about being trans. How is it helpful to reinforce society’s messed up ideas of gender by limiting that child’s activities to what society considers appropriate for that child’s sex? Wouldn’t it be better if the child were told that it is OK to play with any toy and pretend to be whomever they want, and that has zero relationship of whether they are a boy or a girl (or something else entirely)? That they can take the time to figure out each of these things separately? If there is a chance that a child is mistaken about their own identity shouldn’t it be best to delay that child’s puberty until the child feels comfortable about it?
If Zucker’s purpose is to make children comfortable with the gender they were born as (or assigned as) then that’s what he should logically be doing. Remove the pressure of having to have everything about them fit into society’s box, and remove the pressure of having to complete the process before puberty hits.
Hi all. Coming quite late to this discussion. Won’t contribute much nor in any strong way toward any conclusive or definite anything.
But I have kids. Three. Somewhat gappy kids. All crazy kids. From crazy parents with no rigid gender or affinity protocole. Regularly asked why boys have ‘girly’ clothes (actually, we don’t crossdress our kids, but we’re liberal enough that style cross the borders in a way messy enough that other parents ask about the gender, by which they imply the sex, of our kitties) or anything anyhow (rarely the reverse, but it could have happened as well). Part of the reason is that being traveled enough, we’re strongly cross cultural and we have lost strong social identities. (We are transreferentialists, certainly a bit transgender and quite transculturalists in our own ways). I am just writing this intro to balance with parenting experiences, not against cases, rather to add water, even if for the due course of a lack of argument from my part.
My latest son never expressed anything about gender. When he asked if he’s a boy, and because he’s a male, we usually say what things are: he’s a little boy. He could be trans in greater ways, it may change the way we answer him, but he’s already used to misgendering by people. He does not feel like there’s anything wrong with anything relative to gender yet inner- and either way.
And here’s the thing: he’s always playing dolls and pretend cooking at daycare. Always. He’s always in a group of females. Always. At home, he’s playing hero warriors with his brother, to the unexpressed and silent horror shock of their father. Always. Violent performance. That’s sort of a strong non-binary binary.
Is there point I was willing to make? Maybe. The transgender issue seems to be locked into pathwars to transition paths, while I think I may consider (I’m wordy for a purpose) transness is not a polarised bipolar (why trans are more than future transsexuals, and it is all fine, for trans also be a moving and drive back). At some point we’d have better allow for the greater diversity compass, which is not merely targeting an idea of gender that’s socially predefined and exclusive in the name of a rigid definition of transness. In essence, let’s kill gender essentialism and revive a pro-choice existence not as an exit-endpoint but as perpetual open gate and experience. Especially with kids, but everyone is actually agreeing, right?
L, I think there is a consensus here about avoiding rigid gender roles. What I am not sure at all is whether there is agreement on how to interpret someone saying ‘my gender is different from the one assigned to me at birth’, especially if the person saying this is young.
I’m getting older… and I remember how it used to be that transvestism was only loosely-linked to homosexuality and transexualism, contrary to the straight majority’s perception.
(And now, the wheel has turned)
@ 42 John Morales
John, seriously, what the fuck are you on about? So the majority thought transvestism was tightly-linked to homosexuality and “transexualism” but nevertheless these things were loosely linked? And now the wheel has turned? So the majority think transvestism is loosely linked to homosexuality and “transexualism”?
Have you had too much Christmas cheer? Do you need a nap?
As far as I’m aware certainly consensus about avoiding rigid gender roles.
Anat, I don’t know if we are talking past each other or not. I am uneasy about the cavalier way people say ‘puberty blockers’ as if that is a consequence free answer. I have a family member who had a delayed puberty because his body did not produce endogenous hormones. When that was eventually recognised a prescription gixed things up physically just fine, but he had endured a huge amount of shit from his peer group in the meantime. That has emotional consequences. He in turn was pretty hard on his son to be ‘manly’ so as to avoid the shit he had experienced. That lead indirectly to be fair to a failed marriage, an estranged daughter and a son who committed suicide. Anecdata to be sure…
If you are a practitioner who subscribes to more active involvement than puberty blockers, which I cannot see as consequence free at all, what do you do? I suspect that you observe the cold closely, try to untangle and remove existing assumptions about gender and then, when you are,confident that you understand the situation you determine a course of action. This wouldn’t be about forcing someone to be something they are not, or the long term removal of certain toys or friends. Just enough clear space to create an opportunity to understand the child.
I don’t know if that was Zuckers practice. Hell, I’m not a qualified to know if what I envisage is good practice! If someone knows better about Zucker or this idea feel free to chime in.
Hi Ophelia, I used an old email to make a comment. If you are feeling Christmassy would you tidy that up for me and realise it from moderation?
Silentbob:
The usual: an outsider’s view.
Apparently, I didn’t use enough qualifiers to satisfy you.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-dressing
No. You imagine I am rambling drunkenly?
Rob, there is a difference between someone who is ready for puberty and it doesn’t happen and someone who is either not ready for puberty or not ready for the type of puberty their body is going to undergo naturally. Someone who *wants* to delay puberty is likely to benefit from such a delay.
To Rob again: As for treatments that go beyond delaying puberty – these are not relevant to the under 10 year old crowd, which are the kids Zucker insists on discouraging from identifying as trans.
Anat, re puberty blockers, I understand the point you are making @47. That’s fine if you consider the child as an island free from the influence and effects of their peers. My point is that the child exists embedded in a group of peers who are undergoing rapid physical and emotional change. Surely everyone here remembers how fraught an experience those years were. How minor a difference from your peers was necessary to make you an object of negative attention?
Maybe that is is still better than the alternative, for some children at least, but I still have some way to go to see puberty blockers as a consequence free treatment that can be tossed around in such a casual manner as the default.
If history has taught us anything it is that one rule, one approach only seems to work with simple machines. Complex systems always seem to require flexible and multiple approaches to understand (and treat).
Rob, the kids who want the blockers are kids who are at the very least apprehensive about oncoming puberty, up to absolutely horrified by the thought of it. And if they don’t like being on blockers after all, they can just stop, and their natural hormones will take over. (BTW no, I don’t remember those years as negatively as you do. Sure, there were kids all over the place developmentally, so what? And it seems my kid’s peers were rather cool about it too.)
@ Lady Mondegreen
The issue is that she was using that (very convoluted logic) as part of an overall argument against a bill banning conversion therapies. The full text of Bill 77 reads:
Sexual orientation and gender identity treatments
29.1 (1) No person shall, in the course of providing health care services, provide any treatment that seeks to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of a person under 18 years of age.
Exception
(2) The treatments mentioned in subsection (1) do not include,
(a) services that provide acceptance, support or understanding of a person or the facilitation of a person’s coping, social support or identity exploration or development; and
(b) sex-reassignment surgery or any services related to sex-reassignment surgery.
It is not as black and white as Dreger’s belief that if a client says that they are cis/trans, then clinics aren’t allowed any room for exploration and understanding otherwise and must instantly put the client on treatment (or refuse to put the client on treatment). The bill specifies that they simply should not pressure the client one way or the other.
In that article, called “The Big Problem With Outlawing Gender Conversion Therapies,” Dreger never at any point mentions that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) is against gender conversion therapy for ethical reasons (Dreger linked to an article by Vilain and Bailey in support of her piece – this was rejected firmly by WPATH: latimes.com/opinion/readersreact/la-le-0526-transgender-children-20150526-story.html). She never discloses to the readers what gender conversion therapies actually do – she skirts around that, completely.
The irony is that it is Zucker, rather than Bill 77, pushing children towards accepting a particular gender identity when he advocates that parents tell their children “you are not a girl, you are a boy” (or vice versa).
In Dreger’s defence of Zucker in the opening post, why did she neglect to mention the techniques like those outlined in the NPR, the Atlantic, various medical journals and CAMH’s review of Zucker’s clinic, which have caused Zucker to be such a controversial figure? Surely that would be a relevant thing to include? Why was the situation reframed in a way to suggest that transgender activists are against his techniques solely because he “doesn’t instantly affirm gender identities” (as opposed to being against him because his techniques are completely unethical and he actively tries to suppress “gender non-conforming behaviour”)? She is not being remotely fair-minded or balanced.
Here are some very alarming sections from the CAMH report on Zucker’s clinic that were not quoted in Dreger’s “Gender Mad” piece:
camh.ca/en/hospital/about_camh/newsroom/news_releases_media_advisories_and_backgrounders/current_year/Documents/GIC-Review-26Nov2015.pdf
@38 Josh Spokes,
Apologies for the delayed response.
I’m not sure what definition of “emotional blackmail” you’re working from. Conventionally speaking, emotional blackmail is a form of abuse: using threats and punishments in order to control the behavior of others (e.g. “If you hang up the phone, I’m going to kill myself”). If that has come through in anything I’ve written, I offer my sincerest apologies, and ask only that you cite my threats so I can reflect on how I’ve expressed myself so completely at odds with how I’d have meant to express myself.
That said, I *do* intentionally express myself in the following way (which I neither consider to be “emotional blackmail” nor repudiable/dishonest in any way): “The statement [foo] about transgender people is a misconception. My son’s experience, and that of almost every other transgender person I’ve met or heard of, was [not foo]. Furthermore, those who mistreat transgender people in real life routinely cite [foo] as a basis for that mistreatment. For instance, [hurtful statement] was recently directed at my son, and the basis for [hurtful statement] was [foo].”
Take, for example, foo = “Children are physically transitioning based solely on preference for wearing dresses instead of pants; or playing with dolls instead of trucks; or expressing doubt about their actual gender.”
Foo:
in Dreger’s words: “The mistake they make is then to assume that every child who expresses doubt about his or her birth gender assignment should simply be “affirmed” by parents and clinicians in their “new” gender”.
in Holm’s words: “The bizarre thing for me is that these beliefs (which seem to run something like ‘if a child likes something traditionally associated with the other gender, they are that other gender’) quite blatantly buy into the most antiquated ideas on gender. A child that puts a dress on is a girl!”
In John the Drunk’s words: “The activists, who seem to demand instant surgery after the First Cupcake or the First Toolbox, are engaging in an absolute cartoon version of gender essentialism”
This [foo] runs contrary to not only my son’s experience, but that of literally every experience I’m aware of for children who have undergone social transition. Exactly zero times have I heard a parent of a transgender child indicate that their child transitioned on the basis of mere preference in dressware. Is “emotional blackmail” simply pointing out how some proposition fails to match up with one’s real world experience; or citing evidence that the [false] proposition leads to actual harm of real people? If I have firsthand experience that some statement [foo] is factually incorrect, should I not cite that experience? If I have firsthand experience that belief in [foo] leads some people to mistreat/harm others, should I keep that to myself as well?
Do these standards apply elsewhere? If [foo] = “Boys are naturally better at math than girls”, would a commenter be chastized for committing “emotional blackmail” in stating “my daughter is excelling in math; she has better scores than any other boy in her class” as their personal grounds for doubting [foo], or “nevertheless, her math teacher only encouraged boys to join the school’s math club; my daughter didn’t even know it existed” as grounds for showing how [foo] is actively harmful?
I suspect the key difference between “emotionally commiting to a particular, rigid narrative” and “relaying ones experience” is whether or not those relayed experiences contradict the predominant beliefs of the forum. If I’m mistaken, please explain how my narrations of my son’s experiences have been “particular and rigid”; maybe with examples of where I ought to have been less particular and more “waffly” in describing them.
What bearing does that have on my citing my son’s experience, or referencing those of other transgender children, as evidence that statements like “The activists, who seem to demand instant surgery after the First Cupcake or the First Toolbox” are ridiculous caricatures? If you, with four decades of experience with gender policing and personal identity, know of parents who do subject their boys to SRS based on one time they put on a dress; then just say as much. Your having more experience is ABSOLUTELY grounds to correct me on any misconceptions or errors in what I write. But it is not valid to say, “I have more experience in this area than you; so you just need to shut up.”
Take the assertion, “Transgender girls are really just boys who, as a result of their mother’s hatred of men, prefer dolls and dresses and playing with girls.”. Whether your neice’s experience very much aligns with, or directly contradicts, that assessement; I would not discount it as being any less applicable to the conversation than that of my son. What I don’t see is my discounting of such applicable experiences. What I do see (Patrick’s comment and my response being a prime example) is my discounting of experiences as not applicable to the question at hand.
I worded my response to Holms poorly. I’d meant “you don’t care about X” in the context of “Creationists don’t care about transition fossils”; that is, as an accusation that he’s clinging to beliefs in caricatures (transgender kids are transitioning at the drop of a hat; 5 year olds don’t understand gender) and does not care whether or not they match up with the real world. However, my words implicated an actual lack of caring/empathy for suffering of marginalized transgender kids. That was out of line and as I’d indicated to OB, I’m working to avoid sending any such messages in what I write hereafter.
For the record, I do find it incredibly frustrating when people who should know better toss around demonstrably false caricatures and stereotypes. I consider such comments as evidence of intellectually laziness [on the order of Creationists claiming the Cambrian Explosion falsifies evolution]; but I do not consider such commentors to be “enemies” or such comments to be “evil”.
Turns out that report CAMH commissioned–the one used to damn Dr. Zucker and close his Gender Identity Clinic, the one Falcon quoted @ comment #51–was full of inaccuracies, distortions, and unverified rumors. The GIC’s critics painted a distorted and dishonest picture of what went on there.
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/02/fight-over-trans-kids-got-a-researcher-fired.html
Well, that’s very interesting indeed. At the least it’s pretty clear that the review represented the worst aspects of review set up and execution possible.
I do think the nymag article makes a strong case that many points of the report were sloppy/unvetted, if not libelously false; and that the investigation itself was biased in its execution. To that end, I’m now disinclined to see Dr. Zucker in the creepy light cast by the original report (though that *was* news to me, and had had no impact on my pre-existing assessment toward Zucker’s broader “corrective” style of treatment). By all means, it seems Dr. Zucker may have a case for filing libelous charges against those who claimed that he engaged with young patients in an unprofessional, borderline-malpractice, manner.
But I did not see anything in the article which swayed my opinion on the validity of shutting down his clinic. Unchallenged is the claim that Zucker’s treatment involved subjecting children to this
Leaving all else aside – faced with the “symptom” of an 8-year-old boy’s desire to play with dolls leading to social ostracization among peers and siblings, the parents sought medical advice, and Zucker’s medical advice was to
1) take away the dolls
2) subject Bradley to intense conditioning to recognize and avoid “girlish toys”
The article does nothing to rebut the fundamental issue I have with this treatment paradigm: Zucker’s “success” is defined strictly in terms of “desisting with transgender behavior”. Success for Bradley =
* learning to suppress his “abnormal” likes and dislikes
* learning to avoid being seen dressing “like a girl” or playing with “girlish” stuff.
* acting like the kind of boy that other boys will want to hang out with (and that “girls would want”).
It seems wholly inconsistent to simultaneously express support for the approach advocated by Zucker, and yet, in other contexts, express enthusiasm for the exact opposite:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2015/by-thinking-more-like-men/
I mean, consider what “Well done then” would mean from the Zucker vantage point: “Great job conditioning your daughter to be more girlish. It’s for the best. After all, girls will find her masculine interests unappealing. Boys want more girlish girls. She would be an outcast.” Does anyone *not* find that nauseating?
The “Bradley example” hits even closer to home: my younger son has a dollhouse in his room (the kid loves imaginary play – we simply haven’t seen this as a medical problem, or really, as any kind of problem at all*). Most times, when he has friends over that are boys, the dollhouse does go un-used due to lack of mutual interest (though I don’t kid myself that he hasn’t learn some painful lessons about suggesting it – see footnote). Conversely, when he has friends over that are girls, the two of them will often disappear into his room to play with his dolls for hours. I should note, after *these* play-dates, my son is usually scolded; “You are not getting a minute of screen time until you have every last doll and scrap of doll clothing picked up and put away.” [I swear, I’ve walked in to find what must be over 200 pieces of doll clothing scattered over every inch of horizontal surface in his room]
*On just one occasion to date, it was an issue. His older brother had a friend over who, with a loud voice, exclaimed “Oh my gosh! Your brother has a dollhouse in his room? Dude, dolls are for girls!” Older son laughed; younger son shut his door and began crying. [snark] Rather than calling a clinical psychologist to see how I might fix the doll-playing behavior that was causing my son to experience such emotional turmoil[/snark], I chose to address the older boys, “Hey. First – toys are toys, and there’s no rule that says what kind of toys boys have to play with or what kind girls have to play with. Different kids like different things. Think of how you’d feel if other kids made fun of you, just because you liked a food or a game that they didn’t. I don’t think you were trying to tease, but that was really mean and made Mark feel really sad.” I reinforced the same message to my younger son (who eventually re-emerged, at which point the older friend took it upon himself to say “sorry about being mean”). Zucker-fail, I suppose: despite this incident, my son still has his dollhouse – and even played dolls with his younger cousin just last week… He just turned 7, and Bradley’s parents had him in therapy by the age of 6.
@Josh Spokes,
But, darn it all, there I go moving this topic away from the ivory tower / purely-ontological subject it’s supposed to be…. Having the nerve to respond to a topic that factors hugely into my family life by relaying information drawn from that personal experience. I’m still awaiting an explanation at how doing so constitutes “emotional blackmail”.
Kevin – Yes, I do think that sounds horrific.
Kevin @55
First up let me say that the way your child was treated by others was mean and thoughtless. Very sadly that seems to be a go to mode of behaviour for many of ‘us’.
I’m not sure you and I have read that Science of Us article in the same way. I’ll start by quoting the passage that clearly alarmed and offended some and at the least rang alarm bells for [most?] of the rest of us and also your comments on that.
The quoted paragraph does sound horrific, in isolation. The ScienceofUs article continued…
So, I think a fair reading of the situation is not that Zucker subjected Bradley (or other children) to intense conditioning to recognise and avoid “girlish toys” or behaviour at all. It’s also clear that the clinic under Zucker did not see success as steering kids away from ‘abnormal’ behaviour. Rather, in brqadleys case, Zucker temporarily limited access to obsessional playing with girls toys and had the parents make gender neutral toys available until Bradley began socialising with other kids (boys and girls) and then ALL the toys were made available again.
It’s also clear from the article and interviews that in general terms the clinic supported kids and families wherever they ended up – back to cis, or continuing a journey to being gay or trans. It’s worth noting that Bradley now identifies as a gay male – no pressure to be straight and ‘normal’ at all.
I don’t see the situation you describe with your son as being at all the same as that confronting Bradley and Carol. I can’t possibly know what you, your son and your family are going through, but I do try to put myself in the circumstances you describe so as to better comprehend that. You sound like a deeply caring parent struggling to do your best, just as I’m sure any of us would in the same circumstances. You also come across as very defensive and quick to project the worst possible interpretation of events like those discussed above onto your personal circumstances (also natural).
For the very little my opinion is worth it seems to me that you are providing an environment where your child can explore and determine their own gender identity. I hope you leave enough space in your relationship to enable them to confidently change direction if that is what they wish in the future, while still being loved and supported whether they be straight, gay or trans at the end.
I’ll circle back to the Bradley case later, but quick passing comment, yes – we do periodically reiterate that the door is always open for transitioning back (no strings attached, no shame or guilt, and even if just to try it out for a day or two). To me, transitioning wasn’t the decision to let my son to “be a boy”, it was the decision to let him “be himself”.
The clarification claims that the problem was with the “obsession”, but I do have to wonder if Bradley’s obsession were with trains or cars or airplanes or baseballs or hammers and nails or dinosaurs if this would have been seen as a problem. (Or would anyone even bat an eyelash if a girl were similarly obsessed with dolls and dressup?)
I find this an odious defence of gender stereotypes. Sure, it might be more difficult for a child with interests that differ from the norm to find people to socialize with, but this approach seems to be telling kids that they need to conform to the norms, and “learn” to like (or at least pretend to like) things that they aren’t naturally interested in that match their gender (whether they are cis or trans). My kids were boys who liked pink and sparkles and dolls and beads and writing and music and sewing and lego and trains and rockets and computers and power tools and lighting campfires. Some girls thought they were not boyish enough. Other girls (who had similar ecclectic interests) thought they were just fine. Some boys did find their interests unappealing, but they similarly found the stereotypical interests of boys to be uninteresting.
13 is awfully young to declare a kid to be “well-adjusted”, as they are about to embark on the next 5+ years of teenage turmoil.
Kevin @ 58
I sincerely hope you didn’t take my comment as condescending or judgemental, that was not my intent and I apologise if I failed to express myself well. From what I can tell your kids are lucky to have such a dedicated and caring parent prepared to go into bat for them.
By all means return to Bradley’s case later. I’m not sure what else we can parse from the situation as none of us are directly involved (so far as I’m aware).
Theo Bromine @ 59
Indeed you raise a good point (about the obsession with a certain type of toy). I doubt many people would worry about a boy obsessively playing with ‘boy’ toys or a girl with ‘girl’ toys. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a problem, just that most people are socialised to expect that end of the spectrum of behaviour, so it doesn’t ring any alarm bells.
I understand your finding any defence of gender stereotyping offensive. I really do. I could easily have been one of your boys from that description. I was called gay and beaten up for years, which felt particularly unjust as I really liked girls in an opposite sex kind of way. Sigh. Kids are cruel and adults are so often oblivious. Allowing kids to be themselves, while ensuring they develop skills to enable them to live outside of a hot house is necessary. Keep in mind too that you are judging Zucker and his program by reported comments of others. Not Zucker’s own words and certainly not carefully considered phrasing suitable for a professional discussion. An extra large grain of salt is required in my view. That’s not playing hyper-skeptical, it’s playing fair given what we do know.
I did laugh – I hope you meant me to! Having said that what is ‘well adjusted’? I’ve watched kids grow up from birth into their mid-twentys. Some I’ve had real concern for. Some I’ve thought were ‘well-adjusted’, some I’ve thought were actually too adult for their physical age. None of that seemed to predict well how turbulent their teen years were.
Rob @ 60
As a girl with “ungirly” interests, I was teased by the girls, and ignored by the popular boys (though the geeks accepted me), not to mention having my educational pursuits officially thwarted by school staff. (But my older son has always had fun telling people that his *mother* taught him digital electronics and soldering.)
As for my comment about teenage turmoil, it was an attempt at wry humour, so laughter is appropriate. And yes, my point was to wonder what is meant by “well adjusted”.