Guest post: The real moral panic

Mar 12th, 2022 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Incomplete picture.

There are many awareness days related to trans issues, but today’s is very important. Detransition Awareness Day is vital because there are so many people in positions of power being led to believe that something so life-changing as gender identity is a fixed awareness that one is “born in a body that doesn’t match their identity.”

I was at the Seattle Public Library Event sponsored by WoLF in February 2020. After exiting, thanks to police guard we were safe from the frothing crowd who were chanting “No hate, no fear, all genders welcome here” with what I perceived as hatred for the women who spoke and attended.

I met up with a few women who told me that there was a small meeting of people who had been affected by children and teenagers being transitioned early. One of them was a young woman, early twenties, who was a desister. She hadn’t medically transitioned, but she was clawing her way back from believing since she was an early teen that she was a transman. So, at the meeting, there was pizza, and people shared their stories. Some were grandparents of children who were transed very young, and cut off from seeing them because they didn’t want their grandchildren pushed into a process that would alter them irreversibly. Others were parents who had been cut off by their children, their children rejecting them because the children believed they were trans and the parent wanted them to get counseling. Many were detransitioners or desisters who had been rushed into transitioning, with very little thought towards the reasons that they many believe they were transgender.

There’s so much of this “Believe the children, they know who they are.” This was among the stories that were told that night, and we really didn’t learn much from the Satanic Panic, did we? There we were admonished to believe the children, but children are spending so much of their pre-adolescence trying to figure out who they really are and can be easily misled.

When Aaron Rabinowitz talks about Moral Panic in the bathroom bills, he is performing a DARVO trick. There is a moral panic, that if we don’t rush our gender curious kids to trans medically now then they will try to kill themselves. And if the teachers think the parents won’t do this, they must take it on themselves to do the right thing and hide it from the parents.

Gender dysphoria is obviously a real thing. But latching onto the first perceived cure and denying any others (such as working with people to live in a gendered society while also working to break the gender expectations down,) is damaging to so many young people.

And when this moral panic subsides, those who have been medically damaged will not be able to be restored. Breasts can’t be regrown, nor can penises and testes.

Tavris’ article is important and needs to be shared far and wide, to overcome the BS that people like PZ are spreading as “skeptics.”

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