The convenient woman
While the Cass report’s 400 pages will be pored over and debated, one thing is certain – young trans people face an anxious future.
Because of the report’s 400 pages? So without the Cass report young trans people would have faced a happy calm confident future? Because pretending to be the opposite sex and trying to force the world to pretend along with you is such an easy simple fun way to live?
The mother of a 17-year-old trans girl who was a patient at the now-shut Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust said she had initially welcomed Cass’s inquiry, but had been left “disappointed”.
She had believed the Tavistock was “fundamentally not fit for purpose” as a specialist clinic set up to handle a small number of patients, but the “hysterical environment” surrounding the report was leading to young people losing out on healthcare.
This isn’t the Guardian talking, you understand, this is just this one mother, who just happens to think that pretending to be the opposite sex is “healthcare.”
Her daughter’s gender dysphoria diagnosis finally came in 2022, six years after they first saw a clinician. She began puberty blockers a year later.
“Puberty blockers have been really good for her. As she entered puberty, she was really, really dysphoric about her shoulders, her facial hair growing her voice deepening. She was very distressed by it and very sad.”
The woman said the Cass report represented “an agenda from up on high that things need to be more difficult”. “It’s hard enough as a parent without having the entire society or media pointing at transgender people as if they’re some aberration or as if they threaten us.”
So not blocking puberty is an agenda while blocking puberty is just what happens.
Does this useful “the woman” really exist?
I wonder how it was she knew her son was in fact her “daughter”? Did he like the wrong colours, the wrong clothes, play with the wrong toys? Who brought up the idea first, the child or the parent? At what age? Let’s do the math. “Daughter” is now 17 years old. Diagnosis came in 2022 (that’s 15 years old) “six years after they first saw a clinician.” That’s nine years old. I don’t believe it was his idea. What nine year old thinks like that without being prompted or coached?
It’s funny how all the teachers and school boards want to “protect” so-called “trans kids” from hostile, normie parents who might reject or abuse them. But what about abuse and rejection in the other direction? What about all of the “trans kids” who’ve been pushed into this through parents who are homophobic, and don’t want a gay or lesbian child? Ironically, a clinician who is in favour of watchful waiting is saving children from parent-sponsored conversion therapy. Who’s going to protect potentially gay and lesbian children from the Susie Greens of this world when the schools are as ready to trans away the gay as the parents?
In some respects I understand a mother taking that position. Women are after all heavily socialised from a very young age to be caring, nurturing, and affirming of others. Especially offspring (and husbands). I’ve run across quite a few interviews with mothers defending their trans child’s position. It’s not a million miles from the mother of one of the civic creche kids (see other post) who contaminated his story by sitting him on her knee while cuddling him and telling him how brave and wonderful he was every time he made a new disclosure of abuse. The desire is to alleviate hurt, protect the child, have an explanation for the inconceivable thing you don’t really understand. In that context truth comes a pretty distant second for most people I suspect.
I think there’s always been a small percentage of boys who want to be (or think they are) girls, and girls who want to be (or think they are) boys, and that this can be due to a number of factors. In addition to the obvious one where a child mis-categorizes themselves according to what toys or activities they like, there can be jealousy of, or over-identification with, someone of the opposite sex, or overhearing remarks about which sex the parents really wanted or expected.
I recently came across a research paper which found that many preteen or adolescent girls confronted by puberty go through a phase where they imagine themselves as non threatening versions of boys. I myself recall pretending when I was about 11 that I was — that I wanted to be — a boy called “Kip.” Since there was no internet template back then and I was on my own, Kip resembled one of those cheerful, plucky lads found in children’s literature in turn-of-last-century England, hands in pockets and whistling while going on an adventure. Mercifully, this stage was brief.
I agree that the suggestion of being the opposite sex is far, far more prevalent and virulent now than then, but I don’t think it’s always outside prompting or coaching. Kids come up with all sorts of fixations. What’s new is the way the parents and/or surrounding society screw it down tighter.
(I might make an exception, though, for “non-binary.” That idiocy seems culture-bound through and through.)
I spent a lot of time as a kid pretending to be a long list of male characters from movies and tv shows. This of course is at least partly because female characters from movies and tv shows were fewer and didn’t do much. Books had more female characters, who did more, so they were better pretending-material. At any rate, I think we all take a lot of cues from The Media, and that’s surely one factor in the popularity of pretending to be the other sex.
As I heard it, Tolkien was telling Lord of the Rings to his young children as he wrote it, and when his daughter asked why aren’t there any girls in the story, he created Eowyn as a significant character.