This is an article I’ve been avoiding writing for a few years now because there’s no upside to it, much like a man weighing in on feminism or a white person writing about first nations or anyone who isn’t a racist piece of garbage writing about Israel. But because trans-rights have become a political wedge issue, I feel it has become necessary to discuss them.
I’m fifty-five years old. When I was growing up two things were true about transvestites (which we universally thought of as male to female). People didn’t like them, and people mostly didn’t think it was any of their business unless they were tricked into a romantic or sexual encounter with one.
I don’t want to underplay how much they were disliked. Watch the end of the first Ace Ventura movie to get a feel for it.
But I don’t remember many people saying transvestites (or drag queens) didn’t have a right to exist. Now, admittedly, this is the late 70s and 80s and 90s, not the 50s and 60s.
The current panic needs a dissection. It’s obviously something which conservatives have vastly amplified in an attempt to use it as a wedge issue, so they can roll back advances on GLBTQ rights. I say obviously because they’re the ones pushing it hardest, alongside one group of essentialist feminists, the TERFs. Conservatives always love to find an otherwise leftish group to work with: in the past they often worked with anti-porn feminists (whom I have some sympathy for.)
A wedge issue is meant to split. Split a coalition, split the public. Carve the T and Q off GLBTQ as gays, lesbians and bi-sexuals scramble to protect themselves and get mommy and daddy to associate cross-dressing with their kids and feel queasy about it, rather than with those two nice gays or lesbians who want to marry, or the bisexual whose bed-partners have nothing to do with them.
There are three main avenues of attack. Sports, safety in female only spaces like bathrooms, and “save the kiddies.”
Let’s start with sports. There’s a lot of back and forth on this and disagreeing studies, but my take on this is simple enough. If you’ve gone thru puberty as a man you’re going to have an advantage in certain sports due to skeletal structure. I used to run. Look at men running and women running: women’s mechanics are different and less efficient due to wider hips. It’s just that simple. In some gender divided sports I’m not sure that trans-women should be allowed to compete, as a matter of fairness. I don’t see an issue with trans-men competing in most sports, but it may turn out that there are some sports in which female puberty is an advantage. There are certainly sports where the best women are worlds better than the best men (real long distance swimming, as one example, though it seems like most of the advantage would go away with hormone treatment.)
Sports is fairly niche, however. The second issue is female only spaces, mostly public bathrooms. The bottom line here is that there doesn’t seem to be much trans-on-normie violence, but a ton of normie-on-trans violence and that trans-women are at great risk if forced to use men’s bathrooms. Trans-women get raped and beaten a lot and men’s bathrooms are a bad place for them. The “other” stigma combined with the fact that any post-hormone treatment transwoman is unlikely to be able to hide what she is makes them big obvious targets that a significant minority of men thinks it’s OK to rape or beat. A transwoman, while she has some skeletal advantages in sports where small advantages add up to victory, is not a big physical threat to other women, and there is no evidence of a wave of trans-women violence, though there have been some individual cases. The bathroom stuff is a panic, and largely irrational.
Now, the kids thing. This is the real problem, and this is what has people most worked up over and outraged. The first step is to admit that there’s some reason for it.
Understand clearly, the evidence is that people who go thru puberty as their preferred gender, having never gone thru puberty as their non-preferred gender have better outcomes, both psychologically and medically/physically. This is pretty settled.
But we have a culture where an ten to thirteen year old isn’t supposed to make any important decisions for themselves. Our children, including out teenagers below the age of 18, are chattel. Their parents and other authorities make all the important decisions, with the state having the right to override the parents.
This is a time and social bounded case and has not been the situation in all societies. It’s good we don’t have child labor, but the lack of it means that we have come to believe that children and teens (really two different things) are incapable of making their own decisions well or of knowing what is good for them. Further, because of the amount of hormones in our food and water the age of typical puberty has dropped significantly. Many children used to hit puberty as late as 14, that’s rare now.
The problem is that outcomes ARE better if the decision is made at (or rather just before) puberty onset. Again, this isn’t in doubt.
But, yes, it’s a big decision and you’re given hormones to go thru puberty in your non-biological gender, that’s going to lead to worse outcomes if you change your mind.
To the best of my knowledge, however, fewer people change their mind than stick with it and who believe they made the right choice, at least with the time-limited data we have so far.
The other issue related to this is the use of hormone blockers. (Oddly I’m on hormone blockers right now, as they’re standard in one treatment protocol for cancer.)
Understand clearly: the vast majority of evidence and this evidence was accumulated before kid-trans became an issue, is that early puberty is bad for kids: they’re unhappy, they do less well in school, etc. Late puberty is associated with happier and better adjusted kids. Add that to the fact that puberty now comes earlier than it did before we polluted our food and water and a couple years on puberty blockers is close to a non-issue. Hormone blockers do sometimes cause medical issues, so they aren’t risk free, but the risks of growing up as the non-prefferred gender are significant.
But the bottom line here is simple. Should children be able to make their own decisions? Can they? There’s lots of conservative claims that children are unduly influenced by parents or teachers or whatever to become trans, but a cold eye that notices that being a transvestite is still looked on negatively by most of the population leads to the calculation that it’s more likely they’ll be persuaded away becoming trans than towards becoming trans.
Influence or no, though, the problem is that the decision to be trans is best made just before puberty, because not undergoing the other gender’s puberty leads to the best outcomes. This is a decision which should be made by young teens, and our society thinks that young teens shouldn’t make important decisions.
The body in question, however, and the future, is theirs. They are the ones who have to live with it. I am aware of no vast social interest in whether or not transvestites exist. As for the surgery, just leave that decision till they’re legal adults. But the hormone therapy decision should be made young and perhaps, for once, we should allow children to make a decision that matters to them, with the input of their family and doctors, when they need to make it to get the best results.
As for the politics, fuck the right. If people don’t own their own bodies and have the right to make decisions about them, they own nothing. The only reason this is an issue at all is because it involves children and we treat children like property. The rest of it is politically driven moral-panic bullshit. The existence of transvestites, male or female, does not harm you in the vast majority of circumstances (elite athletics is a tiny issue and bathrooms are largely bullshit) and is none of your goddamn business. Mind your own business and let them mind theirs.
(A summary from Scientific American of the evidence.)
Edit: Corrected to indicate improved psychological outcomes (very robust) and some issues from hormone blockers.
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