The Trans Movement Is Not About Rights Anymore
It's about a cultural revolution and the abolition of biological sex.
Andrew Sullivan
2022-01-14
An unusual thing happened in the conversation about transgender identity in America this week. The New York Times conceded that there is, indeed, a debate among medical professionals, transgender people, gays and lesbians and others about medical intervention for pre-pubescent minors who have gender dysphoria. The story pulled some factual punches, but any mildly-fair airing of this debate in the US MSM is a breakthrough of a kind.
Here’s the truth that the NYT was finally forced to acknowledge: “Clinicians are divided” over the role of mental health counseling before making irreversible changes to a child’s body. Among those who are urging more counseling and caution for kids are ground-breaking transgender surgeons. This very public divide was first aired by Abigail Shrier a few months ago on Bari’s Substack, of course, where a trans pioneer in sex-change surgery opined: “It is my considered opinion that due to some of the … I’ll call it just ‘sloppy,’ sloppy healthcare work, that we’re going to have more young adults who will regret having gone through this process.” Oof.
The NYT piece also concedes another key fact: that puberty blockers are neither harmless nor totally reversible. Money quote:
I would think that, just as a general rule, minors making permanent, life-changing decisions should receive more psychological treatment than adults. How on earth is this not the default? In what other field of medicine do patients diagnose themselves, and that alone is justification for dramatic, irreversible medication?
The NYT doesn’t give you the data for the “increasing number” of transitions because it’s hard to find in the US. In the UK, however, the data show a 3,200 percent rise in adolescents seeking transition over a decade — 70 percent of whom are girls seeking to become boys, a break from historical norms where boys/men were much more likely to seek transition. Nor does the NYT give any data for “detransitioners.” But any brief look online suggests they are not exactly “quite rare.” They are, in fact, becoming a small but recognizable and tenacious part of the trans landscape. And among the risks of puberty blockers that the NYT does not mention are neurological damage, bone-density loss, and a permanent inability to experience sexual pleasure. And in almost every case (98 percent in one report), puberty blockers are never reversed.
Other news has also forced a debate about trans women competing in female sports. A Penn swimmer, Lia Thomas, competed for three seasons as a male, transitioned to female, competed against biological women, and destroyed several records in one swoop — demonstrating the lingering benefits of a testosteroned adolescence, even after her T suppression therapy (the minimum requirement under NCAA rules is one year). As the WaPo pointed out, “she posted the fastest times of any female college swimmer in two events this season.” (There is still no mention of Lia Thomas in the NYT.) I defy anyone to watch these performances and still believe that biological sex makes no difference in many sports. Of course it does.
A recent internal report by the Transgender Law Center confirms the bleeding obvious: “Right now, our opposition wins the debate on trans youth in sports against any and all arguments we have tried for our side … Our base and persuadables want to support transgender student-athletes, but are extremely susceptible to our opposition’s argument that excluding trans youth is necessary to protect the fairness of women’s sports.” Well, yes. This is the problem. And why won’t you admit it — instead of insisting that there is no issue of fairness for biological women here at all?
To counter their opposition, the TLC report suggests emphasizing the collective nature of sports, and the benefits of trans inclusion for everyone. They suggest use of the term “genders” rather than gender. And they also lament how previous public education efforts “have reinforced the association between transgender people and whiteness in communities of color.” But none of it works. People know we have sex-segregated sports for a legitimate reason. And they’re not “transphobic” for supporting fairness.
There may be a pragmatic compromise here. There’s no reason, for example, to prevent trans men from playing in men’s sports. They will compete with an actual disadvantage, by and large. You could include trans women in sports where there is no serious male advantage, where skill is much more important than strength and speed. And one way to include trans women in women’s events without penalizing women would be simply to exclude trans women from medals, or records, in the most elite events. In most schools, most of the time, no problem. It’s not a perfect solution, because there is none. But if we were all honest about the science, it’s an option.
The trouble is: too many on the fairness side refuse to see the genuine toll of exclusion, and too many on the trans side refuse to acknowledge biology or common sense. And so one side misgenders and denigrates trans athletes, while the other side insists that opposition is always a function of bigotry, or of controlling power. In fact, the TLC report recommends creating “villains” as one of the more effective strategies. Here’s a good example published in the NYT: “It’s not even, really, about women’s rights or biology. It’s about how terrifying some Americans find any shift toward inclusivity and tolerance.” That may be effective propaganda, but it simply isn’t true. And it’s sickening to claim that people are full of fear and hate simply because they have a different view on a complex subject.
Among those seeking a compromise is the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, led in part by Martina Navratilova, who once had a pioneering trans coach, Renée Richards, who acknowledged she had an unfair advantage over cis women, and is now a member of the working group. “Options [for trans athletes] could include separate heats, additional events or divisions and/or the handicapping of results,” according to a report on the group’s work. Another of its leaders, Donna Lopiano, just penned a piece on how to update the NCAA’s rules to both maintain fairness in competition and protect trans participation. “Sport’s transgender debate needs compromise not conflict,” begins an op-ed by another member of the group, Joanna Harper, a trans athlete herself. Are all of these women “villains”?
Perspective is also needed. This week, the writer Colin Wright posed on Twitter the following question: “What rights do trans people currently not have but want that don’t involve replacing biological sex with one’s subjective ‘gender identity’?” And the response was, of course, crickets. The truth is: the 6-3 Bostock decision places trans people in every state under the protection of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It’s done. It’s built on the sturdy prohibition on sex discrimination. A Trump nominee wrote the ruling.
What the trans movement is now doing, after this comprehensive victory, is not about rights at all. It is about cultural revolution. It’s a much broader movement to dismantle the sex binary, to see biology as a function of power and not science, and thereby to deconstruct the family and even a fixed category such as homosexuality. You can support trans rights and oppose all of this. But they want you to believe you can’t. That’s the bait-and-switch. Don’t take it.
The radicalism of this assault on nature, science and bodily integrity is not hidden. Just before Christmas, for example, New York Magazine ran a first-person cover-story that celebrated “an asexual gay man with a penis and a vagina.” His hatred of his natal femaleness stemmed in part, he says, from being groomed to “live as a sexually available cute-lady vessel capable of carrying white babies” as part of “patriarchal, heterosexist, racist, capitalist acculturation.” He insists that he has always had a “native penis, which some people call a clitoris.” Now, surgeons have carved out flesh from his thigh to create a simulacrum of a non-native dick:
What’s interesting here is not the person’s evident mental instability. (The author had previously organized his own rape as therapy for meeting rape victims in Haiti, and published a piece about it.) It’s the decision by the editors of the magazine to elevate and exploit this assault on bodily sex, to épater les bourgeois one more time, to insist on the normalcy of this, as if it were a matter of civil rights rather than a foray into the nihilist and grotesque. They end the piece thus:
This is what the editors seem to promote: a view of the body as beyond sex or gender, to be created and recreated at will and indefinitely, and an abandonment of any stable notion of sex at all. Whatever else this is, it is not a matter of civil rights.
The maximal inclusion of trans people in society is, to my mind, a moral duty. People with crippling gender dysphoria often suffer terribly and need relief. Protection from discrimination is essential — and is already the law. But that does not mean that biology has ceased to exist; that “trans” is always a stable identity; or that children need no more than affirmation and medical treatment to change sex when they violate gender roles. It does not mean allowing unfair sporting contests; or inviting children to make decisions they simply do not have the capacity to make. To argue this is not hate. It’s just sanity.
We need to slow and calm down. We need to reintroduce caution, skepticism and medical science, alongside compassion, to counter ideological fervor and adolescent delusion. And we need to debate all of this without anyone being threatened, demonized or banished from the public square. It’s doable, and it will be to the great benefit of trans and gay kids and adults now and in the future if we do this carefully and we do this right.
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-trans-movement-is-not-about-rights-67e
Andrew Sullivan
2022-01-14
An unusual thing happened in the conversation about transgender identity in America this week. The New York Times conceded that there is, indeed, a debate among medical professionals, transgender people, gays and lesbians and others about medical intervention for pre-pubescent minors who have gender dysphoria. The story pulled some factual punches, but any mildly-fair airing of this debate in the US MSM is a breakthrough of a kind.
Here’s the truth that the NYT was finally forced to acknowledge: “Clinicians are divided” over the role of mental health counseling before making irreversible changes to a child’s body. Among those who are urging more counseling and caution for kids are ground-breaking transgender surgeons. This very public divide was first aired by Abigail Shrier a few months ago on Bari’s Substack, of course, where a trans pioneer in sex-change surgery opined: “It is my considered opinion that due to some of the … I’ll call it just ‘sloppy,’ sloppy healthcare work, that we’re going to have more young adults who will regret having gone through this process.” Oof.
The NYT piece also concedes another key fact: that puberty blockers are neither harmless nor totally reversible. Money quote:
Some of the drug regimens bring long-term risks, such as irreversible fertility loss. And in some cases, thought to be quite rare, transgender people later “detransition” to the gender they were assigned at birth. Given these risks, as well as the increasing number of adolescents seeking these treatments, some clinicians say that teens need more psychological assessment than adults do.
I would think that, just as a general rule, minors making permanent, life-changing decisions should receive more psychological treatment than adults. How on earth is this not the default? In what other field of medicine do patients diagnose themselves, and that alone is justification for dramatic, irreversible medication?
The NYT doesn’t give you the data for the “increasing number” of transitions because it’s hard to find in the US. In the UK, however, the data show a 3,200 percent rise in adolescents seeking transition over a decade — 70 percent of whom are girls seeking to become boys, a break from historical norms where boys/men were much more likely to seek transition. Nor does the NYT give any data for “detransitioners.” But any brief look online suggests they are not exactly “quite rare.” They are, in fact, becoming a small but recognizable and tenacious part of the trans landscape. And among the risks of puberty blockers that the NYT does not mention are neurological damage, bone-density loss, and a permanent inability to experience sexual pleasure. And in almost every case (98 percent in one report), puberty blockers are never reversed.
Other news has also forced a debate about trans women competing in female sports. A Penn swimmer, Lia Thomas, competed for three seasons as a male, transitioned to female, competed against biological women, and destroyed several records in one swoop — demonstrating the lingering benefits of a testosteroned adolescence, even after her T suppression therapy (the minimum requirement under NCAA rules is one year). As the WaPo pointed out, “she posted the fastest times of any female college swimmer in two events this season.” (There is still no mention of Lia Thomas in the NYT.) I defy anyone to watch these performances and still believe that biological sex makes no difference in many sports. Of course it does.
A recent internal report by the Transgender Law Center confirms the bleeding obvious: “Right now, our opposition wins the debate on trans youth in sports against any and all arguments we have tried for our side … Our base and persuadables want to support transgender student-athletes, but are extremely susceptible to our opposition’s argument that excluding trans youth is necessary to protect the fairness of women’s sports.” Well, yes. This is the problem. And why won’t you admit it — instead of insisting that there is no issue of fairness for biological women here at all?
To counter their opposition, the TLC report suggests emphasizing the collective nature of sports, and the benefits of trans inclusion for everyone. They suggest use of the term “genders” rather than gender. And they also lament how previous public education efforts “have reinforced the association between transgender people and whiteness in communities of color.” But none of it works. People know we have sex-segregated sports for a legitimate reason. And they’re not “transphobic” for supporting fairness.
There may be a pragmatic compromise here. There’s no reason, for example, to prevent trans men from playing in men’s sports. They will compete with an actual disadvantage, by and large. You could include trans women in sports where there is no serious male advantage, where skill is much more important than strength and speed. And one way to include trans women in women’s events without penalizing women would be simply to exclude trans women from medals, or records, in the most elite events. In most schools, most of the time, no problem. It’s not a perfect solution, because there is none. But if we were all honest about the science, it’s an option.
The trouble is: too many on the fairness side refuse to see the genuine toll of exclusion, and too many on the trans side refuse to acknowledge biology or common sense. And so one side misgenders and denigrates trans athletes, while the other side insists that opposition is always a function of bigotry, or of controlling power. In fact, the TLC report recommends creating “villains” as one of the more effective strategies. Here’s a good example published in the NYT: “It’s not even, really, about women’s rights or biology. It’s about how terrifying some Americans find any shift toward inclusivity and tolerance.” That may be effective propaganda, but it simply isn’t true. And it’s sickening to claim that people are full of fear and hate simply because they have a different view on a complex subject.
Among those seeking a compromise is the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, led in part by Martina Navratilova, who once had a pioneering trans coach, Renée Richards, who acknowledged she had an unfair advantage over cis women, and is now a member of the working group. “Options [for trans athletes] could include separate heats, additional events or divisions and/or the handicapping of results,” according to a report on the group’s work. Another of its leaders, Donna Lopiano, just penned a piece on how to update the NCAA’s rules to both maintain fairness in competition and protect trans participation. “Sport’s transgender debate needs compromise not conflict,” begins an op-ed by another member of the group, Joanna Harper, a trans athlete herself. Are all of these women “villains”?
Perspective is also needed. This week, the writer Colin Wright posed on Twitter the following question: “What rights do trans people currently not have but want that don’t involve replacing biological sex with one’s subjective ‘gender identity’?” And the response was, of course, crickets. The truth is: the 6-3 Bostock decision places trans people in every state under the protection of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It’s done. It’s built on the sturdy prohibition on sex discrimination. A Trump nominee wrote the ruling.
What the trans movement is now doing, after this comprehensive victory, is not about rights at all. It is about cultural revolution. It’s a much broader movement to dismantle the sex binary, to see biology as a function of power and not science, and thereby to deconstruct the family and even a fixed category such as homosexuality. You can support trans rights and oppose all of this. But they want you to believe you can’t. That’s the bait-and-switch. Don’t take it.
The radicalism of this assault on nature, science and bodily integrity is not hidden. Just before Christmas, for example, New York Magazine ran a first-person cover-story that celebrated “an asexual gay man with a penis and a vagina.” His hatred of his natal femaleness stemmed in part, he says, from being groomed to “live as a sexually available cute-lady vessel capable of carrying white babies” as part of “patriarchal, heterosexist, racist, capitalist acculturation.” He insists that he has always had a “native penis, which some people call a clitoris.” Now, surgeons have carved out flesh from his thigh to create a simulacrum of a non-native dick:
Weeks before my procedure, I got a block of clay and sat meditating and molding by feel, letting my body answer. The resulting phallus was the exact size I’d been requesting. For days, I lay on the floor on and off in the sunlight coming into my living room, asking my ancestors and transcestors for guidance. Some people might kill for this kind of access and choice. Certainly many, many, many, many people have died in the fight for it. One night, I woke up from a dead sleep, and all I heard was: Take the big dick.
What’s interesting here is not the person’s evident mental instability. (The author had previously organized his own rape as therapy for meeting rape victims in Haiti, and published a piece about it.) It’s the decision by the editors of the magazine to elevate and exploit this assault on bodily sex, to épater les bourgeois one more time, to insist on the normalcy of this, as if it were a matter of civil rights rather than a foray into the nihilist and grotesque. They end the piece thus:
Days before my penis’s first birthday, the warmth and weight of it lay against my vulva, each supporting the other, holding me.
This is what the editors seem to promote: a view of the body as beyond sex or gender, to be created and recreated at will and indefinitely, and an abandonment of any stable notion of sex at all. Whatever else this is, it is not a matter of civil rights.
The maximal inclusion of trans people in society is, to my mind, a moral duty. People with crippling gender dysphoria often suffer terribly and need relief. Protection from discrimination is essential — and is already the law. But that does not mean that biology has ceased to exist; that “trans” is always a stable identity; or that children need no more than affirmation and medical treatment to change sex when they violate gender roles. It does not mean allowing unfair sporting contests; or inviting children to make decisions they simply do not have the capacity to make. To argue this is not hate. It’s just sanity.
We need to slow and calm down. We need to reintroduce caution, skepticism and medical science, alongside compassion, to counter ideological fervor and adolescent delusion. And we need to debate all of this without anyone being threatened, demonized or banished from the public square. It’s doable, and it will be to the great benefit of trans and gay kids and adults now and in the future if we do this carefully and we do this right.
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-trans-movement-is-not-about-rights-67e
