On one level, the trans phenomenon is a praiseworthy struggle for equality by a marginalized and vulnerable minority. But on another level, this phenomenon is harming other marginalized groups in our society – especially women, gays, and children. In this essay, I offer an explanation as to how the trans struggle for human rights has been sidetracked by influential activists, to the detriment of trans and non-trans people alike.
“Trans rights are human rights.” This declaration seems compelling, especially to those of us on the left of the political spectrum. But such a statement can’t be judged true or false until we have a clear understanding of what’s included under the banner of “trans rights.” To the extent that trans rights mirror the rights claimed by earlier oppressed groups, then of course “trans rights are human rights.” Let’s take a moment to list these “trans rights.” We can do so because women, Black people, and homosexuals (among others) claimed these same rights in the past.
Trans Rights:
Trans-identified people should not suffer discrimination, based on their transgender status, in any of the following areas:
Renting an apartment
Buying a home
Employment (hiring and promotion)
Access to public facilities and transportation
Buying and selling goods and services
Education
Voting
Running for elected office
Due process and equal protection
Healthcare and medical insurance
Police protection and personal safety
Protection from unjust incarceration
Free speech
Freedom of association
Marriage and other social contracts
In short, trans people should have the same rights as everyone else. I believe a clear majority of people in the West find this claim reasonable and just. If the demands of all trans people were limited to this plea for equality and nondiscrimination, there would be little controversy.
The problem, however, is this. Trans activists and their allies are making claims on the larger population that go far beyond this plea for equality. I’m referring now, not to trans rights, but to trans beliefs. Activists regard these beliefs as non-negotiable, self-evident "truths" to be imposed on the whole of society, even though many of these beliefs harm people in, and outside of, the trans community.
Here are some of the beliefs I’m referring to. They are all controversial. (It’s important to note here that not all trans people endorse all these beliefs.)
Trans Beliefs:
“Trans women are women.” (In other words, trans-identified men are actually women.)
“Trans men are men.” (Trans-identified women are actually men.)
Everyone has a “gender identity,” that is, an “internal sense or feeling of self as being male, female, both, or neither.” (This is something similar to a soul. It is unverifiable and unfalsifiable.)
Children can be “born in the wrong body.”
It’s possible for a child to go through the “wrong” puberty.
Children can be meaningfully identified as “trans.”
Sex isn't binary. Rather, it represents a spectrum of possibilities.
The sex of infants at birth is not observed and recorded based on external genitalia. Instead, sex is “assigned.”
The words “man” and “woman” no longer refer to sex (“adult male” and “adult female”). These words now refer to gender – a changeable human construct based mainly upon stereotypes. (See boxed note above.)
Trans-identified men must be allowed to participate in women’s sports.
Trans-identified men must be allowed into previously female-only spaces such as bathrooms, locker rooms, shower facilities, prisons, and shelters.
Everyone should affirm a trans-identified person by using whatever pronouns (or neopronouns) that person desires (compelled speech).
A person’s legal sex should be determined solely by self-identification (i.e., by the person’s internal feeling of gender identity) without regard to psychiatric evaluations, medical requirements, or body modifications (gender self-ID laws).
Homosexuality should be redefined as same gender attraction rather than same sex attraction.
It’s acceptable for teachers to introduce young children (ages 5 to 9) to trans beliefs in grade school. This is accomplished through discussion of pronouns and trans-themed books, through flags and banners, and by witnessing the “social transition” of classmates. It’s acceptable to suggest to these impressionable children that boys can become girls and girls can become boys. Those who identity this behavior as “indoctrination” are likely “transphobic.”
Children under 18 wanting to be the opposite sex should be “affirmed.” Psychotherapy to uncover comorbidities (depression, anxiety, autism, eating disorders, self-harm, sexual abuse) is “conversion therapy.”
To not affirm a child wanting to be the opposite sex increases that child’s risk of suicide.
It’s not possible that any of the large number of adolescent girls now claiming to be “trans” could be due, in part, to the harmful influence of social media.
Gender nonconforming children (effeminate boys, masculine girls) are not at greater risk of being identified as “trans” than are gender conforming children.
Puberty blockers are safe and reversible.
Puberty blockers simply function as a pause, giving the child more time to decide who he or she is.
It’s safe and acceptable to provide powerful, and often irreversible, cross-sex hormones to adolescents under 18.
It’s acceptable for school administrators and teachers to “trans” a student, and to keep that fact secret from the student’s parents.
“Social transition” is psychologically harmless to the child undergoing it, and to that child’s classmates who must go along with it.
Anyone cautioning against a social transition → puberty blockers → cross-sex hormones → sexual surgery pipeline is likely “transphobic.”
Children and adolescents under 18 have the ability to consent to a lifetime of medical care, sterility, and sexual dysfunction.
Amputating healthy body parts of adolescents who may be depressed, anxious, autistic, or sexually abused is acceptable medical practice.
Whatever you might think about these trans beliefs, I think you’ll agree they are radically different, in scope and in kind, from the trans rights listed earlier. It’s likely there are many people who support trans rights, yet object to some, or even all, of these trans beliefs.
Nonetheless, trans activists insist that everyone either endorse these beliefs or keep silent. These activists are a minority even within the trans community, but they are a powerful, intimidating minority. They’re intimidating because they have the backing of the federal government, a major political party, mainstream media, Hollywood, many large influential corporations, and quite a few activist medical groups. They even have their own international organization, WPATH (the World Professional Association for Transgender Health), spreading their agenda worldwide.
This institutional support for activists can make it costly for an individual to oppose, or simply to question, trans beliefs. To do so publicly exposes one to the damaging accusation of being a “transphobe.” This, in turn, can easily result in some form of “cancellation.” (Cancellation in this context refers to being shunned for opposing trans beliefs. It can mean loss of friendships, loss of reputation, or even loss of one’s livelihood.)
So how does ideology enter into this picture? At its most basic level, an ideology is simply a group’s set of beliefs. Ideologies are not inherently harmful to the societies in which they are embedded. However, they can become so in two ways:
1. There is an attempt to force group beliefs on people outside the group, or
2. The group’s beliefs prompt actions that harm people.
Trans beliefs constitute an ideology. That ideology – gender ideology – has become destructive for both these reasons.
The trans community has a right to demand equality and nondiscrimination based on their sincerely-held identities. This is true for Mormons, Roman Catholics, Southern Baptists, ultra-orthodox Jews, and many other groups as well. But no community has a right to demand that society at large share their beliefs. To make such a demand, and to attempt enforcing it, is how a legitimate struggle for rights collapses into a harmful ideology.
Earlier, I said the trans movement “is harming other marginalized groups in our society – especially women, gays, and children.” I’ll finish this essay by highlighting some of the negative impacts of gender ideology on each of these three groups.
Gender ideology harms women
Gender ideology harms women in multiple ways. Trans-identified men ("trans women") want protection from men when they are in vulnerable situations (bathrooms, locker rooms, shelters). Women want the same thing. The needs of both groups can’t be satisfied in the same physical space. In each of these situations, gender activists insist on prioritizing the needs of trans-identified men over the safety, privacy, and dignity of women.
Every time a trans-identified man wins an event in a sport meant for women, an affront to basic fairness and common sense occurs. The reason for this is straightforward:
“Male physiology underpins their better athletic performance including increased muscle mass and strength, stronger bones, different skeletal structure, better adapted cardiorespiratory systems, and early developmental effects on brain networks that wires males to be inherently more competitive and aggressive… Male physiology cannot be reformatted by estrogen therapy in transwoman athletes because testosterone has driven permanent effects through early life exposure.”
If this situation continues, how long will it be until women’s basketball, soccer, volleyball, rugby, boxing, track and field, and swimming are all dominated by trans-identified men? How long will it take before young women and girls become reluctant to go out for a sport, knowing they’ll be competing with men and boys who have many natural competitive advantages?
What’s common to these examples is the casual, unapologetic expectation that women (half the planet!) will subordinate their own interests to accommodate the desires of a tiny group of men. This attitude is the root cause of all misogyny.
Also, consider this. Gender ideology promotes the idea that gender takes priority over biological sex. But gender is a collection of socially constructed rolls, stories, and expectations that have been imposed on us on the basis of our biological sex. Over time, these stories and expectations have solidified into various gender stereotypes. While these stereotypes vary from culture to culture – and change over time – they share a disturbingly common element: they are sexist. The stories they tell are all too often stories of women’s subordination to men.
So, if a man has an “inner feeling” that he is a woman – as reflected in the gender stereotypes about women in his particular society – then he "is" a woman. But this makes gender stereotypes the basis for who we are. For women, the result of all this is a disaster: being a woman is a matter of behaving and appearing according to various sexist stereotypes.
Gender ideology harms gay people
Homosexuality is same sex attraction. How a person “identifies,” should be irrelevant here. Gay men are not attracted to women who identify as men, just as lesbians are not attracted to men who identify as women. Any ideology that seeks to redefine homosexuality in terms of gender rather than sex should be unacceptable to gay people because that ideology denies the existence of same sex attraction. In other words, it’s an ideology that erases gay people.
Worse still, consider this question. Which children are more likely to be identified as “trans” at an early age: those who conform to societal expectations of how boys and girls “ought” to behave, or those who are gender nonconforming, that is, effeminate boys and masculine girls? Surely the answer is obvious. But there is a further connection here worth noting. Multiple studies have correlated childhood gender nonconformity with eventual homosexuality. Thus, gender nonconforming children, without themselves knowing it, are in a contradictory situation:
a) They are more likely than other children to be identified as "trans," and
b) They are more likely than other children to grow up gay if they are not identified as "trans."
It would seem adults have two choices when faced with a gender nonconforming child:
One, accept the child. Make it clear to him (or her) there is no wrong way to be a boy or a girl. Allow the child to go through a normal uninterrupted puberty, and then embrace the gay adult who will likely emerge in their late teens.
Two, attempt to change the child. Claim he or she might be “trans.” Suggest to the child they were "born in the wrong body,” that they may, in fact, be the opposite sex. Encourage social transition, and later, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. The adult who emerges from this will be, at least apparently, a “straight” member of the opposite sex. However, to sustain this double illusion, this individual will need costly drugs and medical care for the rest of his or her life.
What about children, gender conforming or not, who suffer from undeniable gender dysphoria prior to puberty? Well, every study to date, including the largest one, has reached the same conclusion: let these children alone and they will eventually come to terms with their sexed bodies. “Let them alone” here means no social transition, no puberty blockers, no drugs – using only counseling and psychotherapy as needed. Under these conditions 88% of children in the study desisted from their gender dysphoria by the time they reached their late teens. This means only 12% persisted. But the key statistic is this: whether they desisted or persisted, two-thirds of these children ended up gay by the time they were twenty.
It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that gender ideology disproportionately affects those children who will most likely grow up to become gay adults. To “trans” such children can be viewed as an attempt, deliberate or not, to avoid the natural outcome of a gay adult, comfortable in their natal sex, and instead to produce the artificial outcome of a straight member of the opposite sex.
For this reason, gender ideology can justifiably be viewed as one of the most radical forms of gay conversion therapy ever conceived.
Did you know ?
In the original Dutch study that later became known as the “Dutch Protocol” – and on which Gender Affirming Care is based – 89% of the 70 patients were same-sex attracted to their natal sex, with most of the others being bisexual. Only one patient was heterosexual. (See here.)
Gender ideology harms children
(The following is in addition to the harm to children I already discussed in the above section on homosexuality.)
For children with gender dysphoria, “gender affirming care” (GAC) has replaced the previous practice of providing psychological care only. Key components of GAC include affirmation of the child’s stated gender identity, early social transition, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and genital surgery.
The main argument used to support GAC is that it improves mental health. But this claim is backed only by low-quality, observational studies. There is not, and has never been, quality research supporting the medicalization of a person’s inner sense of identity. This is a matter of some concern given the risks associated with various components of GAC. Let’s take a brief look at some of these risks.
Early social transition: A large recent study in the journal, Pediatrics, found that 97% of gender dysphoric children who were socially transitioned early (average age 7) continued to identify as transgender 5 years later (average age 12). In fact, 60% of the children had already started puberty blockers. Thus, by the end of the study period, only 3% of the children desisted from transgender identification and re-identified with their natal sex.
But in all earlier studies – studies in which young, gender dysphoric children were not socially transitioned – about 85% desisted from transgender identification some time during adolescence. That’s 85% versus 3%. What’s going on?
An obvious answer is provided by the Endocrine Society. Looking over the evidence, the Society states:
“In most children diagnosed with gender dysmorphia, it did not persist into adolescence. A large majority (about 85%) of prepubertal children with a childhood diagnosis did not remain gender dysmorphic in adolescence. If gender dysphoric children have completely socially transitioned, they may have great difficulty in returning to the original gender role upon entering puberty. Social transition is associated with the persistence of gender dysphoria as a child progresses into adolescence… Social transition (in addition to gender dysphoria) has been found to contribute to the likelihood of persistence.”
Parents and school personnel, by socially transitioning young gender dysphoric children, may actually be consolidating what would otherwise have been a transient notion of belonging to the opposite sex. Anyone who has raised a child knows that children have many fanciful notions.
What's more, allowing social transition in grade schools forces the topic of “changing sex“ to be discussed with children who are not yet mature enough to understand such a topic or to deal with it in a critical fashion. Why do this to children?
Puberty blockers: Gender activists claim puberty blockers are a safe and reversible pause, giving the child more time to explore their “gender identity.” This claim is misleading. Even the NY Times now acknowledges “there is emerging evidence of potential harm from using puberty blockers.” Factually, there are no long-term studies verifying the safety of puberty blockers to halt normally timed puberty in youth with gender dysphoria.
Researchers simply have no idea what will happen to children in the long term who take puberty blockers. They do, however, have multiple concerns that using puberty blockers (GnRH-analogs) adversely affects bone density, sexual function, and possibly even brain development. Additionally, the recently-released Cass Review finds no evidence puberty blockers have any effect on a child's gender dysphoria or psychological well-being.
In short, giving puberty blockers to gender dysphoric children to halt normally timed puberty is a risky experiment – one with no guaranteed benefits, but with numerous potential harms. This helps explain why progressive countries in Europe are either curtailing the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria (Sweden, Finland, Norway, France), or banning their use altogether (United Kingdom). (See here.)
A Note on the Cass Review
Dr. Hilary Cass, former President of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, was asked by England’s National Health Service (NHS) to chair an independent review and make recommendations on how to improve services for children and young people experiencing gender dysphoria.
Taking 4 years to complete, the final report was published on 10 April 2024. Supported by numerous systematic reviews, it is the most thorough scientific analysis of evidence for treatments of gender questioning and gender distressed young people ever undertaken. (See here.)
Additionally, the claim that puberty blockers function as a diagnostic “pause” is simply wrong. Over 95% of children who start on them, later proceed to the next step: cross-sex hormones. Parents must understand that the decision to start puberty blockers for their child is effectively a decision to start cross-sex hormones as well, a little further down the road.
Did you know that if a boy starts puberty blockers at Tanner Stage 2 (beginning puberty) and then, some years later, moves directly to cross-sex hormones, he will be sterile and sexually dysfunctional for life? Listen here to Marci Bowers, the trans President of WPATH, discuss this issue with colleagues.
Cross-sex hormones: As with puberty blockers, there is a lack of high-quality research assessing the outcome of providing cross-sex hormones to adolescents (ages 15-19) with gender dysphoria. But serious risks are associated with taking these hormones (estrogen for trans-identifying men and testosterone for trans-identifying women). These risks include cardiovascular events, pulmonary embolisms, meningiomas (tumors), high blood pressure, baldness, type 2 diabetes, infertility, pelvic pane, vaginal atrophy, blood clots, stroke, and erectile dysfunction. And of course both estrogen and testosterone require lifelong medicalization.
Are there any adults who seriously believe a child (age 9-16) can meaningfully consent to puberty blockers/cross-sex hormones and all the possible consequences such a choice entails? What child has the wisdom and life experience to give informed consent to any of this? Of interest here may be the fact that England’s High Court has determined that children under 16 do not have the ability to understand and weigh the long-term risks and consequences of taking puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
A Note on Suicidality
There is widespread reporting that gender-affirming treatments (puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones) reduce the risk of suicide in children and young people with gender dysphoria. However, the Cass Review finds no evidence, apart from some seriously-flawed studies, that this is the case.
It does recognize the suicide risk in children and young people with gender dysphoria is higher than in the general youth population, but that it is comparable to other young people with a similar range of mental health and psychosocial challenges. Tragically, however, gender-affirming surgery is associated with a significantly elevated risk of suicide (see here).
Finally, consider this. The demographic exhibiting the greatest growth in the desire to be the opposite sex now consists of adolescent girls with no prior history of gender dysphoria. If this is simply an organic and natural development of society’s greater openness to being trans, why are we not seeing comparable growth in adolescent boys wanting to transition? Why are we not seeing such growth in women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s?
The Cass Review unambiguously eliminates a medical pathway (puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery) for this large group of girls, stating that “long-standing gender
incongruence should be an essential prerequisite for medical treatment.” Long standing gender incongruence is exactly what these girls do not have. What they do have in common, however, is a destructive but influential social media stream that provides endless stories of how changing sex will solve all life's problems.
Don’t these particularly vulnerable girls deserve something better from adults than breast binders, “top surgery” (double mastectomies), and testosterone? We’re failing these girls in every conceivable way.
Conclusion
We in the West live in pluralistic societies. There should be room for those among us who wish, for any reason, to appear and to act contrary to our stereotypes for how men and women "ought" to act. There's no plausible reason to discriminate against, to malign, or to do violence to such people. Trans rights are indeed human rights.
Trans beliefs are a different matter. Even in pluralistic societies we should not tolerate attempts to compel people to believe that which they do not believe. And there should be no room for beliefs that prompt harm towards others.
The way forward seems clear. Primum non nocere (“First, do no harm”), especially when it comes to the health and well-being of children. Support trans rights, but resist the harmful ideology that has flourished in its wake.
Stephen Parker
August, 2024
Note: Many ideas in this blog can be traced to an earlier article by Gary Francione, a Professor of Law at Rutgers University in New Jersey. His article, The Transgender-Rights Issue, can be found here. I highly recommend it.
Questions or comments? My email address is stephenparker81451 at gmail.