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If one spends any time being trans on the internet, one occasionally encounters particular antipathy directed against a journalist named Jesse Singal. Iâve sometimes wondered why he stirs up such strong feelings. So I thought I would look into it. (long thread...)
What follows is an account of the controversy written for the benefit of non-trans people who might, looking quickly at it, be minded to accept Singalâs framing of the issue as a fight between good scientists and unruly trans activists. That is a bad framing, and it isnât true.
Iâll declare an interest. JS reposted the âopen letterâ to me with a fairly bland annotation. My bf made a jovial joke about it. JS responded in outrage, saying he planned to back off Twitter. He didnât. I donât bear him any ill will over it, and Iâm not going to make fun of him.
(Just parenthetically tho: the authors of that letter apologized in LARB the following week for having published it. Neither Singal, nor Andrew Sullivan, nor Glenn Greenwald, nor Kathleen Stock, nor anyone else who posted their misleading attack, publicly registered the apology.)
The controversy derives mainly from two articles: one in /The Cut/ concerning the closure of a Toronto clinic for children expressing gender non-conformity, and the other in /The Atlantic/ concerning post-adolescent detransitioners. Both deserve to be read carefully.
In both articles, Singal discusses children who start expressing gender non-conformity, are diagnosed with gender dysphoria, received treatment with hormone suppressors, and given encouragement to change name and pronoun in schools and other social environments.
This is the standard care for cross-gender expression in the US. It is the âgender affirmativeâ approach recommended by AMA and most other healthcare organizations and providers. Hereâs the American Association of Pediatrics:
While standard, it isnât uniformly adopted. The UK Royal College of Psychiatrists, eg, supports a policy of âwatchful waiting,â which is what it sounds like. In practice, the policy debate is between these two approaches. Both involve trade-offs.
For a certain % of children (the % is disputed - below), non-conforming gender expression will begin to trail off after a while. Some portion of that % of people may feel aggrieved and hurt about their treatment, and change their names and pronouns back.
Crucially, nothing recommended by those who advocate âaffirmativeâ care for children and young adolescents is irreversible. So there is real question about what constitutes âwaitingâ when it comes to a kid about to start a puberty s/he may not want.
The phenomenon whereby dysphoria goes away is called âdesistanceâ: the trailing off of gender dysphoria. What % of dysphoric children experience it? That turns out to be a complex q. Initially, S claimed âabout 80 percent.â
(This langauge is kind of annoying tbh. Who on earth feels âokay with the body they were born intoâ? Surely less than 80% of the general population. And it seems to imply that, unless they transition, people have the same body their whole lives? But I digress...)
He moved that figure that down after realizing that the language of the Steensma study did not distinguish between people whose dysphoria remitted and people who stopped attending the clinic (which may have been for any # of reasons). In his second go, he downsized (56/127).
Understandably, as the evidence began to unravel concerning the % of desistance, articles in the HuffPo and elsewhere started referring it as a âmyth.â The language was misleading bc it implied nobody desists. The myth is that 80% desist.
But, as the justifiable % of desisters began to shrink, Singal moved, or rather dramatically widened, the goalposts. Now, he says, simply wants to prove that *some* people experience this phenomenon. Which they obviously do.
Why would Singal adopt such an embattled tone while trying to prove something pretty self-evident and universally agreed? Because his broader argument is that trans people are unreasonable and wonât accept an obvious truth. So, do trans people deny it ever happens? They do not.
Singal has claimed on Twitter that Julia Serano, for example, denies the existence of desisted (ex-trans) people. She really doesnât. He says that trans activists deny *any* possibility of desistance, when in fact they rebut his arguments *about* it from experience and expertise
Here are other examples of Singal saying that trans people and allies deny desistance entirely, next to what they have actually said.
So, what *do* trans people think about desistance? Well, one, that it occupies a rather unwholesome place in the imagination of a transphobic world, an eliminationist dream for the same people who, twenty years ago, hoped their gay children were just going through a phase.
Two, that that fantasy is nourished by articles about the regret of ex-trans people, ignoring the no-less-real suffering of children whose trans expressions were suppressed/discredited/delayed by parents who, whether wellwishing or not, thought their kids would grow out of it
Third, that overstating the rate of desistance supplies misleading information to parents, and so could very well lead to more of that kind of suffering.
Four, that at least some of the doctors that Singal admires most take desistance not merely as a change in expression but as a good outcome. Zucker and Blanchard think being trans is too hard, and if kids could be stopped, that would be to their advantage.
Five, while clearly any healthcare policy entails a balance of competing interests, gender affirmative care (rather than âwatchful waitingâ) may help some non-trans children experiment, clarify, play, learn, and become themselves too. Everyone should be free to change their mind
Six, that (again, given the unlivable conditions in which so many trans people find themselves) one should factor in a substantial parental/cultural pressure on kids to report desistance of their trans expressions and identifications.
Seven, the changes to a body wrought by puberty can be difficult to live with for trans people who transition later on (I include myself here). Given which perspective, a âneutralâ policy would not be one that allows its onset, but delays it until after a child is sure.
Rest of thread here: https://twitter.com/graceelavery/status/1085622777929846785?s=21
