Mish seems to engage in what many people do
when they can’t win an argument; putting words into their opponents’ mouths.
This is similar to Dreger’s manufacturing of a mythical group of trans people
who are apparently trying to force children to become transsexual against their
will. Mish also appears to deliberately obscure issues;
“These
researchers are refuted by positing there is a significant number of
proto-trans kids who never reveal themselves as children, or are not brought to
the attention of researchers (while it is only kids who are not who do,
apparently…). Really? Is this like all the adults who were really happy with
genital surgery as kids, but never actually come forward to confirm this?”
…and in doing so appears deliberately and
highly disingenuously to confuse trans children with intersex children. She
also fails to mention that the other reason I have suggested that this “research”
is questionable in its validity.
She continues in the same vein;
“Or, maybe they just found evidence for something that a lot of
people who aren’t transsexual seem to be well aware of – that most kids who go
through this kind of thing do not end up transsexual. But because of who they
are, and because we don’t like their conclusions, we are going to put them all
in the transphobic bucket and ignore them – and call anybody who dares cite any
of their findings a transphobe too. Wow! Neat system dude”
…providing no evidence whatsoever that the implications
of my empirical research are not true. I suspect she intends to suggest from
this that I am accusing the researchers, which Dreger doesn’t actually quote,
of being transphobes. This is another example of her putting words into my
mouth, as I have said, a classic strategy for people who are unable to make a
coherent argument to support their case. I have suggested, as have many others,
that these “researchers” use psychological torture in the form of “reparative”
therapy on trans children, and that they have a pecuniary interest in the outcome
of their research, which, in my view, significantly undermines the validity of
their findings.
In fact Shannon Minter (1999) carried out a detailed study of
the “research” carried out by the psychiatrists comprising the Invisible
College and demonstrated that their research findings contradict both each
other and themselves. Their data has never, to my knowedge, been made available
to any kind of external audit; indeed there is quite a wide variation in the
percentages they claim as if they are grabbing numbers out of thin air. As such Dreger’s claims are based on
unvalidated data from people whose research has been shown to be muddled and who
may benefit financially from demonstrating that most trans children become
non-trans adults. That is the point I made. Others have also questioned the
validity of this data, suggesting that these trans children may well have not
been “cured” but have simply decided to pretend that they have to avoid more
“treatment”. To suggest that I accused these researchers of transphobia,
however, is a lie.
Mish continues;
“you
repeated what Dreger said herself – sneaky.”
So, quoting someone else is “sneaky”. I
guess the whole output of pretty much every academic and journalist over the
last few centuries must be “sneaky” in that case. Once again these are the
tactics of someone whose argument fails to stand up.
“You
see, another writer might say “Dreger makes clear that the analogy is weak,
because people cannot be trains, and do grow up transgender, and do have gender
identities” – but you don’t do that, you say Dreger is transphobic, because
people cannot be trains, and do grow up transgender, and do have gender
identities – so she is transphobic for saying what you said, except that she
said it first.”
Again my mouth is full of Mish’s words. I
did not say that Dreger is transphobic because, after she wrote about the boy
wanting to believe he is a train, she said that this was a false analogy. I am
saying she is a transphobe because she included the story about the train. If
the story of the boy who wants to be a train is not relevant why did she
include it? However, and this is important, and I am glad Mish brought this up;
she has missed a crucial difference between what I said and what Dreger said
about this analogy. This is what Dreger said;
“let
me be clear that I don't think being a transgender adult is like being a child
who imagines he is a locomotive.”
Read it carefully, Dreger is NOT saying
that a child who wants to be a locomotive is different from a child who says he
or she is a different gender. She is saying that the child who wants to be a train
is different from an ADULT trans person. In other words she is not comparing
like with like. IMO this is significant and represents a deliberate attempt to
avoid being labeled transphobic whilst being transphobic. The only way this can
be read is that she is therefore equating a child assigned female at birth but
who says he is a boy with a child who says he is a locomotive. I am saying that
Dreger is a transphobe because the only inference that can be made from this
section is that she equates train-boy’s desires with those of trans children.
She may be attempting to disguise it with carefully-chosen words but this woman
has a PhD, and people with PhD’s are used to being very careful with words.
Incidentally
Mish later accuses me of generalizing from the particular to the general (which
I don’t, read it carefully), whereas Dreger is clearly doing just that by using
this anecdote.
In fact Dreger quite obviously uses the
analogy to suggest that trans children’s desires are the same as the fantasies
of the train-boy, only she chooses to do that in a particularly underhand way.
Predictably for someone who appears not to
have read the article or my response to it very closely, Mish also lectures me
about listening; “It is time you started
listening to people like Dreger, and dealing with what they actually say, when
they have something reasonable to say – instead of just demonising them as
transphobic and hoping that will get you off the hook of having to actually
deal with what they are saying.”
I have engaged closely with what Dreger is
saying, and my accusation of transphobia is not made lightly. I have explained
exactly why I think she is transphobic above and also because of the way she
considers transsexual surgery to be the worst possible outcome, whilst any
other outcome is OK. This is remarkably similar to the thinking of
Raymond/Jeffries.
Here Mish contradicts herself;
“She
considers an outcome that involves surgery is not the best possible outcome –
hey, guess what, so do I.”
“Saying
there are people who do not have to have transsexual sex reassignment surgery
in order to deal with gender dysphoria is not transphobic. It is not saying one
is better than the other.”
She also comes out with this;
“It
is saying that people are different – diversity, remember?”
… whilst at the same time suggesting, in a kind
of sweeping generalization that;
“non-surgery
is preferable to surgery, if at all possible.”
Again there are
plenty of trans people who would disagree with this. I know one who is awaiting
surgery right now and is desperate to have GRS so that she can get on with her
life. How much longer, under whatever Mish system she would like to see
created, would she have to wait before assorted shrinks have a go at making her
change her mind? One “therapist”, Az Hakeem, recently suggested that “years” of
psychiatric therapy could “cure” transsexuals. I fail to see how years of
messing with someone else’s mind is better than a relatively short time in an
operating theatre. If I was given the choice I would rather people do things to
my body than to my mind any day.
Mish again;
“–
because surgery is surgery, it involves putting people under anesthetic and
cutting them up, as opposed to leaving them alone.”
A disingenuous assertion. The alternative
to surgery is usually years of psychiatric treatment, not “leaving them alone.”
She goes on…
“It
is like thinking that liposuction is not the best approach to losing weight,
but that does not mean I’m ‘fattist’, far from it.”
Words fail me; gender reassignment surgery
is equated with liposuction.
Mish adds the following;
“At
no point does she imply these surgeries are being forced on children against
their will. So, it seems it is you who is being disingenuous.”
Dreger’s article however says this;
“I am
also sick and tired of trans-rights advocates acting like a certain current-day
endocrinologist is ever-so-progressive because he essentially starts prepping
genderqueer kids for surgery the moment they are presented by their distraught
parents.”
On this subject Mish has this to say;
“The
only people I hear arguing they should be medicalised and given endocrine
disrupting drugs in preparation for a delayed puberty which will be induced
using sex steroids in alignment with SRS, are some transsexual adults &
activists, some physicians, and some parents. I do not hear many cis-gendered
people demanding kids be treated – normalised – this way”
A desperate argument. Why should anyone who
is not involved in trans activism, a physician dealing with trans children, or
the parent of a trans child, be arguing for this treatment? However I
particularly find problematic the way she uses the word “normalized” here. This
seems to be done in the same way that pathologizing psychiatrists did as they
positioned trans children in particular, and trans people in general, as
passive objects with no preferences, agency or desires of their own. The
inference being that trans people are passive objects being subject to and
manipulated by others. Something Sandy Stone demonstrated as long ago as 1992
to be the fiction of certain “radical” feminist transphobe. This really does
show how much further trans people have to go, before the rest of society
considers us people rather than objects.
What my research, as well as that of
Shannon Wyss, Surya Monro and the writing of Cris Beam, does is show that trans
children are active agents who make decisions about their own lives, usually in
very difficult situations, they are human beings with agency, their own minds,
and their own feelings.
But the most dishonest aspect of both
Dreger’s article and the response to it is the elephant in the room, which she
finally can’t resist mentioning; hormone blockers. That is the difference
between my position and that of Dreger. When she says “let the children alone”
she isn’t just talking about 5 or 6 year olds, which might appear to be the
case from the story of the locomotive-boy with which she starts the article. No
, what I suspect she really means, and the article makes no sense otherwise,
is; “Don’t give trans adolescents hormone blockers.” I am particularly glad
Mish made this connection; it brings everything out into the open.
Teenagers and toddlers are very different. One
of the particularly misleading things opponents of hormone blockers tend to infer
is that they somehow have an inevitability about them. They do not. Hormone
blockers are entirely reversible, and are given to trans adolescents, after the
start of puberty, in order to give them the breathing space they need. This can
save transboys from suffering the trauma (and physical discomfort) of
developing breasts, and having periods, and transgirls from having to deal with
unwanted erections, wet dreams, a deepening voice and facial hair. If trans
teenagers change their minds they simply stop taking them and puberty in the
gender they were originally assigned at birth commences.
Mish’s suggestion that they are given
hormone blockers to help them pass better as adults is, of course only a small
part of the story, but I am sure readers are getting used to this sort of distortion
by now. In fact, other than saving young trans people from the trauma of
puberty in a body with which they do not identify, hormone blockers are also prescribed
because they can result in transsexuals having less surgery (something one would have expected Mish, from what she
has said, to support). Transmen may not require double mastectomies, transwomen
will not need extensive hair removal and are much less likely to need any
facial feminization surgery or treatment to prevent scalp hair loss.
However the assumptions she makes in the
statement “The argument is that otherwise
healthy kids will be given hormone blockers” represents everything which
appalls me about her arguments. This statement effectively dismisses the
feelings of trans children. Children who are tormented or traumatised by being
born in the wrong body may appear physically well but are unlikely to be having
a good time mentally. A sound physical body does not necessarily make a healthy
child. This effectively represents an erasure of trans children’s lived experience.
Trans people are usually born with bodies that have nothing physically wrong
with them; trans people manifest no physiological signs that they are trans,
that is the problem. Convincing adults that they are trans represents their
only option. If the adults around them are constantly equating their
self-perceptions with much younger children who think they are trains their
problems multiply. The way these children’s feelings are dismissed in this way is
something I find particularly unacceptable.
