OK … I can’t hold this in any longer. I went searching for a safe space to talk about trans issues and I found you guys (as per a previous post). I’m really hoping that you won’t think I’m stirring the trans pot for the sake of it. I really do have concerns.
I teach people who will one day, amongst other roles, work with boys, girls, young women, young men, parents and others in a range of ‘social care’ roles. This includes child and youth services and protection. In both my teaching, and the broader sector of practice that I prepare people to work in, I am facing a wall of ignorant, unthinking, militant trans orthodoxy, or a general fear of challenging this, or downright don’t-give-a rat’s-ism. The kinds of things that I hear people (and these are people with power as teachers, workers and even policy-makers) say uncritically (and as if they were droning a script) are:
- trans children have the brains of the opposite gender
- children should not need court consent, counselling or parental permission to have puberty blockers or hormonal drugs
- if a child wants to access PB’s or other hormonal drugs and the parents object, it should become a child-protection matter
- children should be watched for gender variant behaviour
- children should learn about trans from an early age
- all school toilets should be gender-neutral
- boys / men should be allowed into women’s / girls’ facilities if they say they are girls. Girls should not object.
- single-sex residential care homes (for girls, often those who have been sexually abused) should accept males who say they are female (even though we know there are high levels of sexual abuse in care homes)
- terms such a ‘women’ or ‘girls’ should be changes to ‘people who identify as …’
Beyond this, I have the following experiences:
- teaching a small but significant number of males who identify as ‘queer’, ‘trans’ or ‘female’ who have made it clear that they are entering the area to ‘save’ trans children from not being able to transition
- being told by management that the official position is ‘pro-trans’
- being told by some students that I am transphobic if I mention ‘women’. One was a ‘trans’ male who dressed in leather and studs and wore shirts with violent imagery and slogans.
- having colleagues tell me that they think the orthodoxy is rubbish, but being afraid to speak out (as am I)
- being in a meeting of practitioners and told that we must use ‘persons who identify as …’ instead of ‘women’ or ‘men’
- being in a meeting of practitioners and being shown a ‘trans-positive’ manual that advises that trans boys be allowed into girls’ spaces (camps, homes, detention facilities, etc.)
- raising an actual instance of harassment of a young lesbian by a trans man and general instances of lesbians being denied lesbian-spaces to be told that ‘trans comes first because they are so oppressed’.
This does not happen all the time, and nor is it ‘me against the world’, but it is prevalent enough to concern me and make me feel marginalised and silenced.
The reason I am writing this, apart from to get it off my chest and hopefully find some people who don’t think I am nuts for questioning it, is that I don’t think this is spoken of much (i.e. institutional responses to trans issues). Plus, these people have power over the lives of individuals, and some have the ears of policy-makers. Some make policies for organisations. This isn’t stuff happening on social media – it’s real – and to me it is terrifying because it can lead to the abuse of children, whether they be ‘trans’ kids or girls.
We don’t know the long-term effects of a set of drugs (PB’s) that were developed as an emergency measure to allow the treatment of some childhood cancers. We don’t really know much about child-transitioners. We don’t know much about the long term effects of hormone therapies on children’s bodies. Yet, we have generally moved away from a treatment regime that saw medical and surgical interventions as the last means to the first. Counselling and other therapies have fallen out of favour – and indeed are seen as ‘oppressive’ by some. This has all happened so fast that we don’t really know much at all, beyond isolated and mostly non-longitudinal studies. We know that some variants of ‘the pill’ have had detrimental effects, as has HRT – why are people naïve enough to think that hormonal treatments on young children are going to be magically better?
The issue of boys in girls’ and women’s spaces has been spoken of here, but I worry for girls who have no (or inadequate) parents to care for them or look after them, such as those in justice centres or care homes. These are vulnerable children.
Honestly, I know that many of us are wondering when this trans rubbish will dissipate, but I can’t help thinking that it might take a class-action of young people with cancers or a girls or two to be raped / murdered by a male claiming to be ‘trans’ for this to happen.
