In case you missed it part 2 is here.
I have been ploughing through this thread on and off for several days now, going over the points made and trying to engage with them as fairly and in as much detail as I am able. I reiterate that I am not intending to be authoritative, but hoping to show how there are valid alternative viewpoints that deserve better than to be dismissed out of hand.
J.K. Rowling had clearly been considering this in private, for years. Sifting through data, and testimonies, and articles, and videos.
At the heart of it all is the very simple claim: women are female, and that matters.
I think it says something about the state of the modern world, and women’s own place in it, that a simple declaration of existence as a category separate from men takes years of considered thought and research to make, and is met with a torrent of hostility. Something that for the overwhelming majority of people in the world would be a statement so patently obvious that precious few would expend energy “believing” it. Something that, we are repeatedly told, “nobody” denies.
It should not be this complex.
Carter provides a link the GenderGP site where there are a list of studies on this topic. This one shows 2.2% rate of regret, but defines regret as application for gender reversal surgery. This is an extreme measure. It seems fairly obvious that this will be a minority, as some will experience regret, but cope in their transitioned body, while still others will detransition socially without further surgery. So what a true figure of “regret” is would be is not clear from this paper.
Another citation that attests to the 1% detransition rate is this as yet unpublished study, which only included patients still attending the clinic. This would rule out anybody who experienced some form of regret and never returned — which is actually fairly typical of those desisting or detransitioning. So given the methodology, you would expect this to be a very minimal bound on the true figure.
A third listed study showed that of 162 adults that transitioned, only 1 said they regretted and would not transition again. Which is, yes, below 1% — except that this is based on 325 applications for sex reassignment. So just over half desisted at least partway through the process, some after hormone treatment. Whether that constitutes “detransition” is perhaps beside the point — what we are attempting to gauge is the number of people who believe that transition is the correct course for them at one point, who then go on to change their mind. The point at which they do so is a secondary concern — ideally such cases should be avoided through the mentioned safeguards, but how robust are they in truth? I’m not sure how seriously advocates take such safeguards, for example, here’s a Q&A with GenderGP:
In summary: they operate on informed consent only rather than any specific diagnosis, and it takes only 2-3 months from initial contact to surgery.
Or this comment from Mermaids CEO Susie Green, decrying psychological assessment:
The studies on detransition and regret cited by GenderGP are not the only ones, and a further selection can be found here:
In general, these paint a picture that:
- Short term outcomes are better than long term outcomes
- Longer term studies frequently show high numbers (more than 50%) are lost to followup over time
- Those who are lost to followup in studies tend to be the ones with the worst outcomes
We simply don’t know just how many of those lost to followup are experiencing regret or detransitioning, but it would seem to indicate we desperately need further study. After all of this, I don’t think we really have a true picture just how many experience regret, how long it takes that regret to set in, how severe it is, and what the outcome of that regret is — whether detransition, coming to terms with it with it, or something else. The picture is much more mixed than the topline 1% figure, even in the originally cited studies, and going beyond that reveals a wide variance.
However, when James Caspian tried to study the issue of regret and detransition in greater detail, his research was vetoed on the grounds that it might prove controversial, and trigger a backlash against the university. Surely this cannot be a healthy attitude to scientific enquiry?
To understand what’s being said here, you have to appreciate that historically, the majority of children who exhibit some sort of gender dysphoria desist in adulthood. There are several studies linked to from the following article:
While they vary in quality and sample size, overall they show that up to 90% of children with gender dysphoria desist in adulthood, and a significant percentage of these turn out to be gay or bisexual.
Now, the view expressed in the tweet is in essence that this outcome is a bad thing. Rather than these being children who go through the turbulent times of adolescence and integrate their sense of self with their adult sexed body, we are expected to see them as a tragedy.
We should regard these as trans children denied the support they needed to flourish, whose innate gender identity was quashed into conformity. Any increase in trans youth being referred to gender identity clinics now are a sign that there is no trans child left behind.
Based on the available evidence, we are faced with two diametrically opposed viewpoints.
- That children have a true sense of their own identity, and this should be affirmed. Failing to do so will lead to the child unable to become their truest self in adulthood, possibly even becoming suicidal due to the distress. This lack of support and acceptance is essentially conversion therapy, preventing a child from growing up trans.
- That childhood gender dysphoria is in the majority of cases a temporary state which will be outgrown, and with a reasonable chance that the child will be gay or bisexual in adulthood. Affirming such a child reinforces the trans identity, leading it to become fixed. This is essentially conversion therapy, preventing a child from growing up reconciled with their own body.
This presents us with a controversial and existential fight, with one side believing non-intervention is at the very least neglect to the point of “trans conversion therapy”, and the other side regarding intervention and affirmation as “gay conversion therapy”. Of course, this is complicated somewhat since in both cases there are those who are genuinely abusive and would seek a more coercive approach to “correcting” any gender nonconforming child into mandatory heterosexuality, a factor which leads to additional mistrust from all sides. But setting that aside, and simply comparing affirmation with watchful waiting, how could we know which is right?
Well, only one of those requires the existence of a sense of self that is somehow “truer” than the body it arises from.
I think this is an extremely weak basis to be so flippant about a massive rise in children transitioning as to call it “a good thing”, especially when that rise is so startlingly sex-biased. When women look at wider society and see violence against them unmentioned or glorified, endemic abuse and sexualisation, and at the same time observe a sharp rise in vulnerable girls saying that in this society they do not feel like the female body they were born in is the one they are supposed to grow up with — is it any wonder that these dots are being connected? Why is so much energy expended on correcting the bodies of children, rather than examining to what extent society is influencing this behaviour?
The central issue that prevents reasonable dialogue is that the belief in gender identity has elevated a subjective internal sense of self to the level of the truest expression of a person. That is, anything that threatens, or changes, or invalidates this is an assault on that person. To question who someone says they are is to say that they do not really exist. This means that as a hypothesis it seemingly cannot be falsified, and it treats alternative explanations as an existential threat. There is no objective way of establishing someone’s gender identity, and any attempt to challenge or question it in individuals, or to suggest these identities may not be as certain or as fixed as they are asserted to be, become acts of invalidation.
And if all there really is of a person is the self - if the material body is regarded as optional and malleable to better reflect the truth of that self - then to invalidate the self is to erase the person. Anything other than total acceptance prompts a reaction akin to a fight for survival.
Here the marginalised status of trans people is used to rubbish the suggestion that there is anything untoward with the rapid rise in children seeking to transition. If trans people are “marginalised” then the idea of “powerful forces” is implied to be absurd, and therefore cannot exist to be “transing” children.
Many trans individuals absolutely are marginalised and victimised. It is harder to define the global marginalisation of trans people as a class because it is a wide and variable umbrella, but broadly speaking — gender nonconformity is punished, often savagely, and pretty well universally as a reflection of male-dominated power structures.
At the same time, an estimated 23 million girls simply aren’t alive now, due to sex-selective abortion. An atrocity of unimaginable scale is met with a comparative shrug.
In the US, Elizabeth Warren wins plaudits for reading out a list of 18 transwomen murdered in 2019, but who reads out the list of 18 women murdered there every 3 days?
In terms of visibility and public debate, trans people are anything but marginalised. They are centred in virtually every movement, celebrated on international women’s day, in fact on every day of note — in no small part because Stonewall make such actions a condition of organisations being granted Stonewall Champion status. They are uniquely protected on social media, where abuse of women goes unpunished. Women are not permitted to exist unless they include transwomen, not allowed to talk about their bodies in ways that exclude transwomen or transmen.
Here is a thread keeping track of banned and suspended accounts on twitter:
Here are a couple of examples of the trivial reasons for bans and suspension (ie, stating facts):
Meanwhile, many of the following tweets are still up:
It seems that trans people are at the same time marginalised and centred. Suffering invisibly, and also a cause célèbre, with large platforms moderating discourse generally to suit one perspective. I have to wonder why that is.
Dr. Jane Clare Jones pointed out here that in the UK, 60% of those who contributed to the 2005 Equalities Review were middle or upper class, 74% were male and and 97% were white.
We’re quite used to pointing out how white middle- and upper-class males have a bit of an easy ride in the world. Yet when we talk about the marginalisation of trans people, somehow we forget that there are some really not very marginalised at all people in that category. Billionaires. Bankers. Hedge fund managers. Tech entrepreneurs.
Indeed, it was questioning whether it was right that Philip/Pips Bunce should take a spot on the FT “Top 100 Female Executives list” that was one of the flashpoints in the original Maya Forstater case (which, if you cast your mind back, is what this whole furore right now is all about).
Looking at the thread above, it is clear that some quite wealthy and influential white males have had significant input into the framing of the trans rights debate in this country, and yet are somehow immune from scrutiny or criticism because they share a broad classifier with much more marginalised people. A crude misapplication of intersectional ideas has rendered females defending their rights from colonisation and erasure by males as “punching down”, due to their membership of a marginalised class. We don’t seem to notice the other intersections of power and privilege and sex when Edward Lord ignores protests and makes Hampstead Heath Ladies Pond gender neutral. Or when Liverpool Mayor Joe Anderson is so enraged by women standing up for their rights that he makes all council facilities gender neutral in a fit of pique.
Carter is skeptical of “vaguely defined powerful forces”, but in reality we’re just talking about exactly the same forces that always seem to be in play. Males, advancing male interests. Males who are blind or indifferent to the issues that face females.
This is I think a situation fostered by, emotive slogans, such as “trans rights are human rights”, combined with the idea that this is the same issue globally, with the same solutions. The terms of the debate make it hard to actually establish what is even being asked and on whose behalf. How could anybody be so unkind as to deny rights to “one of the most marginalised groups on the planet”? But that is not an accurate reflection of the situation in the UK. Trans people have rights, and deserve to live free from hate and discrimination. We need to discuss the details of what additional protections are being requested, what services should be funded, who is best served by these changes, and how we reach an acceptable resolution on any conflicts that arise. Yet global suffering and global statistics are used over and over to change the terms of the debate, to stifle legitimate enquiry, and ultimately enact legislation here that won’t actually benefit those whose situation is being appropriated in this way.
Arguing to remove sex-based exemptions and introduce self- id to this country on the basis that “trans rights are human rights” is leveraging the terrible situation of the most marginalised trans individuals worldwide in order to give any male the right to name, represent and legislate for all females.
I have been trying to stick to the points and ignore the side commentary as much as possible, but that is a spectacularly inflammatory comparison.
Rape. Bigot. Hate.
Rowling is reflecting on real people’s experiences of internalised homophobia, struggles with mental health, her own anxieties, and how this can in large part be traced to a society that systematically denigrates and sexualises girls. She’s empathising, finding parallels in her own life, and showing that this is the root of her concerns for what’s happening to girls right now. That she can see herself reflected in these stories makes her wonder how many are out there right now being written as we speak, and what will happen to them. Bombarded with the messages society throws at them, more sexualised than ever, more objectified, and offered an outlet that was never available to her then.
But there’s no engagement with that, no attempt to understand her position. It must be shut down, rendered hateful, disgusting, phobic.
I don’t see any homophobic tropes in there at all, I just cannot understand this reading, but while we’re on that subject, here’s noted trans author Juno Dawson:
But research does show that changes to gender identity can be induced through homophobic bullying.
When I was younger, we knew that telling boys who were quiet, or thoughtful, or different, or soft, or effeminate, or even gay, that they were girls was the very definition of homophobic bullying. It is surely at least arguable that if a message delivered negatively has an effect on gender identity, then delivering the same thing positively through affirmation could have a similar impact?
We see that desistance rates vary depending on treatment, from 90% without intervention, falling to 4% with affirmation, and 0% if a child receives puberty blockers. Why is it so outrageous to suggest that social and medical intervention does cause a temporary state of questioning to become permanent in some cases?
With schools receiving trans inclusion toolkits which state that suggesting to a child that “they might just be gay” is transphobic, there is no room for any alternative narrative. A child is trans if they say they are, and anything short of full affirmation is hateful.
Notice the casual comparison to racism. Why accuse someone of just one sort of hatred, when you can imply another?
And again we see the suggestion that those 60–90% of desisters are possibly a poor outcome, who should have received better support. Kids that could have been trans, and would have been better served under an affirmation model.
There’s an inherent contradiction between the idea that gender identity must be affirmed, and the concept of safeguarding against mistakes. You cannot both always believe someone’s gender identity, and also say you’re making efforts to weed out the ones who are just temporarily confused.
Because, if a process exists to deal with the latter — why would there not be safeguards on adult services too? Why would we ever permit self-id?
A huge thank you to everyone who has got in touch after reading the previous parts to send additional resources and information, I am truly grateful.
The 4th and final part of this series is here:
