When I shared my opinions of a book called Cis White Gay several months ago, I expected no one would care, but seven thousand people clicked on what I had to say.
The author of that book recycled one of his position statements for an article in The Atlantic published yesterday (and also findable on the Wayback Machine). The seven thousand people who read my book review may expect me to say something about it, so I will.
The new article is called "In Defense of Effeminate Gay Boys: If anyone had suggested that I might really be a girl, I don't know how I would have responded." Shortly after publication, the word "gay" was removed from the headline, and we are left for ourselves to think why.
The author's position is that boys aren't girls, that "effeminate" boys are likely gay, and that adults should reject the identities of kids who say they're trans, because what if the kid isn't trans and is being led astray?
He says he was once a "sissy boy" who was mistaken for his mother over the telephone and who spoke to his teacher "too fastidiously for a middle-school boy." This is his claim to authority on the topic.
His "gender nonconformity didn't disqualify me from being male." Of course it didn't.
He says he's concerned that kids today are learning the opposite: that "if you act and dress like a girl, you are one."
I don't think anyone really believes that your clothes determine your gender. I think trans people may tend to mention our clothing when asked extraordinarily basic questions about our gender because we think the inquirer doesn't need or deserve a deep explanation or isn't positioned to understand it.
He supposes that "many doctors and hospitals" (who?) have no "rigorous way" (what rigor is needed?) to determine which kids are really trans, and thus are handing out puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones basically upon demand (really? let trans people know where these clinics are, especially while also admitting that "the majority of [U.S.] red states have now banned" this for minors entirely). One piece of his evidence that doctors are transing all the gay kids into straight kids is that, in one British clinic in 2019, staff "joked" that they were doing this.
Also, he has personally met "a number" of gay men who temporarily lived as women in hopes of avoiding homophobia.
How many is "a number"? It matters since he's arguing that gay boys are at significant risk of this experience. It's also relevant, when someone's existence helps him prove a point, whether he deliberately sought out those people or encountered them entirely by chance. Just because he may know, say, five or six doesn't mean we all do. This is a statement about his friend group. It isn't suggestive of how many gay men out there once felt pressured to be trans, actually lived that way for a while, and now feel distressed about having done so.
It's OK, by the way, to wonder if you're trans. Some people don't immediately know. You can think about it for a good long while (forever, even), meet new friends, find a supportive therapist. Hopefully, the people in your life will care about you regardless of your gender. Wondering whether you're trans and ultimately deciding "nah" is not inherently harmful. You might regret changing your body, but you might also regret not changing your body. That can work both ways. Regret is a normal human emotion in all sorts of contexts.
A couple U.S. medical associations, he tells us, recently recommended that trans kids not receive surgery until they are adults. But surgery is rare for trans kids anyway. These statements from the medical organizations do not represent a sea change, and here they function mainly as a news hook for the Atlantic to publish this essay.
Indeed, the real problem, he says, goes beyond surgery. It is that "effeminate boys" and "gender-nonconforming children" are pressured to be "something other than what they are." What if trans-inclusive people are "nudging effeminate gay boys to think of themselves as girls"? He doesn't have evidence, but what if?
Citing a Dutch study conducted 2000–2008, he says the 70 kids taking puberty blockers were all gay to start with — that is, from his perspective, the kids were to be seen as straight in their reassigned genders. OK, at least he's providing this one piece of evidence that doctors may tend to prescribe puberty blockers with the interest of making the child straight. But this was two decades ago in just one country. Is it still happening today?
He realized during puberty that he was gay, and he feared that his sexuality was a "spiritual defect." Today he is speculating that "if a teacher or a guidance counselor or a therapist had told me that I'd been born in the wrong body and that there was a medical solution" — he didn't say this to anyone, and no one said it to him, but please imagine if they had — "I might have jumped at it."
Well, this is a very big hypothetical. It is a fantasy. It does not suggest that significant numbers of children are declaring themselves trans, are making irreversible changes, and are later anguished with regret.
And if large numbers of those people did exist, they would be writing this article for the Atlantic.
He complains that someone "falsely" wrote "that I'm associated with an 'anti-trans hate group.'" However, the online article about which he's complaining does link to the Southern Poverty Law Center's designation of Genspect as a hate group; it is a fact to say that Genspect has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. If he disagrees with the SPLC designation of Genspect, he might explain to us why, since he has been given this space in the Atlantic.
Part of the price he's had to pay for his stance on trans kids: He was once called into his boss's office to explain his extracurricular hobby of writing about trans kids! (He kept his job.) Plus, a couple close friends rebuked him, telling him his campaign was harming trans kids! (He doesn't tell us whether he contemplated the truth of the accusation, apologized to his friends, or cares whether trans kids are harmed by him or anyone else.)
He thinks this is a significant price to pay.
He ought to compare his sacrifices to those that trans people make by coming out.
"At times, I've been tempted to join the right," he says, because "so many conservatives have been kind to me." Sure, right-wing activists would be kind to him on this issue, insofar as he's being useful to them.
He's bothered that an internet search will tell you that he's anti-trans. That's why, feeling charitable to him, I have not written his name here. You can of course consult it for yourself in the linked articles.
He wants us to consider this takeaway: "How are adults supposed to respond in the moment to a little boy who demands long dresses and dolls, and who insists that he's really a girl?" He says we should "tell him the truth: The difference he feels is real." The boy is gender-nonconforming, maybe gay. Adults should "let him wear the dress and carry the doll," since "boys can do those things too."
But if we can acknowledge that "the difference he feels is real," why would we limit our ideas of the possible differences? Assuming it's possible for a boy to feel gender-conforming or gay, why should it be impossible for the same kid to feel trans or like a girl? That the author of Cis White Gay did not have trans feelings doesn't mean that no kids have them.
Trans people are capable of explaining our feelings and self-understandings, and we can do so in depth far beyond saying whether we like to wear dresses. However, we have less incentive to share ourselves in authentic complexity when our rights are being severely curtailed and the general public has been taught not to believe us. Why would we bother crafting sentences that will be deliberately misconstrued and used against us? Why would we dare to speak off-the-cuff either?
Nowhere in the Atlantic essay did the author pause to say that trans people — of any age — have basic human rights, need to be socially included, or deserve any kind of attention or respect. Instead he suggested that "protecting trans kids" is just "sloganeering." He did not, of course — let's be real — cite any trans person. He did not say this because the function of the essay was not to acknowledge the existence nor support the well-being of trans people. It seems he does not think trans identities are accurate, valid, or meaningful, insofar as he describes gender transition as people's attempt to "bec[o]me something other than what they are." That's the idea he's planting here.