How the Fight Over Transgender Kids Got a Leading Sex Researcher Fired
nymag.com
nymag.com
> "...research suggests that most gender-dysphoric kids will, in the long run, end up identifying as cisgender."
If this really is true, then the approach offered by Dr Zucker makes far more sense to me - to allow the child to make up his/her own mind over time and provide an understanding and sympathetic environment to do it in, rather than immediately treating the child as the opposite sex the moment they express doubt at age 5.
This is what the article means when it says that: "That’s because the authors believe that messages from family, peers, and society do a huge amount of the work of helping form, reinforce, and solidify gender identities, and that at young ages these identities tend to be quite malleable. There’s great potential for confusion. A young boy might notice his new baby sister getting more attention than he is, and start dressing like a girl in a bid to be noticed. His parents, not knowing what to do, might go along with this, inadvertently reinforcing the notion that he’s a girl — a notion which, according to the GIC model, probably doesn’t come from a deep-seated kernel of gender identity, but rather mostly from social reinforcement and family dynamics."
His position - what he told parents coming to his clinic for help - is that if parents don't do everything they can to dissuade young kids from acting in gender-inappropriate ways, to make sure they wear the right clothes and play with the right toys and socialise with the right gender of other kids, they'll turn their kids trans. This is the point of dispute, and he's way outside of the scientific consensus here. All the stuff about the adolescent he may or may not have mocked is a red herring - I've followed this issue, and literally the only place I've heard it mentioned is articles defending Zucker.
The article brings up many more flaws with the external review than the use of that anecdote. For example, the misreporting of statistics (70% vs 30% of patients meeting the criteria for gender dysphoria); the low number of interviews with actual patients of the GIC (9 or 11), of whom even so only 2 had complaints; misreporting the nature of the use of play therapy (for assessment vs treatment); and so forth.
If the GIC is to be condemned (as perhaps it should) for conversion therapy, it should at least be done on the basis of a thorough, fact-checked independent review; the article's thesis is that the external review conducted by Zinck and Pignatiello does not suffice. It's not just one anecdote they take issue with.
> His approach involved telling parents to prevent their kids from playing with toys of the "wrong" gender [...] > His position - what he told parents coming to his clinic for help [...] > I've followed this issue, [...]
Do you have any links you think are particularly informative about the practices of the GIC in this regard?
Seems pretty definitive that he did not mock that person:
> But Adam is now sure that it wasn’t Zucker who made the offensive remark to him, and said he was planning on sending CAMH a note letting them know he had erred, though he didn’t respond to a follow-up email asking him if he had.
(The author got in touch with the person who made the claim, and from details provided, such as full names of the receptionist and other worker, determined he misremembered the clinic where he was mocked. Author provided that person with a photo of the clinician from where she suspected the abuse happened and received a very strong confirmation.)
That said, this whole article and ambiguity about the right approach for handling gender dysphoria is scary to read as a parent. I just try to tell my children that whatever they want to do is appropriate for their gender. E.g., If they are a boy and want to wear dresses, then boys wear dresses and that's OK.
It is considered as something they will grow out of even if sometimes they don't.
This leads me to believe that Dr. Zucker is right and he is yet another victim of uninformed activism.
The allegations in the report are he said, she said from what I an concerned. If you ever worked in a customer facing role you know if you do enough digging you will find someone that would say what you want them to say even if it's not true.
You would need a statistical report of how may people he has treated vs how many people had something bad to say about his treatment to actually see the real truth.
You can get some people to lie or they might have their own reason for lying but given a large enough sample that is meaningless.
That was not a proper investigation it was a witch hunt.
That's sexual orientation, not gender identity, no? One of the salient points in the original article is precisely the distinction between gender identity (which the GIC sees as flexible, but their critics see as immutable) and sexual orientation (which both appear to view as immutable):
> GIC clinicians view this as a conceptual error: The critics are conflating sexual orientation — which can’t be changed, which is part of the reason we view attempts to mess with it it as unethical — and gender identity, which they say isn’t some hardwired thing
> It is considered as something they will grow out of even if sometimes they don't.
Sexual orientation and gender identity are two different things (you can be trans without being attracted to people of the same biological sex, and vice versa.)
So, while the example you refer to (if true) might be relevant to discussion of whether sexual orientation drifts from childhood (or, perhaps, whether environmental pressures get people to outwardly conform to heteronormative social expectations when their orientation is homo- or bi-sexual), it doesn't seem anything directly to do with gender identity discussion.
The simple truth is that, given how toxic and charged a lot of the activism is around this topic, I don't feel able to make any kind of substantive comment that won't be misinterpreted, deliberately or otherwise, and used to pillior me.
I frankly find it bizarre that so many things -- colors, clothes, toys, certain behaviors -- that should have nothing to do with gender are associated with gender. Why are toy isles even gendered? Why does everything for girls have to be pink? The kids wouldn't care if the adults hadn't already hoisted the distinction on them.
I feel like, if we got rid of all these false associations, the difference between genders would be minimal, and that would make the sorts of problems discussed in the article a lot more manageable.
Or are all of these just distractions, and am I missing the point entirely?
My view on this is you have both gender identity and gender expression. Gender identity is very important to people and (to a lesser degree, children), but it's (mostly) invisible. We even hide our most obvious sexual characteristics.
For this and possibly other reasons, gender identifiers are important. It's important that we (cis and trans both) can hold the magical tchotchke of womanhood and wave it about so that other people know what we are. If it wasn't important that people knew what we are we wouldn't spend a fortune on dresses and makeup.
How that gender identity is defined isn't important. What is important is that it is defined. I'd argue that as long as it doesn't impact on a persons life choices then we should have things for boys and things for girls. So - Javascript is for Boys is a bad implementation of Gender Identity. Pink is for Girls is actually a great expression of Gender Identity. (As it doesn't affect career, or ease of getting dressed or anything that may otherwise societally affect women).
Of course this whole conversation is full of mentalists shouting at each other, so we're never going to be able to work out the best way of allowing gender fluidity in children or for trans people to live in the world without being labelled as mentally ill.
Most commenters here won't read the submitted article. I admit I only skimmed it, for it is long, but what I did read was also good. It addresses some of these questions and more. This sort of reporting on purges rarely happens.
I don't actually think this is true. Disclaimer: a close friend of mine studies this academically, so i'm probably incorrectly passing along a vague version of what i've been told, plus i have a certain level of personal investment in the issue. Anyhow, there's rather a difference of opinion in the schools of thought of queer theory (roughly: it's all a social construct) versus sexual difference theory (roughly: no, the physical body is important in the equation) -- if i understand correctly, this is far from a settled question.
I don't want to attack you personally, because i believe you are commenting in good faith (as am i), but this sentence:
> I don't have a strong opinion in the matter other than I know non-passable trans people creep me out on a sub-rational level (so I just avoid them, like spiders).
Comes across as rather hurtful. I hope that sometime in the near future (like, 10–20 years? one can dream), this sentence will be seen as equally dubious as someone saying something like "black people creep me out, i don't know why but i try to avoid them".
I really don't mean to be mean about it, i'm just pointing out that this attitude won't help any early-stage transpeople feel welcome or comfortable. We as the grass-roots society should probably do our bit to make everyone feel accepted and welcome, especially if they do not conform to our (gender expression, as well as other) expectations. I mention the bottom-up point-of-view in contrast to your "Supreme Court" / institutional answer to the issue.
Respectfully.
I dream of a more grand future where I can just rewrite my personality(ies) to feel differently about various things, even to rewrite my brain and form a new body to experience what it's truly like to be female, or Hutu. The natural way of things is evil, but it must be considered and dealt with honestly.
"Preventing visceral racism" http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5001
In it he reports a similar "natural" reaction to some racial group that he'd never met before. But his theory is that simple exposure is enough for people to move past this, as long as they don't construct rationalizations for their initial feeling of "something isn't right here".
Kind of ironic, as he says a lot of things that many, myself included, would consider racist, but you never know, he may be onto something.
If I spent enough time with racists, I might not find racism as repulsive. Describing losing a reaction as "moving past it" suggests to me he had a suspicion of that reaction for other reasons; Had he not, he might have considered himself 'desensitised'.
What I mean by saying this is, flip it around, and people can tolerate a lot of things that are bad. that feeling of "something isn't right here" isn't always wrong.
Gender (socially ascribed) is completely a social construct, consisting both of categorization by outward characteristics into some number of genders, and social stereotypical roles for those genders.
Biological sex features are entirely biological, but not entirely genetic (there are substantial environmental factors), and the genetic portion is more complex than most people thing -- and isn't strictly binary at a genetic level, even before the variations in phenotype due to other factors come into play.
Gender identity is complicated, and I don't think its at all well settled what the basis is; there's certainly some influence from the surrounding societies construct of gender, there's certainly some relation (beside just the biological sex features on which social gender constructs are overtly based) from biology (genetic and otherwise), and I don't think there is any good model of exactly what contributions of each type exist, what other contributions exist, etc.
That's fairly recent. It wasn't until the early 20th century that blue and pink started being promoted as gender identifiers--and it was pink for boys, blue for girls. It stayed pink for boys, blue for girls until the 1940s, and then the pink for girls, blue for boys convention took hold.
From the '60s through the mid-80's the trend was toward gender-neutral clothing for kids, due to the rise of feminism. The style of feminism at this time had a strong anti-femminine bent.
The next generation of feminists took a more accepting approach to femininity, accepting that a woman could be the equal of a man and still also want to be feminine. Marketers picked up on this, and started pushing the blue means boy/masculine and pink means girl/feminine because having different categories leads to more sales (if a family has children of both sexes, they need to buy two sets of baby things instead of just passing the first baby's hand-me-downs on to the second baby). Hence, the spread of blue for boys, pink for girls beyond clothing to things like cribs, strollers, room paint, and so on.
Here is a nice article on this history of this: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-did-girls-st...
> I feel like, if we got rid of all these false associations, the difference between genders would be minimal, and that would make the sorts of problems discussed in the article a lot more manageable
There would probably still be some significant differences. Nearly every other mammal has significant sex-based [1] behavior differences, including primates. It would be astounding if humans did not. There is research that indicates that very young children do have built-in preferences for certain kinds of toys and that these preferences are different for boys and girls, and there is research that finds these same preferences in some non-human primates.
For instance, studies in two different monkey species found that girl baby monkeys preferred to play with dolls more than with trucks, and boy baby monkeys preferred the trucks over the dolls. See http://www.livescience.com/22677-girls-dolls-boys-toy-trucks...
Researchers looking into these preferences in human babies have found that they correlate with sex hormone levels. Boys with higher testosterone levels tend to have stronger preferences for "boy" toys. Girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (a condition that causes them to experience high levels of androgen in the womb) preferred "boy" toys, lending more credence to the theory that hormones are involved. (See previous link for more on this).
[1] I'm saying "sex-based" here rather than "gender-based" because when talking about more than just humans we need to stick to things we can externally observe. Since sex correlates very highly with gender in humans, this substitution works for most humans.
Giving an 11 year-old hormones...
This is reversible (just stop taking the drugs), and for young people with gender dysphoria, the onset of puberty can be extremely traumatic and often triggers a range of sometimes severely self-destructive behaviour, and so delaying puberty is for many seen as by far the safest and best option.
And additionally, I suspect that puberty and its associated natural hormones is a big part of what allows a teen to feel comfortable.
Sorry but I couldn't help laughing out loud. I do not share your suspicion. You probably meant that the hormones makes you feel more comfortable with your gender identity (is there research on this?), but it looks like a general comment about how comfortable teens are with their raging hormones.
I do not think delaying puberty is reversible. Puberty is an integral part of growing up and maturing into an adult. Delaying it will change the child's mental make-up and I do not consider that to be natural or something that should be done with anybody.
IMO the safest thing is to let the child attain majority, and then allow them to make whatever choice they want.
Then you are wrong. Simple as that. There's been plenty of published research investigating these drugs and their effect, both physical and otherwise.
> Puberty is an integral part of growing up and maturing into an adult. Delaying it will change the child's mental make-up and I do not consider that to be natural or something that should be done with anybody.
Going through puberty as the "wrong gender" for someone with gender dysphoria is associated with a long range of substantial mental health issues that also changes a child mental make-up, and in very negative ways.
> IMO the safest thing is to let the child attain majority, and then allow them to make whatever choice they want.
The research disagrees with you. These drugs are not used for fun. They are used because they have been shown to ameliorate substantial health issues for these patients. Waiting until they attain majority is too late - the damage has already been done.
Doing nothing until 18 causes massive irreversible changes.
One of the compelling reasons for treating gender dysphoria -- including by this means -- is that doing so (or not doing so, in the other direction) does, yes, substantially affect health and mortality.
I'm talking specifically about puberty and physical development. Suicide and gender crisis is a social issue.
Lose lose all around.
"Professionals who treat gender identity disorder in children have begun to refer and prescribe hormones, known as a puberty blocker, to delay the onset of puberty until a child is believed to be old enough to make an informed decision on whether hormonal gender reassignment leading to surgical gender reassignment will be in that person's best interest."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_dysphoria#Prepubescent_...
I can see how that could be an uncomfortable idea for some people, but maybe it's the best option available? What would be your solution?
The whole reason they're the accepted course of treatment is that, if the child changes their mind before reaching the age of majority or near-majority when the treatments actually used for the physical transition begin, the effect can be reversed just by stopping the blockers and letting puberty take its natural course.
Edit: I should add a source. It's dropped by five years since 1920, and 7 years since 1860. That's massive. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/oct/21/puberty-adole...
Thanks for the info though.
That doesn't mean that they would have more "mental" maturity (particularly, in any sense relevant to the instant discussion.)
Surely it is better to block hormones at 11 and then go on the right ones at 16, rather than otherwise needing a mastectomy, facial surgery, vocal surgery, hair removal etc. in later life?
To the extent this is the case, this approach amounts to making children conform their outward sex characteristics to society's gender stereotypes that most closely correspond to their internal identity. Which may be less barbaric than trying to force them to conform their behavior to the gender stereotypes that most closely match their outward sex characteristics, but not much less.
[0] I do want to emphasize that, in saying that, I am not arguing against the idea that its the best approach we have available now, or that parents and clinicians shouldn't choose this approach; I'm saying that I strongly suspect that the reason that it may be the best approach we have available is a much more fundamental problem with our social approach to gender.
I am now in my forties, married with children. I am now coming slowly to accept that I am trans. It is a hard and troubling realisation. It is (without doubt) a curse in today's (western) society.
I'm also starting to realise that there are different kinds of transgendered people [1]. I have also come to realise that gender is not necessarily fixed, and it spans a range.
It is not a surprise that our society struggles to accept this, since people only outwardly see two fixed biological sexes from birth. Deviations from the norm are always the subject of derision in society.
Brain gender and physical sex do not always match. Gender and sexuality are also different. Many people confuse these two.
I like the existing methods for dealing with gender-dysphoric children. Delay puberty because it is extremely traumatic (from personal experience). Then wait and see which gender starts to settle. We don't want our children to make mistakes they regret, nor end up forced into a gender that ends up damaging their entire lives.
However, it is incredibly important that children are not forced to be cisgender when they are not, no more than cisgendered children who have a fleeting period of trans-esque feelings be forced into being trans for the rest of their lives.
We need to get it right, otherwise you end up with secretly trans people in their forties with children and a partners who have their lives turned upside down, because something that should have been dealt with 25 years ago was brushed under the carpet.
My gut feeling is that there are a lot more transgendered people out there than we realise. Many of them sit in their "assigned at birth genders", having their souls ripped in two, because they are forced to live with a shameful secret.
Even worse, I worry about people who twist the community and goals to their own ends (some examples show up at times on reddit's TumblrInAction), but I understand that this is probably a minority. At the same time, I can't help but feel like there is a small, growing hostility towards cisgendered people...
Now let's have a look at that article:
"For starters, the most cited study (Steensma) which alleges a 84 percent desistance rate, did not actually differentiate between children with consistent, persistent and insistent gender dysphoria, kids who socially transitioned, and kids who just acted more masculine or feminine than their birth sex and culture allowed for. In other words, it treated gender non-conformance the same as gender dysphoria. Worse, the study could not locate 45.3 percent of the children for follow up, and made the assumption that all of them were desisters. Indeed, other studies used to support this also suffered from similar methodological flaws."
Yowch. That's some seriously dodgy science there - almost half the subjects lost to follow-up, assigning a particular outcome to the drop-outs, questionable selection criteria... And the NY Mag completely ignores the actual methodological issues, instead dismissing them as ideological complaining from trans activists.
This is pretty sleazy too: "they just haven’t come up with scientifically convincing explanations for why the studies would all be wrong, and all in the same way". The studies in question took a group of people who met some definition of gender variance and looked at how many transitioned. The more strict the definition they used, the higher the proportion that transitioned - and the NY Mag are arguing that the studies showing the highest proportion of non-transitioners are right and indisputable because all the studies showed some positive proportion of non-transitioners, which is the only thing they could show.
I know nothing of this particular field, but I do know I can go out on the internet and find well-meaning people writing a very similar story about a scientist commited to the truth being hounded by ill-informed activists on the topic of, for example, climate change. And, to my point, I can find that story written from both sides of the debate.
Who would have thought the temperature of the earth would become a political football? On the other hand, people have been freaking out for literally decades about the mildest of gender controversies, like men not cutting their hair short, or women wanting to wear trousers, so there's a whole backlog of drama that this current issue builds on.
Do males really need a sex change just to play with barbie dolls? Do females need really need to think about sex change just do play with "action figures"? That's an extreme change to make just so you can fit into social roles.
Why not just create your own personal identity that involves being female and doing male-typical activities, or vice versa? Hollywood plays with gender expectations all the time, and while there are certainly still gender norms, the lines aren't so clear anymore, and society has adopted the appetite to continually challenge gender norms.
And there are barriers that far surpass gender, like the barrier of money. Most men and women don't travel much because of money. Because of your racial identity, you can't easily penetrate any social circle you wish; it's hard to be an anthropological spy.
I doubt we would be having this discussion if it was just about playing with culturally acceptable gender relative toys. I suspect, because of what I've heard and read, that feeling like your body does not match your mind, is traumatic and troubling. Additionally I suspect that without having experienced this feeling, it can be hard for those of us to understand quite what it feels like. As such, this is probably a good time to error on the side of caution, and accept that some people may have vastly different experiences from the norm, and we should support them where possible.
> And there are barriers that far surpass gender, like the barrier of money.
Do you have anything to back up that it's a bigger barrier? Keep in mind, we aren't talking just about gender, but whether you feel comfortable in your current gender. I can imagine not feeling comfortable with my own body being quite an issue, and overwhelming a lot of other problems I might have.
this all makes me incredibly sad.
He was very far from genderless. Actually now that I remember it, it was so plain / obvious / natural that (as far as I'm aware) none of the kids picked on him about that - and kids picked on almost anyone for any reason.
Children know what gender they are and learn gender norms from a young age, in fact.
> If they express gender issues, work on it using therapy to find what the cause is. I don't see the need to make them crossdress etc. at such a young age.
Nobody is being forced to "cross dress" (I put this in quotes, since I would argue the term doesn't really fit in the context of trans children). This is something kids do for themselves, along with expressing such thoughts as what gender they are, what toys they prefer to play with, what other kids they like playing with.
And then people like Zucker tell them they mustn't, because it puts them "at risk of homosexuality or transsexuality" (this is me paraphrasing, but it's very close to what he's said), instruct their parents to force them not to, and they end up with psychological issues for the rest of their life.
It claims there is "strong evidence", but doesn't point to it, and dismisses most of the evidence against Zucker.
More to the point, why would Zucker persist with his own method when there actually is evidence for the conventional approach?
Leonard Sax has talked about some important social topics in today's Western society. The media now influences how kids are raised, and how they see their parents. The influence of parents over their kids is gone in the name of liberalism and open-mindedness. The family unit is being broken down, and we are already seeing the consequences of that.
> With problems due to what is known as feminism, SWJs and the like, everything is being watered down and wishy washy.
Rad-fems are loud but they don't run the show. Corporations, Brands do. Corporation and Brands want to make more money. In order to do that, they need to find new segments of the population they will sell stuff to (stuff that are less and less useful).
Yesterday the "traditional christian white family" got that new fridge or car like in the ad, today gays get this or that product from brand X. Tomorrow Brands will target Trans, Muslims or whatever but in order to do that and not piss off old customers they need to control the narrative thus social influence. Is that bad? that's just how things are. Rad-fems, SJW and co are a fad and a tool,they are working for corporations for free. Proof is they don't question the foundations of modern western societies. They are narcissistic. Brands and corporations need them in order to sell more stuff, period.
Basically changes in modern western society are directly related to capitalism and the consumer society. They are not really driven by ideology anymore. Ideologues are just puppets. Watch that whole "islamophobia" finger pointing thing for instance. I bet a few years from now most brands will sell hijabs. They can't today because they'd risk a consumer backlash.
edit: sorry for my broken english.
I wonder if anybody stopped to think about how much "gender dysphoria" was an issue in previous societies. It seems to be purely a modern mental illness. I'm not talking about actual hormonal and physical issues such as hermaphroditism, that's something else.
There's no balance, in some cases it could be psychological and a hormone imbalance (of the childs current gender)
In a few years they'll flip flop in the other direction, when children will be denied reassignment, and it'll start all over again.
Also this could be dangerous to some in adult life, like telling a partner you used to be a boy as a child.
The LGBT group protested. Apparently according to their research the majority of children who feel they are transgender realise they are actually gay.
http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Gender-dysphoria/Pages/Treatmen...
What they certainly would have refused would be to start reassignment if said teen was not yet 18 and/or had not yet undergone the full evaluation and started socially transitioning, and this is in part for medical reasons, in part because it certainly is true that many children with gender dysphoria eventually come to decide they don't want to transition, either because the gender dyphoria resolves or because they don't feel they need to change physically.
I stand by the 2nd paragraph though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_dysphoria_in_children
Gender identity disorder in children is more heavily linked with adult homosexuality than adult transsexualism. According to limited studies, the majority of children diagnosed with GID cease to desire to be the other sex by puberty, with most growing up to identify as gay or lesbian with or without therapeutic intervention.[5][6]