The Great Disappearing Trans Freakout

The Supreme Court drives a stake in the transgender controversy, and neither party says much. Is this chapter in American politics headed for the dustbin of history?

From the New York Times, on the Supreme Court ruling affirming a Tennessee ban on surgeries or the prescription of puberty blockers for minors. Note the language:

Here’s what else to know about the case, United States v. Skrmetti:

The treatments: The law prohibits medical providers from prescribing puberty-delaying medication, offering hormone therapy or performing surgery to treat the psychological distress caused by incongruence between experienced gender and that assigned at birth.

With the trans issue, even America’s ostensible paper of record has to speak in code, in its own pages. The Times couldn’t or wouldn’t use the word sex at the end of the above sentence, though it later used it appropriately when referring to a “federal policy requiring passports to reflect the sex on a person’s original birth certificate.” As if in protest, the paper swapped one preposterous bespoke language innovation (“sex assigned at birth”) for an even more nebulous and confusing one: “gender… assigned at birth.”

I’m an aging cis male without gender-fluid children, so according to current formulas of mainstream discourse my opinion counts as about 1/19th of a person. Still, I’d like to offer a meager observation. No topic in recent history has been language-policed more thoroughly than this one (I have friends who still won’t return calls because I reviewed What is a Woman?). However, because the “Kamala is for They/Them, Trump is For You” commercial is widely credited with helping swing last year’s election, the usual Internet goon squads have gone mute of late, even after this week’s ruling. The Times even ran a think piece about the “new discomfort” yesterday.

If we’re really at freakout’s end, let me be first to say, Ding, Dong, the Language-Policing Witch is Dead! This episode should be an object lesson in what happens when you try to tell people what they should think about things they can see with their own eyes, like a 6’4” biological male flashing the victory sign after double-lapping an NCAA pool full of bewildered young women. Awesome quantities of PR capital were expended denouncing those who booed as bigots. Still, the public wouldn’t budge, on that or related concerns, like the extant question of whether or not minors who can’t vote or drive have an absolute right to Lupron prescriptions. There were ways to talk sensibly and with sensitivity about all this, but no room was left to do so, and this is the result.

Unfortunately, it’s already clear no lesson will be learned, as was also made clear in The Times this week:

The modern version of the trans debate appeared as a scorching international controversy seemingly out of nowhere years ago. It was like opening your door to a seven foot stranger holding two huge theater trunks and asking to crash for a few years. Many in media were still in the not-wanting-to-be-rude phase of ideological engagement, and shrugged at a sudden cascade of op-eds and the addition of “T” at the end of LGB, assuming this was an extension of previous rainbow campaigns like gay marriage.

I can’t have been alone in assuming I was (like Ice Cube) Down For Whatever, only to learn we were actually being asked to co-sign an extremely involved proposition built on stacks of extraordinary new assumptions. A 2018 directive by the American Academy of Pediatrics explained something called the Gender Affirming Care Model (GACM). At the time, my first child was five and probably would have identified as a brontosaurus if I’d asked (which I didn’t, in the apparently mistaken belief it was too early for that sort of thing). If you go to a pediatric dermatology conference, which by chance I did around that time, you’ll see slide after slide of retch-inducing skin conditions followed by doctor-lecturers shrugging and saying, “Eh, just do nothing” for initial treatment. The AAP however now said, seriously, that “watchful waiting” for gender-distressed children was the same thing as conversion therapy for gay adults! Waiting was called “reparative” therapy. The feelings of the six- or seven-year-old in distress were to be obeyed so absoutely that birth certificates were to be changed, to eliminate all bureaucratic memory of the assigned-at-birth ex-person. This all seemed pretty hardcore. Could we be reading it wrong?

Nein! If you worked in media at this time you were constantly instructed not only in taxonomies of sexual identity more complex than German grammar, you were regularly told what parts of your vocabulary (and by extension, your being) were outdated and transphobic. Out of boredom years ago I started a bookmark folder called “Avoid the phrase…” to commemorate newly-exiled verbiage. It’s up to about sixty pages now. “Avoid the phrase sex change (see gender confirmation surgery below),” wrote GLAAD in one example, while the San Francisco Chronicle put readers in check with the headline, “Rejecting the use of ‘Latinx’ is Transphobic.” Another pamphlet helpfully advised, “Avoid the phrase ‘completed transition’ or any other language that implies that a transitioning person is ‘done,’ like a cinnamon roll in the oven.” Another suggested that in theoretical writing, “avoid only using old-fashioned ‘generic’ first names like Joe, Mary and Sue, which can sound singularly White.”

All this was accompanied by a confident belief that sex “assigned at birth” could be unassigned through a combination of hormone therapy, surgery, and social encouragement, which sounded nice until a product of affirmation therapy competed on a track or in a pool against oldthinking anachronisms. Once they could see it, the American’s general tendency to want to be understanding, and live and let live, collapsed under the weight of so many radical asks.

That should be clear by now, but isn’t. As the Court was preparing to hand down the ruling this week, the Times via Abundance author and podcaster Ezra Klein interviewed the “first openly trans member of Congress,” in a piece called, “Sarah McBride on Why the Left Lost on Trans Rights.” The discussion between Klein and the Delaware representative was jaw-dropping, both in its admissions about movement political tactics and the stance on Other People.

In the most revealing exchange, Klein (in the tone of a person expecting to be hit with a rolled-up newspaper for asking) wondered about “re-thinking and self-recrimination,” in the context of the loss to Trump:

I want to talk for a minute about the 2024 election and the aftermath. There’s been a lot of rethinking and self-recrimination among Democrats. One of the comments that got a lot of attention came right after the election when your colleague Seth Moulton, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, said: “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” What did you think when you heard that?

Here, even Klein had to speak in code. By “got a lot of attention,” he meant, “Moulton was ruthlessly dogpiled as a Trump-loving Nazi bigot until he repented.” Moulton’s campaign manager Matt Chilliak resigned in protest after his remarks, adding on X, “Millions of Americans today showed that they hate immigrants and transgender people more than they fear fascism.” A Massachusetts Democrat vowed to put up a primary challenger to Moulton, calling him a “Nazi cooperator” in an email. Meanwhile, Moulton’s fellow Democrat Tom Suozzi was in the same boat after saying, “I don’t want to discriminate, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.” Left Voice denounced the “Democratic Transphobia” of both, writing, “One can see the cynical calculus: Would courting transphobic bigots yield more electoral victories than courting the exceedingly small transgender minority?”

Moulton protested repeatedly that while “some of the, you know, woke left just wants to cancel me,” there was also “a good number of them who agree with me.” In the end, both members took so much flak for “transphobia” that they voted against a House measure barring the participation of biological men in women’s sports.

This is what Klein really meant by “got a lot of attention.”

McBride’s answer was wild:

It wasn’t the language that I would use… The sports conversation is a good one because there is a big difference between banning trans young people from extracurricular programs consistent with their gender identity and recognizing that there’s room for nuance in this conversation. The notion that we created this “all-on” or “all-off” mentality, that you had to be perfect on trans rights across the board, use exactly the right language, and unless you do that, you are a bigot, you’re an enemy. When you create a binary all-on or all-off option for people, you’re going to have a lot of imperfect allies who are going to inevitably choose the all-off option.

What ends up happening is the left excommunicates someone who not only — Seth voted against the ban on trans athletes, but we would excommunicate someone who uses imperfect language — yes, again, not language I would use. But we would excommunicate someone who’s saying that there’s nuance in this conversation and use this language that we don’t approve of — yet still votes “the right way”? That’s exactly what’s wrong with our approach.

Translation: “So long as they bow to pressure on demand and ultimately vote the right way, we don’t have to excommunicate absolutely everyone guilty of ideological lapses.” When McBride said, “There’s room for nuance in this conversation,” what she meant, incredibly, is that a Democrat may temporarily express discomfort on the issue, provided he or she gets back in line in time to vote.

Klein didn’t blink at the idea that people with a point of view differing from activists are “imperfect” human beings, nor was there any embarrassment or regret about the idea of “excommunicating” people from something other than a church. That means no apologies to Canadian Dr. Kenneth Zucker after he was fired and denounced as a conversion therapist for suggesting occasional “Watchful waiting,” or to biologist Colin Wright after he was tossed from PayPal or Etsy for selling “Reality’s Last Stand” merch, or to any of the folks who were dismissed or reprimanded for putting a signature on the Harper’s Free Speech Letter with J.K. Rowling and fifty other people. As for admitting the possibility of actual wrongness (as opposed to political error), on any of these issues, that remains competely and utterly excluded. I lost another friend over the Shrier review because I’d “fallen for” Shrier’s premise that this era saw an explosion of interest in transition among young girls. When the British government commissioned a study into the causes of this “surge,” Shrier should have been vindicated, but her “social contagion” thesis was considered so ideologically abhorrent it could not possibly be right, no matter what the numbers said.

This issue from the start has been been presented as a single battle over “transgender rights” as opposed to what it was, a diverse list of wildly varying new demands. There’s a huge difference between denying an adult the right to transition and putting men with penises in women’s prisons. There’s also a big difference between opposing housing or employment discrimination against transgender adults and demanding the use of terms like “birthing persons.” Society was asked to accept all changes at once, and when voters said no to some, like eliminating the concept of “biological sex,” they were the ones deemed “imperfect,” not the activists who overshot the mark.

The Boston Globe in March took the (for them) extraordinary step of asking if Moulton was owed an apology “now that so many publicly agree.” McBride and the Times got halfway to yes this week. The full concession, to Moulton, will come eventually. The rest of the country, meaning those who aren’t Democratic members of Congress, will have to wait longer. In a true culture war, it can take a long time to get to sorry, and an even longer time to take ownership of damage done to your own cause.