Guest post: The binary goes away, the binary comes back
Originally a comment by Papito on Top of the roller-coaster.
My peak happened rather suddenly when my son announced to us that he was really a woman inside. This was patently absurd. His pediatrician wanted to send him straight to the gender clinic. He said to me, “Do you want a live daughter or a dead son?” I said to him, “I brought my son to you because he was cutting himself. I would like the cutting to stop, not for a professional to do it instead.”
FYI, my son is over it now. I was able to steer him carefully around all the eager affirmers, and find him a real therapist. He’s autistic, he’s not like the other boys, and he feels uncomfortable in his body. The TRAs would have you think that means his Johnson must be cut off, and he must present henceforth as a simulacrum of a woman. He eventually realized that would not be an improvement.
One of the things that struck a bell in my mind in the Cambridge.org article linked above is this sentence:
The notion of conversion therapy for those seeing themselves as transgender relies on another binary – that of ‘cisgender’ and ‘transgender’ – being set, closed, biologically anchored categories without overlap, rather than a more plausible hypothesis that one’s gender identity is flexible, informed by one’s culture, personality, personal preferences and social milieu.
That’s it, that’s what the epithet “trans kids” means: all kids can be sorted, from birth and permanently, into two categories: trans and cis. The binary goes away, the binary comes back.
Why? Why must the TRAs insist that the natural categories of male and female are nebulous, arbitrary, wobbly, and made up by Victorian colonialists, at the very same time they insist that as soon as a child utters the magic words “I’m trans!” he jumps irrevocably into the other box and may nevermore be “cis?” He is now a “trans kid,” and any consideration that this self-identification may be temporary, may be mistaken, and may later be regretted, any consideration whatsoever that human beings are complicated, children grow and learn, or that we are not fully known to ourselves, is nothing but oppression, by one side of this binary against the other.
He said to me, “Do you want a live daughter or a dead son?”
WHAT?
This is what a professional said to you??
I found this site by chance years ago and come here because the articles are interesting and the discussions intelligent and free of dogma.
I have a writing gig (unpaid) at a pretty fantastic site called 3 Quarks Daily, to which I submit monthly columns. Sometime this summer, I’m going to dare to submit a piece about the limits of tolerance/intolerance and how we just have to be able to tolerate some intolerance if we are to get along.
A small part of the essay concerns my take on tolerance towards trans people. I shudder to publish it, so, if I may, I’d like to run this part by the readers here to see if it sounds reasonable [it references earlier parts of the discussion, which you can just ignore]:
I admit to drawing some of the ideas directly from discussions here at B&W.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a new idea comes up that one can be both “trans” and “cis” at the same time, or neither — but neither isn’t like us normal people, who say that we are neither because “trans” and “cis” are meaningless made-up concepts, but rather that “trans” and “cis” are real categories but that you are neither because you’re too cool to fall into the normal boring categories.
Mike B – Well it sounds pretty reasonable to me, but then it would, wouldn’t it!
I especially like the flapdoodle and dropped Scrabble letters.
Mike, it’s not just that it’s an idiotic little slogan instead of meaningful medical advice.
It’s that he said it in front of my son.
And then he proceeded – again, in front of my son, to tell me that “transgender children are twenty times more likely to commit suicide if they are not affirmed.”
Papito, I’m sorry you and your son had to go through that.
JFC Papito, you have more self-restraint than me.
I’ve also been there, done that with my granddaughter, and it was bloody hard work, but in the end, love and care cleared her way back to being a stroppy teen girl, just the way we love her. Yes, she does still cut, but not as frequently, and will often talk about it not long after, rather than hiding it, so again, progress.
@Mike B, looking forward to the entire essay, I think you’re onto it.
Mike B @ 2
I like what you had to say in your essay segment. I understand where you are coming from regarding pronouns for your friend Mel; I don’t quite know what I’d do, but in general I avoid using custom pronouns for anyone. Two articles you might find useful for understanding why are:
Pronouns are Rohypnol
Nina Paley: Why I Don’t Use “Preferred Pronouns”
Both I think are well-put essays. My brief explanation might be that seeing people jailed, fired, de-platformed, or physically attacked for failing to use “preferred pronouns” makes me not want to use them, even to appear “polite”. I have similar reasons for not wanting to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or stand for the National Anthem, here in the US. But there are other reasons, such as clarity of speech, and those are well-described in the essays I linked to.
Good articles, Sackbut. They reinforce how disturbing the whole phenomenon is.