In depth exploration of fzzwrbl
Gaby Hinsliff reviews Time to Think for the Guardian, very very cautiously and queasily, and laced with questionable assumptions.
BBC journalist Hannah Barnes’s densely reported account of events inside the Tavistock Centre’s Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) in London, the country’s only specialist clinic for transgender children…
The book traces Gids’s evolution from its foundation in 1989 – offering a non-judgmental therapeutic approach to exploring gender identity…
The first two paragraphs and already we can see the assumptions doing their work – there definitely is such a thing as “transgender children” and there also definitely is such a thing as “gender identity” and we all know what they are and that they are definitely real. It’s called reification, and it’s very deceptive. It deceives the people who use it as well as the people who hear or read it.
Last summer, a review commissioned by NHS England recommended Gids should close, with patients seen instead by regional units taking a holistic approach to mental and physical health.
Barnes sidesteps the broader social and political context to this, yet the two seem hard to disentangle. Some trans people saw attacks on Gids as attempts to stop children transitioning at all; some gender-critical campaigners treated its closure as vindication of wider arguments. Once being “for” or “against” the Gids treatment model was deemed synonymous with supporting or attacking trans rights generally, analysis of its clinical practices became incredibly difficult.
But what are “trans people” and how does anyone know? What are trans rights and how does anyone know and what do we do when they violate other people’s rights? How do we know “trans” is not iatrogenic? How do we know it’s not a phantasm created by people talking about it endlessly? How do we know it’s not a deceptively definite word for a particularly acute discomfort with being oneself?
It’s so tiresome and frustrating trying to get people to make their assumptions explicit. Even when they’re actually aware they’re making any assumptions, such assumptions are often primordial and formless. The act of expressing them verbally results in epistemic angst, which then gets displaced onto you. You’re the one causing the discomfort, so you must be a bad person in some way.
Nullus: One of the best examples of this was a video by (admittedly far right wing) pundit Matt Walsh when he asked an advocate to DEFINE WOMEN. The man could not do this, and he struggled and became irate when Mr. Walsh did not accept the obfuscations and vague non arguments provided.
Brian: Yeah, What is a Woman? is chock full of moments like that. My personal favorite is the interview with some Gender Studies prof, who bristles at the very mention of “truth”.
I don’t know that I’d call Walsh far right, but one of Genderism’s most ironic side effects has been getting staunch (often sexist) conservatives to start making arguments that would have been considered feminist less than two decades ago.