Andrew Sullivan comes really close to getting it
DIAG director Ellie Swimmer pinpoints what The Weekly Dish journalist gets wrong about "gender-affirming care" for children
I’m not writing to nitpick about whether Andrew Sullivan (in his recent essay on the scandal swirling around Asst Secretary for Health Rachel Levine) uses preferred pronouns or some other common source of division within the world of those who oppose the heinous, destructive ideology being promoted by my party. I mean, who am I to criticize? Plus, Sullivan has the vast majority of this right. Levine has to go. That he’s still in his position is a disgrace that should discredit the current administration and bring shame to every Democrat who doesn’t demand his resignation. It’s so much worse, so much more hideous and nightmarish than most people realize, and Sullivan sees it in all of its horrific glory and shares our disgust.
Where he falters, though, is significant.
“And we know that these ‘doctors’ have no way of objectively knowing whether a child is actually trans or gay or depressed or autistic — and yet they also oppose any broad mental health assessment of a child, if that child has simply declared himself or herself the opposite sex.”
Later, he repeats the point:
“These ‘doctors’ know full well that their experiments have no basis in science, that thousands of gay detransitioners have had their lives and bodies destroyed, and yet continue to experiment on children, without knowing if they are actually trans, if they are gay, or bi, or autistic, or in a social contagion.”
“Actually trans.”
The suggestion that a “trans child” is anything but a construction is a serious problem. It implies that a child might, by an unknown and unknowable biological process based purely on a feeling, have been born wrong; that doctors can change a person’s sex, which is an abusive lie; and that there’s a process by which someone could evaluate a child and determine that pretending to be something you’re not, and using drugs and surgeries to accomplish the deception, makes for a life well-lived. It implies that parents and a medical team can in good conscience launch a child on such a path. And it implies that, despite the known and unknown health implications by which Sullivan is rightly horrified, there is no survivable or even marginally better alternative for this mystical subset of children.
Sullivan’s blindness on this point provides an acceptable avenue for harming children.
We know that for children, the interventions euphemistically referred to as “care” are not supported by evidence (and that for adults, the evidence of “success,” whatever that means, is mixed at best: high rates of suicide and shortened lifespan, based on the initial Dutch studies).
Sullivan suggests the problem is that the “doctors” are simply experimenting on the wrong cohort. Experiment away! Just not on the LGB kids, or the kids with neurocognitive challenges and depression, or the kids who pick up their identities from the GSA club or Reddit or, I don’t know, ChatGPT. As if there is any subset of kids who would be good candidates for an unproven, largely irreversible medical pathway that introduces illness and dysfunction into otherwise healthy bodies, so long as they really, really want it—a practice Sullivan describes as unforgiveable. Evil.
What Sullivan seems to accept, with no more evidence than that provided by the ideological clinicians he decries (meaning none), is that there is a species of child who is capable of knowing the existence of another individual, another’s emotional world, another’s trajectory into adulthood: love and relationships, sex, parenthood, employment, illness. Moreover, that adults should defer to this child’s desires and judgement, and based on this knowing, curtail any chance he or she has for a healthy range of personal experience.
Sullivan’s blindness on this point provides an acceptable avenue for harming children. It validates an industry and ideology that preys on our most vulnerable. It says, “Spare from this dystopian medical nightmare the effeminate boy and the rough-and-tumble girl, and those diagnosed with autism or ADHD, and the kid who picked this up after asking the internet a question. Reserve it for the child merely suffering from a delusion.”
There can be no chinks in the armor, no cracks in the dam. Levine must go, and he must take WPATH and the rest with him.
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“Actually trans” is equivalent to “actually anorexic” It is as if the medical community is enthusiastically affirming the anorexic’s “fatness” and prescribing iatrogenic weight loss interventions, including surgery. It’s complete madness.
As much as I like Andrew Sullivan, he frequently misses the mark on women’s issues. What appeared to take him over the edge was the transitioned children never being able to achieve orgasm. As important as that is, as a mother it’s secondary to keeping a child’s body whole and fertility intact until their brains have fully matured. Trans is something a person does, not something a person is.