Objectivity and Subjectivity

Whose facts matter?

It is terrifying that the world is inexplicable. People like to believe we can understand and control it, so believe in the existence of facts, objective truth, and Right and Wrong, all of which they imagine they know. So we argue past each other. In reality, Objective Truth about anything human cannot be known, only approached or approximated. Each person is marooned in their own subjectivity, their values and desires influencing how they see the world. That, or trapped in someone else’s, which is worse. How can we even talk to one another, when our experience and needs are so different?

I am Trans. I have been going on about this quite a lot lately, as it is denied. I am not a person “questioning my gender”, I know my gender quite well. I do not suffer from gender dysphoria, but have Trans Joy, because I have transitioned. I am not a “believer in gender ideology”, I know precisely what gonads I had, what they do, and what I did to them. I am trans. People are- hundreds of thousands in the census, tens of thousands on gender clinic waiting lists, thousands with Gender Recognition Certificates. There have been trans people for ever, and we exist all round the world in every culture. Some people are trans is about as Objective as you can get about people, just as objective as that people can be gay or left-handed or aphantasic.

I have always been trans. You don’t “become trans” when you embrace your nature, you just are trans, even if you try to present as your sex at birth despite how miserable it makes you.

And trans is subjective. Nobody would know that I am trans if I did not act like a trans person and say I am trans. Any diagnosis is based on what I say, though a psychiatrist might check if I were psychotic, and might try to see if I were lying. Someone might lie, and pretend to be trans, though outside prison it will gain them nothing.

In a free society, my subjectivity matters. I “pursue happiness” by, among other things, transitioning. My example of being authentically myself blesses other people.

The pretence that sex is biological and this is objective truth, or even that it matters apart from issues of reproductive biology, is a lie. Sex- what sex a person is and how that affects their life- is almost entirely cultural.

Other people’s subjectivity matters to me. If a woman is frightened when she sees me in a woman’s loo, that matters, but the answer is not just excluding all trans people.

So much of the argument against trans inclusion is sloganeering, triggering and mystification, as objective as Mein Kampf. Take the slogan “Sex-based Rights!” It is designed to trigger, to make women angry that their right to services with no men is being taken away by trans women and trans allies. Mystification: the anti-trans demand trans exclusion, without mentioning trans. The announcement of the NHS consultation talks about trans exclusion in ten paragraphs, and mentions “transgender patients” once.

I am not the Faceless Threat, the Others that the Tories want decent people to unite against. That’s as subjective as can be. I am a person. I matter as much as cis people do.

Whose facts matter? Everyone’s. Not their lies and bullshit, just their subjective facts, perceptions, needs, desires. Mine, as much as anyone else’s.

Privacy, dignity and safety

“Privacy, dignity and safety” is the new code for driving trans women out of women’s wards, and “same-sex care” means treating trans clinicians as of their assigned sex at birth. The NHS consultation is about all sorts of things, but the press release headline only refers to trans people.

My privacy, dignity and safety matter, just as much as cis people’s. The 2019 NHS guidance provides for that. Trans people should be accommodated according to how we present, as the EHRC Code of practice says.

Trans people would often be in a single room. If I needed to be in hospital, I doubt I would be able to keep my wig looking respectable all the time, and you can’t sleep in a wig. I would not want my bald head on show. Some patients will not have had genital surgery. My aureoles are much smaller than most women’s, and I would be self-conscious showering with others. Trans people I have visited have had a single room.

Privacy and dignity are held out as objective values, but are not. They are subjective.

Subjectivity is the subject or person’s view of themself and the world. There may be an objective truth, a truth not dependent on the perception of minds, but it is extremely hard for minds to know it. We can attempt to understand the biases our minds create, and to eliminate them as far as possible, but not attain true objectivity.

It is not Objective Truth to say “trans women are men”. It involves the value judgment that genes, gonads and genitals matter more than the person’s sense of themself. A woman with a Y chromosome and androgen insensitivity syndrome, AIS, is a woman, according to her assignation at birth: the idea that she is more like a woman, so should be brought up and treated as a female, is subjective not objective. She has no cervix, no female reproductive system, and she will not grow breasts without hormonal intervention. The belief that AIS makes her a woman but the intransigent, incomprehensible belief that they are female does not stop trans women being men, is also entirely subjective.

When Kemi Badenoch opines that I am a man, even if the AIS woman is not, that is merely linguistic. Trans allies say I am a woman. If cis women see me in their ward and feel this is a threat to their dignity and privacy greater than being in hospital, sick, perhaps asleep when male hospital staff and visitors are a few feet from their bed, that I am a threat equally repugnant to being in a bed next to a man, that too is subjective.

Privacy and dignity are subjective. It is as if my privacy and dignity do not matter to the Ministers driving such a change to the NHS Constitution. The Ministers privilege their subjective feelings and ride roughshod over mine.

The current guidance suggests a curtain may be sufficient privacy, for trans women in women’s wards. It would not be, for a trans woman, in a men’s ward. Taking hormones, trans women develop breasts. Those of us who don’t need wigs have our hair in women’s styles. Moving from a single room to the stairs would be humiliating. It might even put pressure on trans women who might pass as men to conceal their trans status while in hospital: it might make us false to ourselves. Whether presenting female or male, being in a men’s ward would place additional stress on me, which I would not want while dealing with the actual health issue.

Safety is more objective. You can count how many assaults there are. Freedom of Information requests found no complaints about trans women in women’s wards.

Excluding trans women does not improve cis women’s “safety”. Saying that it does, is a slander on trans women. There have been abusive NHS staff: projecting threat onto harmless trans people makes patients less safe, as scrutiny is diverted from where it should be.

Trans exclusion has been bolted on to an NHS consultation which deals with real issues, and might even make small improvements. It is a non-issue, put in to grub for votes from hate and gain publicity for the Ministers.

The Tale of Kitty in Boots

Did Beatrix Potter write a nonbinary character? She wrote The Tale of Kitty in Boots in 1915, but only made one illustration for it. There, Kitty, as the kind old lady who feeds her calls her, wears a jacket and tie.

Potter was strongly opposed to authority, and on the side of the child. Look at the fear on those other children’s face.

She also has the habit of saying something shocking and then saying she did not really mean it; or saying something subversive, then giving the societally approved interpretation after. For example, a ferret snatches Kitty’s gun, and she spits at it and scratches it. Then Potter writes,

“(I once saw a copy-book heading to the effect that Evil Communications Corrupt Good Manners; Miss Catherine’s manners were not improved by associating with poaching ferrets…)”

Mmm. Scratching is bad, children. Wink.

In the same nudging way, Potter writes that the old lady “would have been painfully surprised had she ever seen Miss Kitty in a gentleman’s Norfolk jacket, and little fur-lined boots.” What a bad female cat, dressing like a Man! Mercy!

Mrs Tiggywinkle calls her “Sir”, and she was “rather flattered to be mistaken for a sportsman”. The second time she corrects her, “Ma’am”.

She has a friend, Winkiepeeps, another black cat who sleeps in her place when she wants to go out hunting, and eats the breakfast the old lady provides. Winkiepeeps calls her Squintums, though Miss Catherine St Quintin objects.

Of course, there is nothing wrong in women engaging in activities thought of as masculine, or in wearing trousers, though it was frowned on in 1915, when women could not be lawyers or doctors, nor graduate from university. This little cat could just be a tomboy, a girl who liked exciting things.

Yeah, I’m just following Potter’s own trope. Of course Kitty is nonbinary. Why else would she be an “odd little cat”?

Kitty suffers badly in her hunting trip, and afterwards is a reformed, lady-like cat. It is as if Potter does not imagine a happy ending for such a counter-cultural cat. “But Winkiepeeps lived in the woods.” He gets to live Cat, as Cat is.

The book is illustrated by Quentin Blake, and on the front Miss Kitty wears a man’s hunting gear.

The NHS Constitution and trans people

“Strengthen privacy, dignity and safety”. Without naming trans people, the government call us dangerous, and their headline on their NHS consultation only mentions trans exclusions. The consultation asks about other things, but that news story mainly goes on and on about The Trans Threat. Single-sex wards are mentioned three times: they will be “respected”. Someone from Healthwatch welcomes the plans.

Expressionists

“I am not a man. I am not a woman. I am I.”

To the Tate Modern exhibition of Expressionists. On the wall, I read, “The Blue Rider Collective included women artists and those exploring their gender identities”. I had not anticipated this. Who? Here is “Spanish Woman”, by Alexei Jawlensky, sometimes “von Jawlensky”.

The sitter is the dancer, Alexander Sakharoff.

Sakharoff is a dancer able to express their whole self, beyond masculine and feminine. They did not go through a binary transition: perhaps they could not imagine the possibility, perhaps there was no need. They could express their feminine self by performing in women’s or genderfluid clothing. Perhaps they felt afraid, of cancellation of their dancing career or violent homophobia. Their papers are at the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

They wrote, “the body must be an elaborate instrument capable of expressing the soul”, and I find my being through inspired movement.

Marianne Werefkin painted Sakharoff. I got a tote bag with this image. That could be a flower or an impaled insect.

Here is Werefkin’s self-portrait

(not in the exhibition). She inherited money, and was a patron of the arts. This was a man’s role in that society, and she was attacked as a “manwoman”, or Mannfrau, for it- an unnatural member of a third sex. But the “I am I” quote could just mean, Don’t stereotype me. Gabriele Münter, whose work is still in copyright, painted Werefkin, seeing her as “of grand appearance, self-confident, commanding”. This does not make her not a woman.

They moved through the world as best they could, as we all do.

Here is a Kandinsky from the exhibition.

More in Common on Culture War

More in Common, a centrist body committed to bringing people together, has done a deeply transmisic act.

For their briefing paper about culture wars, they asked people about various issues, both Do you support or oppose various actions? And Is your view on this action important or unimportant to you?

There were three trans-related issues, framed as follows:
Allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sports
Public institutions holding family-friendly drag queen shows
Protecting female-only and male-only spaces in places like bathrooms and hospital wards

The third of these has a completely transmisic framing. The word “protecting” implies there is a threat. Of course we “protect” women’s spaces from men, though often not from male cleaners. The framing treats trans women as no different from men.

It would have been easy to frame this issue in a trans-friendly manner. Do you support excluding all trans women from women’s services such as toilets and changing rooms in shops? Or, if naming hospital wards, the survey could point out that a lot of wards have single rooms. My friend, dying, had a single room. I suggest “excluding” rather than “including” in the phrasing, because currently trans women have a right to be in these places, according to the statutory code of practice.

The introductory page has links to download the briefing paper and data tables giving the questions and answers. 76% supported “protecting female-only spaces” and only 6% opposed, which is unsurprising given the framing. 69% said this was important, and 10% unimportant, which would mean the population is seething with transphobia. But, when I go into toilets I have still not been challenged, though I am more and more afraid of saying that in case I jinx it.

On pronouns, 39% agreed using pronouns is basic decency and respect, and 35% said it was compelled speech contrary to personal beliefs. Yet I am not misgendered. Possibly, people gave the anti-trans response because it was suggested to them. Had they been offered the phrase about decency and respect alone, more would have agreed. So, More in Common normalises anti-trans talking points.

The net opposition to trans women in women’s sports was 48%. The question did not distinguish elite from amateur sports. The public were even opposed to drag queen story time, by a net 7%. More people found these matters unimportant than important.

Having said all that, the report has some useful stuff. It quotes Steven, from Blyth, saying transgender inclusion would not “change his life”, which if he’s cis seems obvious. Simone, also from Blyth, said the anti-trans politicians are merely ignorant. Richard from Wokingham called Rishi Sunak “disrespectful” and belittling in his attitude to trans.

However an imagined leaflet promising in its title to “protect women’s only [sic] spaces” was seen as more interesting and important than one to improve bus routes. The least popular title was about renaming streets to reflect modern diversity.

They recommend that politicians “talk about the issues that matter most to the public”. Well, of course they do. They’re More in Common, not some Tufton St junk-tank or the Daily Mail wanting to win votes through stoking hate. They say trans issues should not be dealt with by trying to create electoral wedges, but for the election politicians should stick to everyday concerns of the public and work through trans issues behind the scenes. This “working through”- they don’t say if it might mean scrapping the trans parts of the Equality Act, and the Human Rights they are based on. That settlement allows trans exclusion if there is a good reason- it’s just that there never is a good reason.

It’s not just the far right and hard right who spread hate on trans. We are not safe with anyone. Any organisation which, like More in Common, sees itself as reasonable, balanced, sensible and centrist may preach trans-exclusion. It’s a huge contrast to what they said less than two years ago.

38 Degrees commissioned the report. They say they want people to get “a fair chance in life”. Well, perhaps not trans people. Owen Jones had useful points on the report.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International condemned the UK government for breaching international human rights commitments and curtailing human rights protections, including its blocking the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill. And the Parliamentary Assembly of the ECHR spoke up for trans across the continent, with a good speech by Jeremy Corbyn: he said that ending anti-trans discrimination “is why we exist”. Some people see that the attack on trans is an attack on human rights and freedoms.

For a by-election, Rachel Reeves visited, and I got to see the back of her head. She spoke for seven minutes, then rushed off. A man had wanted her to sign her book for him, but she got away too quickly.

Ready to be the Exile

In therapy, someone might value their own feelings for the first time. The therapist finds the person’s wounds, the times in the past where the world has overwhelmed them.

Later there will be a time for an academic understanding. I have no idea about other clients. But for me as client, healing comes in being in the Exile, the part which could not cope, which was rejected by a protector, and feeling her feelings in the moment of overwhelm, despair, splitting off, becoming Exile.

I was blessed to watch a therapist and person in action over zoom, and as they find the person’s exile I become that exile, feeling the hurt and need to protect and incomprehension, curling up in anguish, and hearing the need of the person for me, the exile, to get up and be an adult and only when I feel the person’s love for me, the exile, as I am, being able to move from that foetal position.

Two days later, there was Heather, co-creating my liberation.

I wanted to go back to The Piano Incident. I was eight, disputing with my mother, weeping though Big Boys Don’t Cry, and part of me became the Exile, lost, abandoned, weeping on the floor. Part of me became the Protector, as young as the Exile but with an idea of how to survive: Get up! Do the more difficult thing, and stretch yourself! Be a Man!

In 2009 I told people of the incident, every person I imagined I just might be able to trust with it, and I felt the full anguish of the Exile as if possessed by her. I told of lying on the floor crying, and my mother just looking at me: “SHE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND!” With all the hurt of that Exile. And then in September 2009 I realised. Oh, riiiight. She didn’t understand. She was who she was, with her limitations. It felt like forgiveness, a great step forward.

It was. I had been trapped in the pain of the exile, reliving it, unable to move on. I could not process that pain. Then I “forgave my mother” and put the pain in the background again. I obeyed the protector, getting up, trying to stretch myself, Getting On with my life and work. I realised it was not forgiveness, for that implies a wrong, but acceptance of who she was, a human being.

I feel that moment in my body now as I tell Heather of it, of my back tenser than ever and my gut repelled but my head up, hopeful, facing the world again: I managed about another three years. I was not ready to heal, so I girded my loins, and kept them girded until it was no longer possible and I retreated.

Now I am ready. I lie down on the floor, and curl up in my misery. I am that exile, in the moment of splitting, weeping, arguing with my mother. She stands over me, and part of me splits off to be the Protector, who knows what the Person must do: Be a Man, do what I am asked even if I think it stretches me too far. That frightened yet certain eight year old stands over me, beside my mother.

As the Exile, I feel my No, my disgust, in my gut. As I imagine the Protector my back tightens in stress.

The risk with affirmations is that they reinforce the Protector not the Exile, but I state the affirmations both need to hear.
Now, I am grown up.
I have agency. I can stretch myself if I wish, or refuse to attempt the difficult thing.
I have choice. I can do what I want to do. I can love what I love.
I can be my feminine self.

I dance my joy. Movement expresses my feelings even better than writing.

Then I think of some of the things I choose. I choose to look at art. I want to see a Caravaggio, loaned from Naples to the National Gallery. I choose to play the piano. These are things my parents introduced me to. Are they truly my choice? I think of them. Various experiences of art are soul-responses, my delight, my reality. I am clear enough on that. On the piano, we discuss the Pathetique sonata. My mother did not like how I put my whole body into those great crashing chords at the end of the first movement. Somewhere, Beethoven uses the instruction “Break the piano.” It was a fortepiano, wood-framed, but still.

-Rock and Roll!
-Yeah!

This is me. I want to play that piece so that someone thinks, I have never quite heard it like that, and it is the only way to play it. And I am far from that class of pianist.

These things that I want, I have so much work to do that perhaps they are impossible. I desire to be my feminine self, and it is no longer forbidden, but I have so much work on my voice, to project it in a head-resonance, unbroken pitch. I want to be a counsellor, and there is so much training to go through.

I feel the tension. But it is not the miserable tension of the Protector, that eight year old boy inside me.

If therapist and client simply look at the wound, and discuss how the client feels about it now, they may hardly advance at all. It might just reinforce the Protector, the false introjected understanding of what must be done, seeing the pain from the Protector’s point of view. I find that feeling myself as the Exile at the moment of exile, feeling the despair and anguish and accepting them, then stating the affirmation the Exile needs to hear, is liberating. The Exiles are us. We need to process their feeling, and for me that means feeling and accepting it.

I feel the Protector inside me, and give him a hug. Thank you for that work. You do not need to do it any more. I know you meant my good, and have carried that anguish all these years.

The vagus nerve is mine, to feel what I feel. I will not reject its responses. My chakras are mine, to feel what they feel, the information I need.

Parliament on the Cass review

There were valuable allies speaking on the Cass review in Parliament, and we should celebrate their bravery. Their points were ignored.

Genspect

Genspect is a trans-denialist organisation: its members deny that trans is a way people are, and that transition is a valid or valuable life-path. Therefore therapists who are members should never be consulted about anything gender-related, and nothing it says about trans people or gender dysphoria can be taken at face value.

Trans people exist. Trans is a thing, in every culture, in every time in history. Genspect denies or minimises that. What can we learn about it from its website?

First, it is a grift. At the top of the page, a large lilac button says “Donate”. At the bottom of the page, it says “Donate” again, and below that a button says “Donate now”. There is a huge amount of money in anti-trans campaigning, and Genspect people want some of it.

They try to appear reasonable, even compassionate. The first headline is “A healthy approach to sex and gender”, and they claim to include professionals and trans people among others. They only include those who accept its trans-denialist viewpoint. On the page headed “Our position”, it becomes clearer what they really want, beyond money.

They want a “non-medicalized” approach. I want that to be an option. However, I want to achieve it by radical trans-acceptance, and they want it by driving trans underground.

They claim there is currently an “affirmative” approach. This is clearly false. Listen to trans people about how hard it is to get treatment we want. Before the Tavistock GIDS would refer to endocrinology, their therapists gave an average of 6.7 appointments before referral (Cass, para 13.11). Those appointments were devoted to challenge, questioning, and assessment whether family dynamics or other causes brought the child to seek gender treatment. There is no affirmative model. Genspect believes there is, because it calls any system where any child at all gets treatment “affirmative”.

At the Tavistock, 727 in four years nine months got puberty blockers. Of those, 489 got cross-sex hormones, after further psychological appointments. 2579 received only psychological assessment or treatment. If there was an “affirmative” approach as the trans-denialists define it, all of them would be on blockers. Yet Genspect claims that the current affirmative model means that medical intervention is “the first line of treatment”.

So their claim that they want schools to be neutral, supporting pupils to explore, not encouraging or discouraging any particular path, is false. They say they want a “slower, more thoughtful” approach, that is, even more appointments than that 6.7 average before any action is taken. And their claim that they have no prejudice against trans people, by which they mean people who have transitioned, is also clearly false. They deny that opposing medical treatment trans people want is transphobic.

They want a ban on medical transition for children and young people. They disapprove of social transition, and claim parents should not accept it when their children say they are trans. Instead parents should “provide thoughtful guidance on the reality of biology”. The term “young people” is ambiguous: the page implies people are “young” until they are thirty.

There’s a great deal of scaremongering on their site. They claim puberty blockers for trans children are “experimental”, and insinuate they are dangerous. They do not indicate any advantage of giving PBs to trans children. They are arguing a case, rather than providing information.

They attack the idea of “gender identity”. Well, it may indeed be unverifiable and unfalsifiable, but the evidence is that trans people exist, whether cis people have a gender identity or not. They say in identical twin pairs where one twin transitions, only 28% of the other twins transition too. But, because of societal transphobia, transition is terrifying. Many trans people put it off indefinitely, despite knowing their own desires. And, that trans might not be entirely genetic does not mean it is not real.

They support gender nonconformity. So do I. Gender stereotypes are bad. But they are also widespread and strongly enforced. I don’t know if a human society without gender stereotypes is possible, or if in such a society there would still be trans people, but I do know in all societies some people are trans.

They want to emphasise the voices of detransitioners. They do not mention retransitioners. I want all people with lived experience to be heard, and the vast majority are those who transition just the once, and go on living their lives in their true gender.

They say that trans youth are no more likely to commit suicide than others with a mental illness, but the better comparator is to children without mental illness. Trans is not a mental illness. They report, rightly, that there has been an increase in children identifying as trans, which they blame on the internet. Well, growing up before the internet, I could never have imagined childhood transition. We are not all as single-minded as Dora Richter. Genspect just assume that this means the children are not trans, really, that there is “rapid onset” gender dysphoria, though the original paper called this merely a hypothesis.

In their articles their loathing of the very idea of transition becomes clearer. This one suggests that developmental trauma causes trans identification. Could curing the trauma make the trans identification go away? The thought is extremely tempting to trans-denialists, those who find trans so repellent that they deny trans exists. It’s also tempting to parents of trans children, who would like a reason to believe their children were not really trans. And it could be a huge source of angst for trans people, considering transition and wondering if it were right for them, and even whether they could be cured. Internalised transphobia is horrific.

The article says it’s likely cure the trauma, cure the trans: trauma causes dysphoria, which the sufferer attaches to a trans identity, then the “affirming” psychologist concretises that. The author, Laura Haynes, says that trauma causes “emotional dysregulation, narcissism, and rage” which are visible in trans rights activists: rage towards women and desire to become women. A lack of separation and individuation, a toddler-like failure to perceive reality (sex is real) characterise TRAs according to her, and no child benefits from “permanent feigning, endocrine disruption, or genital surgery”.

“Shouldn’t we be willing to get to know an unhappy child, before assembly-lining them into sterility and brittle bones?” What a lot to unpack. Merely getting to know the child and the trauma will cure them, but “affirming” doctors are just an assembly line, harming them out of “gender ideology”. This is not a rational or proportionate view of professionals who treat trans children, it’s as full of hate as she is against trans women trying to live our lives and saying things she does not like.

She may be right that treatments for developmental trauma are safe, but they will not cure gender dysphoria if the child is trans. In her last paragraph she suggests “affirming” doctors or parents are traumatised too, inflicting their trauma on “confused” kids who aren’t trans really. That level of denialism means she is incapable of being rational around trans people.

I am traumatised. I don’t know how many people have a hostile inner critic- Psychology Today implies the answer is “lots”. Mine is considerably less hostile since March last year. But from inside, it seems that trauma was more likely to make me deny I am trans than believe it, and since my critic has ameliorated, I am no less trans. It might even be possible for trans people to be mentally healthy, contrary to Haynes’ belief.

Unfortunately, some parts of the NHS are using “training” from people like Genspect.

Medicalising trans people

Trans people should not have to pass, but we do.

We should not be medicalised, having to undergo major operations. Trans men should be able to keep their breasts, if they want, for any reason. Trans women should be accepted as women however little effort we devote to our appearance just as all women should be valued no matter what they look like. But there is pretty privilege- that is not the world we live in.

We suffer hostility when we don’t pass. We are noticed, and that is enough to be ill-treated by some random bigot or just an ordinary person having a bad day. Transphobia and transmisia are ordinary. So we should be able to choose whichever hormonal or surgical intervention we desire.

Trans children treated with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, PBs and CSH, may pass- the voice broken or unbroken as appropriate, the hips the right shape, facial hair, or not, as needed. There are trans people transitioning now, without the support of PBs because they never got through the waiting lists, hips wrong, voice wrong, face wrong. Their chance of passing was taken away in a long, slow, disorienting lie- yes, you might get what you want more than anything else in the world, but not yet; tantalised by the thought of Blockers, always out of reach.

The trans person who got blockers in time is infertile. Fertility matters. I would have been an awful father, making a real mess of my children, controlling, perfectionist and self-hating. And, had I been able to transition and do the work of self-acceptance I am now doing, I might have been a good parent. I like children.

There are reverters. There’s Keira Bell, and Pamela Paul found two more willing to speak to her. Searching for that, I found this 2022 Los Angeles Times article pointing out that Paul is a transphobe: I can’t imagine anyone having the energy for that, or the LAT printing it, now.

Six weeks after I first read Paul’s article, that detransitioner lives with me. She goes to a doctor, who says her sex looks congruent enough. She asks, Wait, what sex do you think I am? Of course, the doctor thinks her male- because PBs and CSH work!

Perhaps she thought transition would be the answer to all her problems, that everything will be perfect. And now it is the Great Mistake of her life which has ruined everything. Her mission was a successful transition, and now her mission is a successful detransition, and until she completes it her life is on hold. Again.

In 2018 I wrote, Don’t have GRS. At the time I regretted surgery, having been told by two women separately “I could find a man like you attractive- but- no penis!” In practically the same words. I have sexual problems arising from the operation, and my choices are: blame myself, blame the cruel, hard world, or move on. None of these please me. Wanting the world to be other than it is is humanity’s greatest source of misery and the only thing that changes it.

So I would give every child who asked for them, PBs and CSH, because every decision that matters closes off possibilities that matter, and things must be grasped, or the possibility withers unfertilised, a dead mockery. Trans adults have been trans children and remember knowing they are trans as children.

In this imperfect world, being a trans person who passes is an acceptable outcome, and fertility might be an acceptable price to pay for that. Hilary Cass rejected all the peer-reviewed, academically published studies showing that PBs and CSH had a good outcome because they were not double-blind. That is only justifiable if you consider the only possible reason for treating trans children with hormones is reducing mental distress at the time of treatment, rather than achieving the result the child wants. But then, that is the reason those prescribing give. Cass would also prevent children from socially transitioning without a doctor’s permission. It is “not a neutral act”, people say, thinking their wrath against trans allies thereby proven wise and good. In reality, nothing that matters is a “neutral act”.

I would agree with Cass that fertility really matters and it should not be risked lightly, if I did not also believe some people are trans, and with intense societal transmisia passing really matters. There are no perfect outcomes for trans people. We can’t have it all. Let us choose, and live with the consequences, however young we are. And anyone who would restrict treatment because of the testimony of detransitioners does not sufficiently value the facts that some people are trans, and that passing matters. Then they should listen to retransitioners, including those who lashed out in rage at their doctors when they detransitioned.

Do trans children “desist”? Much research alleging they do was based on a gender identity disorder diagnosis of children who did not say they were trans, and whose breaking of gender stereotypes was called pathological. This matter is furiously disputed. Regret rates in adults are low. In any event, the suffering of trans children forced to undergo the wrong puberty, forced into a life where passing is deliberately made difficult, should not just be dismissed.

More Larkin: he moved me to tears this morning.

…we should be careful

of each other, we should be kind
while there is still time.

The Cass report is welcomed by the Government, the Opposition, all the press with The Observer particularly delighted; and to find critiques you need small blogs and obscure websites, like my own. So here are some I like. Sonia Sodha’s vile ranting and gloating in The Observer led me to Dazed, which led me to Gender GP, which led me to the figures from Cass’s own review of the patients.

Of 3499 patients discharged from the gender identity development service 727 went on puberty blockers, and 489 went on cross-sex hormones. Fewer than ten detransitioned.

Of 2415 of those patients never referred to endocrinology, 0.5% detransitioned. Unless you believe trans is a bad thing to be, and the best result for a trans person to be living in their gender assigned at birth, this shows that transition is right for trans people.

Opposing transition because nobody detransitions is like opposing gay sex because after it someone might never have straight sex.

Cass’s arguments against social transition are like the arguments for a gay age of consent of 21: causing pain, and producing no benefit. The figures are on pp168-9 of the report.

Cass makes a lot of a large increase in referrals in 2014, calling it “exponential”. However the number of referrals in 2020/21 was lower than that in 2017/18. Thanks to David Allsopp.

Also see Dr Natacha Kennedy. She cited Cal Horton on how Cass harms trans children through “(1) prejudice; (2) cisnormative bias; (3) pathologization; and (4) inconsistent standards of evidence”. Here are responses from Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand.