The Circle of Horror Must Be Broken

The Cass review is groundbreaking and necessary. But it doesn't address the cultural issues at the root of gender fundamentalism.

The Maitlands and the Deetzes, feuding families who reside in the same house yet simultaneously in entirely different worlds — one in the afterlife and the other in the land of the living — in Beetlejuice.

UPDATE: Listen to me read the audio verison of this essay, plus read a companion piece to this essay, here.

There’s a reason the gender debate looks so perplexing from the point of view of many of those not in it. You might go mad trying to grapple with what’s going on if you don’t clue in that, to the adversaries in the ring, it’s an existential war between rival views about the nature of reality itself. This is a heavyweight philosophical and theological debate the likes of which we haven’t seen since Darwin came along and challenged the Biblical view of God’s Creation.

But the battle of ideas around gender is a particularly strange sight to behold, because the factions endlessly trade intellectual punches that never manage to hit each others’ targets: it’s like the two sides exist on entirely separate epistemic planes of mental existence, and they merely cohabitate unhappily in the same material world. It brings to mind the Maitlands and the Deetzes in Beetlejuice, feuding families who both reside in the same haunted Connecticut home, while at the same time they’re living in completely different dimensions, making their attempts to directly engage with each other almost impossible.

(Deplorably, some on the trans activist side are inclined to dress and act more like the violent goons from a much darker film — Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome — and they’re apt to throw very real, very physical punches at the women with whom they disagree.)

Trans activists strike at us critics of gender ideology with homilies about “protecting trans kids,” and they seem genuinely horrified that their sermons don’t move us. No wonder they’re convinced that we’re monstrous bigots: how can we not be monsters if we don’t want to protect kids?!

But we occupy a different mental plane of existence, where the premise of a “trans kid” doesn’t make any sense — to us, there’s no such thing as a “trans kid” in the first place. When we retort that they’re pushing unnecessary, horrific body modifications on otherwise regular but vulnerable kids — autistic, proto-gay, and psychologically distressed kids — our words likewise don’t make any sense on their mental plane.

It carries on like this, a boxing match with ghosts, each side untouched by the other side’s blows.

In the eyes of the gender fundamentalists, the priests and priestesses of 2SLGBTQQIA+ are infallible paragons of progressive virtue, and our argument is completely impossible for them to fathom — which is that the movement formerly known as Gay Rights has been co-opted by straight people who couldn’t resist exploiting for their own interests all the goodwill and social capital that gay people had amassed, by hitching their pet neuroses, kinks, and causes (all those extra letters) onto the LGB. Those interlopers have turned the gay rights movement — my people’s movement — into a close semblance of what gay people’s old arch-nemeses the conservative right once falsely accused us of being: socially objectionable, medically dangerous, and targeting vulnerable kids.

So we’re at an impasse: one side is absolutely convinced that medically modifying the sex traits of children’s bodies is a natural continuation of the great and glorious gay rights movement, and they think their critics are bigoted opponents of the gay rights movement as a whole who want to deliberately harm “queer” children. And the other side is absolutely convinced that medically modifying the sex traits of children’s bodies is a horrifying scandal that only looks like an extension of gay rights because the gay rights movement has been taken over by extremists, some of whom are, in fact, deliberately harming children. That side, my side, has been desperately searching for ways get our argument through to the other side, or, if that fails, to at least to convince the bystanders — the public at large — to side with us, and put a stop to the medicalization of children’s bodies. In that effort, we’ve turned to the scientific method.

Trans is a cultural movement, immune to scientific evidence

I’m a firm believer in the tools of science to help adjudicate disputes such as these. So I’m extremely grateful for the hard work of Dr. Hilary Cass and her team at York University (the UK one, not the Toronto university on whose campus I grew up) to debunk the pseudoscientific lies about youth “gender medicine” with the largest and most comprehensive scientific analysis on the topic ever conducted — four years in the making and almost 400 pages long — and I’m thrilled that the Cass review is making international headlines. But the battle is far from over.

Scientific reviews such as this are not by themselves going to put an end to the gender mess, because there’s a major cultural aspect to the transgender phenomenon, and this cultural front in the battle resides on that other epistemic plane which science alone cannot reach. From the point of view of the trans activists, the scientific conclusion of the Cass review, that “gender medicine” is backed by next to no evidence and is “built on shaky foundations,” is just another futile punch from the ghosts trying to haunt them — it wafts right through them, and only baffles and angers them instead of jolting them back to common sense.

Right now the trans activists and their unwitting accomplices in the media are queuing up to denounce the Cass review as nothing but more hate from the evil bigots who want to harm “trans kids.” They can’t help themselves. It’s deeply rooted in their culture to see us that way.

Ophelia Benson calls the cultural factor the “circle of horror”:

I have a sickening feeling that one reason the medical interference has been seen as okie doke is because so many people were doing it at the same time. There’s a “community” being built, and when there’s a “community,” well at least you won’t be lonely with your ruined body, you’ll be able to find other people in the same boat. Once that stops being the case, the interference stops looking quite so progressive. What does this mean? That much of the fervid proselytizing for medical interference has been recruitment – so that people who have already trashed their bodies will have a pool of potential fellow-miserables. A circle of horror.

To the gender fundamentalists, scientific evidence is irrelevant: it’s impossible for youth medical transition to be harmful instead of helpful, because to believe otherwise is to question the entire cultural system of belief that they depend upon to make each other feel good about what’s been done to people’s bodies.

The “circle of horror” is that the people involved in doing this to youth — including the youth themselves — must work to recruit more people into this procedure ad infinitum, in order to maintain a cultural/social environment in which this is seen as normal. People’s degree of “happiness” with their medical “sexchanges” is contingent on making sure enough other people have had it, too. When the “circle of horror” breaks, so, too, will many people’s positive views about what’s been done to their bodies.

That points to the flawed premise at the heart of the Cass review: you can’t really objectively measure how well gender medicine “works” if you don’t even try to address the mechanism through which it supposedly operates. It’s not enough to just look at mental health outcomes over the short and medium term after kids have been subjected to a battery of psychological, chemical, and surgical “sex change” procedures. (And the Cass report was even hindered at doing that, because the culprit clinicians banded together to withhold the follow-up data, which is where we’d expect to find the really incriminating evidence of how badly “trans medicine” has already hurt scores of young people.)

There’s no clear hypothesis to test!

“Gender Affirming Care” versus Female Genital Mutilation

I’m going to venture to broach the topic of FGM here. I know it’s a very sensitive subject because it’s an awful custom. But there’s an apt comparison to make, and I’ll try to make it delicately. The practice of female genital mutilation is, per UNICEF (via Wikipedia):

usually initiated and carried out by women, who see it as a source of honour, and who fear that failing to have their daughters and granddaughters cut will expose the girls to social exclusion.

(Emphasis mine.)

In a way, FGM is another circle of horror — a cultural practice whose victims feel compelled to assist in its perpetuation to others partly in order to make sense of what’s been done to themselves, because the moment it stops continuing to happen, it becomes clear that the custom has no medical justification outside of itself.

Compare the fear of social exclusion that perpetuates FGM to this quote from the Guardian last week, of a mother who is convinced that her autistic son needs “gender medicine.” She is utterly unpersuaded by the Cass review’s findings that it’s medically unevidenced, because the review doesn’t address the cultural lens through which she sees the world:

I would much rather my child was growing up in a way in which [he] wasn’t sticking out like a sore thumb and potentially going to end up dead.

How would a boy with broad shoulders and a deep voice stick out? Those are the specific traits she says her son is distressed about, and those are normal traits for boys — even boys who might like to dress femininely. (And for that matter, they’re perfectly fine traits for girls, too.)

And for such traits to stick out so much that she thinks her child could die because of them?

I’m so bothered by this quote that I’m planning to write an entire essay about it. But for now, I’ll just point out that her whole basis for wanting medical interventions done to her autistic son’s body is to make sure he fits into the norms and boundaries of the current cultural landscape as she and her son perceive them. And she believes it would be gravely dangerous for her son to not adhere to these supposedly inescapable cultural constraints.

To go back to FGM: with the benefit of an outside perspective we can see very clearly that there’s no direct medical necessity to remove parts of women & girls’ clitorises and labia, and that whatever supposed benefits this practice confers to such victims — I will never call them “patients” or “subjects” or any other word besides victims, no matter how “medicalized” these atrocities are presented to be — it’s entirely dependent on the cultural/social landscape: the domain of social hierarchies and taboos and superstitions and rituals, and the foul effluvium of woman-hatred that clouds the senses of those within it.

Now, imagine there was a report that analyzed the efficacy of female genital mutilation strictly in terms of short-to-medium term self-reported mental health outcomes without ever addressing the question of why the practice had begun in the first place. Wouldn’t that be outrageous?!

To be clear, I’m not trying to say that the Cass report is outrageous — far from it; I think it’s a powerful and necessary report, which is already proving to be greatly beneficial to the struggle to put the “trans kids” scandal behind us. But it’s a sign of how outrageous our current social climate is, how mired in the bog we are, that we can’t be allowed to step all the way back and point out the true horror of the big picture.

No human female is born with an innate medical condition in which she is doomed to suffer unless otherwise healthy parts of her genitals are sliced off of her body. This should be self-evident.

Likewise, no human of either sex is born with an innate medical condition in which they will suffer from such dire psychological distress they might die of suicide unless their otherwise healthy reproductive organs and breasts are removed, their puberty suppressed, a host of other cosmetic medical treatments are given, and that all of society is compelled to collude together to suppress all evidence of the sex of these poor innocents.

Again, this should be self-evident.

The gender mess is ultimately a battle on cultural grounds, and as much as systematic scientific reviews of mental health outcomes are one piece of evidence we can use to put an end to it, they will never be the smoking gun, because the guilty party is the cultural climate that fosters mental distress in vulnerable people who don’t medicalize their bodies, and which (at least temporarily) showers those who do go under the scalpel with praise and social rewards.

The supposedly “positive” mental health outcomes of victims of pediatric gender medicine are as dubious and precarious as the supposedly “positive” outcomes of the victims of FGM. As soon as the circle of horror stops, the cultural fog that dulls the senses of all those involved will lift, and the pain will likely be acute.

Here’s a report about FGM in the Guardian from last month:

Reports have also emerged recently of resurgences in the central Kenya region of Murang’a, where women over 30 are opting to undergo the cut as a “return to culture”.

See how clearly the Guardian is able to report on these “procedures” as a cultural phenomenon instead of a medical treatment — and a terrible, harmful one — because Kenya is way over there.

If only they could see clearly enough to report that the resurgence of sex stereotypes, in large part due to the rise of social media, is why so many women — and men, too — are choosing to undergo (more like being coerced to undergo) their own version of “the cut” right here in the Guardian readership’s own backyard, in Europe and North America.

(An important note regarding medical sex trait modifications among adults: evidence shows that some of those who undergo them do feel better, although questions about the longevity of their satisfaction remain. This is in no way evidence of any kind of innate state of transness — “true trans” is nonsense. It’s evidence that the discrimination gender nonconforming people face in present-day society — the harassment, abuse, and social alienation that butch lesbians and feminine gay men face — is very real, and in some cases leads to such psychological distress that for some adults, the choice to medically camouflage their sex is a pragmatic decision whose pros outweigh the cons. What’s important to note here is that this “positive” outcome is still entirely culturally contingent: decisions adults make about their bodies may be far from ideal, but they might feel that the current cultural environment is so hostile that the medical costs, side effects and all, are a step up for their quality of life. And I can’t say this enough: only adults can even begin to have the necessary perspective to make such drastic life decisions.)

Even though the practice of FGM is, as UNICEF notes, often carried out by women in Africa and the Middle East, the practice is clearly derived from men’s desire to control women’s bodies. And the same can be said for “gender medicine”: if society is putting pressure on vulnerable, and often gay or autistic girls & boys, young women & men, to go under the knife, it’s largely because autogynephilic men initiated the pressure on society in turn: straight men started this circle of horror and they continue to fuel it. Men with erotic fantasies about possessing female bodies brought these ideas into the mainstream, and they continually promote the self-serving lie at the heart of the movement, about the inherent nature of the transgender soul.

Even if they win, they lose.

Earlier I compared the gender mess to the debate between Biblical creationists and proponents of evolutionary biology. I think there’s a lot to that comparison. It’s telling that the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, dramatized in the film Inherit the Wind, ended with the side of science losing to the side of superstition in the Tennessee trial-by-jury.

But even though the creationists won the trial, they lost the argument. The science was — and is — sound, only many in the culture weren’t ready to hear it yet. But the science carried on being sound, and eventually the creationists lost the cultural war as well as the scientific one. It didn’t happen overnight, though, and there are still pockets of young Earth creationists out there. But they no longer have the backing of public institutions such as schools, and most people look back at the Scopes Monkey Trial with a sense of embarrassment that our society had once been so uninformed.

That’s an argument that I think might manage to reach the gender fundamentalists and their allies over on their own turf: let’s keep reminding them that, like the creationist holdouts who opposed the scientific facts of evolution, their side is reliant on nothing but a slowly-dwindling cultural popularity to keep from collapsing into disrepute, as the scientific papers continue to pile up in favour of our side against theirs. It’s only a matter of time until the popular zeitgeist — the cultural landscape, which is the plane of reality that they’re attuned to — catches up with the rapidly coalescing scientific consensus, which says that pediatric “gender medicine” is not medicine at all, and even in the case of adults, cosmetic sex trait alterations come with a host of serious caveats and conditions.

If they’re lucky, people will one day look back on the gender fundamentalists who peddled the idea of “trans kids” the way we look back on the religious fundamentalists who clung to literal interpretations of their creation stories long after they should have seen the light of reason — with a sense of pity.

But it’s more likely the gender activists will be judged far more harshly than that.

When you present the Cass findings to the general public like that… as a reliable sign that the people in the gender fundamentalist tribe are almost certainly headed for profound social and cultural disgrace, well, that’s a blow that packs a real sting, and could set the crowds on the fringes heading for the exits.

The Bible passage, from the Book of Proverbs, behind the title of the film (and the play it’s based on) might be apt:

He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind. And the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.

UPDATE: Listen to me read the audio verison of this essay, plus read a companion piece to this essay, here.