Exploring The Wreck Of Gender Identity

A review of The Gender Trap: The Trans Agenda’s War Against Children by Carla Curtis

When Denise Caignon started her 4th Wave Now website, she chose a header image of a diver examining a shipwreck along with the following lines the Adrienne Rich poem, Diving into the Wreck.  

The thing I came for:  

The wreck and not the story of the wreck  

The thing itself and not the myth  

I recalled those lines while reading The Gender Trap: The Trans Agenda’s War Against Children, a new book published by Gays Against Groomers. Rather than dwell upon the myth, Carla Curtis plunges straight down below the surface, past activists’ manipulative language (adding countless letters, numbers and symbols of the original lesbian, gay, and bisexual of LGB), through fathomless depths of scientific knowledge about human sexuality and finally down to the thing itself, the wreck that is gender identity.  

Origins 

The first attempts at medical conversion of gay people, Curtis recalls, used hormone disruptors and castration:

In the most ironic reversal possible, transgender clinics today actually are attempting to convert male and female homosexuals by chemically and surgically altering them – only this time, into an approximation of the opposite sex.

Studies conducted since the 1980s have consistently shown that, if left alone to work out their identities, a supermajority of adolescents with gender dysphoria grow up to be homosexuals as adults. Today Curtis says, a disproportionate number of gays and lesbians believe they are transgender when compared with the general population. Gender identity activism is “definitely not aligned with, or even remotely sympathetic to, gay people.” In fact, she argues, “trans activists are intensifying their message to gays and lesbians that if you love the same sex, you need to radically alter your body.”

This is the new face of gay shame. “Homosexual men and women are still receiving the message (albeit in another way) that there is something wrong with same-sex attraction.” This inversion relies on the idea that every child has a unique and special gender identity instead of an awareness of themselves as an embodied girl or boy. According to experts, children’s awareness of gender identity emerges between ages two and three and is cemented in most by age six or seven. This also happens to be the age at which children form their most heavily stereotyped views of males and females. Guiding a child away from self-acceptance at this stage makes a deep and lasting negative psychological impact and this abuse lands disproportionately on children who would, if left alone, likely be gay or lesbian or bisexual in adulthood.  

But now they are not being left alone. A new culture of childhood coddles them, infantilizes them and teaches them to be victims with no internal locus of control. They are praised for their existence instead of their accomplishments. Novel rules govern their lives in relation to other children. For instance, “declaring that one is a FtM [Female to Male] transgender bestows great social status, compared to coming out as lesbian, which earns demerits.”  

Systems intended to nurture maturity and self-regulation in young people now do the opposite. “Educational institutions,” she says, “are actively preventing them from growing up.” Youth always rebel, but this time things are different. Students’ misplaced righteous anger, poor relating skills, inability to discern what is going on, their disconnection from reality – and thus from their own bodies – are all being awakened, cultivated, and rewarded. Deprived of the opportunity to develop qualities that might give them a sense of agency, students instead gravitate toward anything that promises to take them outside of themselves. Oblivion and escape are possible, they are taught, by becoming another person entirely. “Transgenders are not born, they are created”: the thing itself and not the myth. The word for this is grooming. 

During her descent to the wreck, Curtis debunks the supposed biological mechanisms for “trans-ness” such as chromosomes, hormones and “brain sex” at speed, then plunges through the deceptive thermocline layer of so-called “intersex” conditions. Here activists deliberately confuse the words “sex” and “gender,” and researchers produce phony science in circular citations and studies with small sample sizes touted endlessly as settled science. Curtis shows how activists’ linguistic reversals of language – “reassignment”, “assignment”, and “affirming” are meant to confuse us so that others have new power over us and why this is especially true for the same-sex attracted, who are demoted in the new oppression hierarchy.

All of the language manipulation by trans activists has the goal of categorizing transgenders as an oppressed class, more oppressed than the boring old homosexuals.

Anyone conversant with the issue will not be bored, while anyone new to the issue will learn a lot.  

Gender offers a simple solution for the complex challenges of life and an easy excuse for authoritarians to impose new order. “One of the chief ways to exert control over other human beings,” Curtis writes, “is to disconnect them from their anchor and their ability to feel pleasure – the body.” It works on anybody, young or old, but the effects are especially pernicious in youth. She says physical dissociation always corresponds to mental and emotional dissociation. Again, the word for this phenomenon is grooming. “The more cut off from themselves people are, the easier it is for external agendas to be inserted in their psyches.” We are all being groomed.  

The most pernicious myth she dispatches is suicide risk. It is, she shows, a red herring. She notes, “studies have shown that suicidal ideation and actual suicides in transgenders are not caused by cultural prejudice or rejection, but by serious emotional problems they had before they transitioned.” Emotional blackmail is neither science nor medicine. Instead of asking parents if they would rather have a live trans son or a dead daughter, Curtis suggests, “a more valid question to ask parents is, would you rather have an unusual or gay child, or an irreversibly mutilated one?”  

Like any good tour guide, Curtis announces the destination at the beginning of the journey and reminds them of what they have seen at the end, but she explores her main theme in the middle of the trip. She is trying to save the kids most likely to go down with the sinking gender ship, the future LGB adults.

If your child is gay, let him or her know that as long as he or she is comfortable in the world, happy, and ethical when dealing with others, a loving, kind, caring relationship is more important than the genitals of the partner.

She urges parents, “you don’t want to give your child an excuse to think that they have to change their body in order to become acceptable.”  

Is it preferable that two people be in a fulfilling gay relationship, or for one member of the couple to radically alter their body with drugs and surgery so that the couple might appear more superficially “normal”?  

Curtis argues that relaxing sex role stereotypes would eliminate the need for hormones and surgery. And if there are people who really feel they are in the wrong body, what is the best remedy? “Do we change the body via hormones and surgeries? Or do we relax our rigid requirements, and expand our definitions of what it means to be male and female?” Authenticity derives from being the thing that you are, not the myth of that thing.  

Science  

“Trans” has been falsely advertised as “the new gay.” Science disambiguates sexual attraction from so-called gender identity. The science of sexual attraction is real, whereas we are all still waiting for the double-blind laboratory test that can detect or measure gender identities in humans. However, the argument here is moral, not scientific. Science is not innately supportive of same-sex attraction. On the contrary, science first had to discover homosexuality, and then medical science has been trying to “cure” it ever since. Curtis reminds us that our modern understanding of homosexuality began as a medical fad:  

In 1871, the terms homosexual and heterosexual appeared in two nonfiction works by the Hungarian writer Daniel von Kâszony, who is thought to have borrowed the concepts from Austrian writer Kâroly Mâria Kertheney after Kertheney used the terms in a private letter dated 1868. Around that time, the control of sexual matters was shifting from the clergy to medical professionals, who regarded all sexual behaviors other than married heterosexual intercourse as illnesses. In 1886, psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing discussed homosexuality – which he categorized as abnormal – in his book Psychopathia Sexualis. After that, the idea spread that it was possible for there to be a sexual orientation other than heterosexuality. Between 1898 and 1908 alone, over one thousand publications on homosexuality were written by physicians.  

Marketed as “the new gay,” transgender is in fact the wreck of homosexuality. This tendency to see variations of human behavior as medical matters reaches beyond the gay community.   

Fixing It  

Medicalization is making a wreck of the lives of heterosexual cross-dressers. In today’s climate, cross-dressing is often erroneously conflated with transgenderism. In the past, a woman might have accepted her partner’s interest in cross-dressing in the context of their relationship. With the possibility of medicalization, however, any such exploration escalates. “Trans-oriented doctors interpret this behavior as an indication he is trans and pressure him into cross-sex hormones and surgery.” The result is wrecked marriages and trans widows. Curtis observes, “once the medical establishment insinuates itself into a cross-dresser’s life, tension may be created where there previously had been none.”   

The roots of such heterosexual cross-dressing are complex. 

Such a man usually declares that he’s transgender for one of three reasons: he’s a cross-dresser (likes to wear clothing made for women), he experiences sexual excitement when perceiving himself as a woman and masquerading as one, or his desire to transition is underscored by a trauma, possibly decades old.

Medicalization also makes a mess of childhood. The story of reality TV star Jazz Jennings, whose childhood transition has spanned 8 seasons, is a cautionary tale. Curtis observes that because Jazz Jennings has been “dosed with puberty blockers and undergone the complete removal of his penis and testicles, not only will he never experience an orgasm, but he is developmentally stuck as a prepubescent eunuch.” Unable to feel anything at all, Jazz is now visibly confused by romance. Curtis explains:

The body’s neural pathways that would have deepened through sexual arousal and communion with another human being are withering away. What does being stuck in this sexual limbo do to a person’s development – physically, mentally, and emotionally? Or spiritually? Depression is an understandable and predictable outcome, independent of the direct pharmacological effects of the hormones.

The wreck of Jazz Jennings belies the myth of the “trans child.”  

Curtis believes we must stop reifying stereotypes in children who are too young to understand them, much less understand their future sexuality. “To drug a child and chop off his genitals simply because he wants a toy considered unsuitable – based on antiquated sexual stereotypes – and plays at make-believe, defies reason.” While activists and advocates of pediatric transition might accuse Curtis of dishonest framing, the infamous Ted Talk by Jackie Green, the former head of the trans organization Mermaids, frames her son’s transition in much the same way, as a matter of medically correcting gender non-conformity.   

Lost Souls  

For this writer, it was gratifying that Curtis examines the abyss of the soul that gender seems to fill. “It’s no accident that transgendering seems to be occurring with the most frequency among those who lack a spiritual focus. I am referring to a meaningful sense of belonging, regardless of whether one follows an organized religion,” she writes. We say that “someone who meets the world in an engaged, curious, compassionate, and expansive manner is sometimes said to ‘have soul,’ or to be ‘soulful.’” Gender is a First World problem. “Modern civilization – which considers itself rational and scientific, and thus superior to so-called primitive cultures – largely lacks soul.”  

Curtis uses the word “transgendering” to imply that the state of “being transgender” is temporary, unlike homosexuality, which is permanent. Verbifying “transgender” is a neat linguistic inversion, downright cheeky, that I liked very much. If The Gender Trap has a flaw, it is that the ride down to the wreck is a little too long, for the ocean it penetrates is so deep. This is not summer beach reading, but it is the right length for a cross-Atlantic flight to Lisbon for Genspect’s The Bigger Picture Conference.  

It is also a much-needed riposte to the tired accusation that opposing sex changes for minor children is somehow incompatible with supporting gay and lesbian people or the insistence that it is everyone’s duty to accommodate the escalating and unreasonable demands of “transgender rights” groups which receive such incredible deference from political, social, media, and cultural elites.   

The ocean bottom of transgender gibberish is littered with the wrecks of progressive institutions – ACLU, HRC, GLAAD, GLSEN, SPLC – which depend on everyone to buy into the myth forever. The Gender Trap is timely. As the myth of medicalization begins to unravel with the Cass Review and the exposure of WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health), Carla Curtis takes us with her for the full descent, turns on the spotlights, and gives us a look at the wreckage they all endorsed.  

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