Swindled!
Paul Tyson on why parents and clinicians fall for the con of "gender affirming care"
I was recently doing a 24-hour stopover at Dubai on my way from Brisbane to Cambridge. I found myself wandering about the concrete and steel laced streets of this transient city of Arabian Nights, looking for some dinner. I was in a jetlagged and disturbed state. I had been reading Hannah Barnes’ magnificent examination of the rise and demise of Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). As I have a close personal connection to this matter, this was hardly neutral reading.
Peering out from my dislocated and peckish daze, I noticed that a friendly man had called out to me from his car, asking for directions. He had a lilting Italian accent. I told him that I was from out of town and could not help him. With what I now recognize as highly practised charm, he started up a conversation and drew me in, like the expert fisher of men that he was. I won’t give you the full embarrassing details of how he managed to get me to receive, as gifts, a couple of suits, some watches, a handbag, and perfumes – all of seeming designer Italian quality – and then part with a substantial financial gift from me in reciprocation of his generosity, so that he could ‘buy a phone for his wife’s birthday.’ And I didn’t even want the suits, jewellery, and perfumes. He persuaded me that my wife would love the Prada handbag, and I did want to get her something, so I went through with it (I was returning to Brisbane on my wedding anniversary). It all sounds preposterously unbelievable now that I recount it, but the way a good swindle works is that you do not know that it is a cunning and instrumental performance at the time.
I’d like to think that I am not that much of a sucker, so it seems to me now that ‘Savio’ was a gifted exponent of the con-artist craft. But then, maybe I am a sucker. Maybe we are all natural suckers, as trust and goodwill are basic human reflexes and integral to our socially interdependent natures.
When Good Faith Meets Bad Actors
What ‘Savio’ taught me is how easily seemingly intelligent and good-natured people (such as myself!) are to deceive and manipulate. This – after self-loathing regret on discovering the truth (about half an hour too late) – led me to think about the various health professionals who have supported or affirmed or medically facilitated the natural-sex disabling ‘transition’ of other people’s children in their professional care. Even more disturbing, it led me to think about parents of suffering children who – in good will and deep compassion – have felt compelled to affirm and support such transitions.
Two things need to be said here. As Hannah Barnes carefully points out, probably all the health professionals involved in GIDS were good intentioned and care-motivated professionals genuinely seeking to help vulnerable and struggling children and youths. Secondly, after you have enabled irreversible physical transition once, the cost of re-evaluating whether you did the right thing is so prohibitively high that very few people are capable of even acknowledging such a possibility, let alone paying the cost of an about face. And when you have supported your own child in the permanent disabling of their reproductive integrity, before they even had the chance to properly consider normal family life as a parent, how you could ever turn around might actually be impossible. In other words, a seemingly irrevocable pact of commitment is entailed in being a supportive parent of a medically transitioned trans child or youth. Let us look at each of these two dynamics.
Health professionals are real people. They are as vulnerable to group-think, to needing to be seen as moral and right-thinking by their peers, public audiences, and clients, as are all people. By now, health professionals working in this domain – particularly under the auspice of state funded health services for children – are almost all on board with Gender Affirming Care, which is professionally mandated in many contexts, such as Queensland Health. Good health professionals are nearly always diligent about following professional guidelines when seeking to assist children and young people suffering with gender incongruence. Hence, our health professionals working with children and young people are fully ‘in’ and committed to the affirmative approach in virtue of having already concretely facilitated sex-presentation (and to varying degrees, reproductive capacity disabling) gender-transitions. How one can help such people face the evidence of serious clinical and therapeutic aporia, incoherence, and actual harms is no easy matter. This is what Hannah Barnes’ book Time To Think explores with great sensitivity and forensic detail.
A Pact
‘Savio’ was not, I believe, a particularly malicious human being. But he was calculating, instrumental, and deceptive in his dealings with me. By craft, and by exploiting my natural trust and small vanities, he got my willing buy-in to his story. Once I had bought it and acted on it (performed it myself), it is only myself that is at fault should I become aware of the ruse and of my ‘consenting’ participation in it. At that point, the desire to continue believing the truth of the false narrative is psychologically hard to resist. My experience of being swindled in Dubai is entirely trivial when compared to being swindled into supporting one’s own child in irreversible reproductive sex-disabling gender transition treatments. But ritual and costly actions are needed to solidify a pact. Performance matters.
Once buy-in has been extracted, how can one then buy-out? Buy-in to a swindle is a one-way trip. I cannot return my ‘designer’ suits and get the money back now. The transaction is completed and irreversible. I can only regret the pact and be careful next time. But if the nature of the pact is irreversible damage to the future family prospects of one’s child, this is possibly beyond facing. The same factor applies to the trans-kids themselves as they age. Hence, the morality of trans-gender affirmation is almost an ultimate commitment to those who have facilitated this process, and to the trans-children themselves. Hence the hurt, and the savage moral righteousness against any honest evaluation of the potential harms in medically transitioning children. Hence the virtual disappearance of any young person who undergoes irreversible trans-surgery and then de-transitions.
There are no accurate statistics on these de-transitioners, for they pose a threat to the validity and integrity of Gender Affirming Care. They pose a threat to the very idea that gender identity, dissociated from biological sex, is a reality. So they must not have been ‘real’ trans people to start with. But how then does a clinician know which gender dysphoric child is really trans and which gender dysphoric child is not, before giving them treatments that will permanently disable their natural sex functional integrity? There is a tacit pact at work here that is beyond reasonable debate, that pushes us beyond asking any serious questions re-evaluating the meaning of the actual evidence.
The above dynamics make raising fundamental questions about physical harms to children and young people – particularly young women with ASD and/or multiple mental health concerns – extremely difficult. I have always sensed harms in this domain, and I have never found contemporary gender theory persuasive. As a result, professionals, activists, queer gender theorists, and parents of trans kids find me immediately offensive and feel threatened if I state any of my concerns. This is entirely understandable given the buy-in that they have already performed. But… is there a swindler here, and if so who?
The Devils We Know
I am an academic who works across philosophy, theology, and sociology. My main area at present concerns the history and philosophy of science and its recent demarcation from religion. I am fully up to date with postmodern critiques of scientific modernity and I understand all the arguments about the linguistic, imaginative, and performative nature of human meaning as it relates to the natural sciences. And I can tell you, I know who the swindlers are. They are the postmodern ‘studies’ academics who exploit the problems of modern positivism to promote the total construction of all human meaning. These are the real swindlers, and I’m telling you they are selling fake jewels and we are all being tragically ripped off.
At the ATM just before I pumped it much harder than I wanted to for ‘Savio’, I said to him, ‘how am I going to explain this expense to my wife?’ After assuring me that she would love the results, he said to me, ‘that’s your problem, not my problem.’ My personal story was perhaps unfortunate collateral damage in the cause he was advancing (‘Savio’s profit) via my naivety. And that is the case here too. Sophisticated queer gender theorist who wish to promote gender-identity anarchy don’t think of my child as their problem. It is the cause that is advanced by the normalization of queer by any means possible that they care about. The vulnerable psyches and bodies of our children are just useful pawns in an ideological cause to them. I can forgive ‘Savio’, and over time, hopefully, I will laugh about being swindled by him. But I cannot forgive Judith Butler.
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I’ve begun to think of ‘trans’ in terms of an organized crime syndicate. Judith Butler might be the well-dressed criminal defense attorney whose job is to talk a good game and maybe pay off a judge here and there so the family can escape justice and accountability. It’s a crucial role, but it seems to me the kingpin doesn’t write books or give lectures. The ‘gender’ dons are men with inherited wealth and influence, cluster-B tendencies, and a fetish. In the final episode, the audience will be shocked to learn who was behind the curtain all along. All the spoiler alerts we attempt now tend to make us look crazy because really: who would ever believe this?
Paul, thanks for writing this, it is genuinely interesting. I never really thought about Judith Butler et al being active swindlers, I mostly considered them demented True Believers. But you have made an interesting comparison with an actual con man.
I appreciate your honesty about being swindled, and maybe you can put it down to being jet-lagged and tired, I have to assume you are NOT that naive (how old are you, anyway?). I would also say that I think academics are even maybe especially prone to con men as they dont live in the real world, and hence are relatively easy marks. Street smart people rarely if ever get swindled.
Also, you make great points about getting conned, and various stages of psychological commitment in the con process. You correctly point out the commitment people make when transing their own kids, its like the Japanese hold outs on Pacific islands, they simply can never accept that they were wrong.
Great work.