Over at “GenderReport.ca”, we find this steaming pile of verbal dung: “How Gender Ideology Imposes A Dangerous Political Agenda In Our Schools”.
As is common with such articles, it is deliberately alarmist, designed to terrify people, not inform. In particular, it treats the concept of “gender ideology” as a given, while never actually providing a meaningful definition of it. In other words, like a lot of these articles, the term has become something of a “straw man” which the reader is then encouraged to direct their fears and worries into.
What is “gender ideology”? In today’s right-wing discourse (which is pretty much the only place you will see the term in active use), it pretty much boils down to anything that involves recognizing transgender identities as real and valid, any steps taken to acknowledge transgender people’s legitimate rights to move through society safely. They throw in a nice dash of “predator fear” for flavouring, and then dump it about in great quantities. It’s the intellectual equivalent of cheez puffs - lots of volume and energy, no real substantive value.
Where schools are concerned, we get the “protect the children” nonsense rolled out, with claims made that children are too young to understand this stuff, and therefore “Gender Ideology” is harming kids. They go on to argue that social contagion (aka “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD)” - debunked over here) is going to cause their kids to be forcibly “transed” (sic - their term, not mine) by schools and doctors.
Pay close attention to the wording of this last sentence here. It is loaded with misconceptions, misunderstandings, and generally false ideas about what transition means, the nature of medical treatments involved, and the ability of trans people of any age to understand and consent.
First, let’s talk about the notion of “highly experimental surgeries”. Male to Female gender reassignment surgeries have been around since the 1950s (and arguably sooner than that by some accounts), and in many ways are really little more than a variation on the seemingly less controversial surgeries performed on intersex children. Female to Male genital surgeries are newer (60s or 70s, I think), but any surgery that’s been around that long is hardly “experimental” at this point. Likewise, hormone therapy has been around since before the 1950s, and puberty blockers have been actively used to treat precocious puberty since at least the 1970s - hardly “experimental” in any meaningful sense of the term. The risks and consequences are well documented and well understood.
As for “taking pills for the rest of your life”, I challenge anyone over the age of 40 to look at their medicine cabinet and the prescriptions that they get refilled every few months. Kids who have asthma often require inhalers for the rest of their life; Type 1 diabetics often need insulin for the duration of their lives, and so on. I’m not seeing a major issue here.
Let’s talk briefly about the developmental issues that get raised - namely that “kids are too young to understand”. First, this infantilizes students who go through some of the most significant stages of development while in school.
By the time a child is in grade 1, we already expect them to understand “boy” and “girl” - and frankly the vast majority do. Who is to say that a grade 1 child cannot also understand the idea of “I have a boy’s body, but I don’t feel like a boy”? In fact, when you talk to a lot of transgender adults, stories of being aware of the incongruence of their body, the social cues they were getting, and how they felt internally is common, with awareness of being transgender happening somewhere between pre-school age and the end of elementary school. Whether they had the language to express that or not is irrelevant.
If the boy that was Johnny is grade 1 comes back the next year and is going by Jane, with long hair now, that’s simply not a problem. We know from experience that most of their classmates will shrug and carry on as normal. Children are, at this age far more flexible than their parents often are.
Middle School (or Junior High as it is called here), is the point in time when most kids go through puberty. Anyone who doesn’t think that transgender youth don’t understand what’s happening to their bodies has never talked to a transgender youth. It is not uncommon for transgender youth to find themselves painfully isolated, both physically and socially at a time when social development is just as important as what’s going on in the body.
By high school, the damage is done for many trans youth, and they’re hanging on until they can transition as adults, free from whatever strictures their parents may have imposed. You cannot tell me that by their teenage years a person is incapable of understanding gender both in physiological and social terms. If you’re going to argue that, then I’m going to ask how it is that person is deemed able to work, operate machinery, and ultimately vote?
What about those for whom “it’s (trans identity) is just a phase?”. Sure, there’s going to be some of that. That is why in general irreversible treatments don’t happen until the individual is old enough to understand the consequences of their decision (mid-teens for cross-sex hormones, and 18 or so for surgeries). Puberty blockers are reversible, and are used as an instrument to buy the person time to experiment and adapt socially without experiencing the often traumatic experience of “the wrong puberty” - and trust me, unwinding that experience as an adult is brutally painful work in therapy.
I will refer you to the following editorial which provides an intelligent, clear-headed overview of why gender affirming care - including recognizing transgender identities in schools - is so important. I won’t bore you with a ton of academic papers which also support that position. Suffice it to say that a few minutes with a decent academic search engine turns up plenty of evidence that supports the author’s claims.
This is a particularly sly bit of sleight-of-hand. Suddenly we go from “gender ideology” to “woke”, so the author can pivot to complaining how recognizing a student’s gender identity in class is somehow an infringement on their right to disagree. We’ve heard this before, from Dr. Jordan B. Peterson (Dr in that he holds a PhD, not that he has any medical expertise). The problem with positions like this is that it is basically telling the students that “as your teacher, I know you better than you know yourself”. This is arguably backwards to begin with, but it’s particularly offensive when you are in fact condescending to the students in your classroom.
As for scrutiny, it’s next to impossible to “scrutinize” a position like this when the concepts of “gender ideology” are not grounded in reality to begin with. Instead it is a mashup of random fears and claims by people who clearly have little or no direct experience with transgender people, their needs and concerns, and the realities of treatment they face. It is one thing to be concerned about something you don’t understand, it is quite another to use those “concerns” to try and erase an entire segment from society because they “scare you”.
On a closing note, I encourage all of you to go read the article “Bathroom Battlegrounds and Penis Panics” for a clear-headed, social perspective on all of this.
