Transphobes don’t care about children, they’re scared of them
Recently, the editor of Disability and Society journal signed an open letter in the Times claiming that “transgender ideology is damaging children.” This was another terrible episode in what has been an atrocious pride month for Black trans people, following closely in the footsteps of the NSPCC’s decision to suspend trans model and activist Munroe Bergdorf as LGBT+ campaigner for Childline.
I haven’t read the Times letter, largely because I refuse to pay money to read the same tired arguments I can find for free online. The persistent cry from transphobes behind these articles always seems to revolve around the harm that may befall their children, as if trans people are a cult and their lives a kind of poison. But pull away the veil of moralizing anger and we find a very different narrative. Transphobes aren’t concerned with protecting their children from aberrant views, but with protecting their views from the children who may challenge them.
Children are people. They think, feel and question with the same hunger that adults do, often with a greater one. As Julian Gill-Peterson explains, from the moment ‘transsexual’ emerged into the public consciousness in the 50s, young people were taking it and laying claim to it, using it to describe feelings they knew themselves to experience. Trans children are not a new concept. It is only the idea that children and young people should not express themselves on equal terms with adults which smudges their knowledge into confusion and out of history books. For transphobes, too, children’s lives are the property of adults and their expression something to encourage or punish based solely on what is seen as normal. There is no radicalism in that view; it is exactly the same as the wider cultural one.
Transphobes sit at the zenith of protecting traditional, conservative values. However much they feel that they push back against a twisted society, really they simply conform to it, doing everything they can to ensure that children who do not are punished. And that punishment comes through the concerted effort to delegitimize trans identities through fake concern. When they speak about trans children, the focus is always on the supposed harm being done to them. And the main way these children are supposedly being harmed is through medicine. It may seem that there is a genuine concern for whatever invasive practices medicine may come up with, but the reality is very different. First, though, we have to understand the obsession.
In our Western culture and for transphobes alike, trans identity is only ever a medicalized one. That is, trans lives are acknowledged insofar as they are diagnosed, drugged, studied, operated on. From the early 20th century, when the concept of sex ‘plasticity’ formed a scientific consensus, to the present day, where the medical model of gender identity clinics and surgery is the dominant lens through which we see trans lives, trans identity has been a diagnosis rather than an experience. And that is an inherently racialized view. The umbrella term of Two-Spirit for many First Nations understandings of gender, the Hijra of South Asia, The Fa’afafine of Samoa, the pre-colonial practice of female husbands in over 30 African societies, none of those cultural practices ever needed a medical eye to make sense. And more, Gill-Peterson highlights how it is black children who have suffered most as gender was medicalized throughout Europe and North America. That is why we must put Black trans people first in any discussion about trans identity. What the transphobe says is never only transphobic, racism bubbles beneath the surface.
Medical transitioning is far from the only form of transition. Many trans people see no need to medically transition, many do not have access to it, many find the whole system too suffocating to take part in. And while those that do have often fought bravely for the right, often against racism and anti-blackness in medicine, there is a narrative that trans people alter their bodies to reflect the innate gender they know themselves to be. That’s fine, that’s how many of us really do see our gender, but it is only one of a myriad of experiences. The fact that this is the dominant view of trans identity tells us something important.
The way gender is understood fluctuates with place and time, but the Western preoccupation with compartmentalisation, with scientifically categorising what this is and what that is, leads to a statuesque norm and an uncompromising vision of how things should be. Gender can never be a space to explore, you cannot move past it or through it, you cannot play with it. You must be one thing, and if you vary from the norm then you must be fixed. That is how medicalization legitimizes trans identity, by making it so a trans person can be categorically defined as a man or a woman, or simply in a box labelled trans. To the world at large, trans people are simply being ‘fixed’ through medicine.
But for transphobes, medical transition is not the way to ‘fix’ trans people, it is too much a threat to their conservative values, namely the gender binary. Their ‘fix’ for trans people is denial, destruction and delegitimization. But how to do that in a world where medicalized trans people are more and more visible? How to protect the stability of their worldview from the possibility of so much more? Well, that’s simple. Like the homophobes of the 70s and 80s, like the commentators who decry gang violence as a thinly veiled cover for their anti-blackness, they use children.
Because children are a symbol. They are the pinnacle of the uncorrupted and virtuous. But what is virtuous to a transphobe? In every rehashed think piece about trans ideology harming children, the focus always revolves around the damage that medical intervention can do to them. Forget that puberty blockers are reversible, ignore the fact that children are thinking and feeling people with as much right to explore their gender as anyone else, or even that many will never go through that medical intervention. The onus always has to be a moralizing one, one that implies the continuation of the status quo.
That is what transphobes mean when they talk about children. It is so easy for them to dismiss trans children and young people because the transphobe’s concern is never actually for them. It is for the conservative, Western values children represent. So in the end, trans kids are confused, gender is still innate, and trans adults are perverts. The transphobe’s view remains shaky but intact. The cure they find for the reality of trans children is therapy. They medicalize trans people as mentally ill. When that does not work, they find social cures: prison or persecution.
The reality is that transphobes are scared of trans children; their very existence is a threat to everything they hold dear. So when trans children exist loudly, proudly, beautifully, the transphobe must attack them. Of course, there is no way of launching verbal warfare on children without revealing yourself to be completely abhorrent. So transphobes do the next best thing, they couch their language in fake concern and panic, they shake their heads, they appeal to the good old days, and the results of their arguments are always the same. A return to tradition and the white nuclear family, an insistence on the fact that trans people are tearing gender apart without ever explaining why that would not be a good thing. And on all sides, from all angles, trans children are bombarded with the idea that they must be ‘fixed’.
Trans children are not broken. Whatever stage of their transition and however they choose to do it, trans people do not need to be ‘fixed.’ Our identities are not problems and we cannot be solved. We are simply here, simply existing. How wonderful.
To read from Black trans women and about their experiences, check the work of Kuchenga Shenje, Shaadi Devereux and Raquel Willis
