The Toxic Sisterhood Of Trans-Affirmation
The Toxic Sisterhood Of Trans-Affirmation
“We have a dilation problem,” Jeannette Jennings tells her friends over coffee. The ‘we’ in this case refers to her teenage son - now her daughter - and the ‘dilation problem’ refers to the maintenance of his vaginoplasty cavity, which closes up if it is not lubricated and stretched.
“I will be so mad if that thing seals up” she growls, miming a neck-wringing of the imaginary child in the air in front of her.
This was from a 2018 documentary that made Jazz Jennings the first trans-child reality star and Mrs. Jennings into the internet’s archetypal Trans soccer mum.
No one remembers the names of the other women in the scene; the anonymous coffee-morning chorus, supporting Jennings with sighs of approval and compassion, but we should have. We should have paid very close attention to the outer layers of the Trans onion, back when we could have done something about it.
Because what the scene captures in real-time is an example of how trans-cheerleading plays out amongst groups of adult women. This is a ‘dilation problem’ of a different kind: a network effect, where trans-affirmation becomes essential to a woman’s status within her hierarchies, across friendship groups and workplaces.
Women's social hierarchies tend to differ from men’s in that they are built on subtle, more distributed systems rather than acute hierarchies. Status is derived from allegiances between women, through the mutual conference of rank, and loyalty building.
As Jennings explains how she fears her child won’t keep his vaginal cavity dilated, coffee-Mum number two nods emphatically, turning to Mum number three to explain knowingly that “without that watchful eye, they [trans kids] tend to go back to old patterns”.
It is an extraordinary comment, which appears to mean both: Our friend is central to the Transing of her child (with the unwitting implication that the kid might otherwise revert back to their old gender), but also: I amongst us have special knowledge on this crunchy subject. The two knowledge owners form an allegiance and are momentarily elevated above the other women as the trans-enlightened of the group.
The exchange is a micro-moment of what has played out online in the past decade, as a festival of gender-enlightened mothering began to flood the internet. In a social media world clustered into algorithmic bubbles of agreement, the Insta-Mum celebrations of trans-childhood receive rapturous applause from their own (often entirely female) audiences.
Back in the real world, gender dysphoria is being addressed in environments dominated by female managerialism and status culture of a similar kind: in schools (70- 80% women staffed), in the rooms of child psychologists (75% women) and in communities of Mums whose identities and values are tied up in an inclusive-centric female internet culture.
The subject is then publicly scrutinized by a left-wing legacy media (the preference of the female urban elite), who predominantly interview women on the subject and then release tentatively worded commentary, by upper-middle-class female commentators who are themselves heavily invested in maintaining a dual identity of both media pundit and inclusive humanitarian. Viewed from a thousand feet, it is hard not to see trans-child-affirmation as entwined with a kind of cultural cartel of female social managerialism.
The trans-affirmative bubble has made it impossible to be a woman in any of these environments and to push back on Trans.
“You have to understand, teachers are surrounded by colleagues and bosses who make it impossible to challenge or even question how students with gender dysphoria are helped.” a secondary school English teacher from London told me.
“Not only can you not challenge the idea that a child has an ‘inner-gender…you are forced to actively adopt the ideology. You have to show you adopt their imagined sex by using the right language. There is so much unspoken expectation to show you have the ‘right attitude’.”
Another teacher I spoke to said it was too dangerous for teachers to push back.
‘It’s just not worth risking being labeled a TERF and losing your job."
Whilst the pushback on Trans is in full swing in the courtrooms and the political realms, challenging the cultures that may have cultivated the problem is more difficult. Unsurprisingly, the most direct condemnation of the narcissistic or self-interested elements of trans-affirmation has come from men:
“We will never beat trans if we fear speaking about the heroic lovers of the limelight” said Dennis Kavanaugh, the director of the Gay Rights Network and one of the only campaigners brave enough to address the underlying cultures of trans-affirmation head-on.
Hacsi Horváth, an epidemiologist who himself lived as a woman for many years sees his own experience of trying to transition as inextricably linked to societal and parental coercion:
“Caring about, listening to, and lovingly parenting a child or young adult is not necessarily a synonym for unexamined “support” for everything the child says or wants.”
The academic Gaad Sad goes so far as to link Trans to a kind of mass contagion of victim/savior narcissism he calls ‘collective Munchausen’s’. The undertones of female spotlight-seeking to the comparison with Munchausen’s is clearly intended to be felt.
Recently, at an Ohio government hearing on gender-affirming care, a de-transitioner called Morgan Keller took to the stand to give her testimony in the cracked voice of one caught medically between worlds. She told of how she had become “captivated by the idea that my female body was fundamentally wrong, and seduced by the prospect that there was something I could do about it”.
Amongst the many tragic elements of her testimony, a sense of deep loneliness pervades; one of an individual who, despite being raised in relatively comfortable circumstances, was never offered a way off the trans train by the adults around her.
To them, she says: “if you wait until you have a de-transitioner, someone is already hurt and you have failed."
As Trans now takes center stage in the public battle for childhood, any challenge to the affirmation of child transgenderism must necessarily include scrutiny of the cultures that rubber-stamped the concept into existence in the first place.
Without this retrospective, there is no way to reform the environments, whose cultures will remain powerful enough to override the law, even if it does eventually catch up.
We once wondered whether the time would come when young people, forever scorched in body and mind by this craze, would come to ask us where we were when they needed us. That time has arrived and as feared, we are struggling to find an answer.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
 | A guest post by
|
This whole topic infuriates me. I was labeled a “tomboy” because I was gifted with athletic ability and wanted to be outside, not because I was confused about my “gender” or who I was. Playing with dolls and dressing up was boring!! My mother definitely would have pushed transitioning on me. She desperately wanted to fit me into a box and label me to ease the burden that I wasn’t “normal”. Thank goodness I grew up in the 80’s!!
I am definitely not the typical woman. I don’t care about being ostracized from the group or losing my job or status in a clearly demented society. I would and do wholeheartedly speak out against any parent or teacher pushing transitioning on a child. It is abuse. Period.
I have not been blessed with motherhood but if I had been, I would hope that the other adults in my life would have the courage to speak out when I was making a grave error or completely misinformed. It is our duty to speak up for abused children. We all know that primary caregivers are incompetent. We all had parents who made plenty of mistakes. Being a parent doesn’t give you the right to do whatever you want to a child.
I don’t understand how a parent can so easily be turned against their own flesh and blood. Where are your ethics and morals? Where is the love?
A very thoughtful and thought-provoking essay, indeed.