Abstract
As readers of Psychology of Women Quarterly know full well, gender is complicated. Nevertheless, media and public policy seem to be full of simplistic and essentialist theories. Women are this way. Men are that way. It’s in the hormones, or the genes, or the brain. Ah, yes, now the brain. Meanwhile, academic perspectives grow more and more complicated.
In the 1950s, as the result of studying intersex individuals, New Zealand psychologist John Money outlined a set of factors contributing to gender role and identity, including hormonal and gonadal sex, internal and external sexual morphology and physiology, and assigned sex and sex of rearing. He noted that “combinations and permutations” of all of these variables produced gender role and orientation/identity. Women’s and gender studies scholarship beginning in the 1970s added new cultural and power-based variables. Controversies over psychiatric nomenclature in the 1980s and 1990s spotlighted pathologies of gender deviance. Developments in genital “sex-change” surgeries reinforced anatomical gender categories at the same time as longitudinal social science research identified subjective and performative fluidity in gender identity.
In the 21st century, communications technology and gender politics seem to be creating new confusion over what defines and constitutes legitimate gender identity, with unexpected policy issues such as official identity documents, educational curricula, insurance coverage for medical procedures, bathroom-use policies, hate speech guidelines, and other issues. Equally important, identity advocacy activism, building since the 1960s, but taking more confrontational directions with the growth of social media such as Twitter, has recently focused on gender identity. Yet, despite these many factors, the public is encouraged to see simplistic narratives of self, identity, and social justice.
The book at hand wades into these complicated waters with a collection of strongly worded essays that take an unfamiliar and politically unpopular “transcritical” point of view about how to view transgender children and youth. I found these essays contentious and sometimes in need of editing; but they illuminated issues I hadn’t thought of and placed the controversies into a broader context. I recommend this book to anyone involved or interested in the current state of gender identity politics and policies. Teaching a chapter or two of this book would doubtlessly enliven gender classroom discussions.
The essays are authored by philosophers, social workers, therapists, and gender scholars on the academic side, and on the consumer side by “detransitioned” transsexuals (individuals who first “transitioned” away from their birth sex and then later changed their minds and behaviors), gender commentators, and a “gender critical dad.” Most authors are located in the United Kingdom. All assert that many “trans-affirmative” policies, such as children self-asserting their gender and medical professionals offering early access to steroid hormones, approved in the name of destigmatizing gender nonconforming children, actually serve to enforce rigid binary categories. The irony is, these authors claim, that what appears liberal and inclusive can actually be rigid and confining.
Josephine Bartosch, journalist and gender activist, for example, offers five powerful stories of middle-aged lesbian women who had each gone through a phase of hating their bodies and wishing they were boys two decades earlier. These women worry that the current spate of television programs about young transgendered kids and the dearth of stories of young lesbians represent a new kind of “lesbophobia.” Several authors worry that children who strongly like or dislike gendered clothes and toys (pink or sparkly stuff, dolls or tea sets, ballet or poetry, and guns or football stuff) are prematurely identified as “trans” by family and school workers who are being mis-educated by a growing cadre of transactivists.
The authors’ primary worry, however, has to do with the unknown long-term effects of hormone and puberty-blocker treatments. They cite extensive trans-affirmative literature, websites, blogs, and media coverage that imply safe and effective medical and surgical treatments are available to enable transgender-labeled kids to lead happy and healthy lives. This misleading oversimplification is the one they fear can wreck all too many lives.
It’s incumbent on gender scholars to pay attention to these new transcritical voices and the research and policy contributions they will bring to the complexities of gender and gender identity.