Don't Give Up Hope!

 

Just waving my little trans flag. Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled by a 6-3 margin that states have the right to ban puberty blockers and any other gender-affirming care being provided to minors. Its supposed reasoning was that the science is unsettled and the topic controversial, so the matter must be left to the states to decide how best to protect trans children.

 

The Court treated flawed, biased, and debunked research by transphobes that has been rejected by all of the major American medical associations as being as valid as reputable, peer-reviewed research. The "medical controversy" it centered is not a controversy within the reputable medical science community.

 

Nor did the Court mention that the Trump administration has cancelled the funding of every single scientific study of trans health, gender affirming care, and the experiences of discrimination of trans, nonbinary, and intersex Americans. (Such funding made up less than 1% of the NIH budget, but has accounted for half of all grant dollars cancelled.) How can such research be considered both vital and determinative by the Court, yet the fact that the federal government is doing everything it can to terminate any such research go unmentioned?

 

The Court also did not care that puberty blockers have been prescribed to thousands and thousands of children who are not trans for decades, with zero controversy, and that this continues today, again without controversy. Nor did the Court note that intersex children who do not request puberty blockers regularly have them imposed--and not only is this accepted by the transphobes who have banned trans care, but framed as obligatory.

 

And all of this is supposed to be to protect trans kids. The youths themselves are thus framed as having no true self-knowledge. The parents who see how gender-affirming care has markedly improved their children's mental health are told that states may hold they are wrong, and are actually abusively exposing their children to harm, when they are in fact doing everything in their power to protect their children's wellbeing.

 

This is not about the government protecting children. It is about the state controlling them, based on bigotry against people like them, like me, like my wife. Want a little proof? On the same day that the Supreme Court announced this decision, the Trump administration ordered the Trevor Project, which provides suicide-prevention hotline services to queer and trans youth, to cease its work. The cruelty is, as ever, the point. They want us to know they don't care if we die.

 

But I care! I see you, all you lovely trans, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, and intersex folks out there, of every age. And so do so many other people! I wave my little trans flag for you. We cannot be erased--not by some ludicrous executive order, not by some wrongly-decided SCOTUS case, not by all the bigots who blather about their freedoms while blatantly denying freedom to others to live and love as their hearts urge them to do. 

 

Don't give up hope, and never stop fighting and shining!

Debunking Silly Claims about Testosterone

As someone who takes exogenous testosterone regularly, and is all too familiar with the fears and stereotypes people express about what will happen to the personalities of those who gender transition using testosterone, I feel zero surprise about the results of this study: testosterone does not make people less empathetic! Nor does it make people more likely to chose whatever course of action requires more... action.

From the article discussing the study, which looked at subjects making moral decisions about which lives to save in the famous Trolly Problem:

"'The results of the current study yielded no evidence in support of any of the four preregistered hypotheses,' write the authors. Those given testosterone were no more likely to prefer taking action than those given the placebo. It was predicted that they'd also be more prone to make utilitarian judgements that minimize total casualties; this wasn't true, either. Another hypothesis suggested that those given testosterone would be less sensitive to moral prohibitions, such as not choosing to kill someone. In fact, the results suggest the exact opposite is true."

That researchers thought having higher levels of testosterone would cause such consequences is the fact that makes my eyes roll.

Testosterone, like all hormones, has real biological effects! But our society is so invested in an essentialist, patriarchal, binary gender ideology that people believe testosterone causes a ridiculous range of gigantic, multicausal phenomena: power, competitiveness, strength, bravery, callousness, violence--everything people love and hate about our conception of masculinity. Those who love patriarchy want testosterone to define an eternal male power that must be deferred to. For essentialist feminists who see women as innately less problematic than men, testosterone is instead the cooties hormone that makes people abusive, impulsive, and smelly.

People naturalize a set of gender relations and stereotypes that are very historically and culturally specific and deem them eternal effects of a hormone. It's just silly. It makes as much sense as saying capitalism is caused by insulin or socialism by melatonin.

I can tell you that I personally am a much calmer and less angry person now than when I was full of progesterone and estrogen. I did not lose my empathy. I did not become more competitive; if anything, I because less so. I did not lose interest in complex moral reasoning. I did not become obsessed with beer. I did not lose the ability to coordinate colors. I did not decide feminism is a load of hooey.

I did get a lot hairier though.