Be afraid! (or not)

Last month the big “trans story” came out of California, but was so quickly supplanted by the announcement regarding Chelsea Manning that it got pushed out of the public view with much less commentary that usually happens in these cases. Truth be told, that's a good thing as such progress usually is more effective, ultimately, when it takes place quietly and incrementally. Because you can look back in five or ten years and say “See? Civilization didn't collapse after all!”

I'm speaking, of course, about the bill signed by Gov. Brown which affirmed a policy already in place in quite a few school districts in California (and elsewhere, for that matter) which allows transgender youth to use the facilities, and participate in the activities, consistent with their identified gender rather than the one assigned at birth.

For the consideration of the potential reader who may not be well versed in the intricacies of trans-related terminology and so forth, let me explain. The phrase “assigned at birth” is not meant to imply that everyone's gender is arbitrary. Rather, it reflects the reality that for a very small percentage of births, the apparent gender of the infant is not, after all, the correct one – but the delivering doctor has no obvious way to determine this at birth. So when the doctor says “it's a boy” or “Its a girl” he's reacting to what he can see, which is 99'9% (or so) reliable. That's your “assigned” gender, which almost no one ever has any reason to wonder about. But occasionally, a child is assigned based on visual evidence incorrectly. Such a child is considered, in most cases, intersex when the situation is discovered. Sometimes the intersex condition is visible, and parents are asked to decide how to handle it. THAT is a subject for another day.

Your identified gender is your internal sense of self, who you believe you are – and it has nothing to do with the physical construct of your outward appearance. It might be customary to think that “because I have a vagina, I therefore know I'm a female” but the reality is that there's no sense in which a child doesn't know what they are until they learn the difference between one set of plumbing and the other. All sorts of examples might be offered to support this premise but that, too, would be a tangent. Short story: you know what gender you are innately, not based on outwardly visible data. Again, for 99+% of the population the outward data and the internal data are consistent. On rare occasions they are not. These people are, depending on the term you want to use (see my previous post on the subject) transgender, transsexual, or intersex.

Contrary to the popular mythology, it's more common for a trans person to know about their gender incongruity as a child than the reverse. Admittedly, there's a reason that myth exists. Until the last 10-15 years, the overwhelming majority of trans-kids would have felt an almost unimaginable social pressure to conceal their status. If they did display “cross-gender” feelings or actions, they were in almost every case browbeaten into conformity, and all this negative feedback of course reinforcing in their mind a sense of self-shame that persists far into adulthood. In my generation, accepting yourself is something that takes you often into your 40's to do.

With each succeeding generation that drops. One can basically correlate the age at which any person comes out with the age they reached in the first decade of this century. In other words, if you survey a thousand out trans people, the vast majority started their transition within the last 15 years, no matter what age they were at the time. That's simply a result of the increased volume of information available in the internet age than had been before. Not unexpectedly, it takes a while for cultural traditions to catch up with new information, or increased availability of information, both of which apply in relation to the science of being trans.

But the truth remains, a very high percentage of people born trans understand their gender dysphoria long before they leave school. The question then becomes, how do we as a society, as the responsible adults, react to this? Predictably, the traditionalist (masquerading as the defenders of morals) express shock and outrage that trans kids would be accommodated. Policies like the one in California (and many other local districts around the country, including the major metro school districts in Texas of all places) which seek to make the world a safer and more tolerant place for the one or two in a thousand kids who have gender dysphoria are twisted into outlandish claims that schools are purposely confusing the gender of your kids.

It's utter nonsense. Documented cases exist in which misguided adults tried to indoctrinate a child into a specific gender identity, with horrifically failed results. One need only consider the fact that medical and psychological science has utterly failed to come up with an effective treatment to “cure” a transsexual person of gender dysphoria. Heck, one need only ask themselves “what possible strategy might have been applied to me, when I was six, to make me think I was the opposite gender?” Are any of you willing to admit that could have been done? Of course it couldn't.

What remains, then, is teaching kids a pretty simple message, paraphrased thus: “You may someday have a classmate who believe they are the opposite sex from what you thought they were. This is a real condition, just like diabetes or anything else, and it's stupid to be mean to them for it, so don't do that, okay?” What's so objectionable about that?

“But,” the traditionalist cries, “Bathrooms! Locker rooms! Wild penises running around everywhere!!!”

Again, it's nonsense on so many levels. There may have been a time when no one anywhere ever used the bathroom with people of the opposite sex, in which one could have claimed it was dangerous to individuals or society to do so. Just as there was a time when people would have declared it a danger to society for blacks and whites to toilet in the same place. But for whatever reason, some places did it anyway. Guess what? No “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!” too place. Well, some folks might be on the fringes of that mass hysteria thing, but almost all of them are getting paid handsomely to be there.

In point of fact, we have a substantial data sample now, in both public settings and student settings, demonstrating conclusively that the predicted dangers failed to appear. Yes, occasionally some pervy man – a cis-man by the way – violates women's private spaces with his person or his technology, but there's no correlation at all between those fairly rare incidents and the local policies and laws being trans friendly or not. The whole “men will claim to be trans in order to gain access to vulnerable women” prediction completely failed to materialize. Even in school districts, this policy has been in place on the local level for, in some cases, close to a decade – long enough for us to see what the downside is. Here's the thing – no downside. All the rabble rousing is so much scare tactics proffered to you by people who KNOW based on available data that the thing they are warning you about hasn't happened.

So you, if you believe the rantings of everyone from Peter LaBarbara to Scott Lively to Bryan Fischer, if you believe the dire scare stories on WND, ONN, or the Christian Post – you need to ask yourself “why do these people continue to lie to me? What's in it for them?” Then consider the fact that every one of them will remind you that they are in business thanks to the generous financial support of believers like you.

You do the math.