Transgender

The Supreme Court today is hearing arguments against Tennessee’s statewide ban on prescribing puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy for minors with gender dysphoria. The challenge to the state law is being led by the Biden administration and the American Civil Liberties Union and is brought on behalf of three teens with gender dysphoria, their parents and a doctor. Their lawyer is also transgender. The Tennessee law came about during a period of very fraught debate over how to treat children who suffer from gender dysphoria.

Prisha has a crushed larynx from weekly testosterone injections; she cannot sing or even talk for long periods of time without feeling pain. She also describes feeling “phantom breasts” — similar to someone who has lost a limb — from her double mastectomy. Chloe will forever live with broader shoulders, wider hips, a more angular jaw and “severe atrophy” of her reproductive organs.  Ritchie is completely numb in his genital area, minus the pain he feels when trying to dilate his “neovagina” or use the restroom. It typically takes ten minutes for him to empty his bladder and it almost always ends in a mess.

You shouldn’t make a habit out of watching the daily White House press briefings unless you want to get much dumber, but every now and then they are good for some cheap entertainment. On Monday, for example, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre decided to dedicate precious podium time to “Transgender Day of Remembrance.” GLAAD, an LGBTQ+ activist organization, says that Transgender Day of Remembrance is meant to commemorate “transgender people whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence.” TDOR (they really like their acronyms, huh?) was started in 1999 by a transgender activist in memory of Rita Hester, a transgender woman whose murder remains unsolved. I found it a bit interesting that the catalyst for TDOR was an unsolved murder case.

I’ve often thought that a candid fly-on-the-wall documentary about the production of the Harry Potter films would be considerably more entertaining than any of the lackluster pictures themselves (Alfonso Cuaron’s excellent Prisoner of Azkaban duly excepted). Alan Rickman’s recent diaries suggest that the sets were unhappy, frantic places where actors were seldom allowed to create memorable characters and where the focus on the juvenile performers meant that one of the finest British ensemble casts ever assembled often functioned as little more than expensive set-dressing. Yet more than a decade after the final film, the actors continue to command headlines, some of which is thanks to Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling’s views on the trans issue.

Sex and gender were supposed to be allies in the identitarian march of the feminist left. But gender, it appears, keeps butting up against the reality of sex. "I will say this and everyone's gonna hate me,” singer Macy Gray recently told Piers Morgan, “but as a woman, just because you go change your (body) parts, doesn't make you a woman, sorry.” (She subsequently apologized for her comments.) Bette Midler also elicited censure for her recent tweet: "WOMEN OF THE WORLD! We are being stripped of our rights over our bodies, our lives and even of our name!" (She later qualified that her comments were not intended to be “transphobic.”) Women, generations of feminists have been telling us, are supposed to be powerful. They’re supposed to be capable.

I can pinpoint the moment I knew I wouldn’t be able to remain, as I had thought of myself until that time, “pro-trans.” I had grown up in 1990s New York City and had known many gender-bending people. Very few called themselves “trans,” but androgyny was in. Drag queens ran the club scene. “Girls who want boys/Who like boys to be girls/Who do boys like they're girls/Who do girls like they're boys,” the 1994 Blur song went. What was the big deal about being a girl who wanted to look like a boy or a boy who wanted to present as a girl? No one was hurting anyone. You like red lipstick, that boy likes wearing a dress. Who cared? I certainly didn’t. It was the early 2000s, the heyday of the blogosphere, and the comment sections were lit.