The subject of gender and transgenderism — especially as it pertains to children — is clouded in confusion and misinformation more than nearly any other subject in our society. Both the “woke” left and the populist right bring such a level of partisanship and hot-take-ism to the issue that opening the door of clarity is nearly impossible. While both sides bear culpability, the first article in this series focuses on left-wing discourse around gender.

The harassment, career implosions and threats of physical violence some face for objecting to left-wing gender ideology make honest conversations around this subject nearly impossible. We need to cut through the dishonesty and sophistry about gender that academia, medicine and media produce. Why? Because common falsehoods about complex social issues lead to further political polarization — and in this instance, harm children. Honest science-based conversations around this issue will result in superior healthcare for gender-distressed youths.

Ideological capture

Over the last decade, hyper-progressive identity politics captured large portions of the arts, humanities, journalism, education, social sciences and, to some extent, biology, medicine and government agencies. No “woke” issue prompts more self-censorship than the orthodoxy around transgender issues.

The eloquent American commenter Sam Harris coined the phrase “uniquely combustible” to describe the sensitivity Islam holds toward criticism. In Western culture, the transgender community is also “uniquely combustible” when faced with criticism, especially concerning transgender healthcare practices for children.

I am not arguing that every single transgender person is incapable of engaging in discourse. I am arguing that there is a small sect of radical activists who are not representative of the transgender population, just as jihadists are not representative of Muslims. This sect disrupts science, medicine and civil discourse, often to the chagrin of many transgender people.

An aggressive cancel culture surrounds the topic of gender. Various case examples and further evidence illustrate this. Activist harassment forces doctors, scientists and journalists into a pattern of self-censorship because they do not want to share the unfortunate fates of the dissenters they see around them.

DEI’s effect on universities

The massive left-wing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) industrial complex that permeates universities has its tentacles in everything: hiring, lectures, curriculum, departmental culture, disciplinary procedures and propaganda dissemination. DEI ideology holds that “marginalized” racial and sexual groups are “hurt” by violations of politically correct etiquette. It often targets people who violate its dogma for reputation damage, career destruction and frivolous “bias” investigations.

In his recent book, The Canceling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff, President of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, estimated that roughly 100,000 college professors were punished for constitutionally protected speech over the last decade. In fact, faculty today are more likely to self-censor than during the McCarthy Era.

A prominent example of cancellation is that of Dr. Lisa Littman, a former professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. In 2018, she coined the term “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” to explain the sudden rise in youths identifying as transgender. Her research was widely criticized at the time of its publication for relying on testimony from parents who were posting on “anti-trans” websites and for positing that the increase may be the result of social contagion.

The publishing journal PLOS One reviewed her work and republished it after the controversy, finding that it only contained tiny errors that had no impact on the conclusion. Regardless, Littman lost her consulting job and no longer teaches at the university.

The term “anti-trans” confuses scientific discourse. It is so overused it essentially loses all meaning. Legitimate and scientifically informed points of view are contorted and misrepresented to make doctors and scientists look like hatemongers.

The website Transgender Map labels any person who rejects hardline gender ideology, including transgender people, as enemies of the transgender population. The American Academy of Pediatrics even labels those asking for systematic review of the evidence for gender-affirming care as “anti-transgender.”

Another example of cancellation is that of Dr. Carole Hooven, a former Harvard biologist, hormone expert and celebrated professor from Cambridge, Massachusetts. She insisted that human sex differences are dimorphic while she simultaneously emphasized her respect for preferred pronouns. For dissenting, she lost almost all professional support at Harvard, pushing her into early retirement. She described a “fear that spreads every time someone is punished for their speech” on college campuses.

That fear directly undermines the foundation of liberal epistemic culture. “Epistemic” is a Greek word for “how we come to knowledge.” Free speech is a vital part of this process. But having it on paper is not enough. Ideas must be aired out in the open, rigorously challenged and refined to make them more accurate.

People do not want to air out difficult ideas when fear of a cancellation firestorm hangs over them. DEI apparatchiks support this fear through Stasi-like reporting services, campus-wide emails, training sessions and posters reminding university members what words to use and how to use them — even if scientists disagree. This creates an environment of silence.

There is something Soviet about this culture. Those loyal to the Party in the USSR often took punishing dissidents into their own hands. Today, formal punishments do occur, but in other instances, they do not involve formal procedures. Instead, they embrace communist-styled social ostracization and reputation destruction, pushing non-conformists to leave institutions.

Medical discourse suffocates

In science and medicine, a radical ideology that tried to reshape human beings was dominant for decades. It was called eugenics. Created in 1883, the theory sought to improve human genetic quality, often through selective human breeding and forced sterilization. To not support the ideology could have been a career death sentence for doctors and scientists. The current left-wing ideology holds many similarities to eugenics dogma, especially the expectation of conformity to its tenets and the idea that human beings can be remade.

One of the central tenets of today’s dogma is gender-affirming care (GAC). GAC holds that doctors and therapists should affirm a child’s self-described inner sense of gender. They should provide measures like puberty blockers and hormones to align one’s inner sense of gender with the outer biological sex. Major medical organizations in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand continue to support GAC, despite their British and European counterparts’ move toward a model that embraces psychotherapy and questioning gender identity.

In 2021, Zander Keig, a transsexual social worker and member of the World Professional Organization for Transgender Health (WPATH), released a letter criticizing WPATH’s new standards of care for youth medical transition. He objected to the group’s removal of the evidence and ethics sections. Again, activists and ideology got in the way. The letter collected roughly 1,700 signatures before Keig closed it; activists were sabotaging it with fake signatures.

Social media platforms also traffic in this confusion. The Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing suicides among members of the LGBTQ+ community, placed a disclaimer on a YouTube video panel discussing the gender exploratory therapy model for gender-distressed youths. The group labeled the practice as “conversion therapy” because the model does not immediately affirm a minor’s self-perceived gender identity. This is despite advocates of the practice painstakingly explaining that the exploratory model does not push patients away from or toward any gender identity.

In 2023, a therapist writing under the pen name Sophia Sedosa posted a well-informed, fact-based essay on Substack about why the exploratory therapy model for transgender youths is legal in California. While she listed professional reasons for remaining anonymous, one of them was to avoid social consternation: “I would rather not be harassed by activists.”

In April 2024, Dr. Hilary Cass, a highly respected transsexual pediatrician-scientist from England, released an “Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People,” more commonly known as the Cass Review. The Review found poor evidence to support youth transition, so the doctor recommended a halt to the practice.

The Cass Review also supported the exploratory therapy model over the immediate affirmation of gender identity, more high-quality research, the admonition of healthcare providers who provide gender-affirming care without parental consent, an insistence that transitioning is not right for everyone who wants it and condemnation of toxic cancel culture. Cass also argued that social influence and social media are partly responsible for the increase in the transgender youth population.

Unlike Sedosa, Cass could not maintain her anonymity. Predictably, she received violent threats. Local police warned her not to use public transportation following the publication of her review. There is a clear pattern here.

One of the more horrendous examples of this pattern is the mistreatment of Dr. Eithan Haim, a surgeon at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, Texas. He blew the whistle on the hospital’s secret continuation of transgender medical procedures for children after the hospital declared it had ceased those practices.

The Department of Justice accuses Haim of violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a federal law that protects patients’ health information from being given without their consent. A thorough examination of the accusations against Haim done by National Review finds that these are ginned-up charges that would never be applied to a similar whistleblower if the issue were not about transgender children. Haim faces up to a decade in prison and $250,000 dollars in fines. This ongoing case will certainly produce a chilling effect among doctors who want to speak out.

Confusion in journalism

The public relies on the media to provide succinct explanations of complex subjects they may not have the time to investigate or the expertise to understand. Outlets on the left and right have made a fetish out of covering anything and everything transgender, often in a polarizing, simplistic and highly politicized manner.

In 2017, Katie Herzog, a journalist from Portland, Oregon, attempted to report on the issue thoughtfully. Her compassionate and balanced piece, “The Detransitioners: They Were Transgender, Until They Weren’t,” earned her extensive harassment and social ostracization. She eventually moved “in part because of the turmoil.”

Abigail Shirier, author of the 2020 book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, received backlash for supporting the social contagion hypothesis. Chase Strangio, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said, “stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”

When free-thinking journalists are mistreated and discredited, that leaves an opening for the most ideologically driven. Ali Velishi, host of MSNBC’s Velishi show, cherry-picked a study that found a 73% reduction in suicidality among transgender-identifying youths who received GAC. He also presented the fact that major American medical organizations support GAC.

It is common for the media to refer to the opinions of major medical organizations to justify arguments. However, American medical organizations are getting this issue wrong. This is evidenced by European medical organizations’ lack of support for GAC, the recent departure of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons from supporting these procedures and an astounding lack of evidence — something these organizations refuse to contend with.

The research is also presented out of context. It compares a population with an enormous mental illness comorbidity rate, transgender youths, to the cisgender population. When compared with other equally depressed and anxious populations, the rates of suicidality are similar. The study also does not determine what part of GAC reduced suicidality; it could have been therapy that made the difference rather than chemical interventions.

A vital piece of context is often left out of the conversation around transgender youth healthcare. The limited body of research that does exist does not apply to most of the current population of gender-distressed young people. The explosion in youths self-identifying as transgender has different symptoms than those observed in the “Dutch Studies,” which is the most thorough GAC research. In fact, scientists who performed the Dutch Studies cautioned against “blindly adopting our research.”

Another example of irrational coverage of this issue was an article ABC published in 2023, titled, “‘Genocidal’: Transgender people begin to flee states with anti-LGBTQ laws.” Elsa, a seven-year-old male child from Texas, identifies as female. His parents describe him as “wise beyond her years,” having “guided [them] through her gender journey.” His gender journey began at age three. On National Daughter’s Day, he asked, “Can I be your daughter?” Today’s parents tend to overindulge their children.

At the time of the article’s publication, Texas had recently planned to make GAC illegal. When the child’s family discussed moving states to give him GAC care when he was older, he said, “Just let them hurt me.”

The child’s belief that officers of the state will commit an act of violence against him and that that is preferable to moving demonstrates that — like all children — he is not wise beyond his years. He is not ready to make such significant life-altering choices.

Fortunately, The New York Times demonstrates that we may be turning a corner regarding public discourse around transgender issues. It published fact-based opinion pieces this year about the Cass Review that contradicted one another, something nearly impossible several years ago.

NYT writer Pamela Paul’s piece on the Review questions why America is “still pretending” GAC works. She echoes many of the criticisms highlighted in this article and dispells the myth that transgender children will commit suicide if they do not receive GAC. Fellow writer David Brooks called Cass “the kind of hero the world needs today.” He argues that her courage to explore this issue was complimented by a sense of uncertainty in her review. Cass did not make definitive claims without evidence, unlike many in the trenches of the LGBTQ+ culture war.

Meanwhile, NYT journalist Lydia Polgreen’s well-informed piece, “The Strange Report Fueling the War on Trans Kids,” criticized the Cass Review for understandable methodological reasons. However, a deeper look finds that Polgreen takes issue with Cass’s opinion that moving minors down the transgender pathway is not right for everyone who identifies as queer. Polgreen likens denying minors hormones and puberty blockers to denying the sexuality of a homosexual and as “a wish for a child not to be queer.”

This is very different from homosexuality and is not what Cass thinks. She believes children should not undergo years of invasive medical procedures unless they are absolutely necessary. It is not a denial of their queerness. Further, homosexuality does not require years of medical interventions and it is not associated with a mental illness like gender dysphoria.

The extreme discourse and polarization around transgenderism and children is a symptom of a larger ongoing social crisis in Western society. The means by which we come to knowledge is now dysfunctional. Openly discussing contentious issues is a necessary part of repairing that dysfunction, reversing the capture of institutions by ideology and ending the hold that cancel culture has on intellectual life and scientific discourse. Holding a nuanced dialogue on this issue brings us closer to scientific and medical truths about gender that will benefit gender-distressed youths.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.