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| www.stoppingthehate.com |
The Sunday Times over the weekend had a feature about six
children suffering from Gender Identity Disorder who are being given drugs to
delay the onset of puberty, giving them more time to decide whether they wish
to change sex later in life.
The operations are being paid for by the taxpayers, although
I don't think that's the issue. If the state can pay several thousands to save
a person from a life of misery and eventual suicide then I for one think that
is money well-spent. And yet the strange thing is that, taking aside the fact
that “blockers” may affect cognitive ability and bone density, there's actually
no accepted medical proof or consensus that sex change operations actually help
someone's mental health; we may one day find that it does, but we simply don’t
know enough at the moment.
Yet that hasn't stopped the growth of a political orthodoxy
that boys and girls are sometimes born into the wrong bodies – their gender
does not match their physical sex – and that this is best fixed by hormone
treatment and/or surgery later in life; and that anyone who finds this
uncomfortable suffers themselves from a psychological condition, apparently,
called transphobia.
This is the only explanation acceptable to the media and,
indeed, the state, which spends a fair deal of money (which we don’t have)
combating transphobia. Yet at the moment science is still quite confused about
Gender Identity Disorder, and what is acceptable to say about it is constrained
by taboo and threats, and academics who argue against the standard political
narrative tend to get persecuted. A few years back Prof Michael Bailey wrote a
book about the subject, The Man Who Would Be Queen, detailing a theory which
suggested that there were two kinds of transsexualism - "homosexual
transsexuals", who are attracted to men, and "non-homosexual
transsexuals", who are aroused by the image of themselves as a woman. The
controversy arose over the implication that transsexuals were men, rather than
women in men's bodies.
Despite the book being widely praised by the likes of Steven
Pinker and neuroscientist Simon LeVay, and various gay writers, Prof Bailey was
effectively hounded out of academia; a petition organised by a transgender
protest group ensured that the Lambda Literary Foundation withdrew the book
from its shortlist, while one campaigner constructed a website with pictures of
Bailey’s children with sexually explicit captions.
It’s one thing to use such outrage against newspaper
columnists, shock jocks or religious leaders who argue their views based on
faith (although many who attack the religious demand their beliefs are treated
with respect and reverence), but to do so against academics seems contrary to
the scientific method. An academic should not be attacked for hate-think, only
for being proven wrong. I have no idea whether Bailey is right or wrong, but
the subject should not be politically restricted at any rate.
Certainly the political orthodoxy is influenced by the
concept of “gender” as something almost unrelated to biology, an idea that
really should be given its one-way ticket to Switzerland, yet which is still
believed by many intelligent people. There was a story the other day about a
boy, aged five, whose “gender” had been kept secret until now.
Yesterday Miss Laxton, a web editor, said that she thought
gender stereotyping was "fundamentally stupid".
"I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping," she
said.
"Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you
want to slot people into boxes?”
I’m sure she’s an excellent mother, and I doubt he’ll be
troubled by this slight experiment when in years to come he’s a commander in
the Parachute Regiment, but it sounds like the sort of thing people of the 22nd
century will laugh at as typical of our crazy age. Stereotyping is not only not
fundamentally stupid, but it’s fundamentally necessary, as Norman Dennis wrote
in this essential account of the Salem-like events that followed the Stephen
Lawrence murder: “In any interaction where there are consequences for the
individual, responding to the self-chosen stereotype presented by the other
person is indispensable. To ask for anybody to deal with everybody in all
circumstances on the basis of what the other person is ‘really’ like is to ask
the impossible.”
So stereotyping males is a necessary social shorthand, and
while of course men display a range of temperaments in their propensity to
violence, emotional sensitivity, physical strength or anything else, and many
men are closer to the female average in many areas, to suggest that gender is
separate from sex is a sort of flat-earth feminism.
And what's the orthodoxy in one generation can quickly
become laughable in the next. There was a New York Time piece the other about
how autism in France is still treated using Freud: “Le Mur,” or “The Wall,” a small documentary film about
autism released online last year, might normally not have attracted much
attention.
But an effort by French psychoanalysts to keep it from
public eyes has helped to make it into a minor cause and shone a spotlight on
the way children in France are treated for mental health problems.
The documentary, the first film by Sophie Robert, follows
two autistic boys: Guillaume, who has been treated with the behavioral, or
“American,” approach; and Julien, who has been kept in an asylum for six years
and treated with psychoanalysis. Guillaume, though challenged, is functioning
at a high level in school. Julien is essentially silent, locked out of society…
Ms. Robert said the version of psychoanalysis that is most
prevalent in France, particularly the post-Freudian school championed by
Jacques Lacan, takes it as a given that autism and other mental health problems
are caused by children’s relationship with their mothers, or by “maternal
madness.”
A generation ago Freud's ideas were the all-powerful in the
English-speaking world; now to American and British readers the idea that
autism is being treated using psychoanalysis seems positively medieval. The
same may well turn out true for Gender Identity Disorder, especially when one
considers that most children who suffer from it later come to realise that they
were born in the right body after all.
Anyway. I hope children given the blockers grow up to be
healthy, happy people as a result; but I for one would like to see more
evidence, one way or the other.
By Ed West / the Telegraph