[NOTE: I wrote this garbage years ago. It was a stage in my development as I learned to understand something I didn’t. I’m now ashamed of most of it, but I choose not to delete it because it’s proof that people can and do grow and change over time. So if someone you know still thinks this shit, please know they CAN GET OVER IT.]

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In which I’m very sorry, but you do not get to pick your race, your age, your orientation, or your sex. You barely even get to pick your tax bracket or style of education. We all struggle with things; your struggle is most likely an unfortunate mental disorder. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, I myself periodically live in terror that I’m about. to. die. any. second. now. and it’s just the configuration of my brain and not a literal medical emergency. This is the power of our oversized human brains… and their very convincing disorders.

Don’t Let Your Doctor Do This To Your Newborn is an hysterical, almost violently pro-transgender article about the crushing dangers of so-called “gender assignment.”

The author claims that calling an infant a “boy” or a “girl” collapses its infinite choices into a narrow, limited, single gender, and that while it’s safe for many it’s basically a death sentence to a few.

Peanuts are “safe for many, but basically a death sentence for a few,” too, I can’t help but point out. Fucking peanuts, okay? And you don’t get to have feelings about fatal peanut allergies; either you suffer from one or you don’t. You’re just born that way. And you stay that way until you die, because that allergy is just part of who you are, down to your genetic coding.

You were expressed that way. Just as you are expressed as male or female. (Don’t even start with the intersex topic; it affects fewer than those with fatal peanut allergies.)

Listen. If it’s wrong to acknowledge a person’s sex — which is an actual thing, coded into nearly every cell, and not a feeling — at birth, it’s also wrong to take high school kids on careers field trips, because you’re collapsing their potential by showing them how adults work at the factory or mine or lab or bank or retail store, cruelly exposing them to a future they should be aware of in advance, in order to help them make informed decisions about adulthood.

How terrible it is, to acknowledge your little girl is a girl, and let her observe other girls being girls, so that she will have some prior knowledge of the condition her chromosomes have expressed in her, as her life unfolds!

One of the doctors who pioneered gender reassignment therapies and surgeries now wholly rejects it based on the results: research indicates that most post-ops do not find their dysmorphia is assuaged enough after transitioning to keep them out of psychiatric wards, and many — something like 40% — suicide in spite of “becoming” their preferred sex/gender.

Such numbers are poor support indeed for the concept that transgenderism can be “fixed” with reassignment surgery, and strong support for the theory that it’s a disorder like anorexia or body integrity disorder.

If you think there are male and female brains, you also think there are males and females. Period. Because if there are male brains, those brains are the expressions of the conditions of being male: genetic, hormonal, environmental, and physical. And undergoing hormone and surgical treatments does not change your sex. If you were born male, nearly every cell in your body will attest to this throughout your entire life no matter how many breast implants you’ve had.

Just as dysmorphia is most certainly a disease in the anorexic (and one we treat with the therapy they need, and not the liposuction they want), I’m nearly certain it’s also a disease in the transgendered. I’m sure it’s just as painful as depression or schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or any other illness. And I bet it sucks mightily to suffer from it.

But I don’t think chemical, hormonal, and surgical therapies are appropriate treatment for the condition. Once you have your skull shaved to feminize your face, you can’t go back. Once you have your genitalia permanently mutilated altered, you can’t go back. Once you have your earlobes gauged or your cartilage punched or your skin scarified, you can’t go back. Many of the decisions of youth are permanent and can’t be undone. Which is exactly and precisely why your parents forbade you from doing such things when you were a kid, and possibly even made you beg just to get your ears pierced.

Want to live as a woman for a few years, or the rest of your life? Be my guest! I’ll absolutely support your right to buy bras and do your makeup and wear nail polish and learn about the ins and outs of leg shaving and the hand-washing of delicate intimate garments. I’ll talk girltalk with you and include you in girls-only excursions; I’ll tell you anecdotes to inform you during your journey through my female world.

I’ll be your friend. I’ll totally be your friend, just like I would if you had a violent bipolar disorder and pruned all my fruit trees to death in a manic episode. I’ll still think you’re you and I’ll still see you, the exact person you are, warts and all. Crazy and all. Just as I hope you’ll see me through my own crazy.

But, while I’ll be vaguely flattered that you, a man, are so pathologically fascinated by my sex that you’re trying to join it, and I’ll probably be amazed by your inherent femininity and by how much you’re not like men, and I’ll probably even seek out and show you brain scans of men living as women and enthuse with you about how much they look like the brain scans of actual women and be amazed with you about the plasticity of the brain in general, I’ll still know you don’t menstruate. I’ll still know you were never a 12-year old girl growing her very own tits. I’ll still know you were and are a man, although one with issues I don’t really understand, and I’ll love you anyway, just like I love people with chronic pain I don’t have, or mental illnesses different from my own, or who have lost body parts I still have.

Same the other way. If you’re a female who wants to live as a man, I will absolutely treat you like a man. I’ll help you learn to flirt with women. I’ll ask you to carry the heavy things and fetch the drinks and kill the spiders and fix the car and pay the tab. But I’ll also know that you know what it’s like to have boobs, and menstruate, and network horizontally like a woman rather than vertically like a man, and I will not share with you the experience of not wanting to be what you are, because I’ve never once wanted to change sex, not even for an instant. Because sex doesn’t fucking matter. And gender is already plastic.

I personally am “gender non-conformant.” I spent years working in so-called male-dominated areas; more than once I was the only woman working in my building. I could claim that I, personally, struggled with oppression and won my positions in “male dominated” areas. But I won’t, because I didn’t. These areas weren’t closed to my sex, they were closed to those incapable of fulfilling the necessary duties. I, a woman, possessed the necessary skills to be an internet engineer in the early 00’s, and was hired. I experienced no sexism beyond that expressed by my all-male co-workers on occasion when offering to lift heavy things for me.

In other words, as long as you’re not hurting yourself or others, I’ll support your experience. I’ll believe you when you say you believe you were always a woman or always a man. I’ll help you live your new gender any way I can.

But I won’t think that you can become the opposite sex, nor that your condition isn’t an unfortunate, pain-causing disorder. And I will not support you in causing harm to yourself through hormones and surgery. I mean, if you insist on doing it, I’ll support you with casseroles after surgery and my hand-me-down sundresses if you want them, but I will never think that you can truly change your sex.

Because you can’t. And there’s no reason to, even if you could, because you can do whatever you want: as a male you can wear nail polish, raise children, work at the jewelry counter. Whatever antiquated idea of femininity you have, you can live it with your dick still attached, and be loved and accepted for it. Because beyond the biology of procreation, things already are fluid. Girls can be scientists and boys can babysit and take home-ec classes. Nobody fucking cares. Go be a chick firefighter. Go be a male nurse. NOBODY CARES, and nobody is stopping you.

Caitlin is not a shining beacon of bravery; he’s a fucking crazy person. From the pictures before his facial feminization surgery we can tell he was already no stranger to self-mutilation via optional “medical” procedures. He’s a privileged white man who has enjoyed all the benefits of being a privileged white male: he’s been a world-class male athlete, a father, a frequent guest of Hugh Hefner’s with all that that implies, a revered public figure who graced countless boxes of breakfast cereal.

Right now he’s just an old, weird victim of Hollywood conditioning, who has fetishized the idea of himself as the object of his own sexual desires. This is either unchecked egomania or a bona fide mental disorder, people. While I have no doubt that Mr. Jenner believes he’s “always” been female, I doubt it’s literally true. The mind is very plastic and will believe what it wants, when it wants. If we had a time machine and asked the world-class male olympian at the height of his very male power if he’d give up his prowess for tits and corresponding physical inferiority, we’d probably hear a resounding “fuck no” in response. It’s my decidedly non-professional opinion that Mr. Jenner’s current situation is a combination of typical Hollywood sexual fetishism, rejection of aging, and pathological need for media attention.

The number of very small children claiming they’re transgender is increasing exponentially because children are human, and humans mimic each other. No matter what a child says, a good parent sets limits. When your 7-year old claims he identifies as a 30-year old and wants to start day trading with your retirement fund, you tell him to go mow the goddamned lawn and to stop being a nuisance: you do not give him your eTrade login and make him an appointment for a ten thousand dollar bespoke wool suit he’ll grow out of in five months. Because that would be stupid.

When your 7-year old says he’s actually a girl, you don’t put him on fucking hormones that will fuck him up for the rest of his life, you buy him a dress and let him pretend to be a girl for awhile because it’s totally fine if he wants to grow up and be a househusband or a daycare provider or a nurse or a hairdresser or a secretary. And if it goes too far, you put a stop to it, just like you do when your child quits eating real food in favor of junk or refuses to do chores or spends Christmas vacation in bed. A good parent doesn’t support nonsense; a good parent stops it because catering to the desires of incomplete, unformed children is basically abuse. Adults do know more than children, and it’s their mandate to direct and protect and guide from that vantage.

Maybe I don’t know exactly how you feel, kid, but I do know that wallowing will get you absolutely fucking nowhere.

One problem we’re having has to do with the LGBT movement. The gay movement, as evidenced by the ‘T’ at the end, has essentially been co-opted by transgenderism and is now more or less politically hog-tied: they can’t say they disagree with transgenderism because to do so would be to reject the inclusiveness of the original movement. Plus the movement has always included drag queens, who are transvestites in the main and who have always been fabulous and very important to the movement on a lot of levels. I mean, at first, the identification was there: you’ve been afraid, rejected, beaten? You’re different from the norm? So are we! Join us and find a new family! It’s hard to let go of.

Homosexuals have claimed that someday we’ll find a physiological component of homosexuality somewhere; gays say that they were born gay and that it’s not a choice. And now transgenderism says the same thing: that it’s not a choice. But the difference is that gays don’t suffer from body dysmorphia, they don’t starve themselves when they’re too thin, they don’t amputate limbs if left alone, they don’t want to be straight women. They’re just, well, gay.

So we have transgenderism wrapped up in a movement that can’t separate itself from them, and the almost thundering silence from a huge percentage of homosexuals on the topic of transgenderism leads me to believe that they don’t necessarily support it. Wanting to be with another man and live a life is one thing; wanting to mutilate yourself hormonally and surgically is another. Gay males for the most part love loving and being males, and they celebrate their maleness; they don’t want to turn that maleness into femaleness. And probably the same is true for most lesbians in their love and celebration of womanliness.

I don’t begrudge the transgendered their current options, but I do think they should be treated with appropriate therapies rather than free access to violent and damaging surgeries. While the social issues of the transgendered and homosexuals seem to be intertwined in the minds of the media and the public, I think they’re wholly different because one group suffers from dysmorphia and the other doesn’t. I also think it’s important to understand the difference between transvestism and transgenderism and to resolutely define them as not being the same thing (even though they’re clearly, it seems, of a spectrum, they’re still different because only one group wishes to mutilate itself beyond the regular pains of tight corsets, heels, and trying to get one’s goddamned false eyelashes on evenly).

I don’t think that the gay rights movement is the same as the transgender movement. I don’t think feminism — which pioneered the idea that a girl could be an astronaut and a boy could be a nurse — is the same either, because neither has a bedrock of, well, self-mutilating mental disorder. I do think that modern PC speech limits both parties’ comments on the topic.

And since I’m neither gay nor a feminist I’m just going to say what I believe a lot of people think: while there is undeniably some fabulousness to some aspects of the transgender movement, most of their language and message is co-opted from other, non-related movements, and that I think those who have deep-seated desires to mutilate themselves bodily are suffering from a disorder, and not a rights issue.

I cannot call persons who subject themselves to hormonal and surgical mutilation followed by suicide brave; I call them suffering persons, who have been woefully underserved by the rest of us. They need cognitive therapy, love, and support, just like anybody else with a shitty and painful disorder, and most emphatically not all the rope they need to hang themselves. Every so-called transgender person we “celebrate” is another call for help ignored.

We need to stop championing attention whores like Mr. Jenner, and we need to stop giving young children the latitude to make decisions that will impact their development for the rest of their lives when they’re incapable of doing so. We need to adult the fuck up and say no, I’m sorry, I know it hurts, but you cannot do that. You will always be male, but you can absolutely be a teacher and wear mascara as long as you harm no one…

…not even yourself.

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All that said, there’s also this: The doctor’s reserch may be way out of date: “A closer reading of the paper shows that the increased mortality is in those who had surgery before 1989, and that mortality in trans people after 1989 is not statistically different from the general population.” – http://www.transadvocate.com/worlds-experts-condemn-the-mchugh-hoax_n_13924.htm#sthash.pUTGloh9.dpuf
And this: Where there may be evidence, or there may be another case of you-find-what-you-look-for: “Unfortunately, it appears that McHugh has decided to ignore the growing body of neurological and genetic research providing evidence of a biological basis for gender dysphoria. A 2009 study found a correlation between an increased number of a certain kind of sequence repeat in the Androgen Receptor gene and gender dysphoria. Another study in 2009 identified significant differences in cerebral grey matter structure in trans women who had yet to start hormone therapy when compared to cis men. In 2011, researchers noted that the structure of a sexually-dimorphic region of the brain, known as the intermediate nucleus, of trans women fell somewhere between cis men and cis women, while a similar difference was not noted castrated cis men. A 2013 functional brain imaging study of adolescents with gender dysphoria demonstrated a tendency for trans teens to perform more similarly to their identified sex (as opposed to their assigned sex) in a verbal fluency assessment, with similar correlation in brain activity during the assessment.” – http://www.transadvocate.com/clinging-to-a-dangerous-past-dr-paul-mchughs-selective-reading-of-transgender-medical-literature_n_13842.htm#sthash.bb9boZNg.dpuf