pustluk:

there is no position from which paranoia about so-called ‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria’ makes sense. even if you assume that gender dysphoria is wholly biological and should be medicalized, it is logical to conclude that adolescents who know transgender people or are educated about trans issues are more likely to come out as trans themselves, rather than stay in the closet, and seek healthcare. in preventative medicine, this is called ‘awareness’. it is considered, believe it or not, a good thing.

alternatively, you could choose to pay attention to what trans scholars, activists, and laypeople have been saying for at least twenty years and start from the assumption that gender and transness are (to every meaningful extent) biopolitical and social in nature. in that case, it makes even more sense that a teenager with a solid support system that includes gay and trans people would feel more comfortable exploring how they inhabit their bodies, how they imagine themselves in relation to their assigned gender and gender roles, how they are feeling throughout their puberty and sexual experiences, and generally what makes them happy when they look in the mirror and walk outside. this, too, is a good thing.

it’s also what happened to me eleven or twelve years ago after meeting R., a latina trans woman in her early forties and friend of my mother, around whom i learned words for things i’d been feeling for as long as i could remember. i lacked the institutional backing to act on those feelings as a pre-teen, but i would spend the next seven years with them as they came into sharpening focus. this would happen again not long afterward, when i started associating with other gay (and closeted!) kids and acquired the language and knowledge to articulate my sexuality for the first time at about 13 or 14. gay kids find each other, one way or another. it’s how we’ve always coped with adolescence in a heterosexist world.

i would hope that no one could take seriously the assertion that this is a story about me being brainwashed by older gay people and other gay kids into making rash and socially unacceptable decisions about where to put my body. this itself, though, raises the most important point i want to make here: that the idea of pathogenic sexual degeneracy spreading through teenagers and using gay and queer people as a vector feels familiar.

ten to fifteen years ago, certain gay liberals of relative privilege were able to escape that vise by appealing to biology—that, yes, they were gay and this may well have been in opposition to traditional American values (or not), but they were ‘born this way’. claiming that no one on earth would choose to be gay, liberal gay activism apologized for itself and said, effectively, “we would change if we could, but we can’t, and that’s why you have to accept us”.

in fact, i would argue that the liberal gay community, by banking so completely on ‘born this way’ politics, is itself partially culpable for the ‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria’ mess in which we’ve now found ourselves. by abandoning the radical position that gay people should be respected regardless of why homosexuality exists, and by retreating into largely baseless biological essentialism, liberal gay activism handed the question and its baggage off to less marketable, gender-divergent gay and queer people.

only a few years later, those people—trans people—are now reckoning with the exact same arguments. the difference is that, this time around, the homophobia and transphobia has folded liberal bioessentialism into its own line of reasoning. it’s not about gay kids being lured away from family values and recruited into the ‘gay lifestyle’; it’s about so-called fad transsexualism that harms both those who are ‘recruited’ and those the medical institution has deemed ‘born this way’ and worthy of respect and healthcare. moreover, the argument is coming not just from open reactionaries and fundamentalists, but from an institutional source far more difficult to discredit and far more capable of dismantling the gains we’ve made in healthcare access over the past twenty years.

there has only ever been one way out of this: to stop asking why gay and trans people exist, stop asking what we are doing with our bodies, and start asking how we are doing and how our lives could be made easier.