Describe problems in words they can hear
And the danger of "thought-terminating cliches"
It is a moral imperative that we prevent cisgender children from accidentally accessing gender affirming medicine. Cisgender children need a thorough psychological assessment, including a differential diagnosis, and continual therapy before even contemplating hormones or surgery, and cisgender children should have plenty of "off ramps" available during transition. Cisgender children who inappropriately access gender affirming care are extremely likely to regret transitioning! They talk about transition as being a way to avoid dealing with trauma or abuse. Gender affirming care is used as a way to avoid dealing with other issues.
Every gender clinician has an ethical duty to ensure that any child to whom they prescribe puberty blockers, gender affirming cross-sex hormones, or gender affirming surgery only does so when they are certain the child is a transgender child.
Now if all this makes sense to you so far, please understand there are no "cisgender" children or "transgender" children. There are children who may (or may not) have gender dysphoria. These children absolutely DO require psychological support.
Because so many people have accepted the reality of "transgender children", they have stopped questioning the legitimacy of "gender affirming care", wrongly believing that children are receiving this because it's medically necessary.
Replace "transgender child" with "child who is gender non-conforming" or "traumatized child" or "child who is uncomfortable developing into a man or woman" and you'll see the problem from a whole different angle. In this light, "gender affirming" means concretizing an identity.
These children are having their endocrine systems medically destroyed and replaced. They are having healthy body parts removed. This is happening to "cisgender children" who later experience regret, many of whom will detransition. No child is born transgender. They are made.
I posted the above as a Twitter thread that got a little bit of traction. Some people understood what I was doing, but others sought to correct my use of cisgender without making it past the first tweet in my series.
Any of us who’ve argued with a transgender activist or one of their allies has run into the thought-terminating cliche trans women are women (TWAW). As some conservative content creators have learned, transgender activists and clinicians are loathe to define womanhood in any relatable terms, often resorting to circular definitions or completely avoiding the discussion at all. Those employing TWAW never need to defend it (see, no debate) and never need to understand it. Any critical challenge to transgender etiology is slammed closed by the utterance TWAW.
We can point our fingers and say, “observe, this person is in an echo chamber.” However, isn’t it the case that we are in our own echo chamber also? When my critics saw the word cisgender in my tweet thread, rather than process my thread to understand my point, they immediately responded to tell me things like:
“Cis” is a slur
There is no such thing as “cisgender children”
Don’t refer to children as “cis”
Stop saying “cis”
And so forth. It’s apparent that some portion of the 2,300 people who engaged with my tweet determined that there was nothing useful in it for them to understand. Instead, something triggered in their brains—a thought terminating cliche—that the language I was using was some type of wrongspeak that needed to be addressed.
We are all human. If you aren’t worried about being in an echo chamber, that’s a good sign that you are in an echo chamber. None of us are immune from this effect. You should never feel wholly comfortable with your beliefs, and people who challenge your thinking are offering you the gift of evaluating your own ideas.
As for me, I’m trying to reach other people within an echo chamber. These people are already comfortable with the word cisgender. These people already believe in such a thing as transgender children. If I want to reach past their defenses, I can’t start off by demanding they adopt my preferred vocabulary.
The gender ideology has spread widely and deeply. If I’m going to convince the mildly indoctrinated—which, for most people, is something they don’t understand themselves to be—I need to use language and concepts that are already inside of their model of the problem. Their ears are already primed to accept some words and reject others. Like yours are. Like mine are.
My friend Paul Wheaton has something he calls the Wheaton Eco Scale
https://permies.com/t/scale
In it, he describes various levels of "eco," but the key part is this: most people will find folks one or two levels up "pretty cool," three or four levels up "a bit nutty," four or five levels up "downright crazy," and six levels up "should probably be institutionalized." He notes that if people seem crazy to you, they might just be further along on your own path.
On the flip side, most people will find folks one level behind to be ignorant, two levels back to be assholes, and any further back they should be shot on sight for the betterment of society as a whole. Paul says that these reactions are also inappropriate and that people will not change if you yell at them and hit them with sticks. They may change if you tell them about the cool stuff that's just a little bit ahead of them, and keep to yourself the things that are a long way ahead of them.
I find this essay to be in line with his very good observations of human nature.
I love this post! Thank you for saying it. Speaking for myself alone, I am on the side of facts, whatever they may be. I want to always place truth above ideological commitments. When there's no conflict between the two categories, it's easy. When I encounter a fact that stubbornly refuses to bend to some preferred doctrine or other, it becomes much more difficult.
One such stubborn fact is that, despite my preferences, a huge number of people have accepted the trans mythology. In addition, many, many people have succumbed to the promise that they would resolve their dysphoria by adopting a trans identity. As a society, we must find healthy, respectful ways to accommodate those with whom we disagree and those who have made significant errors. For, regardless of how you feel about Christian teachings it's wise to honor the message in "Let the one among you who is without sin throw the first stone."