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.

"In Thought ..." by irishwildcat is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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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.