If You Talk About Things You Don't Understand, You'll Have To Accept The Consequences
If I had the power, I’d give everybody on Earth the ability to read everybody else’s mind. I know, I know, that sounds like an absolute nightmare, but hear me out.
Sure, the first few generations would be rough. The divorce rate would be near 100%, we'd all know about that embarrassing thing that happened to you in college, your boss would find out how much you slack off at work. Those of us who grew up in a world where we could lie and dissemble and pretend would suffer terribly.
But eventually, I think we’d reach a point where we weren’t so uncomfortable with the truth.
We wouldn’t have to worry about how people saw us because we’d know the truth. We wouldn’t have to question people’s motivations because we’d understand them. We wouldn’t need to divide ourselves into tribes because we’d see, underneath all the nonsense, that almost all of us care about the same things.
In my article, Let’s Go Down To Puberty Blocker Town, I wrote about Roisin Murphy, a pop singer who was punished for caring about something we should all care about; children. Murphy’s Facebook post criticising puberty blockers was seen by some as an attempt to attack children, not protect them.
Rebel tried to explain why.
Rebel:
If you are not trans, you should not speak about what being trans entails. It's really simple, isn't it? Don't talk about things you don't understand. Don't talk about other people's lives and experiences as if you knew better than them. 2023 seems to be a bit late a year to still have to teach, to adults, that if you still insist to talk about things of which you have no experience and that you don't understand, you'll have to accept the consequences.
The right to be an asshole to trans children is guaranteed by no laws.
Steve QJ:
“If you are not trans, you should not speak about what being trans entails. It's really simple, isn't it?”
Yes, it is really simple. Which is why I don't understand why people like you seem to struggle so much to get it.
Roisin isn't talking about what being trans entails (as if there's a single definition for that anyway). She's talking about a medication which she believes to be harmful. There is significant data to back this view.
She may, of course, be wrong. But speaking up and asking the question, rather than shrugging your shoulders and saying, "well, that doesn't directly affect me, so who cares?" is what genuine compassion looks like.
The argument you're making could have just as easily been applied to smoking before people realised how harmful it is, or lobotomies before people realised how harmful they were, or heck, even gay people who voluntarily submitted to conversion therapy at Christian camps because they thought it would "cure" them.
If you're only capable of caring about yourself, well, you do you. But don't mistake that for being a decent person.
Rebel:
Róisín Murphy is not trans. She is not a doctor (which still wouldn't qualify her as an expert) and she is parroting word by word the talking points of the TERFs she "begs" not to be associated with. "Defend the little kids".
You know even less than her since you don't even know who she is (a singer), and yet you wrote an entire article about it.
Have you direct experience of trans lives? I do. I am trans, I experienced transphobia and belittling at the young age of 43 from people who know absolutely nothing about hormones - sometimes including doctors! - and yet talk. What do you know about puberty blockers?
Steve QJ:
"Defend the little kids".
Yes. Defend the little kids.
I don't care how many times you write your little scare quotes around it, I don't care how many times you act as if the idea that somebody could care about children who aren't their own is preposterous, I don't care how incapable you might personally be of this extraordinarily basic level of human empathy, most people care about defending the little kids.
Again, if you think Murphy is factually wrong (yes, I know who she is but it's completely irrelevant to her point, which is why I didn't spend much time on her pop career), then fine. Let's examine the data and the studies and have a conversation that doesn't devolve into crybullying about "transphobia." Let's acknowledge the fact that there is far from a scientific consensus on this issue and that most children who aren't placed on this medical pathway don't need it once they go through puberty.
Let's talk about the fact that several gender clinics have been exposed as reckless and negligent in their treatment of gender dysphoric children, both pre and especially post surgery. Let's talk about the fact that every country that has taken the time to perform a clinical review of the data has advocated a more measured approach than is currently in place.
If you're one of the people who is scared enough of that conversation that you'd rather punish someone who has done nothing wrong than consider the possibility that some aspects of gender related care for children are deeply flawed, then again, you do you. But us weirdos who care about the welfare of children will carry on, thanks.
In the immortal words of James Baldwin:
“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe. And I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognising this may be incapable of morality.”
Children are never somebody else’s business. It’s never politically incorrect to care about them. It’s never a mistake to speak up in their defence. Even if you’re not an expert. Even if you turn out to be wrong.
You don’t need to be a gynaecologist before you can say that female genital mutilation is wrong. You don’t need to be a psychologist to know that conversion therapy is wrong. And you don’t need to be trans to at least ask if puberty blockers are wrong.
We could all do with a world where we talked more about experiences we don’t understand. Because that’s how we learn. That’s how we avoid making mistakes. That’s how we come to see that it’s not just the children, we are all ours. We are all each other's. Old and young, male and female, black and white.
Talking about things we don’t understand, discussing topics where we don’t agree, is the best way to appreciate this crucial point. At least until we figure out how to read each other’s minds.
"If you are not trans, you should not speak about what being trans entails. It's really simple, isn't it? Don't talk about things you don't understand. Don't talk about other people's lives and experiences as if you knew better than them. 2023 seems to be a bit late a year to still have to teach, to adults, that if you still insist to talk about things of which you have no experience and that you don't understand, you'll have to accept the consequences."
This logic drives me crazy. I cut my teeth, largely through historical accident, on writing about human sexuality. I was bombarded on all sides with criticisms as my writing reached wider and wider audiences. First, trickled in the responses that I'm not doing enough. "Your writing is almost entirely heteronormative (odd, seeing as I myself may be hetero but my relationships and those I discuss are decidedly not normative). I wrote what I'm familiar with—at first. As I wrote more, I expanded to more and more topics that I have less and less, if any, experience with. Then it became, "How dare you write about things you have no experience with?"
The message was clear: damned if you do, damned if you don't.
If you write about the heteronormative relationships you're intimately familiar with, you're ignoring other people's situation. If you write about their situation, you're speaking about the experience of others without any real experience of your own.
What seems lost is a combination of two ideas:
1. That there's merit in both objectivity, observation of things from the outside, AND the phenomena and emotions of personal subjective experience. Both are merited and powerful forms of inquiry and neither should be shunned in favor of the other, as modern science and phenomenology have both shown, concerning the former and latter, respectively.
2. That there's value in ideas that don't confirm our inner experiences. I wonder how much of this is a byproduct of our technologies that feed us things we agree with, things we like, things that make us feel positive feelings via algorithm all day long. When all you've known or most of what you've known has been carefully hand-picked to conform to your biases, and it streams through a screen you stare at all day, that's bound to have some consequences. It's no wonder we can't engage with daring ideas anymore, let alone ideas that don't perfect conform to our preconceived molds about how the things and events in the world ought to be.
I absolutely must reiterate that I have many friends in the LGBTQ community and these pseudo-activists represent precisely none of them, and make them feel uncomfortable, probably in the same way the loud-mouth Trump and all of his ideological Republican minions don't represent me, a ginger-haired pasty white American dude who just happens to match the demographic of their most die-hard voters.
Great piece. But I think you meant “conversion therapy,” not “conversation therapy,” in your third from last paragraph?