A Dyke A Broad #9
Saying No to Self-Censorship, the Keira Bell Decision and the New Queer Love for Big Pharma, plus... What's that thing in the back of my fridge? No really.
First! The thing that made me happiest last week was the huge New York Times spread of Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, the dynamic duo of dyke performance artists finally getting their due. You can catch their last show, Last Gasp, on VOD for just $5 I think until Dec. 12 at LaMama.
And on the more disgruntled front…
Let’s Talk about Shame and Self-Censorship
I got an email from an old Avenger comrade saying she really liked last week’s newsletter, ThingsGiving, TERF-baiting, and More, but didn’t want to say so in a comment online because she was afraid she’d get harassed. And when I admitted I’d been reluctant to “share” it on Facebook for the same reason, she wondered how many more of us there were
shamed into public silence lest we be pilloried and branded with the scarlet letter du jour… And where did this self-loathing come from? Has it always been there, even in the days of sex positivity and "lesbian chic.”
That got me thinking.
As for me, yes, I’ve grappled with self-loathing and fear since I was a teen. I was too smart. Too stupid. Too homo. Too fat, or at least not a size 6. Doing street activism as a Lesbian Avenger was a respite from it. If you were scared, it was at least because you were doing something fierce. Self-loathing all but disappeared with my comrades at my back. Who gave me power at the same time I ceded it to them.
It’s harder than you think to reclaim it. Even now, I slide into a “progressive” mindset so unconsciously I can write a whole knee-jerk article with not one original thought. I have to continually challenge myself, Do I really think that? Did I ever? Do I still? Or is it just groupthink?
The main way I know I’m thinking my own thoughts, and not yours, is that when I follow them to the bitter end, it’s usually somewhere off to the side. Neither Right. But not orthodox Left either. Mostly because I have questions where others have certainties. They say, “Blah blah blah. No discussion, period.” And I’m like, “But what about x? What about y? There’s z as well that seems to contradict all of the above.”
The room for me seems to be shrinking, along with my courage to write openly. And not just when it comes to raising questions about dyke-baiting. Wednesday after I got that email, I sat down and made a whole list of articles I haven’t written this year. To mention just a few…
“Aren’t there ethical questions about using “LatinX” when most Latinas and Latinos don’t like it and refuse to use it?”
“Does gender neutral language even work? Does anybody care?”
“Why Woke Racists Erase the Vast Majority of Muslim Women Who Don’t Wear the Hijab, Especially When They Are Angry at Men.”
“What a Scam!: How Lesbian Foundations No Longer Serve Lesbians But Still Keep Their Endowments.”
And I thought about the consequences of not writing. How one article leads to the next. And sometimes eventually to interesting ideas. Action even. But if that first one never happens, nothing does.
Maybe I’ll give it a try occasionally. I’ll crawl out on the limb and start to saw. And see how much it really hurts to fall. It’s not like I’m in Cuba or anything, where artists are demanding an end to censorship.
So here goes.
When Did Queers Fall in Love with Big Pharma and the Medical Industrial Complex?
I’m old. So old it’s a miracle I don’t drool and walk with a walker, and pee myself. After all, I still know actual dykes from multiple continents who had doctors give them electric shocks as part of conversion therapy, not just to turn them straight, but make them more compliant as women. I’ve seen angry women (including my own mother) stuffed with calming drugs by doctors because it was easier than figuring out what was really wrong (the Patriarchy).
Last week on World AIDS Day I remembered how sick gay men were turned away from hospitals, or sold drugs at such impossibly high prices they died like flies. And how women were not being diagnosed at all because their symptoms were different from those of men. Nope, “Women don’t get AIDS, they just die from it.” They had to be their own advocates. (Check out their story in Harriet Hirshorn’s great film Nothing Without Us.) On the other hand, doctors have been actively performing forced hysterectomies on immigrant women in the U.S. because… why not? It’s a gig, right?
Then there the prince of an M.D. on the second floor of my building here in Paris who diagnosed me as a hysteric and germaphobe in the spring for suggesting that his habit of using the hallway as waiting room for his sweating, coughing patients was a little troubling during an pandemic.
I could go on. But won’t.
I’m not writing all this to say all doctors are monsters, (only some), but just to remind people that in general Big Pharma and the Medical Industrial Complex don’t necessarily have your best interests at heart. Especially if you’re queer. Or a woman. Heaven forbid you’re both. And if they don’t hate us outright for political or religious reasons, many just want to sell their services or merch and turn a profit. Why do you think a huge chunk of people in the U.S. are addicted to Purdue Pharma’s Oxy? Including members of my own family? The more, the merrier. Jump on board.
All of which to say it baffles me why some trans activists are up in arms about the court decision against Britain’s Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, preventing them from handing out puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones to young kids and teenagers like they’re gummy vitamins.
It’s almost like they don’t care that if you walked through the doors of the Tavistock clinic and demanded drugs, you got what you came for, even if you were just ten years old, or hated your sexed and gendered body because of internalized homophobia, eating disorders, sexual abuse, autism, major depression, or other issues. The clinic was so cavalier, some of their own senior clinicians tried to blow the whistle—to no avail.
What are they, shills for the drug companies?
Keira Bell thinks so. As a young black girl she was one of Tavistock’s patients. When she first approached them at age 15 she was depressed and anxious, and afraid of the fact she liked girls. She was kind of “masculine”, and hated the idea of growing up and being forced to like pink, and wear make-up and be “feminine”. After spending a lot of time online, she figured, she was meant to be a boy. Transitioning would solve everything.
After just three one-hour visits to the Tavistock clinic, where they didn’t explore any of those things in depth, they said she was right, and they gave her puberty blockers at sixteen. At 17 they prescribed her testosterone, and finally gave her a double-mastectomy at 20. At 23 she quit taking T, transitioned back to being a woman. And sued. Because it became clear to her the problem was never her body. It was the world which wanted to force girls like her into a frilly little heterosexual box.
Another claimant in her suit was the mother of a 15-year-old girl with autism who’s attending the clinic and is on the waiting list for treatment. She thinks letting the girl decide for herself is a bad idea. She told the BBC, “My fear is—it’s not that she transitions—it’s that she gets it wrong.” Because for many autistic girls, gender rules, and roles, make little sense in general. A lot of social conventions don’t. So you need to take extra care with them.
If protecting kids like that is an act of transphobia, an act anti-trans, then what is a pro-trans act? This court ruling does not ban medically transitioning for young people, not by a long-shot. (Read the whole decision here.) It just means doctors in the UK have to do their jobs and protect young children who are highly unlikely to be able to give their competent consent for treatment. The whole focus of the case.
One positive result of the Keira Bell case is that it aired questions about puberty blockers which increasingly seem neither as reversible or as benign as places like Tavistock have claimed. In fact, there’s some indication that they may provoke a range of medical problems from osteoporosis to emotional and mental issues tied to a brain whose development was interrupted. Puberty blockers might even be counterproductive for gender dysphoria which in many cases resolves with age.
Trans people have a right to this information. And those well-funded institutions who have been effective at blocking research and even discussions about this by claiming it is inherently transphobic are sadly misguided at best.
Even with good information, it’s tough to weigh the costs and benefits at ten or fifteen years of age. It’s even hard at forty.
I remember having coffee a decade ago with a trans activist who’d been living as a woman for years, but had begun struggling with whether or not to transition medically, and have surgery done. Her friends said she should, but she was afraid. There were lots of complications. And god knows what the long-term consequences were. I’m telling you this because she was in her late 30’s, to mid-40’s. And was an activist, extremely visible at the time. And even she could barely fathom as the High Court wrote: “the immediate and long-term consequences of the treatment, the limited evidence available as to its efficacy or purpose…”
There’s so much pressure. So few good ways to judge what will improve your life.
I remember, too, writing about Leelah Alcorn who committed suicide when her parents refused to let her transition. They seemed like awful people, totally transphobic and homophobic, but in her suicide note, she wrote her greatest fear was being an “ugly woman,” and “looking like a man in drag.” An idea of her future framed by misogyny. An inability to see any human value in females apart from our looks and ability to get a man. I wondered how her life would have turned out if she’d been able to transition. Very few “real” women are beauty queens. (And some “real” girls kill themselves because of it.) And of course, very few trans women are Janet Mock or Laverne Cox. Likewise, very few trans men are fit for GQ.
I wondered, too, how she would have handled aging. Imagining her passing and beautiful at eighteen, but discarded like other women by thirty with wrinkles forming around the eyes. Flesh starting to sag. What then? What about the trans man who is handsome at twenty, balding at forty with a pot belly and man boobs? Bodies are important. But they aren’t everything. And they don’t stay the same.
By the way, none of this means I’m particularly opposed to surgery or drugs (I used to take anything anybody handed me, except for heroin, which seemed a step too far). But we should above all tell our queer kids that there is no easy answer when it comes to gender (or anything else). We probably won’t, though. It’s easier and more profitable to stuff them with pills and send them on their way.
At least that will be harder to do now in Britain.
When it was all over, Keira Bell told the press that she hoped the judgment marked the end of gender clinics “playing God with our bodies [by] experimenting on the young and vulnerable with untested, harmful drugs”.
And when asked directly in an interview with Tribuna Feminista why she thought there was a global push to consider children and teenagers “adult enough” to consent to life-altering treatments, Keira Bell answered, “Follow the money!”
And when asked how society can address gender dysphoria in children and teenagers, Keira gave the following answer:
“Gender nonconformity needs to be accepted. Role models are really important. Young lesbians or bisexual women, especially those of us who are black or brown, don’t have many role models.”
I’ll give the last words to a young black lesbian in the UK with more thoughts on that, including the radical idea that:
there’s a reasonable amount of common ground between women and trans-identifying people, since we both exist as gendered subjects under patriarchy. But instead of pushing men to make public spaces more inclusive for all by stopping the violence that puts women and gender non-conforming people both at risk, too many people get caught up in scrapping over the crumbs from patriarchy’s table.
I agree with the first bit, but I think there’s a lot more at stake than crumbs.
Tune in next week to play, What is that in the back of my fridge?
All my disgruntled love,
Yelly Snogswell
The whole "let's have kids make decisions about their hormones before puberty" topic unnerves me. On the one hand, you do have trans people who really did know that young, and for whom puberty/adolescence was really torture. But now the party line seems to be that if a child or a teenager doesn't present as the gender norm, or expresses a desire to be the opposite gender, that must mean they're transgender and thus MUST medically transition, and not letting them do so will be psychologically damaging. As you noted, that actually narrows gender norms, leaving no room for masculine women and feminine men. Also, children and adolescents are constantly switching identities, trying them on and off until they find one that makes sense to them. Locking them into a trans identity, and worse making physiologic changes, is I think as bad as locking a queer person into a straight identity.
Are parents who make these irrevocable decisions on behave of their underage children doing this truly out of love for them and wanting them to feel whole and accepted, or is there an additional element of "if I don't do this, I'll be branded as an awful parent"? (Which frankly, a lot of parents go through for just about everything these days.) And if the person is old enough to make the decision themselves, I think some of them may not be thinking it through to the end. All that matters is that they become the gender they feel they need to be, and changing their body will automatically make everything better.
This also feeds into the anti-science bias that has permeated both the left and the right these days. Authority is pooh-poohed, and even taking into account the real excesses of Big Pharma, the attitude is that what really matters is what you feel, not what actually is.