No, effeminate boys aren’t being ‘transed’

Last week, The Atlantic ran a piece by writer Ben Appel titled “In Defense of Effeminate Boys.” The subtitle of the piece read: “If anyone had suggested that I might really be a girl, I don’t know how I would have responded,” and Appel essentially accuses doctors and trans-affirming parents of “transing” gay and lesbian kids. 

The accusation that trans kids existing and receiving gender-affirming care is a form of gay conversion therapy has long held sway in gender-critical circles, but the reality of trans lives undoes the argument. Those who have made hating trans people their living like Appel have a misguided idea about the dynamics at play when a child comes out as trans.

Such “activists” are under the mistaken impression that parents will see their kid dressing or or playing in a gender nonconforming way, and then introduce the idea of being trans into otherwise innocent children’s heads. In the minds of the Appels and J.K. Rowlings of the world, it is secretly homophobic parents who force otherwise cis gay children into transitioning.

But in my experience, nothing could be further from the truth.

In making his arguments, Appel draws heavily from his own experience growing up as an effeminate boy. He concludes that he is thankful that no one ever suggested he might really be a girl, because he doesn’t “know how he would have reacted.” This, he says, is the only thing that saved him from life as a trans woman. As if becoming a trans woman is an awful thing worthy of being saved from.

But I would argue that in reality, the reason no one suggested to Appel that he might be trans is not a factor of the time period and its accompanying level of (or lack of) trans awareness, but rather because no one really instills in kids that they might be trans. At least, not in the way Appel imagines.

Growing up, I knew I was a girl before I even knew what my sexuality was. By age six, I was regularly passing out from crying, praying to god to wake up from my nightmare the next morning as a girl. I wasn’t particularly feminine as a child either. I liked sports, I played in the mud and dirt, and yet I knew in my heart that I was a girl.

No one ever asked me if I might be trans—why would they? I hid it with all my might. My mom used to keep old boxes of clothes stored in an extra space behind my closet, and whenever I had the chance, I was back there, trying things on. It was a small bit of relief in an otherwise agonizing gendered childhood.

One day, I noticed that the boxes in that space that I used to raid were marked “Do not wear.” I thought I was busted. No one ever asked me about it. No one asked me if maybe I was really a girl. Later, when I came out as an adult, my mom said she had no recollection of writing that on those boxes of her old clothes.

That was in the eighties. I wonder now how my life would have been different had I been born closer to the new millennium. Puberty blockers weren’t an option for rural trans kids like me back then.

“I have no wish for effeminate boys or masculine girls to be forced into transitioning. I know better than most what being manipulated into living in the wrong gender feels like”

But the idea that most trans people, including kids, were encouraged by others to become trans is simply false. In fact, throughout my coming out process, I was constantly implored by nearly everyone around me to just be an effeminate man.

“Can’t you just hide it?” they would ask. “Can’t you wait for your kids to get to college?”

The great irony is that I came out as a woman before I came out as being attracted to men. When I started dating men, the questions got even more pointed. “Why not just be a gay man?”

Well, that’s not how I work. As a teenager, some of my first sexual thoughts were about being with a man, but in those same thoughts, I was a trans woman. The second part of that was just as important as the first. I shouldn’t have to explain all of this just to live my life. Why can’t you leave me alone?

What I heard from them was, “Can you keep hiding it for my own comfort?” Very few people in this world actually want there to be more trans people in the world. They say it’s a hard life, and that’s true. They say that consigning a child to a trans life is consigning them to a life of medicalization, hardship and discrimination, and they ask: “Wouldn’t it be better if they just didn’t end up trans?”

Well no, actually. Hiding my transness nearly killed me. Why can’t we instead put some of that energy toward building a world where trans people’s lives aren’t quite so hard?

I have no wish for effeminate boys or masculine girls to be forced into transitioning. I know better than most what being manipulated into living in the wrong gender feels like. This is why just being gender nonconforming was removed from the gender dysphoria diagnosis criteria, according to the DSM 4, years ago.

Now a child must insistently, consistently and persistently state that they are of another gender. They must do so over a long period of time in order for a doctor to give a dysphoria diagnosis. 

Appel asks what would have happened if he had been shuffled into a modern gender dysphoria diagnosis system, and the answer is it would have gone nowhere—because he never stated himself that he was a girl, and certainly never did so insistently, consistently and persistently.

We live in a world now where internet know-it-alls think they are more informed than actual experienced doctors. We shouldn’t allow these medical interlopers to cause destruction in trans kids’ lives.

We have diagnosis criteria that are working right now, so let’s trust the doctors. Trans kids deserve the right to transition because people of all ages are entitled to dignity and the pursuit of happiness, no matter what the editors currently running our mainstream media think of that concept.