The debate over transgender healthcare has recently escalated to a fever pitch. Trans activists are engaging in censorious and even coercive tactics to shut down any critical inquiry into the safety or efficacy of immediately medicalizing anyone who presents with Gender Dysphoria or self-identifies as transgender. We, as members of the transgender community, and others with Gender Dysphoria, wish to disavow these tactics and to request our healthcare be as safe, rigorously researched, and apolitical as every other healthcare field. 

 

Queer Theory

 

We feel gender related healthcare has been polluted by an academic theory that seeks to blur the categories of male and female; gay and straight; cisgender and transgender. Queer Theory’s aim is a noble one: to shield oppressed people from the forces of their oppression by erasing the lines between oppressor and oppressed. However, when theory, rather than evidence, informs healthcare practices, safety is compromised. 

 

Queer Theory is a post-modern philosophy that started in academia in the early 1990s and has trickled out into the broader LGBT community over the last decade or so. Queer Theory posits that gender is just a performance; that male and female are merely learned behaviors that can be performed equally as well by either sex. Naturally, trans activists embraced this idea of gender being untethered from biological sex. And despite this view being difficult to translate into law or medicine, activists have been successful in working that understanding of gender into both. 

 

Today, most people who have adopted and perpetuate Queer Theory have no idea what Queer Theory is. They simply understand it as progressivism, or pejoratively, as ‘wokism’. But it is an academic philosophy - a lingual tactic - intended to protect the vulnerable, that has spread throughout the western world and ultimately become a state sanctioned religion. Indeed, in recent years it has become almost blasphemous to question the often contradictory tenets of Queer Theory. For example, that sex is both arbitrary and irrelevant, yet sometimes can be incorrectly ‘assigned’ and requires medical intervention. These are mutually exclusive views on sex and gender, yet anyone who points this out will be accused of hatred and wishing harm on vulnerable people. 

 

 

Gender Dysphoria

 

Gender Dysphoria is not a philosophy or a political agenda. It is a psychological condition whereby a person perceives the sex characteristics of their body to be incorrect. There are multiple pathways to developing Gender Dysphoria – all of which need to be better researched and better understood by the healthcare providers working with this patient population. But any clinicians interested in doing this research have been pushed out of their practices by activists who will not allow for any understanding of the trans experience outside of the Queer Theory view. This is only serving to harm the population the activists purport to be helping. 

 

As people living with Gender Dysphoria, we want competent, evidence-based care. This includes mental health care and thorough psychosocial assessment prior to any medicalization, at any age. What we are advocating for is not conversion therapy, despite what many trans activists often claim. According to the evolving standard for treating Gender Dysphoria, anything other than immediate access to hormone therapy and surgeries is misconstrued as conversion therapy. This is not only an absurd view of psychosocial evaluations, its causing unnecessary harm to young, vulnerable people.  

 

 

In Sum

 

Activists have created confusion about what “trans” is by couching it in an academic theory that deliberately obscures any definitive categories. In addition, they employ intimidation campaigns against any individual or organization that seeks clarity. As people with gender dysphoria, many of us transgender or detransitioners, we want to clear away the confusion and obfuscation surrounding our condition. For the safety and well-being of all trans and gender dysphoric people, we need our healthcare, especially our mental healthcare, disentangled from a well-meaning yet misappropriated academic philosophy. 

​

Signed,