The (Political) Science of Gender

An Article for Lux Magazine

Genspect is an Ireland-based international network of gender-critical “exploratory therapy” types who aren’t against trans people—it’s important to them that you know this—they just think that when it comes to “gender-questioning children” we’re moving to medicalization too fast, man, they just have a few questions.

I also had a few questions, so I wrote an article about the group and their positions for Lux Magazine. As it turns out, the science overwhelmingly supports gender-affirming care for trans people, including children and teenagers, and some of the people involved with Genspect have robust connections with homophobic groups and with people that push gay conversion therapy. As Trans Safety Network’s Mallory Moore pointed out to me, “exploratory therapy” is essentially gay conversion therapy with a find/replace for “gay” and “trans.” Being trans results from childhood trauma or some kind of parental failure. By addressing that trauma, we can untrans the kid and boom! Problem solved. Except there was never a problem and you did the opposite of solving it.

I think you should read the article. It’s something I’m really proud of. I’m loud about transphobia on social media but I’ve never had a chance to write an article that pushes back against the wave of anti-trans sentiment and legislation that endangers a lot of human beings and many of my closest friends. I care about this issue from a human rights perspective, and as someone who wants the best possible life for the people I love, and also as someone who knows that once the conservatives are done chewing their way through trans people, people like me are next. I get called trans on the internet all. the. time. This does not bother me—it’s not an insult—but it’s sends a very clear signal about what happens to people who don’t fit stereotypical gender roles if trans people lose this fight. “Trans” means “doesn’t do gender right,” and that can mean everything from combining a beard with a dress to acting too bossy in the board room.

The Lux article goes deeply into what gender affirming care for minors actually is, what the position of groups like Genspect actually are, and the wretched state of “evidence” against gender-affirming care, so I won’t rehash any of that here. But there are a couple things mentioned briefly in the article that I wished I’d had a chance to get into more, so here they are:

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The first thing is something Mallory Moore, a researcher at Trans Safety Network, said to me during our interview way back in March. I have thought about it nearly every day since then:

“Trans health activists especially have big problems with WPATH being too conservative, as far as we are concerned. But the scientific process isn’t a debate in the New York Times. It’s journal papers back and forth and people going to meetings and stuff. It’s boring.”

When you saw this substack’s title, you probably had a reaction of some sort. But your reaction probably wasn’t, “why the hell is Laura Jedeed writing about science instead of politics?”

That’s weird, OK? It’s weird that I got tapped to write this article and it’s weird that no one finds it weird. I didn’t get lost on my way to biology class and end up in PolySci, I did that shit on purpose. Why is this a politics issue? Why are we fighting about it in the papers, on forums, and in the halls of congress, instead of in lecture halls and laboratories?

I think it’s because of COVID.

We are living in a post-traumatic stressworld. Everyone on this planet went through something truly horrific in 2020 and 2021. Everything about our lives got weird. Life as we knew it shut down for months, for years. Over a million people died in the United States. Most major cities in America have a smaller population than that. Austin. San Jose. Columbus. A city of corpses.

We live in the age of science. Plagues aren’t supposed to happen anymore. When they do happen they happen to the Other—HIV killed gay people in the 80s, people in Africa today, but never to us, never to Real Americans™.

We were all born into a social contract with capitalism. We work unfulfilling jobs and saddle ourselves with debt and wallow in spiritual poverty in exchange for stuff—so much stuff, the best stuff anyone has ever had—and also safety. We don’t have famines. We don’t have war (at least, not here at home). We certainly don’t have pandemics. This is America, and we have the technology to control for every human tragedy.

COVID took that contract, shredded it, and set the shreds on fire.

We trusted that science would protect us from pandemics. When the pandemic arrived anyway, we trusted science to deal with it. It didn’t. There weren’t enough COVID tests. We had no PPE, we were totally unprepared, doctors and nurses were dying. The scientists told us not to wear masks, then suddenly we had to wear masks. Liquor stores stayed open while churches and community centers closed. Playgrounds closed but you could go to restaurants as long as you wore your mask while standing. Within weeks, science was the most partisan topic possible and it’s stayed that way ever since.

Most of our COVID measures had little to do with actual science, but we live in a world of advertising, and our governement advertised the COVID measures as science, so that’s how most people think about it. “Science” now means everything from Dr Faucci to Columbia medical school research. Which, for many people, means the entire field is suspect.

We are dealing with a crisis of faith on par with the Protestant reformation. An institution we held as sacred—something absolutely central to every aspect of our society—no longer appears infallible. We have seen its corruption. The way it sells indulgences in the form of PPP loans and essential business designations. The way it fails to protect its flock. The scientific process might be infallible on a long enough timerframe, but the church of Science clearly isn’t.

And so, when you tell someone that the science shows that gender-affirming care is best for kids, the people who are most skeptical of masks and vaccines and all the rest become more skeptical of gender affirming care, not less. Same thing for every scientific advancement from now until forever, amen.

Science doesn’t matter like it used to. Welcome to the New World Order.

The obvious place to start research for an article is to google the thing you’re researching. But when I typed “Genspect” into Google I quickly found myself despairing—not because of an absence of things to write about, but because dedicated, underpaid activists who have researched Genspect for years had done all the research for me—more than I could ever possibly use.

We modified the section of my article that talks about the role of activist researchers during the editing process pretty significantly—the feeling was that we wanted to keep the spotlight on Genspect in this piece, and it’s a decision I agree with. But here’s the original, aggro version:

With the exception of the Mother Jones emails, none of this information was secret when the New York Times treated Genspect like an authoritative source. Groups like Trans Safety Network, Health Liberation Now!, and Transgender Map, along with individual researchers like Zinnia Jones and Erin Reed, have spent years painstakingly researching, analyzing, and compiling information on groups like Genspect. Their research embodies the exact kind of rational, evidence-based discourse that outlets like the New York Times claim to value. What they actually seem to value, though, is the aesthetic of rationality. After all, who sounds more trustworthy, Health Liberation Now!, or the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine? 

It’s not just that Trans Healthcare has become a political issue rather than a scientific one, it’s that, like everything else in our cursed age, it has become an issue of aesthetics. The goal isn’t to be scientific about gender, but to appear scientific about it. Most people aren’t going to spend a week reading articles on Google Scholar, they have bills and shit, but they have an idea of what science looks like. Science is a white lab coat. Science is academic jargon. Science is slick, and modern, and it has lots of citations, and it feels right. But that’s not always true.

The rationality aesthetic is why Ben Shapiro can position himself as the pinnacle of rational discourse. “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” Shapiro says, as though he’s ever won a real debate in his life, as though he could hold his own against anyone with better rhetorical skills than the angry college freshmen (debate me you coward). He doesn’t care about facts. He’s a showman. Rationality is a costume he wears to disguise his utter lack of substance.

Most people in America—not just conservatives, but most people—seem to believe that if you’re yelling, you’ve lost. If I stood up and screamed while crying hysterically that gender-affirming care saves lives, that would be a rational statement. If I looked you dead in the eye and calmly explained that allowing children to socially transition is dangerous and will inevitably lead to bottom surgery, that would be an irrational statement based on nothing. We have, however, been trained to care much more about the style than the substance. Screaming and crying = irrational. End of story. But B-Shap is right: facts don’t care about your feelings. Presentation has no impact on whether or not a thing is true.

We need to actively push back against the idea that tone and truth have anything to do with each other while being aware that, when it comes to persuading the masses, presentation matters even more than facts do. As always, it’s a difficult road to walk. You can know that optics are stupid while acknowledging their central importance in keeping people safe.

Anyway, please go read the article if you want to, I’m really proud of it and it was great working with Lux on the piece. Trans rights are human rights, true things are true no matter how you say them, and there is no meaningful scientific debate about gender-affirming care. Hold the line. We are all in this together.