Is Being Trans a Cop-out To Adulthood?
Exploring the Peter Pan Syndrome, Brace Yourself for Election Day, And a Shocking Netflix Show (Postmodernism + Disability Activism = Sex Scandal)
What’s on my mind…
You can either watch or read this section. The video is embedded below, followed by a text version.
Is Being TRANSgender a Cop-Out to Adulthood?
Imagine a 16 year old girl. No matter where she lives or how she was raised, she’s now living through one of the most turbulent and rapidly-changing stages in her development. In the midst of this adolescent chaos, she recognizes, with dread, that adulthood is just around the corner. Her body is developing in ways that make her uneasy, and everything about becoming an adult woman seems daunting and perhaps a little scary. Could becoming a trans man help her entirely sidestep the project of female adulthood?
Are trans identities and medical transition a cop-out to growing up?
We’ll begin with a look at Gen Z. People born between 1996 and 2010 take less risks than previous generations. They reach independence milestones, like getting a drivers license or a first job, much later than their parents or grandparents did. Rates of high-risk “externalizing behaviors,” like drinking alcohol or having casual sex, have also gone down with Gen Z.
Researchers, parents, and psychologists have generated different theories to explain these trends. This is the internet generation, with greater access to knowledge and information, so perhaps they are better educated about safety and are therefore more responsible. They are also being entertained by their screens and by social media, so they do their socializing online rather than in person at parties or real-life activities. The lack of real world risk-taking has made them less tolerant to distress, so they’re also very anxious and prefer to play it safe.
But I am skeptical that this generation is actually “being safer.” Can the teenage desire to challenge authority and engage in risky behavior simply disappear? I doubt it. Instead, risk-taking behavior may still be present, having been diverted and transformed into something different. Furthermore, I suspect this new manifestation of risk-taking truly holds kids back from growing up. Remember that risky behavior is different from healthy risk taking.
One of the new behaviors we see in Gen Z is their willingness to question gender and sexual identity much more than previous generations. Polls show that somewhere between 7% and 28% of Gen Z adults identify somewhere within LGBTQ.
In my experience working with this group, I have found that questioning one’s gender identity can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, they are re-thinking notions of femininity and masculinity and subverting the gender binary. They can find immense power in making decisions about who they want to be, what they want to be called, and what pronouns other people can use for them. They take a public stance, make demands of others, and proclaim an alternative identity—one that is sometimes marginalized and often at the center of our cultural debates. All of this can have a subversive and bold quality. On the other hand, coming out and socially or medically transitioning means they are stopping their birth sex identity in its tracks. When a young person begins curating a different identity in a new sex role or a non-binary label, they’re dodging the responsibilities and maturation looming right around the corner. Girls don’t want to become adult women. Boys don’t want to become adult men. So are they really taking ownership of their lives and making bold, mature decisions?
When it comes to medical interventions for younger teens, like puberty blockers, there’s literally a pharmaceutical halting of development. Cross-sex hormones then synthetically usher the child into a transsexual adulthood, away from their natal sex.
When a young person takes on this new social or medical identity, what happens to their ‘original’ self? In the case of an FtM, does she just get frozen in time? Is she forgotten and left behind? And what is the child’s relationship to the new boy she’s trying to become? Is she actually growing up anew, now as a boy? Or is she simply derailing her true female maturation? To explore these questions, let’s turn to a story which I adored during my own childhood: Peter Pan.
A plot summary: Peter Pan is an adventurous child who never wants to grow up and learns how to fly using happy thoughts and fairy dust. He recruits a new friend, Wendy, and her little brothers to fly up to the fantasy world of Neverland, where his friends, the Lost Boys live full-time. After several escapades with pirates, mermaids and fairies, Wendy decides to leave Neverland and return to her real life in London. Peter is devastated to lose Wendy, a symbol of nurturing and motherly love for him and the Lost Boys. She eventually settles down, gets married, and starts her own family. The story of Peter Pan offers a warning: while fantasy, whimsy, and imagination can be a joyful distraction, getting stuck here is dangerous. Peter can’t grow up or genuinely build relationships that matter to him while he is trapped in a fantasy and untethered from the real world.
A contemporary term, “Peter Pan Syndrome,” was the title of a 1983 book by Dr. Dan Kiley, and describes adult men who struggle with responsibility and emotional maturity. Today, I think this concept can apply to trans identities as well.
Let me explain what I mean.
It’s always easier to live in a hypothetical fantasy than it is to face the real world challenges that are particular to us: to our own personality, to our life circumstances, to our physical abilities and limitations. Gender-questioning teens often have a vivid and rich imagination, and can picture themselves becoming happier and more confident as someone new. It becomes tempting to pursue that fantasy and avoid the painstaking work of developing themselves from their current starting point. So in this way, the trans fantasy is an escape strategy to avoid the difficulties, traumas, or self-loathing they are dealing with in the moment.
When families decide to move beyond this fantasy and medicalize a child’s identity, things get dark. Childhood medicalization can actually destroy sexual function. Kids don’t care about their own sexual function, of course, because they’re children. In fact, many young people are repulsed by the prospect of having sex or of having their own kids in the future. But why are some doctors willing to permanently compromise a child’s future sexual function?
This is a morbid medical Peter Panning of sorts, because it locks the patient into a permanent childhood sexual state, even as they become adults in the future.
Medicalizing is a major step in a young person’s life. Hormone injections could feel like a right of passage to adulthood. Girls are promised, “you’ll go through male puberty when you take Testosterone.” “This time it will be the ‘right puberty’.” As though she gets a do-over for adolescence.
The trans medical journey has other superficial similarities to a rite of passage.
With surgery for example, there’s a willingness to voluntarily endure pain. Medical interventions and appointments and hospital visits separate an adolescent from his peers. He is symbolically leaving the protection and carefree experience of childhood, and a difficult trial ushers him into adulthood. Any after that treacherous journey, of course, one hopes to be transformed by it.
But is this a real psychological or maturational transformation? Is this transformative in ways that truly matter?
I’m not saying that social and medical transition necessarily keeps someone locked into a complete fantasy. In many ways, transition requires young patients to face many difficult realities. For example, only after medical transition steps do some young people recognize the limits of what modern medicine can and can’t do. Medicine is not magic. If their aesthetic fantasies didn’t get actualized by the hormones and surgeries, they have no choice but to find self-compassion. Maybe too little too late.
And certainly, others feel satisfied with the outcomes of such medical interventions. But inevitably, they need to face some biological realities, health consequences, and other facts of life as a trans person.
Everyone comes face-to-face with reality. Fantasies will always collide with the truth…eventually.
Facing reality at any stage in the process may quickly pull someone back down to earth and reveal a more grounded understanding of life in a human mammal’s body.
But for a time, it’s possible to push the cognitive dissonance aside and remain in a child-like state of denial which attempts to reject reality altogether. This is what happens when dogmatic slogans replace genuine thought and reflection. Thoughtlessly parroting slogans is not a sophisticated or mature way to make sense of things or argue your point.
In last month’s newsletter, I introduced my concept of a denial-based personal identity and an acceptance-based personal identity, and many of you asked me to expand on these. In summary, a denial-based personal identity involves refusal to accept basic realities, instead leaning on slogans and word games and beliefs that can’t be proven. It’s also a sign that someone is stuck in a child-like way of thinking— the Peter Pan Syndrome.
To illustrate this, let’s take an example that drew a great deal of attention on YouTube in the last few weeks.
Surrounded is a debating game filmed and put on YouTube by Jubilee. On this episode, Ben Shapiro, conservative commentator was debating a trans man, about abortion. The trans man jumped around from one argument to another: sexual assault, freedom, the American Dream. It was scattered and hard to follow, but the debate topic was supposed to be whether abortion is morally indefensible.
I’m not familiar with this person, their arguments, or how they conceptualize their identity. I’m not trying to pick on this individual. But for our purposes we’re just interested in the stated premise: trans men can get pregnant, and therefore men can get pregnant.
An acceptance-based framework for identity—one that is mature, and in touch with reality—might sound like this:
Trans men are females. Only females can get pregnant. So, since I’m a trans man and I’m taking testosterone, if the hormones haven’t compromised my body’s ability to get pregnant yet, then it is possible for me to get pregnant—because I’m female. I’ve medically and aesthetically changed the appearance of my body so that I can live more seamlessly in society’s male sex role, but that doesn’t mean I’m not female anymore.
Notice that in this example, having an acceptance-based personal identity doesn’t deny the existence of trans people or force anyone to make specific decisions about medical interventions. It’s a healthy and grounded way to describe the realities of a transgender identity and of trans medicalization. Taking an acceptance-based view of reality also fosters more insight and clarity to inform people’s decisions. Only by accepting reality can people decide whether a social or medical identity change is the best strategy for their life.
But as we’ve discussed, children, teens and young adults may use a trans identity to dodge the healthy development that is required for them to become genuinely mature, whole adults.
What’s on my radar…
Election Day
It’s election day tomorrow and I decided to release this newsletter a day early.
Tensions are high and regardless of who wins this election, emotions are guaranteed to escalate.
Both parties believe that a win for the other side will bring about disastrous policies, give leadership positions to dangerous politicians, and create chaos for the United States.
And for those concerned about children who are questioning their identity, the stakes can feel even higher, with both candidates explicitly talking about trans and gender issues. Childhood medicalization, women’s sports, and tax-funded gender surgeries were issues raised in both political smear ads and on the campaign trail.
I’m nervous too. I’m nervous about policies that could hurt vulnerable children, women and girls. On the other hand, I’m also worried about the hyperbolic backlash from social justice activists who feel threatened. Regardless of how this election goes, I’ll be holding my breath.
However, I’ve gone through my own complex political “journey” over the last 10 years and learned one thing for certain: our day-to-day lives will almost certainly remain unaffected in the immediate aftermath of this election. We’re going to have to take things one day at a time.
So from that spirit, I would encourage you to model some balance and grounding. Go vote, and then get on with your life. Try not to refresh twitter every 3 seconds (a reminder for myself). Try not to keep the TV on all day and all night. Try not to catastrophize.
You may be thinking, “Sasha, I’m not the one who is going to be catastrophizing. It’s my kid that I’m worried about! My kid is going to lose their sh!t if so-and-so wins.” (I can guess which so-and-so you’re talking about.)
But we’ve actually had both candidates in positions of power before–albeit to different degrees. You may not agree with their policies. You may not be able to decode what those policies are. You may think they’re a threat to democracy. You may despise them as individuals. But since I’m here writing this, and you’re here reading it, we know we’ve survived these politicians before. And we can survive it again, regardless of who wins tomorrow.
If your child begins to catastrophize, remind them too. Contextualize. De-escalate.
Maybe plan something fun for the family to do on Tuesday or Wednesday night. Interrupt rumination. Sometimes a distraction is exactly what’s called for.
Now, let’s get out there and perform our civic duty!
What’s new in my Parent Membership Group on SubscribeStar…
Essential Topics Video: My Talk from Genspect Lisbon
Topic Video: I shared a special-release version of my recent Genspect Talk which included an explainer of acceptance-based and denial-based personal identity. Genspect will be releasing the talk on their YouTube channel soon.
Don’t forget that you can always view short clips of Topic Videos and other educational videos on my YouTube Channel.
October Live Q+A: here are some of the submissions from last month:
What motivates detransition?
How do we switch therapists?
Understanding social + peer influence
Self-hatred + self-loathing: trans as escape mechanism
Setting boundaries when an adult child will only engage in a transactional relationship with parents
Fear of growing up and lacking independence skills
FtM "gay boys" — my daughter thinks she’s a gay male
Parental loneliness + isolation
Breast binding
College + Life after HS
Should I try to have some hard talks during international travel with my child?
To hear this conversation, you can join the Q+A tier of my Parent Membership Group here.
What’s on my TV……
Netflix Documentary: Tell Them you Love Me
This is one of the most twisted stories I’ve ever heard. The characters from this documentary refused to leave my mind’s eye for many days after I watched it. A Rutgers philosophy professor, Anna Stubblefield, focused her research on race and disability, among other topics. She had become interested in something called facilitated communication, a method of assisting disabled non-verbal individuals, allegedly, to communicate by holding their arm above a keyboard and helping them to type out their thoughts. Her mother, who had been a speech therapist and had assisted dozens of disabled people in her career, developed a strong belief in facilitated communication. Anna had great faith in this tool’s ability to unlock and reveal the rich inner life of disabled people. The argument goes that often an apparently low IQ in a disabled individual is a sort of false flag. Actually, the person may be intelligent and have robust cognitive abilities, but IQ can’t really be measured due to the communication barriers.
One of the students in Anna’s college course is John Johnson, who has a disabled and non-verbal brother with cerebral palsy named Derrick. As John gets further into his coursework, he learns more about disabilities and about the facilitated communication method. He and his mother, Daisy, become intrigued at the possibility of giving Derrick a more enriching and expressive life. John approaches Dr Stubblefield to learn more about facilitated communication, and she generously volunteers to do a few informal sessions with Derrick. The first few meetings seem modest but promising, and the communication sessions with Anna continue. What ends up happening in this story, though, is absolutely remarkable. And how we interpret the series of shocking events will be completely different, depending on our initial assumptions about disability, the facilitated communication tool, and the human capacity for self-deception.
I’m trying my best to avoid spoilers, so I’ll just point out some of the themes that I noticed, which will be familiar to anyone following the gender debates.
academic disciplines (like so called ‘grievance studies’) which may have a utopian worldview
insular ideas circulating within highly-educated circles within academia
the arrogance of academic ‘authorities’ when interacting with families or parents who they deem unenlightened or lacking sophistication
how new names and new identities can be used to drive a wedge between a person and their family
belief in an unseen, untestable, and quasi-spiritual version of human potential
the willingness to demolish one’s own life for a fantasy you’ve created … alone in your own mind
Is Dr. Stubblefield a monster? A savior? A naive dreamer? A complete narcissist? A racist who lacks cultural competence?
I’ll let you decide.
If you’ve watched this film on Netflix, please tell me what you think! I have much more to say but will avoid giving away any of the plot line.
What’s on our podcast…
The last few weeks on Gender: A Wider Lens has been really enriching, especially for me as a lifter. Check it out:
Holding the Line on Liberal Values with Helen Pluckrose and Carrie Clark In this episode we critically examine the intersections of identity, sex-based rights, mental health, and societal influences. Drawing from both personal experiences and professional insights, Carrie and Helen help us explore complex and sensitive ideas around self-expression, feminism, and gender, encouraging a nuanced and reflective perspective. The conversation also delves into the controversy following Genspect’s 2023 Bigger Picture Conference in Denver, known as "Blue Dress Gate," unpacking the cultural and social tensions surrounding the event.
A Conversation with April Hutchinson, Champion for Women's Sports April is a Canadian powerlifter, North American deadlift record holder, fairness for women in sports advocate and recovering alcoholic. Powerlifting during COVID saved her life as she was battling alcohol addiction. A remarkable talent and dedicated athlete, within a short period, April performed record-breaking lifts and was catapulted to elite status in the sport. Everything changed when she discovered that one of the athletes winning gold medals in the women’s division was a biological male. Compelled to speak out and tell the truth, April soon found herself suspended from the Canadian Powerlifting Union. Rather than cower or retreat silently, April stood up for her values and continued to push for fairness in her sport, and she tells us this amazing story on GWL.
What Happened at the Genspect Conference in Lisbon We reflect on The Bigger Picture Conference, discuss notable speakers, and key themes. Is Gender Dysphoria an incomplete diagnosis? What can other disciplines tell us about resolving the gender crisis? And which talk got the most engagement and energy from the crowd? We explore these and may other questions as we recap the incredible event.
Why Do People Double Down in the Face of Contrary Evidence? When the evidence points to harms and danger, why do gender-affirmation advocates double down? Leon Festinger studied doomsday cults and created the term “cognitive dissonance” and we explore his research to help us understand today’s debates about pediatric gender medicine.
Live in Lisbon with Billboard Chris His strategy is simple: he stands in a public place with a billboard which reads, “Children Cannot Consent to Puberty Blockers.” People approach him and discuss, debate, express gratitude, or call him a bigot. This is all captured on video and the outcomes of his conversations are moving. He tells us what communication strategies are most effective and how he leads people to clearer thinking through straightforward patient dialogue.
I am available for one-on-one parent consultations. You can learn more about what these sessions entail, plus view my availability on my Substack.
Often I am booked quite far in advance, but if you are a Founding Member of this Substack, you will get priority booking.
In the meantime…
Here’s one thing to try…
Cook something together
I love to make recipes that are part of my family or my husband’s family tradition. Taking part in our past helps us understand who we are. I often think that gender-distressed kids are searching for their identity while simultaneously distancing themselves from their past. Cooking old recipes is a beautiful way to actively participate in your own family history.
Do you have any recipes that have been passed down through the generations? Do your children have any favorite foods that create nostalgia or moments of connection? Can you learn how to make them together or teach your children?
If not, perhaps there are other ways to engage your teen in the kitchen. For example, if your child loves Anime, you could try making ramen from scratch or take a Japanese cooking class together.
Does your family connect over food? Share some stories or recipes below, I’d love to hear about it!
Incredibly insightful. Thank you.
What I would really like to see, is if G:AWL could re-interview Prof. J. Michael Bailey, given all that has been said about the subject of autogynephilia so far, much of which has been completely wrong/unsupported by research.
I think it would also be good to hear what Prof. J. M. B. has to say about autoandrophilia. I have heard accounts, but there's also no research for it.