What Would Trans Compromise Even Look Like? (The Right Won't Accept It)

Conservatives and complicit centrists have obliterated every trans compromise position, so I don't know what we're supposed to do now.

How would you react if I said that puberty blockers were once the compromise position for youth gender care? If you're new to the so-called trans debate, this might be shocking for you to hear, but it's nonetheless true.

I got to thinking about this earlier this week because of two things that popped up in the discourse. the first was former Vice President Kamala Harris' new book 107 Days, which recounted her failed presidential run last year. There's a short section in the book in which she calls for Democrats to find a kinder middle ground position in between Republicans and "trans activists" on issues like youth transitioning and sports participation.

The other bit was the New York Times' Ezra Klein calling for ways to "live with" MAGA extremists in the long run. In an interview with writer Te-Nehishi Coates on his podcast, Klein repeatedly questions what liberals should do with trans issues as a means to compromise with the right.

And I have to say, as a trans journalist who has been covering this stuff closely for a decade now, there is no compromise that conservatives will accept on trans issues. They have already successfully portrayed the already existing compromise positions as symptoms of liberal extremity on gender. Klein himself bought that framing a few weeks ago in a separate podcast interview with Congresswoman Sarah McBride.

Let me take you through it...

In the 80's and early 90's, trans care and especially youth trans care was a highly controlled sector of care controlled by a small handful of specialist gender clinicians. For kids, it was strictly considered a mental health condition with a strictly mental health solution. Throughout the history of trans youth care, the clinician's goal was not to make sure that trans kids could live happy, fulfilling lives, instead the goal was to produce as many cisgender, heterosexual adults as possible, by any means necessary.

A close look at the methods proposed by those early trans health gatekeepers show banning of cross gender toys for kids, so no Barbies for "natal boys", no Matchbox cars for "natal girls", etc. No cross gender friends, and firm boundaries on gender expression. Youth transitioning was simply not possible under this care regime. It was conversion therapy in that the only acceptable outcome was a desistance from a young person's trans, no matter the cost.

Producing a trans adult with this process was considered a professional failure in these clinics.

Studies with dubious numbers were produced, showing 80% or more of these clinic's kids would end up desisting. Well yeah, that was the point of the treatment. Outlast the child's resolve and eventually the kid would give up. Parents were happy that they didn't have to risk a potentially embarrassing conversation with their families and neighbors. Wins all around.

But eventually those kids grew up, and it turns out they didn't so much as desist as they were rather tortured into accepting a life they never wanted. Horror stories abound of clinicians who simply knew what was best for helpless children who just happened to be different who ended up producing much more serious mental health issues down the line.

So eventually, parents, patient advocates, and some forward thinking clinicians started rethinking this approach. What if transness is just a natural, if rare, variation on human life? What if, instead of fighting a kid's gender identity with Orwellian vigor, we instead accepted that children could be trans and helped them?

One potential option is to just administer cross sex hormones to those whose dysphoria is most distressing so that they can develop in their gender transitions alongside their peers. All puberties are gender transitions themselves, when pre-teen kids change from genderless bags of flesh into something more distinguishably gendered. You could simply let the trans girls develop hips and breasts on the same time scale as their cisgender female peers, and vice versa for trans boys.

But that, of course, comes with a lot of risk. A hormonal, cross gender medical transition is just as permanent as natal puberty, do we really want kids making these lifelong decisions at 11 or 13?

That's tough. Medical providers had to find another way.

That's when puberty blockers came along as an idea. Already having been in use for decades for precocious puberty on even younger children, experts theorized that giving puberty blockers to trans kids could put a pause on natal puberty so that a child could mature mentally and make a permanent decision later.

It's not a perfect system, but it's not bad, and certainly better than the alternatives. A maximalist trans rights position would be to go ahead and administer estrogen to trans girls at the very start of puberty, the compromise is to create a way to wait on the administration until the kid reaches a more mature age. I support that compromise.

This eventually became the standard treatment for treating gender dysphoric youth.

For that I've been labeled a "trans activist", an extremist, and now, according to the FBI, a potential domestic terrorist.

Instead, conservatives and quite a few centrist pundits have taken the position that trans kids simply do not exist and that gender dysphoria should be treated with the only goal of producing a cisgender (preferably heterosexual) outcome. The right lied and lied and lied about this. Conservative pundits falsely claimed that surgeries were being performed on toddlers and newborns, that schools were running secret gender clinics and surgery centers, that transness was a social contagion. They claimed that kids were transitioning to get attention and praise from other kids.

In 2018, I interviewed a teenaged trans girl from blue ass New York City that had to switch between multiple schools to avoid relentless bullying. She tearfully told me how she had once been thrown from the top of a tall jungle gym by a bully because she was trans. If this is what happens to trans teens in the Big Apple, I promise you these kids are not being celebrated.

In most of the country, it is now impossible to even access the compromise and standard medical treatment for gender dysphoria and Republicans are eager to expand those bans nationwide. They're gathering the private medical and identifying information of trans youth who are simply too young to battle back against the government. Accepting parents are terrified and I don't blame them.

But when one side does this with the standard compromise in this issue, what's the point of seeking yet another compromise? It might appeal to the senses of a liberal pundit or candidate to try to find compromise, but none will come. Sensing a softness in the left's position on trans rights, what incentive does the right have in compromising?

In the UK, this liberal instinct for compromise has led the country's allegedly left wing political party to be the one to try to ban trans people from public toilets and institute a total ban on puberty blockers. The US is quickly heading for that same outcome. The right has every incentive to continue lying constantly about trans people until "good liberals" give in and they can do whatever horrifically freakish shit they've dreamed about doing to trans people for years.

There is no incentive for me to seek compromise because the right has already proven themselves to be operating in bad faith on these issues. Instead I am left to sit here and monitor the government's plans for my demographic and the left's willingness towards complicity, and gauging my safety level for staying put in this country. If we continue down this path, I will have no choice but to flee overseas, even though I live in a bright blue dot in a bright blue state.

Compromise isn't possible here. I'm running out of ways to explain this to all the good liberals.

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Don't miss the latest episode of my podcast Cancel Me, Daddy with my co-host Christine Grimaldi and this week's guest Kat Tenbarge where we went deep on the free speech fallout from Charlie Kirk's death:

I'll be back later this week with our Friday feature, Sick Burns, and another potential piece mid-week about the fight over funding the federal government.