Left, Right and Gender

Criticism of gender affirming treatments is not and never has been a right wing cause

Photo by Aiden Craver on Unsplash

One of the most pernicious myths that has grown up around the fight to reform pediatric gender medicine is part of the culture war between progressives and social conservatives. This might seem obvious if you consider only the coverage of the issue in the United States, where the fight over banning medical transition of minors has been largely a partisan issue but when you look deeper into the alternative media and consider the wider international debate, a different picture emerges. Much of the hard work of exposing the weak evidence supporting gender medicine has been done by people from the progressive left.

The gender affirming model of care rose to dominance without any real public discussion. The tiny number of children being seen by specialist gender clinics prior to 2015 was of no political interest to anyone except a small but well-funded group of transgender activists.

Transgender rights activists can muster a noisy protest when their power is threatened, but this is not how they achieved power. Instead, wealthy sponsors like the Pritzker Foundation and the Arcus Foundation passed out grants to universities, hospitals and NGOs. This strategy was outlined in a document prepared by Denton’s (one of the world’s largest law firms) and the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which is associated with a major media conglomerate. James Kirkup describes how this document recommends getting ahead of the legislative agenda, avoiding media attention and linking the gender identity to the more popular cause of marriage equality. This strategy of working behind the scenes mirrors the approach of conservative lobby groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council.

By contrast, much of the opposition to gender ideology has come from volunteer run groups with minimal budgets. The first organization to challenge the affirming model of care was Transgender Trend which was founded in England in 2015 by Stephanie Davies-Arai. It was joined, in the United States, by 4thwavenow which was founded by the mother of a trans-identified teen. (Her daughter subsequently desisted and is now out as a lesbian.) Both of these sites provided information to parents who were concerned about the pressure put on them by the education system and health care professionals to medically transition their children. Research has found that most of these parents tended to have liberal attitudes to LGBT rights in general.

The participants in Lisa Littman's 2018 study of parents of gender dysphoric teens were recruited mainly through 4thwavenow and Transgender Trend. This has led to criticism that the sample group was biased, but what is interesting is what they study found about this particular sub-population. The responses to the questionnaire showed that 85.9% of the parents who responded supported same sex marriage and 88.2% believed trans people deserved equal rights. A 2023 study by Michael Bailey and Suzanna Diaz surveyed parents who contacted the website ParentsofROGDKids.com. As part of the study, 280 e-mail responses were examined for statements supportive or unsupportive of LGBT rights in general and found 70 responses that were supportive and only 5 that were unsupportive.

Lesbians and gays have long been active critics of medical practices which harm young lesbians and gays. Gender Health Query, founded in 2019 by a group of LGBT people, was one of the first sites to provide a comprehensive review of the evidence on medical transition. Gays and lesbians like Malcolm Clark and Kathleen Stock have been some of the most determined critics of gender ideology. Many lesbians, gays and bisexuals are concerned that the trans and queer element of the LGBTQ movement have taken over the agenda. This has led to the creation of groups like LGB Alliance which advocated specfifcially for the rights of same sex attracted people.

The debate over gender identity has exposed and deepened divisions within the feminist movement. There are outspoken liberal leaning feminists on both sides of the debate.

Whistleblowers working at gender clinics, like the 35 therapists who resigned from the Tavistock clinic and Jamie Reed in the United States, have exposed how gender affirming clinicians push children and teens with serious mental health issues onto medical transition. They started out as sympathetic to LGBT people (and were often LGB themselves) and this was one of the reasons they sought to work with gender distressed youth in the first place.

The myth that criticism of gender medicine is a right-wing cause has been sustained because, until a year or two ago, most of the debate on gender medicine was taking place on blogs and small circulation alternative media. The major liberal and mainstream conservative media either ignored the issue or were entirely supportive of affirming care. The only large circulation media organizations that would publish anything critical of gender affirming care were right-wing leaning ones like The Federalist or The Spectator. Often these pieces were by left-leaning authors.

There are of course important conservative voices in the debate. Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage, published in 2020, remains essential reading. More recently, Leor Sapir of the Manhattan Institute has been providing informative commentary. Furthermore, there are LGBT people who are both conservative and critics of the gender affirming model. However, almost all of the key early critics would consider themselves to be on the left.

It is sometimes difficult to talk about left wing and right wing positions because the whole concept of what it means to be right / conservative or left / liberal / socialist is becoming increasingly unclear. This is not just a matter of one or both sides moving to more extreme positions. The whole idea of the political spectrum has lost its meaning. Political alignments no longer reflect class interests or a commitment to an internally consistent ideology. They are increasingly simply a matter of loyalty to a group and whatever cluster of beliefs the group happens to hold at the moment.

At one time it was possible to say in general terms that right meant libertarian and economic issues and authoritarian on social issues while left meant supporting more government involvement in the economy and less in people’s private lives. Today the authoritarianism of the right, which enforced values of patriarchal families and patriotism, is matched by an authoritarianism of the left which enforces the values of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion.

One of the notable things about the gender debate is that many of the strongest critics of gender ideology come from the radical left or radical right. When gender critical You Tuber Magdalen Berns died in 2019 her death was noted in two publications. One was the National Review, the flagship of the American right. The other was the Morning Star which was once the official paper to the Communist Party of Great Britain. People who could agree on little else still shared the belief that sex is binary and sterilizing children is a bad idea. The fact that it is still possible to work for common goals across in an increasingly polarized political culture is one of the few signs of hope in this dismal story.

Trans-activists have been desperate to link groups like SEGM and Genspect to the religious right but they have little to show for their efforts. Activists who examined SEGM’s public filings found records of three anonymous donations of $20,000, and $20,000 as well as grants from the Edward Charles Foundation. This was enough to generate headlines about “shadow money” and dodgy funding. A journalist writing for Undark tracked down one of SEGM’s actual major donors who was “a 68-year-old woman from California who asked to remain anonymous because she feared harassment, described herself as a non-religious feminist who had supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.” (Take note that she did not mention Joe Biden.)

While right wing publications were at least willing to talk about the problems with gender medicine, elected officials were reluctant to do anything. The trans-activist strategy of linking their cause to the larger and more popular lesbian, gay and bisexual community paid off. Conservative parties had been bruised by the losing fight against gay marriage and the leadership watched as corporate sponsors added pink and blue to their rainbow flags during Pride Month. They had little interest in backing another losing cause.

In the United States a website tracking “anti-trans” legislation found that there was little political interest in gender transition of children prior to 2020. Most of the bills introduced prior to 2020 dealt with bathroom access and even they had dropped off by 2019. Canadian Conservatives dropped their initial opposition to a proposed conversion therapy ban and let the bill pass without serious study.

The turning point in the debate was J. K. Rowling’s Tweet in support of Maya Forstater on December 19, 2019, an event the gender-critical X/Twitter now celebrates as “TERFmas.”

J. K. Rowling had unimpeachable liberal credentials and could not be ignored or cancelled. Her comments may not have changed many people’s minds, cognitive dissonance is strong, but it did at least make some people aware that there was a debate. While coverage in the liberal media remained one sided, with Rowling dismissed as an outlier, there was more openness in the moderate conservative media. The year 2020 saw some meaningful change in England, including the commissioning of the Cass Review.

There were significant developments in Sweden and Finland. Both countries commissioned reviews of pediatric gender medicine which resulted in changes to the treatment model to limit the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and emphasize psychotherapy. The change was not politically driven in either country. In both cases the government at the time was a centre-left coalition of Social Democrats and Greens. In Finland, the policy review was initiated by a request from leading clinicians in the national gender clinic. In Sweden the pressure for change came from parents groups and was aided by an investigative report on national television.

In the United States, Republican leaders took notice and started to bring forward legislation restricting medical transition of minors. The number of gender healthcare related bills increased from just 9 on 2019 to 185 in 2023. The fact that politicians in conservative American states were pointing to liberal Scandinavian countries as a model for their policies got the attention of the American media. There has been no bridging of the partisan divide. Some Democrat controlled states have responded to treatment bans by declaring themselves “sanctuary states” for youth who are unable to get hormones and puberty blockers elsewhere.

However, the liberal media is now at least willing to acknowledge that there is a debate and hear from both sides. Since around 2022 it has been possible to get an article critical of gender medicine published in mainstream outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post.

The Cass Review was another turning point. A thoroughly researched report by a respected pediatrician vindicated the concerns that Transgender Trend and 4thwavenow had raised nine years ago. The Labour Party, which had been wavering on gender issues for over a year, has endorsed the report.  Wes Streeting, the Labour Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Services, recently said he was wrong not to speak up sooner in defence of women’s right to single sex wards.

In Canada and the United States, the response has been slower. Biden and Trudeau have endorsed gender ideology in terms that make it very hard to change course. But it will also be harder to stay on a destructive course. Democratic strategists are going to have to realize that they cannot risk continual humiliations like Ted Cruz grilling a judicial nominee over sending a trans-identified rapist (who by definition is male) to a women’s prison. Change at the political level is likely to be slow in both Canada and the United States. In a federal system, changes will be needed at both the federal and provincial or state levels.

Change in the corporate world could be much faster as corporations are very sensitive to signals from the marketplace. Anheuser-Busch learned a painful lesson from the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco. If marketing executives see that supporting transgender rights is no longer helping a corporate brand they will stop doing it.

Unfortunately, the institutions most resistant to change are major universities, professional associations and public sector unions which are insulated both from market forces and political control. These are also the places where gender ideology is doing the most harm.

As the liberal establishment slowly pivots on pediatric gender medicine they are faced with a dilemma. It is hard to admit your opponents were right but it's even harder to apologize to friends who were vilified for raising the alarm years ago.

Furthermore, many people who have been fired or harassed for gender critical view will not be satisfied with an apology; they are suing for damages and winning. An employment tribunal in Scotland recently found in favour of a former employee of the Edinburgh rape crisis centre who was fired for questioning whether trans-identified males should work with rape survivors. In California, a school district reached a US$360,000 settlement with a teacher who was fired for refusing to follow school policies on transgender student. Many other similar lawsuits are pending. The road back to sanity is going to be long and expensive.