Right out of the gate, Jack Turban’s essay fails. Turban, an assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry is founding director of the Gender Psychiatry Program at the University of California, San Francisco (here is his webpage). If you fall for his psychobabble, then congratulate yourself for recognizing that you live in an ideological bubble that shields you from your awful natural capacity to reason.
Turban asserts that there is a better way to think about gender identity and he doesn’t like it when his better way is rejected, which is to say that he is very defensive about the fact that gender identity is a bogus construct and when it is said of those confused about gender that they are so because of social contagion. “Others have decried the rise in adolescents identifying as transgender and nonbinary as a ‘social contagion,’ likening gender diversity to a disease,” Turban tells us, with scare quotes around the term.
There is no ulterior motive behind the concept of social contagion. This is not a trick of language to manufacture a false perception. Social contagion is the very real process by which irrational attitudes, behaviors, and emotions, etc., rapidly spread through groups. It’s also known as mass hysteria, mass psychogenic illness, and moral panic. Turban surely knows about the phenomenon, its various names, and that it’s well-documented. It’s seen, for example, in rapid-onset and situational Tourette’s. (See Why Aren’t We Talking More About Social Contagion? See also The Future of a Delusion: Mass Formation Psychosis and the Fetish of Corporate Statism.)
The crisis of gender identity in adolescents is neither transcultural and transhistorical nor spontaneously emergent. Social contagion explains the rise of adolescents identifying as the gender they’re not. But it is more than this. The rise of the transgender adolescent tracks the development of gender ideology, queer praxis, and the advent of social media. (See When “Twice-Born” Goes Wrong: The Crisis of Personality Among Rebellious Youth; Anti-Minotaur: Reclaiming The Truth of Gender From the Labyrinth of Lies; Neutralizing the Gender-Detection Brain Module; The Queer Project and the Practice of Deceptive Mimicry; Wait Until You’re Older.)
It is in fact Turban who wants this to be a disease. He wants this to be a condition his industry classifies as “gender dysphoria,” the prescribed treatment for which involves hormonally altering and surgically modifying the bodies of children based on the delusion that they are not the gender they are. The construct was first introduced in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in its fifth edition (DSM-5), published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in 2013. This term replaces the most accurate albeit still problematic disease construct “gender identity disorder.” (See Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy)
That it is a disorder in the sense that it is a delusion is easily verifiable by a physical examination. One’s gender is determined by gamete size and reproductive anatomy. If these are ambiguous, then there are chromosomes. I have written quite a lot on this. (See Gender and the Gender Role; Gender and the English Language; Separating Sex and Gender in Language Works Against Reason and Science; Sex and Gender are Interchangeable Terms; Sex = Gender Redux: Eschewing the Queer Linguistic Bubble; Scientific Materialism and the Necessity of Noncircular Conceptual Definitions; The Science™ and its Devotees; Men Do Not Have Periods; Lesbians Don’t Like Penises, So Our Definitions Must Change; There’s No Obligation to Speak Like a Queer Theorist. Doing so Misrepresents Reality; The Casual Use of Propagandistic Language Surrounding Sex and Gender; Changing the Language of Gender does not Change the Definition of Rape.)
How does one explain to a boy that he is not a dinosaur or a dog? If he is determined to believe this, if this desire persists over time, then have him examined. When it is confirmed that he is in fact a human boy, then whatever psychological approach is helpful in helping him come to terms with that should be deployed. It would be unthinkable to accuse those working with such a boy of engaging in “conversion therapy” because they disabuse him of the notion that he is either of these things. This assumes a priori that he is in fact what he is not and cannot be and meant to be that. What doctor in his right mind would use chemicals, hormones, and surgeries to alter the boy’s physiology and physical appearance to make him appear as either? No amount of dysphoria would justify that.
Let this sink in. Turban is pushing a disease model that only works with one type of disease despite a plethora of analogs, a disease that necessitates chemical alteration of physiology and surgical modification of the body while accusing those who are aware of the medicalization of a social phenomenon and the problems this will cause for families with an affected children of being the ones pushing a disease model.
Credit where credit is due: as bad as the propaganda of this op-ed is, it is nonetheless relentless. It’s as if Turban has a livelihood to protect—and past actions to excuse and justify. After stumbling out of the gate, Turban appeals to the wisdom of children: “Younger people especially are opening up about gender and thinking about this part of their identities with more nuance and clarity than older generations typically have.” Mao used this tactic to great—and horrific—effect in China during the cultural revolution. (See The Mao Zedong Thought Shift from the Class-Analytical to Race-Ideological; Maoism and Wokism and the Tyranny of Bureaucratic Collectivism; The Cultural Revolution; The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones.)
Children are not the ones educating adults about gender. It’s adults encouraging children to think about gender identity. In one of my fields of expertise (criminology), we call this child sexualization. Children are raised in an environment where cultural programming has them thinking about gender and sexual activity very early on and in a particular way, according to a specific agenda. Classrooms are festooned with gender propaganda. Libraries are stocked with pornography. Doctors and nurses provoke children during intake assessments to consider whether they might be the other gender. After confusing them, teachers and doctors keep the knowledge from the parents, working behind their back to put the child on the path to becoming a permanent medical patient. This is grooming. (See Civic Spaces and the Illiberal Desire to Subvert Them; Whose Spaces Are These Anyway? Political Advocacy in Public Schools; Ideology in Public Schools—What Can We Do About It?; Dianetics in Our Schools; Defending Drag for Children; Drag Queen Lap Dance at Forsyth Tech: Humiliating the Gullible; If All This Strikes You as Perverse, You’re Right. It is; Kids Resisting Indoctrination; California to Hand Children to the Queer Lobby and the Medical Industrial Complex; The Gender Hoax and the Betrayal of Children by the Adults in Their Lives).
Turban has three elements to the argument he uses to bamboozle parents. The second is the gender role. I will leave that one to the side (it’s a sideways but obvious endorsement of gender stereotypes) and look at the first and third, which are really the same thing. The first is Bob Stoller’s crackpot notion of “gender identity,” manufactured in the late 1960s (Bob also believed in dream telepathy—see Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy). “The most basic part of gender identity is what I call our transcendent sense of gender,” writes Turban. (Bob would love this.) “In a way that goes beyond language, people often just feel male or female, and some more strongly than others.”
They “just feel male or female.” In other words, as I have been telling readers for a while now, this is a religion, replete with the construct of a soul: the transcendent gendered self—an angel or spirit—put in the wrong body, a body wrongly assigned a gender at birth. (By whom? A doctor.) The “transcendent gendered self” is not verifiable, as it’s entirely subjective. There’s no evidence for it. It can’t be rationally explained. It escapes language. It’s just a feeling, a feeling where a boy who is not a girl somehow knows what it would feel like to be one and, because he feels this way, he must be one. (See The Pelvis Tells the Story: Archeology and Physical Anthropology are Most Unkind).
It’s a feeling that one is not allowed to have about race. How does a white girl feel like a black girl? Why can’t she have chemicals to turn her skin darker? Why can’t she undergo facial racialization surgery? Her black self is her transcendent self. How can you deny her this? It’s her feeling, not yours. Ask Rachel Dolezal. She has always felt this way. At least that what she tells us. Why do you doubt her? (Am I a bad person because I do?) (See Stepping into Oppression; Racecraft and Witch Hunts. The American Humanist Association Tries Cancel Culture; The Strange Essentialisms of Identity Politics.) Swap out gender for race (or another species of animal) in Turban’s evidence for gender identity: “Some of my young patients draw themselves as a certain gender and have a ‘wow, this is me’ feeling.” That’s Dolezal. (For the record, when I was a kid, I was asked to draw myself as who I would like to be when I grew up and I drew a hippie. But it probably had nothing to do with the fact that this was in the late 1960s.)
“Others have strong positive feelings when people use certain pronouns for them, or strong negative feelings when people use other pronouns,” Turban writes. “As is the case with many emotions, it’s hard to describe this transcendent feeling in words.” Turban is telling you that, except for what a person says, there is no way to differentiate between a boy who says he is a girl because he finds it sexually arousing to perform a female activity or enter a female space, on the one hand, and a boy who really thinks he’s a girl, on the other. There’s no argument for why that shouldn’t matter (and lots of arguments as to why it should).
“The third part of gender identity is the physical domain—how we feel about our bodies,” Turban writes. As noted, this is the first part of gender identity. “Some people identify as transgender and are happy with their bodies. Others are distressed by their gendered physical attributes,” he continues. This is an interesting construction: “gendered physical attributes.” Since gender is determinable by gamete size and reproductive anatomy (again, if ambiguous, then chromosomes) why the need for three words when there is one word (gender) that sums up the entire thing? Overcomplicating things is a strategy that groomers use to confuse the target.
“They may feel that their deepening voices or the shapes of their chests are at odds with their senses of self,” Turban writes, as if children have not since time immemorial had to confront the reality of puberty. For tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years humans have dealt with these changes through rituals that mitigate the effects of liminality. This means boys become men and girls become women. These aren’t straitjacket rituals. They’re the ways humans naturally managed the anxieties that life presents at every turn. Turban wants psychiatrists to take over the role of parents and communities in negotiating the difficulties of normal life. He wants to cut out of the child’s life those who love him and make him dependent upon an industry that generates billions of dollars for executives and stockholders. (The Body as Primary Commodity: The Techno-Religious Cult of Transgenderism; Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds; Mystification in the Marketing of “Live-Saving Gender-Affirming Health Care”; Making Patients for the Medical-Industrial Complex; The Persistence of Medical Atrocities: Lobotomy, Nazi Doctors, and Gender Affirming Care; Thomas Szasz, Medical Freedom, and the Tyranny of Gender Ideology; The Function of Gender Ideology in Rationalizing Physician Harm..)
“This incongruence can lead to eating disorders, anxiety or depression,” Turban writes, “which is when doctors may consider gender-affirming medical interventions.” He should have thrown in more DSM diagnostic classifications. Why not? Gender dysphoria can be the master explanation, the underlying disease model, for a host of psychiatric disorders, all of which can be treated by manufacturing simulated sexual identities that require life-long patient care. (See Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy; Feeding the Medical-Industrial Complex.)
freedom and reason 