Andrew Sullivan, who I've read off-and-on since he was at the New Republic magazine, asks: Is this "The Greatest Scandal In Gay Rights History? How journalists - yes, journalists - want to shut down reporting on child transition."
Discussing one program, he notes:
More than a third of the kids pushed onto the trans track had autism, sometimes severe. Others were victims of domestic abuse...No questions about other aspects of a child’s mental health were considered if the kid was identifying as the opposite sex.
It's the fall of 1968. I'm in a ramshackle college bar in a midwestern mill town nursing a Stroh's 3.2 beer -- a legal drink for 18-year-olds. A new girl (I'm unaware how new) occupies the neighboring stool. I say, "hi." She says, "hi."
We start talking. She's from New York City. I ask if she's visiting relatives, one of two reasons an NYC native would turn up locally -- turnpike pile-up being the other. No, she's having medical procedures performed. "Oh?" says I, with a thoughtful pause, "what procedures are those?" I'm perplexed. My town is not known for medical tourism. She tells me she is having her sex changed from male to female and prepares for a confrontation she doesn't get.
As a Time Magazine reader back then, I knew everything that happened in the world a week after it happened. They'd informed me that sex reassignment surgery was available for those who were born one sex but were "hard-wired" for the other (with only two genders to choose from at the time). This is a rare condition, they explained, which affected maybe one in 100,000 -- whereas we now know it's half of the second grade at the local elementary school. How an otherwise credible publication could get its numbers so far off is beyond me.
Another possible explanation for the numerical disparity between then and now is "water fluoridation." The cumulative effect of all that fluoride could be fewer cavities and more gender-swapping. Naturally, the last part went unmentioned by the public health authorities to prevent undo discomfort in the rubes who simply refuse to cut down on their consumption of sugary sodas and would rather lose their teeth than rearrange their genitals.
There could be another possible, if unlikely, explanation. I once heard of a certain medical procedure where the number of operations performed in a locale was determined by the number of surgeons who perform it. Unfortunately, more people died who got the operation than among the people who remained ignorant of the cause of their suffering and took antacids instead -- death being the sometimes side-effect of the procedure. Apparently, this was not considered a sufficient reason to stop performing it.
Also, I had a friend who was a resident at the local trauma center. He told me to avoid a certain surgeon whose blade should never be allowed to touch flesh. Everyone at the hospital knew about him but the guy still performed operations so...it's good to have a powerful union on your side. Sure, it's a delicate question, but one that needs to be asked: could the increased availability of medical specialists dedicated to the treatment of the condition account for the swelling caseload? Personally, I doubt it. Fluoridation, that's the cause.
It was the presence of a highly talented plastic surgeon, a man of my slight acquaintance, that made my town the "sex-change capital of the world." He had quasi-nude statues on the lawn in front of his office depicting the human form as GQ and the Swimsuit Edition intended (pre-body positive days). As a scruffy thirteen-year-old, I hitchhiked around town (considered safe means of travel by my peers -- which is not the same as being safe, though we had no problems). I got a ride from the doctor once. His "Truman Capote" like manner made him memorable. I knew him for a total of maybe eight-and-a-half minutes and rather liked him.
A few years later he was on a local television show to talk about prophecy, not puberty blockers. He combined the rhymes of Nostradamus (also a doctor) with the Book of Revelations to place the Second Coming at the close of the second millennium. He mentioned his own modest role in it (he was in one of the crowds, I think). With hindsight, his foresight was a bit off -- unless it was the second coming of crazy he anticipated.
He was the reason the "journeyman-lady" came to town for her transformation. Today, she'd go into the military. She was born a boy, she explained, but always had the mind of a girl. She was required to go through counseling and live as a girl for a time as she underwent hormone treatments. She seemed very much a female when I met her but the below-the-tummy "tuck" was still in her future. I thought, sure, changing your mind can be hard, but is changing everything but your mind easier? I did not try to dissuade her, though, because of what happened a couple weeks before.
I was in a different bar, one with "lounge" in the name, a classier place where the upholstery ain't held together with tape and they charge an extra nickel a drink to keep out the riff-raff. I'd spent several weeks on a summer job in a hot and loud foundry that produced missing fingers among the employees. Having worked overtime and escaped with digits intact, I felt both fortunate and flush with cash. I also found myself in the surprising position of talking to a beautiful, well-accoutered girl. She told me she was going to have a nose job because she didn't like her nose and she was finally doing something about it. This made no sense because, in her case, nature had achieved the pinnacle of nasal perfection, or so I thought.
Admittedly, I come from a family where the proboscis is a prominent facial feature. My father said we had "Noble Roman Noses," even though we weren't Italian. Perhaps it was my distorted view of nasal normality that caused me to counsel her hotness against the action. She had a quite lovely nose, I said, and a simple cost/benefit analysis -- given the possible downside risks -- shows she should not undergo the procedure. She reacted with great hostility, the way wrong-headed people often do when a right-headed person tries to correct their behavior for the overall benefit of the entire society -- a society whose medical resources need to be focused on real medical problems rather than catering to the vanity of stunningly attractive, cash-flush females. In her defense, she did leave town to have the procedure performed, maybe because she wanted to wake up still a girl.
Back at the shabbier bar, a large man came over to the "journeyman lady" and gave me a stern look as he addressed her. "Time to leave." He seemed more like a bodyguard than a friend or relative. As they left I thought, given how open she was about her transition, a bodyguard might be a prudent precaution.
A few weeks later she was in that bar again and at the center of a celebration. She was now as much of a woman as she was ever going to be. I thought of that old saying, "no matter where you go, there you are!" I wondered if that applied to bodies as well as places. If so, her problems were by no means at an end.
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