by Helen Joyce, The Critic
What happens to those caught up in the social contagion, once it has passed?
Young men, said Aristotle, “are changeable and fickle in their desires, which are violent when they last, but quickly over”. (He had little to say about women, regarding them as inferior because they couldn’t produce semen, which he attributed to their bodies being too cold.)
Setting aside the cod science, most countries’ legal systems recognise, like Aristotle, that the desires of youth are strong but fleeting. With varying age cutoffs, laws protect young people from regret by banning activities that risk long-term harm, such as buying alcohol or cigarettes, taking on debt or getting tattooed.
This insight that teenagers and young adults are impulsive and mercurial sits awkwardly with the central tenets of trans ideology: that everyone has an innate gender identity, and that it is reasonable to align one’s body with that identity by taking hormones and undergoing surgery.
Never mind that these claims are contradictory — if gender identity is distinct from sex, what can it possibly mean to align the two? Nonetheless they are written into many countries’ laws, preached by gender clinicians and expounded on TikTok by excitable neopronouned youths.
These claims imply that no child is too young to declare a trans identity, and to be believed. Diane Ehrensaft, an influential psychologist based in San Francisco, has said that toddlers can send non-verbal “gender messages”. A baby boy may signal a female identity by unpopping his onesie to mimic a dress, or a baby girl may rip out a hairclip to indicate she is really a boy. Ehrensaft has advised parents of children as young as three to “affirm” their gender identities — that is, to lie to them and everyone else about their sex.