The Transgender Movement Rediscovers Gender Roles

By Nate Hochman

Monday, August 15, 2022

A May 2021 video on child gender transitions from the Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) that has been making the rounds in conservative Internet circles is a particularly stark example of how the benign-sounding language of medical expertise — “adolescents” who are “coming to the realization that they might be trans or gender diverse” can now be “treated,” BCH’s Dr. Jeremi Carswell informs viewers — can mask an ideology with serious consequences for gender-confused youth. But it’s also an unwitting testament to the contradictions sewn into that ideology, which often go unchallenged amid the zealous enforcement of trans orthodoxy in medical circles.

In the one-minute clip — “When does a child know they’re transgender?” — Dr. Carswell, the director of BCH’s “Gender Multispecialty Service,” justifies sex changes for young children on the grounds that “a child will often know that they are transgender from the moment that they have any ability to express themselves.” She goes on:

And parents will often tell us this. We have parents who tell us that their kids, they knew from the minute they were born, practically, in actions like refusing to get a haircut or standing to urinate — trying to stand to urinate, refusing to stand to urinate — trying on siblings’ clothing, playing with the quote, “opposite gender” toys, things like that.

In a saner era, all this would be chalked up to the child in question being a “tomboy” or, to use a newly minted term, a “tomgirl” — a boy or girl who behaves in a manner that conforms more with the gender roles of the opposite sex. For most of human history, this has been an exceedingly common phenomenon. “In a US study from 2012, while nearly half of girls reported being traditional girls, the rest almost equally identified as either ‘in-betweens’ or tomboys,” the Guardian noted in 2014. It was routinely treated as a harmless, largely unremarkable aspect of childhood. Today, however, the experts to whom we outsource medical judgments have decided that it necessitates life-altering sex changes requiring surgery and a lifelong cocktail of medications.

More to the point, Carswell’s argument that engaging in “opposite gender” activities is proof of a child’s transgender identity flies in the face of what feminists have told us since at least the 1960s. The Left’s long war against “gender roles” was traditionally based on a desire to liberate men and women from social expectations about male and female behavior. In my hometown of Portland, Ore., and on my left-wing liberal-arts college campus, one could often see the popular slogan “raise boys and girls the same way” — originally attributed to the feminist artist Jenny Holzer — emblazoned on T-shirts and bumper stickers. “We can look at the ways we raise kids as an index to how unfinished the feminist revolution really is,” Katha Pollitt declared in a 1995 essay for the New York Times. “Biological determinism may reassure some adults about their present, but it is feminism, the ideology of flexible and converging sex roles, that fits our children’s future.” Last year, the California state legislature went so far as to mandate gender-neutral toy aisles. As I reported at the time:

Beginning on January 1, 2024, any large retailer in California that fails to provide “a reasonable selection” of products in a “gender neutral section . . . regardless of whether they have been traditionally marketed for either girls or boys” will be fined $250. Subsequent violations of the new gender-neutrality mandate — which will still allow gender-specific toys and aisles at stores — will cost them $500. Assembly Bill 1084 was signed into law by California governor Gavin Newsom this past Saturday, purportedly justified by the fact that gender-segregating “clothing and toys sections of department stores . . . incorrectly implies that their use by one gender is appropriate,” according the bill’s author, Assemblyman Evan Low (D., Silicon Valley).

Assemblyman Low was operating on the antiquated feminist assumption that, as he wrote in a statement, “the segregation of toys by a social construct of what is appropriate for which gender is the antithesis of modern thinking.”

But today, as the transgender revolution devours the feminism that preceded it, gender roles are back with a vengeance. “Modern thinking” now militates in favor of gender-segregated toys and garb. So much so, in fact, that a boy’s choice to play with Barbie dolls, or a girl’s choice to wear masculine clothing, is taken in itself as proof that young people today must have access to “a full suite of surgical options for transgender teens and young adults,” according to the BCH website, including “vaginoplasty, metoidioplasty, phalloplasty, chest reconstruction, breast augmentation, facial harmonization and other gender affirmation surgeries.” As my colleague Alexandra DeSanctis noted on Twitter this morning:

This worldview attempts to argue simultaneously that 1) we must reject gender stereotypes because they’re entirely socially constructed and 2) we should actively “transition” young children based on their choice of “opposite gender” toys. These beliefs are mutually exclusive.

Alexandra, in her charity, might be giving transgender ideology too much credit — while to a rational observer, it might seem that rejecting gender stereotypes and transitioning young children who abide by the wrong ones are “mutually exclusive,” the latter is the inevitable conclusion of the former. In insisting that gender roles are entirely socially constructed, the Left arrived at the position that gender itself could change, depending on an individual’s personal feelings on the matter; but once that project arrived at its logical conclusion — i.e., the conviction that individuals can transition from one gender to the other — it suddenly found itself back at square one. One can only “transition” from one gender to another if those genders have concrete, distinct characteristics. Thus, in deconstructing the gender binary, the cultural revolutionaries have embraced a much more radical version of sex distinctions and, yes, stereotypes, than anything on offer from the older tradition. In our moment of social upheaval, I often return to a prescient quote from Russell Kirk’s seminal “Ten Conservative Principles”:

When successful revolutionaries have effaced old customs, derided old conventions, and broken the continuity of social institutions — why, presently they discover the necessity of establishing fresh customs, conventions, and continuity; but that process is painful and slow; and the new social order that eventually emerges may be much inferior to the old order that radicals overthrew in their zeal for the Earthly Paradise.

It is the nature of radicals to eat their own. Robespierre himself was put to death by the very Jacobins with whom he had fought side by side in the French Revolution. The older feminist crusade against gender roles was only ever a waypoint on the road to today’s transgender moment. Yesterday’s radicals are today’s moderates. The rolling cultural revolution continues.