Obey Thy Child
When Governor Walz signed an executive order last March to declare Minnesota a ‘trans refuge’ state, Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan was brimming with pride. She knew she was on the right side of history and wanted everyone to notice. So she stepped in front of the microphone and paraphrased a wise old saying from Maya Angelou:
WHEN OUR CHILDREN TELL US WHO THEY ARE [...] BELIEVE THEM
Very apropos. After all, Angelou had been a civil rights crusader in the 1960s. Trans is basically the new Black, haven’t you heard?
According to Flanagan, parents have no right to question their children’s gender identities. All that matters is what kids tell you. Asking for proof that your son or daughter will benefit from cross-sex hormones is hateful. Differential diagnosis is a form of cis-heteronormative oppression. Controlled trials are unkind.
But in the original version of the quote (coined in an off-camera discussion with Oprah Winfrey) Angelou used the word ‘show’ instead of ‘tell’.
What the poet laureate really meant was that talk is cheap. Words don’t always align with reality and you should not automatically trust what people say. Believe the evidence of your own eyes and experiences. Don’t be gullible.
In fact, Flanagan’s quote was a complete bastardization of Angelou’s. Rather than being wary of words, Flanagan demands that parents blindly trust that their kids know what they’re talking about when they say they’re trans. She might as well have said when Reddit tells your kids who they are, believe it.
But there is no blood test, brain scan, or conclusive questionnaire that can detect gender dysphoria. The only criterion for diagnosis is a verbal declaration. Words. And there is also no evidence base to prove the safety and efficacy of these treatments.
Again, we are told to rely on the assurances of professional groups that refuse to show their work. RCTs? NNT? COI? STFU.
Flanagan did what TRAs do best: sophistry. She hijacked a wise old saying from yesteryear and twisted its meaning to make her own intellectually bankrupt political message seem more respectable than it actually is. Whereas Maya Angelou fought to desegregate schools, Lt. Gov. Flanagan wants to de-sex adolescent bodies. There is no moral equivalence between the two.
It’s the same thing they did to Hillary Clinton. Women’s rights are human rights? Not when it comes to single-sex spaces. In 1995, our first lady flew to Beijing and argued that women living in war zones deserve protection from rape. But now the slogan made famous by that speech has been distorted to justify something completely different: male sex-offenders serving time in women’s prisons. Oh well! Trans rights are human rights.
To this day, I’m still not sure what to make of the knife on Flanagan’s Protect Trans Kids shirt. Perhaps it’s a symbol of cutting off body parts to ‘protect’ kids from the wrongness of their anatomy. (He played with dolls? Cut off his balls. She climbed a tree? Mastectomy.)
Or maybe the knife is supposed to represent justified violence against transphobes. Who knows? I do, however, appreciate the designer’s use of hackneyed tattoo images to convey the message that minors know what’s best for them. The garish calligraphy, the rose-and-dagger cliché…it’s just perfect. People never regret tattoos, you see. Especially the ones they get as teenagers.
As a teenager, I started saving money to get enormous, well-nigh cartoonish breast implants when I turned eighteen. I felt self-conscious about my modest endowment because people teased me about it. They bullied me about a lot of other things too. By the time I was eighteen, I no longer wanted oversize breast implants, or any breast implants at all. My B-cup boobs managed to get in the way when I was doing things like swinging a golf club (badly). I also no longer wanted to give gross men who thought all women should look like Penthouse pets what they wanted. I'd decided my small boobs and big butt were, at least to some degree, and anti gross pig barometer. I learned, however, that there are gross pigs who will go ahead and use a woman for sex while making her feel bad about the parts of her body she's insecure about.
I know that getting ridiculously large breast implants is not the same thing as having one's breasts removed altogether or having one's genitalia permanently surgically altered. I could always have had the stupid breast implants removed. However, getting oversize breast implants would not make me become "my true self" as I believed it would when I was a teenager any more than taking cross-sex hormones and having radical surgical procedures will make anyone else into their "true self." Plus, I'd desisted from this idea by the time I was eighteen.
I don't want to downplay the distress anyone feels when we've learned to hate our bodies (and ourselves) because people have belittled and hurt us. I'm almost sixty years old now and I'm still dealing with the repercussions of other people's abuse. I've had minor cosmetic procedures done over the years. I had liposuction to reduce the fatty padding under my chin and veneers put over my four top front teeth. I've never had a rhinoplasty, and I've never had breast implants or liposuction on any other part of my body. Doing these things would not make me become "my true self." The idea that cosmetic procedures will make a person become their true self is a lie fed to us by an industry that profits from people's insecurities.
People who have been severely abused (including bullying) tend not to like themselves. "Gender affirmation" is a way of eradicating the "weird kids" who have been bullied into not liking who they are. This includes kids on the autism spectrum, gay kids, gender-nonconforming kids, and other oddballs like me, who was straight, liked wearing baggy clothes, and didn't like adhering to the misogynistic roles assigned to my sex.
It's so hard to live in Minnesota these days. My daughter was transed 4+ years ago in Minnesota. Everyone from CPS, the play therapist, school, my Ex, and others hid this from me while illegally withholding my daughter from me. I share co-legal. Now that it's legal to trans a minor in Minnesota, I really wonder if right minded people are going to put up with this? I haven't and I am in constant lawsuits to fight this evil cult that has taken over almost everything in Minnesota.