Non-Binary? Sure. Castration? No.
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| Why are some parents and clinicians so quick to pathologize a child's normal play with identity? |
I would agree fully with some social justice advocates that any human being should be able to express themselves peacefully and lawfully without fearing harm in a civilized society. That is certainly the ideal of any truly kind and ethical person. However, no such purely civilized society yet exists. And the likelihood of one blossoming into existence in an overpopulated and polluted world is becoming more dubious.
So, I am with anyone who is non-binary in the sense of male vs. female. I am against anyone who is non-binary in the sense of good vs. evil. I am against anyone who is non-binary in the sense of non-violence vs. violence. I am against anyone who is non-binary in the sense of anarchy vs. lawfulness.
I myself was non-binary in my early years during the 1950's. I despised team sports. I could not bear being naked around my male peers. I looked primarily to strong women as my role models. My identity certainly was not male in relation to the males in my working class environment. Yet I had male genitalia. I did not have an unfortunate self-hating obsession with those genitalia. Didn't think of them much then. I was lucky.
All this is meant to say that I am not a rabid and homophobic cis-male. On the contrary, I am a gay man with a hard-earned self-confidence in my sexuality and maleness. I do not expect everyone to deal with being non-binary as I have learned to. However, I do not condone turning simply non-binary childishness into a problem to be treated with hormones. Nor do I support castration as a treatment for gender identity issues.
My baccalaureate degree is in cellular biology with a minor in chemistry. I am acutely aware of the whims of human biology at the cellular level. Some rare individuals are born physically non-binary, with a combination of male and female sexual organ manifestations. The luck of the draw.
These hermaphroditic cases are rare anomalies. Because they are obvious anomalies, an argument can be made that they impede healthy development. A physician's attempt to surgically or chemically make these anomalies more easily lived with in a physically binary world might be a case of "doing no harm" in light of using medical means to a better quality of life. Perhaps, if all other options were exhausted.
This is different from having a psychological gender problem in a normal body. Having an intractable obsession with genitalia or other gender characteristics, male or female, is a disease, in the literal sense that it prevents the person from being at ease with their physical reality. Psychologists and psychiatrists as guilds have equivocated the literal and the figurative in relation to diseases and what they have qualified as disorders.
The miserable failure of psychologists and psychiatrists as guilds to come up with a compassionate, reproduceable and efficacious treatment for negative genital obsession is obvious. This would seem odd, if you were unaware of the deep and unresolved homophobia within those professional groups.
Evidence of that homophobia is the refusal to accept that non-binary behavior and gender obsession in children are two very different phenomena. The former is often a normal stage of homosexual development. The latter is not. But there is stubborn refusal among psychologists and psychiatrists to accept homosexual development as different and distinct (with its own normal and abnormal manifestations) from heterosexual development.
A persistently non-binary child is stigmatized socially perhaps. Their family internalizes the stigmatization which triggers fear and desperation to "do something". The child is made "the problem". Many gay men and lesbians who grow up into functional adults will share stories of encountering this process in their developments. They have emerged from the developmental crucible without any need for surgery or hormones.
A child who becomes adversely fixated on their normal genitalia is another matter. However, it is still likely that child may be homosexual but is unable to process gender identity issues due to their environment or their brain chemistry. The focus of their psychic confusion becomes the genitalia, when the confusion may well be more related to attraction or identification that is at odds with what their environment is telling them is "right" or "acceptable" or "lovable".
The failure of psychological and psychiatric treatments, as I see it, is the false notion that the fixation alone is the issue. Fixating on the patient's painful fixation is like picking at a wound. But, as I have stated, few psychologists or psychiatrists are willing to face parental disapproval by starting with the hypothesis that the child is gay or lesbian by nature. They would rather suggest to binary parents that the child can become binary in appearance, regardless of the child's birth gender.
Here lies the irony of the transgender movement, or political trend. Transgender individuals who have undergone chemical and/or physical castration are not at all non-binary. They have been altered to a binary-compliant form artificially. The non-binary male, possibly a gay male, is transformed into an imitation of a binary woman. The non-binary female, possibly a lesbian, is transformed into an imitation of a binary man.
The actual sexual behaviors of transgender adults would support this theory. While transgender adults may associate primarily with their chosen gender in social and life-partner contexts, they tend to seek sexual encounters with people of their rejected birth sex, their same sex. Castrated birth-males with cis-males. Castrated birth-females with cis-females.
The confusion between non-binary and binary identity is obvious in people with gender issues. Why wouldn't it be? They are individuals with major basic identity problems. Denial of this dysfunction by politicizing the debate over whether or not it is disease is useless when considering what kind of help will be most useful and effective to ease their suffering.
The simple solution, of course, is to buy into their denial of disease or disorder. This is what a segment of the medical community is doing. Offering the fix of hormones and eventual irreversible mutilation readily pleases some parents who would prefer to see their child as broken rather than seeing them as homosexual, or other from their heterosexual selves. I speculate that parents who may have unresolved sexual identity issues would be most prone to prefer a transgender child to a homosexual child.
The political push from within the gay male and lesbian populations in developed countries to become normalized in law with heterosexuals in terms of military service and marriage has had its cost. Developmental sciences have backed away from the serious and critical study of homosexual identity. It has become too politically charged.
So, without serious and critical science on homosexuality as a functional state of being with its own normal developmental course, those who would still deny the existence of healthy homosexuality have the freedom to apply philosophy and guess work to dealing with potentially homosexual children who have become stuck in a developmental phase.
Transgenderism has been tolerated in some societies over homosexuality for centuries. In societies where homosexuals may be tortured and killed publicly, transgender individuals have had the option to join cults or to hide in disguise. Castration also has an ancient history in human societies. Conquerors have castrated whole male populations of the defeated. Potentates have castrated male servants to prevent accidental impregnation of aristocratic females. The merging of transgender disguise with castration in a heterosexually dominated world is not surprising.
Perhaps the greatest failing of today's homosexual-rights activists has been the acceptance of castration as a legitimate treatment of genital obsession and self-hatred. For centuries, homosexual men have been seen as victims of stunted personal development, while lesbians have been seen as the embodiment of penis envy. In accepting castration as valid treatment, today's LGBTQ activists have sacrificed a major gain in the social validation of homosexual men and women as equal, distinctly different and healthy human beings.
The lobotomy was once the treatment of choice for violent paranoid schizophrenics and "promiscuous" homosexual males in state hospitals. In the absence of detailed research, electroshock was used in many cases where its effect was untherapeutic and neurologically damaging. Teeth with cavities were once simply pulled, not treated. Broken limbs used to be summarily amputated. Chemical castration is still a legal treatment for certain dangerous sex criminals, who do not respond to other treatment. Female genital mutilation, practiced in some cultures today, is largely condemned, even by some who support transgender castration.
Given how far our medical treatments have evolved away from doing irreversible harm to patients in the name of curing them, why are LGBTQ activists and a segment of the treatment providers in developed nations enthusiastically supporting the butchering of healthy young bodies as "treatment" for a psychological problem? The answer is doubtless complex, but I strongly believe at its core lies a misunderstanding, or perhaps dismissal, of the normal development of homosexual identity due to an unresolved homophobia in the practitioners and supporters of these barbaric practices.
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