Judith Butler says the quiet parts out loud

Her statement on the Skrmetti decision is as stupid as you'd expect.

On June 18, the Supreme Court announced that it had voted 6-3 to uphold Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors. That same day, UC Berkeley published the reactions of various Berkeley “experts,” including Judith Butler. The charlatan wrote:

In upholding Tennessee’s law banning gender-affirming care for youth, the Supreme Court sets aside the findings of every major medical association that to deny such care constitutes a harm to the health of young people.

She continued:

This decision rests on a confusion about what is “care” and what is “harm.” Indeed, the harm that the decision does by denying care to trans and gender nonconforming youth goes unremarked except in the searing dissent authored by Justice Sotomayor: “The court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims.” After all, she points out, boys can take the same medications to become more masculine, and girls can receive the same treatments to appear more feminine. It appears that only when the treatment allows for transition from one sex to another that it becomes problematic. But if trans people are deprived of a form of care to which non-trans people have access, how is that not a problem of unequal treatment?

First, the misleading claim that “every major medical association” (such as the American Academy of Pediatrics) supports pediatric sex trait modification. As Dr. Julia Mason, AAP fellow and founding member of the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine, has stated in numerous interviews, the AAP never polled rank-and-file pediatricians about the best way to help kids with gender issues.

“Most of us first heard about the issue when we saw the AAP's 2018 Statement [endorsing ‘gender-affirming care’],” she told me.

It gets worse. In 2021, SEGM paid to have a booth at the AAP’s National Conference and Exhibition. The plan, Dr. Mason said, was to reach out to pediatricians, share copies of articles by SEGM members, and inform people about the low-quality evidentiary basis for pediatric gender medicine. After SEGM submitted the application and paid the $2500 deposit, the exhibition management company sent them a short email stating that their “request to exhibit is denied.”

This is what a “major medical association supporting gender-affirming care” looks like.

Back to Butler. I’d really love to know who she (and Sotomayor, in her dissent) is referring to when she mentions boys who take testosterone “to become more masculine” and girls who take estrogen “to appear more feminine.” If she’s talking about children with delayed puberty or hypogonadism (their testicles or ovaries are unable to produce enough testosterone or estrogen due to a genetic disorder, injury, or something else), then obviously this can’t be compared to so-called gender-affirming care. It’s one thing to prescribe hormones so that a young person’s endocrine system can function properly. It’s quite another thing to prescribe hormones to disrupt a kid’s endocrine system in the hope of making him/her appear more like the opposite sex. One scenario aids reproductive health; the other impairs it.

This argument is as ridiculous as saying that treating gender dysphoria with puberty blockers is no different than treating precocious puberty with blockers. There’s actually a very big difference: Kids with precocious puberty who are put on blockers eventually go through puberty. A gender dysphoric kid who takes blockers and continues with medical “transition” never goes through puberty. Rather, clinicians give him/her exclusively opposite-sex hormones to produce the secondary sex characteristics of the opposite sex. And no, these hormones do not induce the “correct puberty,” since there’s no such thing as a male body going through a female puberty, or vice versa.

“Sure, these treatments might have negative side effects (sterility, cognitive impairment, osteoporosis, etc.), but they improve the kid’s mental health!” proponents of pediatric gender medicine argue.

We actually don’t know one way or the other whether blockers and hormones improve mental health. What we do know is that all of the evidence supporting the claim that “gender-affirming care” decreases depression and anxiety is either “low” or “very low” in quality.¹

But even if there was good evidence to support this claim, is this really the way we want to go about helping these kids? By sterilizing them and turning them into lifelong medical patients? Call me crazy, but maybe there’s a more therapeutic approach we could take, one that helps kids to feel more comfortable in their bodies while keeping them rooted in material reality. In the meantime, we can try to make more space in society for gender nonconformity so that girly little boys and butch little girls don’t feel like they have to change everything about themselves to gain acceptance. Just a thought.

Speaking of regressive ideas about sex and gender—did you notice how Butler used the phrase “trans and gender nonconforming youth” in her statement about which kids need this type of “care”? One of the most horrifying aspects of this medical scandal has been seeing how quickly insane ideas have been normalized and propagated. First, it was only the “true trans” kid who needed blockers and hormones. Then, “nonbinary” kids needed them too. Now, kids who are merely gender nonconforming need to be medicalized.

They even have a new acronym for it: "TNBGNC.” Transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming.

We’re officially at the point where all the quiet parts have been said out loud. And yet people are still trying to sell this antigay pseudoscience as “progress.”

Please do not be afraid to correct them.

My book Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic is now available for preorder in the US and the UK! Go here to place your order.

1. This is according to the GRADE system, which is the trusted framework for assessing the quality of evidence in healthcare.