It's Not Transphobic To Say Your Daughter Is a Girl: The Wise Lesbian Guide for Progressives

Résumé

Every progressive parent of a girl on the path to medical gender transition must read this tiny, powerful book.

It's Not Transphobic to Say Your Daughter Is A The Wise Lesbian Guide for Progressives allows parents to see the current explosive growth in girls seeking "gender transition" through the lenses of sociology, gay and lesbian history, and recent data on the long-term risk of childhood and adolescent medicalization in the pursuit of expressing trans identities.

Parents uneasy with the idea of radical medical interventions as a solution to their daughters' deep psychological and social distress will find here affirmation of the wisdom of asking questions, thinking critically, and exploring a range of non-medicalizing ways to support their gender-non-conforming or gender distressed daughters. The author, a sociologist and social worker, traces for readers the origins of psychiatry's pathologizing of gender non-conformity, reading the practice of "diagnosing" children's violations of gender conventions as a means of "treating" nascent homosexuality. From this vantage point, contemporary trans medicine looks like the resumption of 20th Century efforts to use hormones and surgery to treat or eliminate homosexuality --- deeply homophobic, deeply sexist, and particularly devastating to the newest target children and adolescents.

The media positions questioning trans ideology --- the set of beliefs underwriting the most visible elements in the trans movement --- as an expression of extreme Right-wing Republican impulses, an allegation that inhibits progressive, feminist, LGBT allies from asking the questions that must be asked about child and adolescent transition, linguistic interventions that shift common understandings of sex, sexuality, and sex-based rights, and the ideology itself. As you read through chapters on the homophobic history of the "treatment" of "men trapped in women's bodies," institutional ideological capture, the pseudoscience and legitimate science on cross-sex hormones and elective surgeries, and strategies for helping your daughter feel comfortable growing into adulthood in her female body, whether she is same-sex or opposite-sex attracted, you'll become increasingly convinced that it's not transphobic to say your daughter is a girl.