How to disagree: Reflecting on two months of The One Percent

Today we'll respond to some reader comments, reaffirm our aspirations, contextualize recent (controversial) guest posts with Trans Studies, and centre academic freedom

We launched The One Percent at the end of October, almost two months ago. There are 240 of you following along now and we’re very grateful for the support!

We devised this newsletter with a few goals in mind:

1. Share some of our academic writing and thinking;

2. Share our musings and personal experiences as researchers studying detransition and trans medicine; and

3. Showcase community writing by individuals who have personal experiences of transitioning and/or detransitioning (broadly defined).

Over the past few weeks, we have noticed quite a few comments and feedback in response to our articles, and to our guest writers.

In many ways, it’s useful to receive feedback. In fact, we welcome and encourage it.

In our first ever article, Introducing The One Percent, we wrote:

This writing space will also be open to hosting critiques or commentaries of our research. So if you have feedback, please get in touch!

Today’s article will reflect on, and respond to, some of the comments we have received since launching.

It will also reaffirm our values and purposes as community-facing academics and it will connect recent guest posts with Trans Studies writing.

We hope that this will also work as a reminder of our aims, which we laid out in The One Percent’s manifesto, shared a few weeks back (“Why do we study detransition?”).

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To start, here’s a quick snippet from our first post, which established our commitment to an honest presentation of detransition, including facilitating a platform for a range of identities, perspectives, and ideologies:

We firmly resist and reject the treatment of detransition as a polemic and a culture-war issue, and we believe that these longstanding debates have distracted people from really engaging with detransition as a fully human experience. But we also think that an honest presentation of detransition—one that is willing to tolerate uncomfortable emotions, re-evaluate past beliefs, and embrace uncertainty—has been largely missing, especially from academic scholarship and mainstream trans discourse.

[…]

First, we aim to discuss the latest research on detransition, retransition, and gender fluidity from a thoughtful and scholarly perspective. We’ll document some of the ideological battles within the science of transition and detransition, examining the foundational studies on detransition and regret. We’ll also present what’s new, including our own research.

Second, we intend to provide a platform for trans/nonbinary/detrans/retrans research, writing, and community discussion.

Third, we will share some personal stories about how the personal and professional struggles of doing detransition research brought us—two seemingly antagonistic researchers who initially came from opposite sides of the gender medicine wars—together.

This may be what sets us apart as academics, rather than activists or plain cultural critics.

However, we also feel the need to point out that transphobia is a serious issue and we don’t support the misgendering of trans people, the suggestion that all of transitioning is “harm,” or the idea that most trans people will eventually detransition.

Transphobia and the trans-critical movement are real

At the backdrop of The One Percent is a growing socially conservative movement that seeks to legislate away trans people’s rights and dignity. The right-wing and trans-critical attacks on trans young people, gender-diversity, and overall LGBTQ+ rights happening around the world is real and it’s scary.

We are living through a painful era and it’s hard to predict where the next few years will go. The dehumanization of trans people with respect to bathroom legislation in the US is just one example of the scapegoating of transness, especially trans women.

There are many people writing Substacks on such topics: Julia Serano, Kai Cheng Thom, and Erin Reed are just a few good examples.

The broader right-wing and trans-critical discourse paints trans women and transfeminine people as dangerous predators, and trans men, nonbinary AFAB folks, and detrans women as “attention seekers” or mentally ill, duped, victims of patriarchy.

Detransitioned men are sometimes left unconsidered altogether.

We have ourselves written about the risks of politicization on trans issues, and gender-affirming healthcare specifically, by opportunistic conservative political actors.

But some recent comments have prompted us to affirm our commitment to academic freedom and engaging with the full diversity of detrans viewpoints.

For instance, in an article about developing a detrans support website, we were called “charlatans.” And then there was a fair bit of “debate” in the comments last week in response to Nico’s guest post.

Anti-intellectualism, information eco-systems, and “guilt by association”

We’re living in a time of profound anti-intellectualism and polarization of information ecosystems (e.g., online echo chambers).

When confronted with ideas or stories with which we disagree (and that evoke strong emotions in us), we can sometimes respond with what has been called “guilt by association,” or a reputational smear strategy. Essentially, instead of engaging with the ideas of our opponent that we find objectionable, a “witch hunt” is launched to discredit the person’s character by linking them to “bad actors.” Sometimes these personal links may in fact be true, but often they are false.

While we can understand why this happens, we don’t see this as a productive response, a healthy way to disagree, or a way to build bridges.

But this kind of practice has also become so normalized that we sometimes don’t even stop and think critically about it! It comes almost as second nature.

Academics who are public-facing, especially those who work on controversial topics such as trans/detrans, vaccination, or abortion, can face a lot of criticism, backlash, and even populist witch hunts.

One such case emerged a few years ago with a nonbinary academic who studies pedophiles/minor-attracted people for the purpose of encouraging treatment and reducing sexual violence against children. This researcher lost their tenure-track academic job as a result of an organized right-wing smear campaign.

These witch hunts can be instigated by the Right, such as the case mentioned above. But they also come from the Left.

We personally know many “affirming” trans clinicians and researchers who have been subject to cancellations because they advocated for more research into trans identity development or gender dysphoria, for example.

We ourselves have experienced some of this already for researching and writing about detransition—from “both sides,” several times. We won’t go into the psychological damage that can come from being publicly attacked and misrepresented, but it’s worth mentioning.

While this approach usually comes from a place of good intention, it’s an important element behind the shunning that can happen to detransitioners when they express regret or question the care they received. Not only that, “cancel culture” and shunning strokes divisions among trans/LGBTQ+ communities during a time we most need to be united.

Many trans and queer activists have begun to openly advocate for discussion across divides.

Kai Cheng Thom is a brilliant writer and a transfeminine queer activist in Toronto who wrote a great op-ed in Xtra magazine about this exactly.

Clementine Morrigan, of the podcast Fucking Cancelled, is another queer Canadian artist and activist who focuses on analyzing some of these toxic dynamics within Leftist queer culture.

Some of the dynamics that unfolded in the comments on Nico’s article last week (e.g., applying guilt-by-association without quite knowing all of the facts) can, according to Morrigan, operate similar to policing, but without having any formal process in place.

Now, don’t get us wrong. We welcome critical feedback and engagement! And we expected some of that with his ideas, specifically. Why?

Because the perspective he shared was one of caution surrounding pediatric trans medicine, a perspective that was formed from his own history of trans activism.

Pablo (who invited Nico to write) also thought it was important to have a detrans perspective from a non-English speaking country to show that these discussions are happening elsewhere, not just in Europe and North America.

Although we do not agree with everything shared by our guest writers (we don’t even agree on everything among ourselves!), we to provide academic and community/lived experience perspectives.

This includes the full range of perspectives held by LGBTQ+ and detransitioned people.

As it happens, some—perhaps even many—detrans folks do apply critical thinking with regards to at least some aspects of the prevailing gender-affirming model of care.

Lay shared this in her guest post last week, for example (which, by the way, did not get any of the backlash that Nico did!):

I also believe that GNC people should get to do whatever they want to their bodies to a reasonable extent, with enough research and therapy. Despite that being the case, and me firmly wanting transition to still be an option for severe cases of dysphoria, I still believe that the way that doctors and the trans community treat people questioning their gender identity or considering transition is unhelpful at best, and at times incredibly harmful in ways that could very much have been prevented.

[…]

We detrans folks are not all weapons against the trans community. We may be bitter about how we were treated and how we were harmed by the TQ+ community, but many of us (if not most) still deeply care about transgender people, dysphoric people, and all GNC people…

I believe we can all do better, and that trans people, detrans people, bio/cis women, all marginalized folks can build bridges between the communities and find middle ground to finally minimize harm. That is my firm goal as a feminist, detrans activist and trans ally.

We welcome trans, nonbinary, and detrans people who have similar experiences, but who have come to an entirely different perspectives to write something in response!

Are our recent guest writers alone in their views?

Some main points of our recent guest writers, Lay and Nico, were of thoughtfulness and curiosity regarding trans medical interventions, particularly as they intersect with psychiatric disability, physical health, and childhood. They called for thinking toward an ethics of community care.

Drawing the most heat, Nico also documented the history of a trans family organization in Chile (founded by himself) that took a non-medical approach.

To our knowledge, this was not uncommon thinking in Canada, the US, and the UK in the 2000s-2010s. These early groups advocated for social acceptance for trans and gender nonconforming children, expanding room for gender diversity. But they were not exactly championing the pediatric medical model we see today. Their main function was resisting the previous generation’s pathologization/conversion approach that viewed transness as behaviours to be clinically corrected vis-à-vis behaviour modification.

As academics, to help us make sense of gender diversity and the emergence of detransition, we often borrow ideas from Trans Studies scholars.

This is an academic discipline where we also see a lot of criticality and thoughtfulness with regards to the recent social and discursive production of the “transgender child.” The book Trans kids: Being gendered in the twenty-first century, written by Tey Meadow, who is a queer and trans theorist, is a good example. Jules Gill-Peterson also has a book called Histories of the transgender child worth checking out.

Spanish trans man and sociologist Miquel Missé has also deliberated on this topic. In his book The myth of the wrong body, Missé dedicates chapter 5, “Trojan horses in a trans revolution,” to exploring the social production of the “trans minor” and its linkage to trans medicalization and pathologization. Missé writes:

Depathologization, in my opinion, means that we don’t call it [trans] an illness anymore, yes, but it means more than that. It means understanding trans issues beyond something biological that requires medical solutions and instead as something social, cultural, and political. (p. 88)

He continues, reflecting on early medical interventions and what messages they send about trans people and gender diversity overall:

[W]hen we insist on the importance of modifying the body as soon as possible, what we’re basically saying about the bodies of visibly trans people is they are not desirable, that it is better not to look like them.

[…]

And I ask myself: are we maybe overdoing it with the information we’re giving these kids about body transformation?

[…]

Some trans activists have been saying this for years: if only all the time spent on medical solutions to being transgender could be dedicated to empowerment, visibility, and body positivity (pp. 90-97).

Another Trans Studies scholar and bioethicist, Sahar Sadjadi, raised a similar point over a decade ago, when the category of the “transgender child” was just starting to take shape.

In a 2013 article titled The endocrinologist’s office—Puberty suppression: Saving children from a natural disaster?, Sadjadi wrote:

The goal of this short analysis is not to argue against puberty suppression but to draw attention to complexities overshadowed by the narrative of saving children from the looming disaster of puberty and from future abject lives as transgender adults, as told by some advocates of treatment.

[…]

Specters of violence and suicide among transgender youth and adults, as inevitable consequences of puberty, are frequently mobilized to achieve a compelling narrative about the necessity of medically treating children.

[…]

[Mainstream narratives about the tragedy of adult transness] turns on the familiar stereotypes of transgender people to mobilize public sentiments, portraying transgender people who have not received medical treatment in childhood as inherently damaged.

[…]

The treatment is being implemented, however, under the pressure of the emergency of saving the child from the devastation assumed to follow the onset of puberty. It must be remembered that puberty suppression as the first step to medical transition, if followed by cross-sex hormones, which has been the case for almost all reported cases, leads to infertility due to the permanent immaturity of the gonads and the reproductive tract. The absence of the discussion of sterilization of children as a major ethical challenge in this bioethics article, and many other clinical debates on puberty suppression, is striking (pp. 254-297).

The last point of Sadjadi’s analysis deserves more attention, and we will dedicate more focus on that in the future to engage with the topic trans/detrans sexual health and reproductive justice.

[As a quick note for clarity: infertility is a consequence of the pathway from pubertal suppression at an early stage of puberty (e.g., Tanner 2) and moving directly to hormonal therapy. This is because sexual maturation has not been completed and gametes are immature. Fertility is generally presumed to be maintained on hormonal therapy alone.]

But in brief, more than a decade on, in a longitudinal follow-up of Dutch trans children (who are now adults), between a third (of trans women) to almost half (of trans men) of the sample reported infertility regret caused by early medical interventions and state-enforced sterilization.

To drive this point home even further, transfeminine writer rosza daniel lang/levitsky wrote a compelling piece on the topic of pubertal suppression, the history of conversion practices, trans eugenics, and reproductive justice, which you can read here. It is aptly titled “sterilization, trans kids, and the eugenic imaginary: all the doctors are friends (but not our friends).”

Critical thinking with regards to trans medicine has long been foundational to the discipline of Trans Studies, not only to advocate for better access to interventions, to humanize gender-diverse people, and to bring attention to pathologizing clinical approaches, but also to call into question some of the ideas that underly these practices (and the potential harms of treatments).

For anyone who would like a copy of these articles, please send us a message or email us.

Final thoughts

Fundamentally, as researchers, we are committed to academic freedom, the free exchange of ideas, and to research ethics.

We do not stand for transphobia, we do not support legal bans on trans medicine, and we do not stand with the trans-critical/gender-critical movement.

But we are also not in the business of suppressing detrans people from sharing their perspectives—even if we may disagree with some of these positions!

To do so would go against the original ethos of The One Percent, which we created with the purpose of providing a space for a range of detrans voices and to explore difficult topics.

It would also be academically dishonest (and bad sociology of medicine) to suppress some of the complex truths of detrans perspectives and their activism. Some of it can be, indeed, incredibly uncomfortable to hear and sit with, especially for some LGBTQ+ people. But it’s important for our communities to know about.

As we have said, we reaffirm support for trans, nonbinary, detrans, and all GNC people, data-driven transition-related healthcare, and our commitment to a space where a wide range of lived experiences can be considered.

We would like to end here by sharing this quote, written by French sociologist Gustave Le Bon, in his 1895 work The crowd: A study of the popular mind:

The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim (p. 49).

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