This moment is hard. Just this morning, the Supreme Court struck down bans on conversion therapy, allowing a new generation of LGBTQIA+ people to be pulled into “therapy” meant to somehow make someone not gay, or not transgender. No matter that this type of “treatment” has been shown to be not just ineffective, but actively dangerous. It increases rates of mental illness, self-harm, and suicide. And I say again - it does not and cannot work2. Of course, the same people who want to enable conversion therapy are those who think my mere existence in the world amounts to “grooming” kids to be trans or gay. They use that framing to demand that stories of queer people be banned from libraries, that pride flags be banned from classrooms, and that LGBTQIA+ people just generally be banned from public life entirely.

And it’s that last sentence that makes today so important. I simply refuse to stop being seen. As Lily Alexandre says in her video, there is one group of people for whom Trans Day of Visibility has been an unquestionable success: us. I understood my transness by seeing other trans people and recognizing my feelings in their stories. I understood that transition was possible by seeing the transitions of those who have gone before. And I knew that I had every right to be myself by witnessing those of past generations who fought even harder to be themselves. I simply could not have been myself if it weren’t for those who were bravely visible before me.

Beyond that, my favorite survey of the last year showed that when someone knows a trans person, they are far more likely to support trans rights3. Those who don’t know us treat us like an abstraction, a concept to be debated. But if you know me? It’s a lot harder to be scared of me or disgusted by my life. You see my joy, the love I try to give to the world, and just the general normalcy of my life.4 You see that I’m not that different from you, and the attacks on me and other trans people become absurd.

The final reason I refuse to be invisible is one of defiance. A friend of mine told me last year, “you are the revolution.” Trans people call into question so many things about our society, in all of the best ways. And I’ll be damned if those who would demonize me get to win simply because I stop fighting. I won’t do it. In the words of Neo from The Matrix5, “I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you, a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible.”

The cost of this visibility is high. I worry about being targeted for harassment or even violence, though my life of relative privilege gives me some buffer from that. Trans women of color continue to face far more threat as they move through the world. I’m aware of the stares, of the silent judgment as I move through life. I spend time and energy educating others on questions I simply should not have to answer, but I do anyways. And I do all of this while I continue to go through the difficult process of transition, and just life for anyone in 2026.

To my dear trans community: I see you, and I know much of what it’s cost you to be yourself, though each of you has unique struggles. You continue to inspire me every day, and there’s no community I’d rather be a part of. Thank you for your courage and your hope and your love as you continue to insist on not just surviving, but living6.

So today, I simply refuse to drop into the shadows. I won’t make others comfortable by staying out of sight. I will exist, publicly, so that those who would try to vanish me at least have to look me in the eye while they do it. But they will eventually fail. Someday, trans people will be broadly accepted. We’ll all get to be ourselves, and the bigotry of this era will be seen as a product of an antiquated time7.

While I do that, my existence continues to act as a sign of possibility for anyone out there who sees themselves in my life, and thinks, “you’re like me!”

Before I forget, and if you read nothing else: I’m making a paper chain to count down the days, and if you want to send a supportive message for me to write on the chain, you can do that via a Google Form here.

This surgery is one I’ve been working towards for almost three years now, with well over a hundred hours of electrolysis hair removal1 as preparation for it. Typically it’s about 9-hours under anesthesia, with two main plastic surgeons and of course a whole surgical team assisting. Recovery takes months to a year, depending on how you want to count, but it sure sounds like the first month will see me pretty much doing nothing, then I’ll slowly start doing more as the second and third month progress. This surgery also has a higher rate of needing revision surgeries, just due to the complexity, but serious complications are still rare, so I’m confident we’ll get to a good final result.

I’m so excited at the ultimate result of this surgery. Even just being able to wear whatever I want (bikini season!) will be so freeing.

There’s not much else to say here. I’m very happy with the medical team that I’ll be working with, and the support that a number of people have already offered for my recovery. As we get closer, I’ll share more opportunities to support (e.g. meal trains, or visiting me while I’m watching Doctor Who and Star Trek and playing video games).

Thank you all for being with me on this journey — absolutely couldn’t do it without so many of you! Sending love to you all and hoping you are each doing well this spring.

-Celeste

The world is a darker place than it should be today. Hundreds of transgender people we know of, and likely thousands more that we don’t, are gone. One by one, with few headlines, no stadium-sized vigils. These are people who lit the lives of those around them — friends, family, or just the person they ran into at the store and were met with a kind smile. Someone somewhere today is wishing they could get a hug from their best friend, only to remember: they will never hug their friend again.

Transgender Day of Remembrance is such an important day for our community, and this year is one I’m finding particularly difficult. This year, trans people have faced a relentless onslaught of attacks from some of the most powerful people in our country.

Why are there over 900 anti-LGBTQ+ bills1 proposed across the country just this year? Why are so many of them designed to target trans kids? Why does enforcing the gender binary warrant a mention in a presidential inauguration speech? Why are trans people mocked multiple times in a State of the Union address? And why do so many who call themselves Christian fail to stand up and say “this is not how we love our neighbors”?

Those familiar with the story of Jesus’ birth will know that the first thing the Roman Empire did upon learning of him was to try to kill him. King Herod learns from the magi that a child has been born who they say will become King of the Jews. This possible threat to Empire is all Herod needs in order for him to turn murderous. Failing to locate Jesus specifically, he gives orders to kill every boy under two years of age.

Herod did this because he thought that Jesus would change his world. A threat to his power was coming.

I often think about the knee-jerk rejection of trans people, particularly by conservative Christians. I’m not the first to think this, but they reject us because we break so many of their rules. Our society has been organized around gender divisions for so long, that the existence of people who can transcend those rules can only be understood as a threat. What is a church with male-only pastors to do when a trans man arrives and wants to preach? What about when one of their pastors comes out as a trans woman? What about women’s ministries? Outside of the church, how do we affect bathrooms, or sports, or the military?

On January 27th, after several other awful anti-trans executive orders earlier in the week, the president signed a new one banning anyone with gender dysphoria from serving in the military. It said that transgender people are categorically incapable of honor, truth, discipline, humility, and selflessness. Simply for being who we are.

In the onslaught of near-daily attacks by the new administration, I can’t have been the only one in the community holding my breath, wondering how long it would be before we heard of tragedy. I saw regular social media posts in the trans community that said something like, “remember, your number one job right now is simply to stay alive until tomorrow.”

I want to say right now: I am so proud of our community for how we supported each other and cared for each other this year. The trans community has rallied and protected itself in this time, just as it has so many times before. There are fewer names this year than last. It’s always an incomplete list, but in a year where we’ve been targeted more than any other in recent memory, I can’t be the only one who feared just how long this year’s list would be. But we worked hard, in so many ways, to protect each other, even from our own hands. That work saved lives, though we’ll never know how many.

But four days after Trump’s order, on the morning of January 31st, someone spotted a flag hanging atop the Syracuse Veterans Affairs parking garage. But, far from the kind in our national anthem that gave hope and courage to those who saw it, this transgender pride flag was draped over the hanging body of Elisa Rae Shupe. Shupe served in the Army for 18 years and, in 2016, became the first in the country to obtain legal non-binary identification. She had a complicated journey, including a detransition and later retransition to female. A suicide note showed the depth of betrayal she felt, and, tragically, the degree to which she simply saw no path forward in Trump’s America.

The maddening inevitability of our losses is something I wrote about on my blog on October 7th. I wrote,

There are precious trans souls alive right now. Living, breathing, trying to make their way in this world. Maybe fast asleep, maybe watching a favorite show. They might have gone to work or school today, and hugged a friend or said, “I love you,” to their mom.

Here is a fact so awful it makes me want to scream until my voice is gone: some of them will also be among those we have lost come November 20th.

Two weeks later, on October 23rd, 21 year-old Lia Smith was lost to suicide while attending Middleberry college. While she had competed in women’s swimming and diving, she stopped as she said she was “not welcome.” A double-major in computer-science and statistics, Lia had also spoken on a panel in favor of trans rights, closing with the words, “Know that there are people in your community who are here for you and care about you.”

And on October 27th, we also lost Marisol Payero to suicide. Marisol was a 22 year-old student at Kennesaw State University and would have graduated next month, completing her degree in History Education. As President of the Kennesaw Pride Alliance, she helped open a new Pride Center after the university closed its LGBTQ+ resource center due to cuts in diversity programs.

As is commonly said - we do not know the full circumstances of these deaths, but suicide never happens in isolation of societal factors. This is a system designed to make people feel desperate, isolated, and without hope. It’s a system that is, at its best, indifferent to our deaths. And there are some who hear of our deaths and cheer.

Many of those we grieve today were not lost to suicide, but were murdered. As always, black trans women make up the majority of those killed. The violence includes seemingly random killings, killings at the hands of romantic partners or friends, and of course, clear hate crimes. Even though many of these cases include “no motive was known”, frequently friends or family express suspicion that the murder was a hate crime. This includes 27 year-old Kamora Jones, whose body was found in her bedroom by her own mother, possibly killed by an intimate partner. Her mother said she was, “an animal-lover who could make anyone laugh. Someone with a big heart and a life cut far too short.” But even when we don’t know that these women were killed for being trans, many of them were forced into lives that are vulnerable to this kind of violence. Their existence alone is so powerful that it undermines white supremacy, gender hierarchy, and so many other systems all at once. So these women are frequently relegated to lives of insecure housing and food, many being forced to engage in sex work just to survive. These incredible, beautiful women are some of the strongest people in the country, with more courage than I can even imagine. Why couldn’t they live in a world that honored them?

And then there are those whose deaths defy not just reason, but comprehension. Sam Nordquist was a 24 year-old biracial transgender man who worked at a group home for disabled people in Minnesota. After going missing in early December, his remains were found in February in a field. Investigators eventually determined that, during those two months, people he thought were his friends, including one he lived with, had tortured him in ways I cannot describe. His murderers are not being charged with a hate crime, in part because some of them were also queer.

And I look for some reason for the senseless, some hope to counter the loss, knowing that neither is fully possible.

I have a cisgender friend who said, about trans people, “You are the revolution.” And the trans community is indeed revolutionary. We break all kinds of things. We show the world a kind of freedom they’ve never known. We shine. Trans friends: we shine so brightly that the world covers its eyes and lashes out rather than allow us to reshape their warped lenses. If they let us be ourselves, we will change everything. If only they allowed themselves to see how good that would be.

As a Christian, I read Genesis and I understand that God made all sorts of people and called us good. I see God promise in Isaiah to give eunuchs names “better than sons or daughters.” I see a God who is masculine and feminine and everything in between and beyond, and I see God trying to brighten the world through the people they have created. And I know that God weeps with us tonight. Trans people, whether Christian or not, are brilliant lights showing freedom and love to the world.

And so, we keep shining. We fight for joy and liberation for ourselves and all of our beautiful siblings who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, intersex, asexual, aromantic, and anyone else who understands themselves as queer, which in turn brings liberation to all. We dance, we care, we hope, we dream, and we love, and we do it together. Trans family: we love so fiercely. Anyone who gets to spend time with us, I’d like to think, is changed for the better. Someday, someday, the world will understand that.

But tonight, we grieve those who are no longer with us today. We thank them for the beauty they shared with us. And we promise them that we will remember them and continue to fight for a world filled with their light.

In 2021, I left an abusive church. After experiencing spiritual, psychological, and emotional abuse, I had to go on a journey of understanding what happened to me and others. I’ve written a lot about that church on my other blog, so I won’t repeat that here, but I want to talk about one of the things I learned through that experience, as well as from talking to those who have been in abusive relationships, toxic workplaces, high control groups, and other unhealthy situations. That is: it’s all one thing.

The dynamics of an abusive relationship, a toxic, high control community, and an oppressive government are fundamentally the same. In each, those with power use fundamentally the same tactics to control those without. These include, but are not limited to the following, with some examples from both ends of the spectrum.

• Threatening loss of relationship/community

  • Abusive spouse: “I’ll never speak to you again”, or “I’ll take the kids and you’ll never see them again.”

  • Oppressive government: Threatening to deport or imprison

• Withdrawal of critical support

  • Abusive spouse: If they have income and victim does not, victim is very vulnerable, especially if kids are in the picture.

  • Oppressive government: Denying health care or an equitable justice system

• Shaping the reality of the victim

  • Abusive spouse: “What?? I have never [done this thing that they have definitely done]”

  • Oppressive government: Propoganda

• Surveillance

  • Abusive spouse: Regularly checking victim’s electronics, having them followed

  • Oppressive government: wiretapping, secret investigations for any wrongdoing no matter how small

I’ll stop there, but feel free to add more in the comments!

Leave a comment

What I really want to talk about is how the acute stress responses that you’re likely familiar with are also the same across these circumstances. This makes sense - if the stressors follow the same patterns, we would expect the same stress responses to be activated.

Before I do that, I do want to acknowledge that in some cases, the emotion in question is disgust, and of course and have written their incredible book Eucontamination: Disgust Theology and the Christian Life which discusses how disgust can manifest at the individual level all the way up to a societal level.

Acute Stress Responses

You’ve almost certainly heard of “fight or flight.” It’s understood as an instinctive response to danger exhibited by many animals, humans included. If you’re out in the woods and a rattlesnake crosses the trail in front of you, you might immediately run or you might attack it (consult your local wildlife expert for what the proper way to respond is). Either has risk, but the point is that these reactions are actually not even conscious choices. They’re driven by the more instinctive parts of your brain before you even have a chance to think anything through rationally.

At best, this can save your life and successfully mitigate the threat. The woman who runs out of the house from her abusive boyfriend might survive his latest drunk explosion. The former church member who tells their story publicly about how the leaders were harming those in the church might prevent further harm to themselves or others. The Jews who fled Nazi Germany had much better chances than those who remained, but also Nazi Germany was defeated by the allied forces in a long and terrible war. Different responses make sense for different individuals in different situations, and we don’t always choose the response as rationally as we think.

Sadly, these responses are sometimes deployed against phantom threats. Countless people have died when someone saw them as a threat, only to later find that the threat existed only in their minds. This is true in cases of “trans panic” where a would-be intimate partner discovers that their partner is transgender, and assaults them or even murders them.

And just as we see people in power try to encourage a disgust response towards “the other”1, we see those in power try to instill fear of “the other” as well. The abusive partner might try to tell his victim that they can’t trust friends or family because of some ulterior motive. The cult leader might insinuate (or outright say) that books he hasn’t approved are dangerous for those in the cult to read. And the oppressive head of state might spread baseless accusations of widespread violence being perpetrated by a marginalized group.

An improper fear

If you’ll allow me a brief detour, that last one happened to the trans community last month as conservatives started falling over themselves to blame the entire trans community (and our allies), and in fact transness itself for the murder of Charlie Kirk2. The Heritage Foundation’s “Oversight Project” released a statement in which they “urge the FBI to designate ‘Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism’ (‘TIVE’) as a Domestic Terrorism threat category”, which they define in a way that would apply to anyone (including me) who even states (accurately3) that government policies which oppress trans people lead to self-harm or suicide among the trans community.

The statement incorrectly relies on the idea that a disproportionate amount of violence is being committed by trans people, saying, “Experts estimate that 50%of all major (non-gang related) school shootings since 2015 have involved or likely involved transgender idology.” Pretty scary, right?

This idea has been thoroughly debunked4, including in an excellent piece by Dell Cameron and Andrew Couts at Wired, “Heritage Foundation Uses Bogus Stat to Push a Trans Terrorism Classification.” I want to quote it at length to demonstrate the absurdity of the claim:

There have been 74 total active school shooter incidents since 2015; of those, three of the perpetrators have identified as transgender, according to Riedman’s data. Data collected by the Gun Violence Archive shows that there were 5,748 mass shootings at any location in the US between January 1, 2013, and September 15, 2025; of those, five of the shooters identified as transgender people, nonbinary, or having undergone gender-affirming care—less than 0.087 percent.

In other words, Heritage’s “50 percent” claim is not just unsupported, it appears misleading by design, arbitrary in scope, and unscientific at its core.

“A methodology that limits the pool of potential observations in this way suggests researchers have a predetermined outcome in mind,” (R.G.) Cravens and (Rachel) Carroll Rivas say. “It’s a method that suggests the researchers are committing an error called selecting on the dependent variable—choosing a sample that ensures the study will produce the desired outcome. In combination with the use of ‘trans ideology,’ this suggests that the desired outcome is the further scapegoating and demonization of transgender people.”

Carroll Rivas and Cravens, who work with the Southern Poverty Law Center, also state that, “Trans people are far more likely to be victimized by gun violence than to perpetrate it.”

It must be noted that Kirk’s murder was, of course, allegedly committed by a cisgender man and we still don’t have a full picture of his motive.

I know that’s a long detour, and this has not been made policy (yet), but I wanted to demonstrate how the claims can be completely divorced from reality and yet still have the desired effect: spreading fear of trans people.

Healthy and Unhealthy Stress Responses

The United States was right to fight against the Nazis in World War II. And those who oppose trans rights out of fear are wrong to do so.

Which leads me to the point of this series. I don’t only want to discuss the ways fight, flight, freeze, and fawn manifest in the face of oppression, I want to talk about healthy and unhealthy manifestations of those. Each of them can be done in a way that is honorable and just. But each of them also has the potential to be deeply harmful if we’re not careful.

There is a saying I came across in survivor communities after leaving my abusive church, and I like it. “We never judge a survivor for how they survived.” That is, the sexual assault victim who stays quiet and still until the assault is over and she can get to safety is not “consenting” to the violence being done to her5. Her body may be in a “freeze” response, or she may quite reasonably fear that any other action will result in her death. Similarly, if she has an opportunity to incapacitate the attacker and takes it, we recognize that as honorable self-defense. The Biblical Rahab was commended for her dishonesty in hiding Israelite spies. While each of these involves some behavior that, in a vaccuum, might be seen as unethical, each is a perfectly reasonable and ethical (sometimes commendable!) way to survive a given situation, and the survivor should never be shamed for it.

At a societal level, every war for independance ever fought has included morally thorny actions, because every war has included morally thorny actions. Even peaceful protests can include actions that make us feel odd. Labor strikes are a refusal to work as previously agreed, but they have been instrumental in protecting the rights of workers across the decades.

But, not to cast doubt on too many who find themselves in this situation, there are also unacceptable ways of surviving. We cannot support when someone harms other would-be survivors in order to protect themselves. Individually, if two people are running from a bear, and one of them trips the other one to sacrifice them to the bear, I suspect none of us would approve. Collectively, attempting to eliminate an “enemy” group entirely because one of them committed an act of violence is a horrific overreaction that punishes innocents for the actions of one person.

In the face of oppression, I wanted to write a series of (short) essays describing the healthy and unhealthy expressions of these collective stress responses. We’ll talk about when inaction is admirable, when fighting back is damnable, when fleeing is bravery, and when fawning is betrayal. This is an idea that’s been on my mind for over a year, and I’m excited to finally share it out with you all!

You can subscribe (for free!) so you don’t miss the rest of the series!

Trans Day of Remembrance is November 20th each year. The list of names of those we will grieve is being compiled, with 22 of my trans siblings added just last month. I just read a couple of the stories and they are heartbreaking. As always, trans women of color make up the majority of the list.

23 year-old Kamora Woods of Indianapolis was murdered on June 27th. She was found dead by her own mother. The circumstances of her murder are not fully known, but she was found half undressed, and the alleged murderer ID’d by a fingerprint on a condom wrapper. Someone murdering a would-be intimate partner upon finding out that they are trans, going from an act commonly associated with love to the purest form of hate in seconds, is what’s known as “trans panic.” The mother says the young woman was open about being trans, so this could have been about something else. But as always, many trans people, and particularly trans women of color like Kamora, live lives of precarity where they are more vulnerable to violence, even if that violence isn’t explicitly directed at their transness.

There are multiple stories of trans people murdered in what looks like more common and random acts of violence, though of course we can’t be sure. But even in these, we see cruelty - police identifying the victims by their deadnames. In one case, 24 year old Rosa Machuca was one of three victims of a shooting in Austin, Texas. The other were an elderly man and, I am so sorry to have to tell you this: a four year old child. Gun violence is a threat to all. Rosa came out as transgender in 2022, the same year as me. But the political climate in Texas had already begun to turn into one of the most hostile states for trans rights, and so she did not legally change her name. This resulted in the police, of course, referring to her by her deadname in their reports. This is a case where I can imagine someone being like “but they are just using her legal name!” But you cannot say that without also saying that the state of Texas had made it dangerous, then illegal to change her legal name. This is a system that insisted on seeing Rosa for someone other than who she was.

In the UK, 25 year old trans man Toni Asik died in custody of the UK prison system. He’d been housed with the women in the prison, and was experiencing severe mental health issues. The staff apparently repeatedly misgendered and mistreated Toni prior to his death, which from what I can gather, is thought to have been by suicide.

Neglect. Disgust. Cruelty.

And my siblings are gone. And we will gather to grieve them in a few weeks.

But here is the thing I want to talk about today. There are precious trans souls alive right now. Living, breathing, trying to make their way in this world. Maybe fast asleep, maybe watching a favorite show. They might have gone to work or school today, and hugged a friend or said, “I love you,” to their mom.

Here is fact so awful it makes me want to scream until my voice is gone: some of them will also be among those we have lost come November 20th, and there’s nothing I can do about it but watch as names are added. And I just so badly wish I knew who so that I could do something about it.

However, we don’t live in that particular sci-fi or fantasy world. We don’t know which trans woman will be murdered because some insecure man can’t handle the fact that he is attracted to her. We don’t know which trans boy will be lost to suicide because the bullying at school was relentless, and the only reaction his parents would give him would be, “our daughter, just stop saying you’re a boy!” We don’t know which non-binary sibling of ours will be gone but then there will be days of indignity as the media fails to take three seconds to understand how to refer to them accurately and respectfully.

Someone will cry out for help and be mocked. Someone will be with someone safe who, in an instant, becomes their end. Someone will simply be desperate and be callously destroyed. Someone will have a cause of death of “drug overdose” or “alcohol poisoning”, but we will know that this person was just trying to cope with a world that is screaming, “WE HATE YOU.” Their death will be brushed aside so easily we likely won’t even know their name on November 20th. Some of these deaths will be called “suicides”, but when despair and precarity are the inevitable results of a society, those who built that society deserve the blame. And some of these will be rightly understood as political violence — the inevitable result of government policies of hatred towards trans people1.

It might be tempting to think of Trans Day of Remembrance as something like Memorial Day. A day of recognition for all those lost in the past.

But my dear trans community (I love you all so much) instead has a most peculiar and dreadful need2: we know we will lose dozens of people every single year, with such confidence that we have put a date on this year’s calendar. And next year’s. And the next and the next and the next. Not to mourn all those we lost in the past. But to mourn those we lose each and every year. Today, like all days, could be called a day of premembrance.

And so I sit here in early October and grieve those I cannot yet name, because in this moment they are still here. But I know that they are living their last days. Wearing their last incredible outfit. Helping their friend for the last time. Smiling their last smiles. Laughing their final laughs. Crying their last tears. Hugging their last hugs. And then, with nothing you, or I, or anyone else can do, they will be gone. All we will have is what stories people can tell about them, the memories, the things they created, and the impact they made on those around them.

And for some, their name will be on a list to be grieved on November 20th.

Some pleas

A word to my trans friends: stay. Some of the deaths I described above will be done to trans people and there may be nothing we can do about it. But some are deaths due to mental health of substance abuse, and those we can. Please, please… stay. I know things are hard. I’ve wondered this year if I was going to make it. Sometimes I still do. But remember that getting to tomorrow is worth it. If you can get help, get help. If you can make your home safer, do it. I truly believe that better days are coming and that there is still so much joy and love and life to be had right now. Find those joys and loves and cling to them.

A word to the allies: help. Your trans friend has had a very difficult year. This is fact, not a guess. Go give them a hug. Tell them you love them. Let them know what they mean to you and that you are there for them and it doesn’t matter to you if they can’t be there for you as much right now. Be Samwise Gamgee who tells them that you can’t carry their burden of living in this world right now, but you’d be honored to help carry them. If you can help provide housing, health care, financial suppot, or some form of security or safety or more, consider doing it. For those of you who are Christian, consider these words:

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.

But consider what your friend is facing right now, and endeavor to help them feel a little lighter.

A word to everyone: please take care of yourselves. Find a way to spread and experience love, if you can. I saw this in the park the other day, and it made me smile and I hope it makes you smile, too:

Note on this post: This is part of a series, started by my friend Billie Hoard discussing Dr. Preston Sprinkle’s book Embodied. You can see the whole index for the series here. This is the third part of Chapter 10. Previously:

• Part 10A: I discussed how the entire concept of Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) is junk science (technical term2), not to be taken seriously. I also discuss Dr. Sprinkle’s first example of a woman who detransitioned, and how he forces her story to fit his narrative more neatly.

• Part 10B: I discuss Dr. Sprinkle’s invocation of three anti-trans talking points. Specifically, the fast growth in teens seeking gender-affirming care in the 2010’s, the shift towards more trans boys getting care than trans girls, and once again, detransitioners.

This post will cover the third part of Chapter 10, in which Sprinkle introduces Lisa Littman and begins discussing her study.

The Study

This entire post needs to be read through the lens that Gender-affirming Care is endorsed by every relevant major medical organization in the country as being the best treatment for gender dysphoria in youth and adults. It’s been studied for decades and shows phenomenal satisfaction rates for patients. It’s cautious, requiring multiple evaluations over months or years for a teenager to get puberty blockers or hormones. Surgeries are rarely performed on minors, and when they are, the rigor of those evaluations and the time to receive treatment increases. No one is pushing anyone into transition.

Meanwhile, the study that backs claims of ROGD is one that only produced a hypothesis, which has not been substantiated, and has significant evidence against it.

Despite that, many who are anti-trans use ROGD as a way to invalidate trans identities, at times positioning it as settled fact, outweighing all of the other research.

I made this meme to illustrate this posture:

The Author: Lisa Littman

Lisa Littman is the author of the original study on what she called “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria.” Dr. Preston Sprinkle introduces her this way:

Lisa Littman of Brown University coined the term Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria “rapid-onset,” because most of these kids announce they are trans* in a way that seems quite sudden to their parents and counselors.

Littman’s credentials are conspicuous for their absence beyond “of Brown University.” She is not someone who had ever worked professionally with a child experiencing gender dysphoria. She is a medical doctor, yes, but she is an OB/GYN3. She has worked in “public health”, but her projects were, according to her, “mostly related to the health of pregnant women (immunizations, smoking cessation, oral health, premature births)”.4 Which is to say, she has no relevant experience when it comes to research on gender dysphoria, nor does she have a co-author who does. The lack of a co-author with relevant experience, in my opinion, is somewhat damning. It could imply that she cares so little about expertise that she didn’t look for one. Alternatively, it may indicate that all experts she approached either did not view her as worth partnering with or her study as something on which it would be worthwhile to collaborate.

Dr. Sprinkle’s wording, “because most of these kids…,” is completely unfounded — it’s not even a claim Littman herself made in her study. As we discussed in the previous entries, she coined the term during the development of the study, not as a conclusion. Therefore, it could not have been based on an empirical “most” yet, as no study that could have yielded such a characterization had been done. Moreover, the design of her study (as we will discuss) is incapable of saying what percent of trans teens experience her hypothesized “ROGD”, as it explicitly only accepted responses from parents who believed their children had experienced a rapid onset of gender dysphoria. If I did a study asking for people who got a sudden flat tire whether or not the tire experienced any damage, I would expect 100% of responses to tell me they experienced a sudden flat tire, which does not indicate that 100% of flats are sudden or that 100% of drivers experience flat tires at all. Finally, as Littman had not yet — and still has not — verified the existence of ROGD, let alone the rate at which it occurs, those cannot have been the reason she coined the term, as Dr. Sprinkle claims. Dr. Sprinkle’s claim here is entirely false.

There is one thing Dr. Sprinkle deserves credit for, which is that he includes the phrase “seems quite sudden to their parents” (emphasis mine). The omission of the fact that this study is about parent reports is a key weakness of much reporting on this study, and indeed the original study fails to consistently present things from this perspective. Sadly, Dr. Sprinkle will not maintain this phrasing, but it’s notable that he includes it up front.

We continue:

A few years ago, Littman published the first peer-reviewed study on ROGD…

And with that, before we go any further, we need to talk about the massive correction this paper went through.

The Correction

I’m going to rip the Band-Aid off right now. The study56 was released on August 16, 2018. Criticism of it mounted quickly enough that just eleven days after publication, on August 27th, a formal review was announced by PLOS One, the journal that published it7. In March 2019, a massive correction8 was published, and the editor-in-chief of PLOS One issued an apology to the “trans and gender variant community.” From what I found, this is the only apology ever issued by PLOS One9, a journal which publishes tens of thousands of papers per year10. The correction included a new Title, Abstract, Purpose, Methods, Results, Conclusion, and more.

Dr. Sprinkle never mentions the existence of this correction, either in his main text or in his footnotes. His footnote (later in this paragraph) uses the corrected title of the paper, so he was almost cetainly aware of it but chose not to provide this information to his readers. For him to have an entire chapter devoted to the concept of “ROGD” without even mentioning that the foundational study underwent a significant correction, is misleading to the point of dishonesty, unless he is unthinkably sloppy, biased, or both in his research.

Littman’s original conclusion11 says, “Rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) describes a phenomenon…,” implying that its existence has been confirmed. The corrected conclusion12 instead states, “Emerging hypotheses include the possibility of a potential new subcategory of gender dysphoria (referred to as rapid-onset gender dysphoria) that has not yet been clinically validated…“ Here, we see that the study simply gathered information that lead to the “generation of hypotheses” and that, “More research that includes data collection from AYAs, parents, clinicians and third party informants is needed…”

Littman writes this about the correction13:

As mentioned in the article, the study design of this research falls under descriptive research: as such, it did not assign an exposure, there were no comparison groups, and the study’s output was hypothesis-generating rather than hypothesis-testing [12]. Descriptive studies often represent a first inquiry into an area of research and the findings of descriptive studies are used to generate new hypotheses that can be tested in subsequent research [12–13]. Because of the known limitations of descriptive studies, claims about causal associations cannot be made [12], and there were none made in the article. The conclusions of the current study are that the findings raise certain hypotheses and that more research is needed.

Let me re-emphasize: “claims about causal associations cannot be made.” And then we again see the call that, “more research is needed.”

The “Formal Comment”14 published by PLOS One alongside the correction acknowledges that parent perspectives are interesting scientifically, but discusses their limitations at length, suggesting two alternative study designs that would have been better. It particularly takes exception with trying to establish a new diagnosis with no input from the youth involved:

Several studies have pointed out the importance of involving young people in studies of their health [2]. From a bioethical point of view, despite several dilemmas [3], this need is guided by the principle of the best interest of children and their right to be represented in the matters that affect them [4]. In this regard, with respect to medical procedures related to gender in childhood (in trans and intersex cases), the WHO among other agencies [5], already recognized the need to take children’s voices into account in order to avoid coercive treatments: "the best interests of the child should always be the primary concern, giving due weight to the views of children in accordance with their age and maturity, and taking into account their evolving capacity for decision-making" (p13).

Not only does it highlight scientific support for including youth perspectives, it cites both the United Nations and the World Health Organization regarding the rights of youth to have their perspectives included and the importance of doing so to prevent “coercive” treatments.

The “Formal Comment” is well worth reading in its entirety.

Importantly, despite the “generation of hypotheses” and the emphasis on a need for more research, Littman has performed a follow-up study. However, others have, which I’ll discuss later, but Julia Serano’s thorough essay All the Evidence Against Transgender Social Contagion15 covers the relevant research and I recommend reading it in its entirety.

Study Discussion

Dr. Preston Sprinkle begins his discussion of the study with this:

A few years ago, Littman published the first peer-reviewed study on ROGD, where she surveyed 256 parents who have kids (83 percent of whom are female) that seem to fit her description of ROGD.[12]16

First, despite Dr. Sprinkle’s later argument in his book to use the pronouns a trans person prefers, he misgenders the kids instead of using “assigned female at birth.”

Now, let’s look at how this study was performed.

In July of 2016, Lisa Littman posted an invitation to a survey on three online forums which are self-described in anti-trans terms: 4thwavenow, transgendertrend, and Youth Trans Critical Professionals. According to Littman’s correction, it was also shared (not by her) to a Facebook group, “Parents of Transgender Children”17, though that share is not publicly available, nor do we fully understand the composition of that group. While that may have added some responses from parents who were not anti-trans, the survey itself has a strong filter on who could take it, which I will discuss in a moment.

The link to the survey was also promoted by conservative writer David French in an article in National Review introducing his readers to the ideas of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” and “transgender contagion.”18 His article unbelievably pushes this idea as established fact while promoting the survey that informs the first ever study into whether or not it’s even a warranted hypothesis. From this, we can establish that some conservative voices were ready to run with the idea even without any scientific backing for it.

The survey invitation is quite interesting19, and I want to quote the opening to it:

We have heard from many parents describing that their child had a rapid onset of gender dysphoria in the context of increasing social media use and/or being part of a peer group in which one or multiple friends has developed gender dysphoria and come out as transgender during a similar time frame. Several parents have described situations where entire friend groups became gender dysphoric. This type of presentation is atypical and has not been studied to date. We feel that this phenomenon needs to be described and studied scientifically.

If your child has had sudden or rapid development of gender dysphoria beginning between the ages of 10 and 21, please consider completing the following online survey.

Furthermore, in the analysis of the data they received, they explicitly rejected responses that did not fit the ROGD narrative. According to the study itself:

Inclusion criteria were (1) completion of a survey with parental response that the child had a sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria; and (2) parental indication that the child’s gender dysphoria began during or after puberty. There was logic embedded in the survey that disqualified surveys that answered “no” (or skipped the question) about whether the child had a sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria and 23 surveys were disqualified prior to completion (20 “no” answers and 3 skipped answers). After cleaning the data for the 274 completed surveys, 8 surveys were excluded for not having a sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria and 10 surveys were excluded for not having gender dysphoria that began during or after puberty, which left 256 completed surveys for inclusion.

As you can hopefully see with this study design, Dr. Sprinkle’s “most of these kids” cannot be supported by this study, anymore than a study on the experiences of left-handed trans kids could establish that “most of these kids” are left-handed.

In a court, this would also be known as “leading the witness.” This invitation amounts to something like, “We want to show that ROGD is a thing. If you believe that ROGD is a thing, tell us that ROGD is a thing.” It’s not just selection bias of placing the invite on anti-trans sites, it explicitly asks for only parents who believe that their children experienced “a rapid onset of gender dysphoria.” It even tells them the hypothesized causes (social media and peer groups), prior to asking participants to characterize these things in their kids.

As for the methodology, this survey was an anonymous survey on SurveyMonkey. Literally anyone could respond to it, and no personally identifiable information was collected. No effort was made to ensure or confirm that the responses were coming from real parents or that they accurately described their children. I obviously cannot say with confidence that anyone was creating false or duplicate responses, but Littman cannot confidently state that no one did.

And this leads us to one of the biggest issues with the survey: only parents were even intended to be surveyed. The children, the ones who the survey is supposed to be about, were never spoken to. Dr. Sprinkle will discuss this issue in a bit, and I’ll save further discussion for when he does.

“Common factors”

Dr. Sprinkle then highlights some “common factors” that the parents reported.

Popularity and friendship

Some of these, like, “Many, if not all, of their friends at school were trans*, and their coming out often followed their friends’ coming out as trans*,” are impossible to verify from the parents’ perspective, especially given that the survey invite itself tells respondants this is one of the theorized factors.

One Dr. Sprinkle highlights is, “Many of them became more popular after they came out as trans*.[14]” Here, Dr. Sprinkle is paraphrasing in a way that changes the meaning substantially. The actual quote, which he only includes in footnote 14, is this (emphasis mine):

More than 60 percent of the kids Littman studied “experienced an increased popularity within their friend group when they announced a transgender identification”

I’ve heard this claim so many times - that kids are transitioning to be cool. But let’s look into the facts here.

Once again, no kids were studied. Parents were interviewed. The failure to frame things this way was one of the reasons the study underwent such a large correction. Here, Dr. Sprinkle just makes the same error again. But beyond that, Dr. Sprinkle omits the key phrase “within their friend group.” Even if we are taking the parents’ word as being accurate, they didn’t even claim that popularity at the school level reliably increased. Just within the child’s friend group. It’s also unclear how exactly the parent was evaluating this metric.

In fact, one of the “benefits” Littman says that parents described was that the child experienced, “improved protection from ongoing bullying.” That’s hardly an indication of a wide-spread increase in popularity, and in fact shows more of what trans people know is true: that we experience hostility at far greater rates than many other groups. According to the 2019 CDC Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance report20, which would have been available as Dr. Sprinkle was writing Embodied.

• “29% of transgender youth have been threatened or injured with a weapon on school property, compared to 7% of cisgender youth…”

• “43% of transgender youth have been bullied on school property, compared to 18% of cisgender youth”

• “29% of transgender youth have attempted suicide, compared to 7% of cisgender youth”

In 2023, the updated CDC report21 included more comprehensive data on youth who either identified as transgender or were not sure of their gender identity. The findings, I hope you’ll agree22, are beyond concerning. I’ve simplified the results table23 for ease of reading here:

These numbers are alarming and also include clear reasons for why mental health is so bad amongst those who are trans or questioning: high rates of bullying and lack of feeling safe, along with unstable housing and lack of social connection. Far from becoming more popular overall, trans and questioning kids are more likely than not to have a shortage of close connections at school.

Social Media

The next point Dr. Sprinkle lists is:

They engaged in heavy online and social media activity (more than normal) surrounding their coming out.

The study also doesn’t give any metrics or comparison to other children of the same age, so there’s not much to discuss here.

Mental Health

Dr. Sprinkle’s last common factor, which he spends some time discussing: “Many of them had other mental health concerns that weren’t being dealt with.”

That last point about co-occurring mental health concerns is significant. In fact, 63 percent of the kids referred to in Littman’s survey “had one or more diagnoses of a psychiatric disorder or neurodevelopmental disability preceding the onset of gender dysphoria.”

Once again, this statement is one the paper cannot (and does not) say24 - it can only say respondents reported the child had one or more of those diagnoses preceding the parents’ awareness of their child’s gender dysphoria. I’ll edit his language going forward.

He then lists multiple diagnoses, each of which I’d like to briefly comment on. Before I do, I want to bring up a data point that Dr. Sprinkle does not. Specifically, 195 (77%) of the 255 responses answered “No” to “Do you think your child is CORRECT in their belief that they are transgender?” Only six (2%) thought their child was correct25. That fits with the general tone of the three communities and again points to the selection bias. Let’s look at the supposed diagnoses:

“48% had experienced a traumatic or stressful event prior to the [respondents’ awareness of the child’s gender dysphoria].”

“Experienced a traumatic or stressful event” is not a diagnosis (This is Dr. Sprinkle’s error, not Littman’s), especially given the list of events in the survey, which includes the divorce of parents, a mental disorder in a sibling, or a break-up26. But more importantly, is Dr. Sprinkle really trying to argue that someone can’t know that they are transgender because they went through a breakup, or because their sibling has anxiety? Or on the flip side, is he trying to argue that parents divorcing could turn a child trans?

“45% were engaging in nonsuicidal self-injury prior to [respondents’ awareness of the child’s gender dysphoria].”

Again, that should read “prior to the parents’ awareness of the child’s gender dysphoria.” And this is largely consistent with surveys showing higher rates of self-harm and suicidality amongst those experiencing gender dysphoria, when not supported or permitted to transition. A 2023 systemic review of 21 other studies found that “[adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria] have more suicidal ideation, life-threatening behaviour, self-injurious thoughts or self-harm than their cisgender peers.”27 This is actually evidence that the child was experiencing gender dysphoria.

“15% had been diagnosed with ADHD”

Beginning with this one, Dr. Sprinkle’s numbers are wrong, because they are from a different table, for a different question. While still within a paragraph preceeded and followed by assertions that these numbers represent the children prior to coming out (Table 4 of Littman), Dr. Sprinkle is quoting numbers from Table 9, which include the time period after the child came out. I’ll correct the numbers as we go28.

In this case the number prior to coming out is 11.6%29. This is consistent with this from the CDC: “An estimated 7 million (11.4%) U.S. children aged 3–17 years have ever been diagnosed with ADHD, according to a national survey of parents using data from 2022.”30 As with other factors, it’s unclear how exactly ADHD would lead someone to incorrectly believe they are transgender — Dr. Sprinkle doesn’t explain, and Littman’s paper doesn’t discuss this result from the survey.

The last four are:

• “12% had been diagnosed with OCD.” (Should be: 8.4%)

• “12% were on the autism spectrum.” (Should be: 8.0%)

• “7% had an eating disorder.” (Should be: 4.8%)

• “7% were bipolar.” (Should be: 3.2%)

Like ADHD, no explanation is given for how these factors might influence someone to wrongly think they are transgender. And without that link, these are simply a form of ablism and infantilization of those with these conditions. It’s quite offensive to imply that someone with an eating disorder, for example, has a diminished capacity for either understanding their gender or for making decisions about transition. This is a whole other claim beyond the (unproven) hypothesis of ROGD, and neither Dr. Sprinkle nor Lisa Littman attempt to justify it.

Dr. Sprinkle follows that list with:

These mental health issues were present before the kids came out as trans*.

Here, Dr. Sprinkle finally correctly uses “before the kids came out as trans*” (italics mine). But he also labels the entire list as “mental health issues”, when neither autism nor having “experienced a … stressful event” are mental health issues. Particularly with regard to autism, this is highly irresponsible of Dr. Sprinkle, who should be more careful when speaking about a highly misunderstood group. Sadly his treatment of those with autism here appears to match his treatment of transgender people throughout this book.

Then Dr. Sprinkle says:

Of those who consulted a gender therapist or physician for the purpose of pursuing transition, only 28 percent of clinicians chose to “explore issues of mental health, previous trauma, or any alternative causes of gender dysphoria before proceeding”—even after parents informed the clinicians of previously diagnosed mental health issues. [17] One parent “tried to give our son’s trans doctor a medical history of our son,” but “she refused to accept it. She said the half hour diagnosis in her office with him was sufficient.”[18]31

I have to say quite a bit about this paragraph. First, 59% of the parents said their child never saw a physician or therapist, which could be an indication of unsupportive parents never even taking their child to be evaluated by professionals.

Second, the “28 percent” number is only 21% in the paper32, while 26% replied “Don’t Know” and 53% responded “No”. Littman’s paper clarifies that “before proceeding” means “before proceeding with the evaluation,” not transition itself, which a reader might infer from Dr. Sprinkle’s quotation33. Furthermore, this sentance shows either Littman’s bias or unfamiliarity with gender dysphoria. There are no known “alternative causes of gender dysphoria”, including mental health or previous trauma. She is, of course, welcome to study this and develop hypotheses, but it’s hardly nefarious of specialists to not inquire about potential alternative causes when there are no known alternative causes. Either Littman (and Dr. Sprinkle) are unaware of this or they are mounting a critique of professionals who are following known best practices. Remember, neither Littman nor Dr. Sprinkle have treated patients with gender dysphoria, or have a license that would allow them to do so.

Regarding the doctor who refused a medical history, this story doesn’t add up. I have never once seen a doctor without providing a medical history (including any doctor who has treated me for gender dysphoria). If this doctor went on to prescribe puberty blockers or hormones without at least some medical history, my understanding is that they would be guilty of medical malpractice. The family should sue and should win. But it’s also possible, as the paper says about many of the parents34, that the child was only being seen for evaluation of gender dysphoria, not for treatment options, in which case a medical history would be irrelevant. The later detail that it was regarding a “half-hour diagnosis” supports this. Again, that’d hardly be nefarious, as a medical history is irrelevant to the diagnosis of gender dysphoria, which we’ll take a loook at now.

Let’s talk about what the criteria for gender dysphoria are, so that we can understand why the above are irrelevant. The criteria are:35

A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, of at least six months’ duration, as manifested by at least two or more of the following:

- A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and primary and/or secondary sex characteristics (or in young adolescents, the anticipated secondary sex characteristics)

- A strong desire to be rid of one’s primary and/or secondary sex characteristics because of a marked incongruence with one’s experienced/expressed gender (or in young adolescents, a desire to prevent the development of the anticipated secondary sex characteristics)

- A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics of the other gender

- A strong desire to be of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)

- A strong desire to be treated as the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)

- A strong conviction that one has the typical feelings and reactions of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)

The condition is associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

Importantly, none of those symptoms are symptoms of any other psychological condition. Which is to say, a diagnosis of gender dysphoria requires no differentiation from other diagnoses. “A strong desire to be treated as the other gender…” is not a symptom of ADHD, OCD, or eating disorders. “A strong conviction that one has the typical feelings and reactions of the other gender” is not a sign that someone is on the autism spectrum.36

According to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), providers should, “Assess the capacity to consent for the specific physical treatment prior to the initiation of [medical treatments].”37 For this purpose, it would be necessary to account for any psychological conditions which impact an individual’s ability to consent to health care (of any kind). But again, things like ADHD, OCD, eating disorders, or having gone through a past stressful event are not things that would preclude consent even if they were discussed.

This entire section is just difficult to grapple with - the statistics are somewhat interesting, but in no way cast doubt on gender-affirming care. The anecdotes appear to be designed to undermine faith in the ability of professionals to provide appropriate care, but are anecdotal and missing enough context that they could not be used to build a substantive case against gender-affirming care. Finally, several of Dr. Sprinkle’s word choices here are ableist and infantilizing of those with various conditions.

Accused of transphobia

Let’s continue:

Parents were often called “transphobic” or “bigoted” by their kids if they encouraged their child to wait longer before transitioning, if they recommended a comprehensive health evaluation before transitioning, or if they simply expressed concerns about transitioning.[19] Littman said that the majority of the kids in her study thought “transition would solve their problems,” and many of them “became unwilling to work on their basic mental health issues before seeking treatment.[20]3839

Dr. Sprinkle is doing some serious cherry picking in that first sentence. Yes, those were all reasons listed for why the parents said they were called transphobic. But they aren’t the only reasons. 64% of responses said they had been called “bigoted” or “transphobic” by their child40. Of those, 80%41 of parents said one of the reasons was, “Disagreeing with the child about the child’s assessment of being transgender.” And… yes? If a child says they are trans, and the parent is not just uncertain about it, but actively saying the child is not transgender, it doesn’t surprise me if the child calls them transphobic. Again, these are parents who hang out in online forums called things like “Youth Trans Critical Professionals” and “transgender trend”.

Additionally, the average parent who said they were called transphobic/bigoted cited 5.2 reasons for being called this. Given that the child was likely not saying “I believe you are transphobic for each of the following five reasons”, we should interpret this more as the child had called the parent transphobic in an environment where the parent had done this collection of things (and potentially more).

Also note that

But to Sprinkle’s point, given that we know that 80% of those who were called transphobic were those who disagreed that their child was trans, what do we know about the factors Sprinkle named?

“encouraged their child to wait longer before transitioning”

This is not actually one of the options in the survey - the closest match is, “Recommending that their child take more time to figure out if their feelings of gender dysphoria persist or go away,” (italics mine). 70% of those who were called bigoted or transphobic cited this as a reason, but a minimum of 72%42 of these also said they disagreed with the child’s assessment of being trans. So yes - if a parent tells a child “you’re not trans, and you should wait and see if your feelings go away,” it’s hopefully understandable to you why the child might assess their parents as “transphobic”.

“recommended a comprehensive health evaluation before transitioning”

The original study reports this as “recommending a comprehensive evaluation before starting hormones and/or surgery.” The original survey specifies “mental health” evaluation. This is the rarest reason listed. Only about 33%43 of the parents who were called bigoted/transphobic cited this reason. A minimum of 40% of them disagreed with their child’s assesssment of being trans.

“simply expressed concerns about transitioning”

Sprinkle adds the word “simply” which, as I’ve shown, is almost certainly untrue. These parents were voicing multiple objections. And the actual response here is “Expressing concerns for their child’s future if the child were to take hormones and/or have surgery.” 63% of those who were called transphobic/bigoted chose this answer, and 69% of those denied their child’s trans identity.

Five other reasons are reported by Littman, but Dr. Sprinkle omits them:

• “referring to their child by the pronouns that they used to use before the announcement” (misgendering): 59% of those called transphobic/bigoted

• “Telling their child that they thought hormones/surgery would not help them” (inserting themselves into the role of psychologists/psychiatrists, endocrinologists, and surgeons): 58% of those called transphobic/bigoted

• “Calling their child by the child’s birth name” (deadnaming): 52% of those called transphobic/bigoted.

• “Recommending that their child work on other mental health issues first to determine if they are the cause of their dysphoria” (inserting themselves into the role of psychologists/psychiatrists, to investigate something that is not a known cause of dysphoria): 52% of those called transphobic/bigoted

• “Recommending therapy for basic mental health issues (not related to gender)”: 48% of those called transphobic/bigoted. This is the one answer that I’d frankly recommend for anyone. In isolation, it would feel like an overreaction by the teen. However, given that a minimum of 40% (likely higher) of these also disagreed with their child’s assessment of being trans, and likely more cited other highly problematic reasons, we can’t take it in isolation.

Here’s the full set of responses:

To me, it seems that in a survey where only 2% of parents agreed with their child’s assessment, it’s a show of remarkable restraint by the kids that 36% of them had not called their parents transphobic or bigoted.

Perhaps interestingly, Littman asked about three additional factors, but does not include them in the final report, nor does she say why she excludes them:

• Telling your child that you think hormones and/or surgery would be harmful to them

• Refusing to drive your child to a gender therapist, gender clinic or physician for the purpose of transitioning

• Refusing to pay for appointments, medications, surgery related to transition

One could speculate as to why these were not included in the final report, but I think it’s worth noting that these answers are some of the stronger forms of pushback Littman asked about. If many parents selected these answers, it would perhaps be even more understandable that the child saw their parents as transphobic or bigoted.

But regardless, yes: if someone refuses to call me my name or pronouns, and tells me that I’m not actually a woman, I feel comfortable using the label “transphobic” or “bigoted” for this (though I personally tend to use “anti-trans”)44. If you disagree, the burden is on you to give me a coherent definition of “transphobic” that does not include those behaviors.

Either way, Dr. Sprinkle is missing, ignoring, or hiding facts that don’t help his case, and seemingly trying to portray these parents as poor victims of overzealous teens. We’ve talked about DARVO45 before — the tactic wherein someone who harms another will Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. It’s what’s being implied here by Dr. Sprinkle, and possibly also by Littman and the respondents completing the survey. Here we have parents who are denying their children the ability to live as who they say they are, and in many cases denying them even the ability to explore their gender identity. It boggles my mind that I have to say this, but forcing someone to live as a gender other than what they know themselves to be is unbelievably harmful. But by centering the labels the child places on the parent, we see the DARVO in action — the kids are said to be doing harm by accusing their parents (likely accurately) of transphobia and bigotry. We’re meant to feel sorry for these poor parents, when in fact these parents are, whether they know it or not, inflicting damage on their kids that lead to mental health issues they may be unpacking with therapists for decades46.

As for the claim about children being unwilling to work on their mental health issues before seeking treatment, we alredy talked about this. Someone assigned male at birth saying, “I am a girl,” is a sign of exactly one psychological condition: gender dysphoria. And the gold standard treatment for gender dysphoria is gender-affirming care. On the other hand, gender dysphoria is known to cause mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety. This is why, “let’s just resolve your depression before we treat your gender dysphoria,” is as ridiculous as, “let’s just fix this flat tire before we take the nail out of it.” Is it possible there are additional contributors to the depression? Sure, and therapy is good for anyone with (or without) mental health conditions. But it’s not going to resolve the gender dysphoria, and no child should be expected to fix depression that arises due to gender dysphoria without being able to proceed with gender affirming care.

As for me, my work with therapists treated my depression, anxiety, and PTSD while we moved forward with gender-affirming care.

To be continued…

Well, this got long again, though we covered another … checks notes … three pages. Coming up, we’ll cover Dr. Sprinkle’s descriptions of the reactions to Littman’s study, and a brief passage where he discusses the sex ratio amongst trans youth. After that, we’ll move into a section about “Medicalizing the Youth”. Then, he’ll visit detransition again, but we already covered much of that. Finally, we’ll see his closing passage “A Christian Response.”

Before you go, please don’t forget to subscribe to make sure you get the next part, and to let me know you appreciate my work - it really does help, and it’s free! Also, leave comments, questions, etc below - I always read them and they help me know what you’d like to hear more about.

23

Full table here:

Note on this post: This is part of a series, started by my friend Billie Hoard discussing Dr. Preston Sprinkle’s book Embodied. You can see the whole index for the series here. If you haven’t already, you’ll want to read at least the previous entry, covering the first part of this chapter. To recap, I discussed how the entire concept of Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) is junk science (technical term), not to be taken seriously. I also discussed Dr. Sprinkle’s first example — a woman who detransitioned — and how he forces her story to fit his narrative more neatly.

We begin immediately after where we left off. Dr. Sprinkle concludes Helena’s story of transition and detransition. After issuing the reminder that, “We should never view an entire idea or concept through the lens of just one story,” he says the following,

But in the last few years, stories like Helena’s have exploded on the scene.2

No citation is given. No source. It’s not quantified, and therefore is difficult to refute directly.

I will grant that the rising number of people transitioning almost certainly increases the number of people detransitioning, because increasing the number of people who do a thing pretty much always increases the number of people who regret doing that thing.

But we do not gauge risk based on absolute quantity (which, again, Dr. Sprinkle doesn’t even provide here), but rather on likelihood. It’s not enough to know that a treatment can go wrong, you want to know the odds. Then, a patient weighs risks and benefits, gathering the needed information.

This is why it’s so critical to understand that, as I said last time, 94% of transitioners are more satisfied with their life now, while less than 3% are less satisfied.3 True regret was found to be roughly 1% in a 2023 review including, “27 studies involving almost 8,000 teens and adults who had transgender surgeries”4.

Dr. Sprinkle’s use of the word “exploded” here is a poor choice, since it creates a clear impression for the reader, which is neither contextualized nor backed by data he shares. Someone who is interested in facts should strive for dispassionate language5.

Moving forward, he says this:

Some call the sudden rise of dysphoria in teens a trend. Others call it an outbreak.[4]6. Some psychologists have termed it Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD).

First, there is no evidence that there is a rise of dysphoria in teens. There is a rise in rates of diagnosis of gender dysphoria, but one need only look at my own story to know that many cases of gender dysphoria were undiagnosed in the past. We’ll talk more about this later in this essay.

Only one source is given for his claim here, which is to an article written in October 2017 by Lisa Marchiano.7 The earliest known use of the phrase was by Dr. Lisa Littman (MD, Residency in Ob/Gyn), including on a site now known to be run by Marchiano.8 Dr. Littman’s heavily corrected 2018 paper includes “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria” in the title. The paper has no co-authors, but gives three acknowledgements for assistance with the paper, one of which is for Lisa Marchiano.

Neither Marchiano nor Dr. Littman had professionally worked with transgender children9, and neither claims to be a psychologist.

Again, Dr. Sprinkle’s characterization, at least given the sources he has cited, inflates the number of individuals and appears to invent their credentials.

Dr. Sprinkle’s use of the loaded terms “sudden” and “outbreak” also cultivate a sense of “something is wrong” in the reader before he’s ever even introduced the facts.

However, prior to Dr. Sprinkle jumping into the study, he drops in a few common talking points that we need to address.

The Increase

Sprinkle goes on to say:

Whatever you name it, the percentage of teenagers identifying as trans*—a growing number of whom later detransition—has risen exponentially, especially among female teenagers.

Again, no citation for the growth in trans teens is given, but it is accurate that more teens are identifying as transgender or non-binary. A Reuters report from 2022 showed that new diagnoses of gender dysphoria among youth aged 6-17 increased from roughly 15,000 in 2017 to roughly 42,000 in 2021.10 For context, as the report states, there are roughly 48 million people in the US in that age range. If we take the total of 121,882 in that five year period, we find that roughly 0.3% of them received a diagnosis. Of those, just 17,683 (15%) received puberty blockers, hormones, or both, representing just 0.037% (one in roughly 2,700) of the total youth population studied11.

On the other hand, a 2024 study12 found that “About 3.3% of high school students identify as transgender and another 2.2% have at some point questioned if they were.” Using the lower number (3.3%), and comparing it to the percent receiving puberty blockers and hormones, we can say that just 1.1% (one in 89) of those who identify as transgender are currently seeking medical care13. That’s important, because most concerns around transition center around fears of medical interventions doing “irreversible damage”14. But this data shows that nearly all trans high schoolers are only socially transitioning, in which they might change their name, pronouns, or choices like clothing and hairstyle. For these youth, were they to ultimately identify with their assigned sex at birth, there’s no permanent changes made.

Detransition

I will grant that “a growing number of whom later detransition” (emphasis mine) is likely accurate. But the raw number of people who detransition is hardly interesting. That’s like saying that, since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, “a growing number of people are returning their iPhones”. Almost certainly true, but simply because the number of people buying iPhones increases. As more people buy them, the inevitable return count increases, even if (if Apple is doing quality control well), the percentage may have decreased.

The relevant statistic is whether or not the percentage of individuals detransitioning is increasing, and (again), Dr. Sprinkle doesn’t give a citation. However, even the UK’s Cass Review (not peer-reviewed), published in 2024, seen by many as having significant anti-trans bias15, found that “less than ten” of the 3,499 cases they tracked of youth being treated for gender dysphoria resulted in detransition. That’s a maximum rate of just 0.3%. Anti-trans voices have been speculating about rising detransition rates for quite some time now16, but they simply have not materialized1718.

These rates, as many point out, are far better than many common medical interventions. A 2024 study in the American Journal of Surgery19 found that regret for gender-affirming surgery was less than 1%, while it was significantly higher for other types of surgery, including breast reconstruction, breast augmentation, prostatectomy, and bariatric surgery. It also found that regret rate for some life decisions was significantly higher, including 7% who regret having children. 43% of first marriages end in divorce, and divorce is the end of a whopping 73% of third marriages20.

In conclusion, not only do a low percentage of those who transition eventually detransition, but that percentage is significantly lower than for other common medical interventions and life decisions.

Sex Ratio Among Transgender Youth

Dr. Sprinkle claims (again, with no source) that this increase is found “especially among female teenagers.” First, he should have said “transgender teen boys”, rather than misgendering them as “female.” Second, a 2022 study published in Pediatrics (“The Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics”) by Dr. Jack Turban21 and others found that, as of 2019, the sex ratio amongst transgender youth in the US was roughly 1.2 trans feminine teens for every trans masculine teen. That is a decrease in ratio from 1.5 found in 2017. There has been a larger increase amongst trans masculine teens seeking medical care (remember, this is a small subset of those who identify as transgender) in the UK, now exceeding the number of trans feminine teens.

Julia Serano, as always, has an excellent article22 diving into the discussion, but I want to highlight a few things here.

First, why is this bad? If there was no concern about there being more trans femme individuals before, then why is there concern about there being more trans masc individuals now (if indeed there are)? Why must there be more trans femmes than trans mascs?

If you pay attention to trans discourse as much as I do, you’ll see that the conversation is dominated by concerns about trans women (adults) and trans boys (youth). Adult trans men are frequently completely forgotten about, and trans girls (youth) are also frequently ignored. Trans women are cast as deviant men, or even a threat. Trans boys, on the other hand, are cast as impressionable young girls; hapless victims of “gender ideology.”

As Serano writes, it’s hard not to believe that this is partially rooted in cultural misogyny that infantilizes teen “girls”, and shames feminine “men”. In more patriarchal circles where women’s primary role is to bear children, this can take on the appearance of a panic about the potential for trans boys to lose their fertility. First, this is not an inevitable result of transition, especially if no medical interventions occur. Remember, gender confirmation surgery (genital surgery or removal of reproductive organs) for minors is an incredibly rare thing in the United States - performed less than 20 times per year23.

But additionally, there is simply no reason to believe that the sex ratios from 15 years ago were the “true ratio”, when so few trans people were able to be “out.” It’s better, in my opinion, to see early data on sex ratios as a small and skewed sample size, and that we will learn more as we go forward.

Setup for ROGD Discussion

Dr. Sprinkle then writes something of his goal for the coming pages:

I want to discuss this social phenomenon, since it raises many practical questions about trans* identities, mental health, online influence, and the ethics of medical interventions for adolescents. Let’s first get our minds around the recent escalation of teens identifying as trans*.

As we covered, there is no “social phenomenon” of ROGD, and therefore it cannot raise any questions. But let’s see what Dr. Sprinkle has to say.

“What is Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria?”

This is the next section header, and, as discussed, it’s nothing. I guess it could be said it’s a junk science term used to cast doubt on transgender identities and gender transition as a whole, but nothing more than that.

But first, he goes back to covering the increase in the percentage of youth identifying as transgender.

Fast Increase

Here’s how Dr. Sprinkle begins:

In many Western countries, we’ve seen a massive spike in teenagers questioning their gender. For instance, the Tavistock Centre in London, the main gender clinic in the United Kingdom, treated 51 (34 males, 17 females) children and teenagers in 2009 who had gender dysphoria or were identifying as trans*. In 2016, the same clinic saw 1,766 (557 males, 1,209 females) children and teenagers, and in 2019 it saw 2,364 (624 males, 1,740 females).[5]24 That’s more than a 5,000 percent increase among females in ten years.

These numbers are referring more specifically to the Gender Identity Development Service, which was based at the Tavistock Centre. In my time in trans discourse, these Tavistock numbers are brought up more than any others regarding “rapid increase”. Let’s take a look at them a little more closely.

First, according to the wikipedia article25 “Puberty blockers were considered a usable option by the end of the 1990s but only for patients aged 16 or over who had first tried extensive therapy.” This protocol appears to have held until 2011, when the following changes began:

In 2011, in response to changing international standards for gender care, the clinic began a research study allowing a "carefully selected group of young people" to receive puberty blockers after the age of 12. In 2014, prior to the study's completion, the clinic received NHS approval to offer them without mandating enrollment in a research study.^[16] In 2012, the service was extended to a satellite site in Leeds. Endocrine support was also extended to Leeds Children's Hospital at the Leeds General Infirmary site in 2013.^[17]

Also of note, the WPATH Standards of Care (which informs gender-affirming care across the world) version 7 were published in 2012.26

So 2009 is not a neutral starting point, from which we could expect only organic growth. Those numbers were under a very tightly controlled set of parameters. Instead, the potential age range tripled in 2011 (from 16-17 to 12-17), with barriers further reduced in each of 2012, 2013, and 2014.

So let’s look at those 2016-2019 numbers that Dr. Sprinkle cites. Among those assigned male at birth, the service saw an increase from 557 to 624 patients, or approximately 4% annualized growth. That’s hardly remarkable. For those assigned female at birth, the increase is from 1,209 to 1,740. That’s a 13% annual growth rate. More rapid, but hardly “exponential”, to borrow Dr. Sprinkle’s word from earlier in the chapter. The percentage of those assigned male at birth (which Dr. Sprinkle will discuss later) declined modestly from 31% to 26%.

Incidentally, in 2011, a survey was done on patient satisfaction, and it found this, again according to Wikipedia27:

In 2011, a patient satisfaction survey found the majority were satisfied, but a quarter expressed dissatisfaction with long wait lists. Other concerns included geographic inaccessibility and the requirement for real-life experience.^[18]

Note that by then, there were already concerns about long wait lists, geographic inaccessibility, and the requirement for “real-life experience” (in which patients are required to socially transition prior to medical treatment), all of which would have suppressed the number of patients treated.

Despite all of that, according to the study analyzing those survey responses, “Ninety-four percent [of patients] would recommend the services if a friend or relative had a gender-related problem.”28

By 2021, wait lists had increased to over two years, longer in some other cases. I highly recommend watching this episode of Philosophy Tube (Abigail Thorn) about her experience, as an adult, trying to get gender-affirming care in the UK. It will dispel any notions that somehow the UK’s medical system was rushing people into gender-affirming care — quite the opposite was the case.

So yes, the numbers have increased, as happens when a new service is available, and then again when it’s made more accessible. But the increases in the most recent years for which data was presented show modest year-over-year growth, and the numbers are quite small when compared to population, having never reached more than one in a thousand children in that age range29.

Since the service was quite small prior to 2011, and COVID affected numbers in the 2020-21 and 2021-22 financial years, I’ve charted the referrals from 2011-12 to 2019-2020.

And here is the growth rate by year:

There was a single anomolous (from 2014-15 to 2015-16) year. Recall that, sometime in 2014, they stopped requiring patients to enroll in studies, making it much easier to access care. Other than that, growth rates in referrals per year had been falling quite steadily, actually reaching 7% in 2018-2019, and then 0% in 2019-2020’s Financial Year30.

And this is where I have to bring the left-handedness graph in. In the early 1900’s, left-handedness was stigmatized, and frequently children were forced to write with their right hand anyways. This caused significant psychological damage, and eventually children were allowed to use either hand.

Numbers start at 3%, and then “increase dramatically” to ~12% from roughly 1915 to 1940, a twenty-five year period. And then, of course, they level out. We can assume from this graph that roughly 75% of left-handed children were being forced to use their right hand anyways.

Many trans people, including me, will tell you that the world was not safe for trans people 30 years ago. Very few trans people were “out” at the time. I didn’t even know the word until college (early 2000’s). Pop culture mocked trans people31. Like I said above, huge changes to the medical situation around trans people happened in the early 2010’s. Today, I know so many trans people with the same story as me — I could not safely understand my gender until very recently. Growing up now, I would have known, and could have pursued medical transition as a teen and young adult. But I didn’t grow up now, so I didn’t transition until I was 40.

In any case, yes, the numbers in the 2010’s grew rapidly. But they have also leveled off. But anyone trying to say that the increased numbers are due to (completely unevidenced) social contagion while refusing to engage with the fact that prior years were suppresed is showing tremendous bias. The latter is evidenced by every trans person with a story like mine, as well as simply the known fact of transphobia32 through the years33). But perhaps most directly: it’s evidenced by the fact that “social contagion” is literally used as an argument to deny trans people the ability to live as themselves.

The argument of social contagion attempts to say that transness is generated via social influence (with no solid evidence), when we have decades of history, including the use of the “social contagion” argument itself, of tremendous societal pressure preventing trans people from transitioning.

Regardless, despite this increase, we still see very high satisfaction among those who transition. Unless we see a substantial decrease in that satisfaction, there is every reason to believe that what we are seeing is simply closer to the true number of trans people, who are now visible with the stigma reduced.

Finally, Dr. Sprinkle mentions similar growth trends in other countries, which I have no disagreement with.

Concern

After that, he says this, with no citation:

A growing number of medical practitioners, feminists, parents, detransitioners, and even some older trans* people are deeply concerned about the sudden rise in young people questioning their gender.

I don’t want to spend too much time on this because there is no source. But I will say this:

1. Every major medical organization in the US supports gender-affirming care. No European country that allowed gender-affirming care has now banned it, not even the UK.

2. Yes, there exist trans-exclusionary radical feminists (“TERF’s”), who are, as the name implies, anti-trans. But women in general are more supportive of trans people, not less, despite all of the hand-wringing about “women’s spaces” and “women’s sports,” which are issues which affect women directly.34

3. It’s impossible to evaluate his claim about parents.

4. We already discussed detransitioners who regret their transition - a “growing number” is likely true, but there is no evidence of a percentage that is either growing or concerning.

5. “Even some older trans* people” - as with any group, you can find someone from a marginalized group who is willing to agree with the points of the majority. These trans people do not speak for the whole, just like I don’t. But the vast majority of trans people support youth having access to appropriate gender-affirming care - this is not a large debate within the community.

Then Dr. Sprinkle goes on to describe his own experience as an evangelical Christian who speaks against gender transition.

Through my own organization, the Center for Faith, Sexuality & Gender, I’ve seen a dramatic increase in emails and phone calls from parents whose child comes out as trans*, seemingly out of the blue, with no prior evidence of gender dysphoria. Many of these stories that I’ve listened to fit the description of ROGD.

First, Dr. Sprinkle cannot diagnose someone as having ROGD because:

1. ROGD doesn’t exist as a diagnosis

2. Dr. Sprinkle is not someone with a credential that would allow him to diagnose anything

Second - I have no doubt that a man who is known for speaking against LGBTQ+ people in the church gets calls and emails from anti-LGBTQ+ parents.

And third, because of that, it’s not surprising at all that those parents would be caught off guard by their child coming out. Coming out, almost by nature, is something that happens “suddenly”. My parents never knew of my struggle with gender dysphoria until the moment I told them I was transgender. To them, I would fit the description above, “parents whose child comes out as trans*, seemingly out of the blue, with no prior evidence of gender dysphoria.” What this completely omits is any discussion with the child as to what prior evidence they have for gender dysphoria. I had decades of it, despite my parents not knowing. I hid it all that time, terrified that anyone would find out, because of what they would think of me. When I did start to come out, I told the safest people first, and then gradually more. I was already on Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) by the time I came out to many people.

And this is the thing - almost definitionally, a parent does not know that a child is trans until the child says they are trans. At which point the child has likely been thinking about it for a while, but the parent is hearing it suddenly. If the parent won’t listen, and won’t hear the child say “this is how it has been for me”, then the parent may look for a theory like ROGD to say, “something made my child trans.” And if the ROGD narrative has been pushed through the media, churches, and conservative books and online spaces, along with anti-trans sentiment, then the parents find exactly the theory they need to dismiss their child, and they adopt it.

But let’s further talk about selection bias - Dr. Sprinkle is a conservative evangelical author, known for his “let’s be nice, but still not affirming” position towards LGBTQIA+ people. What type of parents are going to email him for advice? Those who fundamentally support their trans child? Or those who do not? And when he (or someone else) offers them the narrative of ROGD, when they desperately want to believe that their child isn’t “actually” trans, these parents are likely to accept it, despite what their child is saying.

I’m not the first to come to this conclusion: gender dysphoria is not a social contagion. But the belief that it is one very well may be. It’s an idea that spreads without evidence, contrary to actual evidence.

To be continued…

I know we haven’t gotten to it yet, but the next section gets into Dr. Sprinkle’s actual discussion of the study written by Lisa Littman on the concept of ROGD. We’ll dig into both the study and his writing about it. It’ll probably take a couple posts to get through it, but one of them is almost finished, so expect it in the coming days.

Before you go, please don’t forget to subscribe to make sure you get the next part, and to let me know you appreciate my work - it really does help, and it’s free! Also, leave comments, questions, etc below - I always read them, I try to respond, and they help me know what you’d like to hear more about.

This page will provide sources for the information in the brochure, which simply did not fit in the printed version. You can also access the latest version of the brochure!

Footnotes

Cover

1: “But we’re a small community – only 11% of Americans say they know a trans person well”; “Over 60% of Americans say they don’t know a trans person, so it’s easy to spread misinformation about the community.”

PRRI, Gender and Politics Survey, 2023. Specifically, 1% said they are transgender, 5% said a close friend is, and 5% said a family member is. An additional 25% have a transgender acquaintance. 63% say they do not know someone who is transgender.

“How are trans rights under attack”

2: “Lawmakers across the country have introduced over 2,000 anti-trans bills in the last three years.”

Source: Trans Legislation Tracker. As of July 26, 2025, 953 anti-trans bills had been introduced in 2025 alone, on top of 701 in 2024 and 615 in 2023. 258 of those bills have passed.

3: “Donald Trump’s campaign spent over $200 million on anti-trans ads”

Source: The Drum. “What Trump’s win – and $215m worth of anti-trans ads – mean for the future of advertising”

4: “27 states now ban gender-affirming care for minors”

Source: Human Rights Campaign. “Map: Attacks on Gender Affirming Care by State”

4a: “Many have made it difficult or impossible to change gender markers on ID, and Trump is trying to do this with passports, too.”

Source: Assigned Media. “Passports Are Again Available to Transgender Americans, However Briefly”

5: “Under Trump’s orders, trans people are being kicked out of the military.”

Source: Erin in the Morning. “SCOTUS Allows Military Ban That Calls Trans People "Dishonorable" To Go Into Effect”

6: “29 states ban trans girls in girls’ sports, even in elementary school.”

Source: Movement Advancement Project. “Bans on Transgender Youth Participation in Sports”

7: 19 states have trans bathroom bans, forcing trans people to use the wrong restroom in at least some certain circumstances.⁷

Source: Movement Advancement Project. “Bans on Transgender People Using Public Bathrooms and Facilities According to their Gender Identity”

8: “‘Don’t say gay’ bills target trans kids and teachers in schools as well”

Source (for one example): Erin in the Morning. “11th Circuit Rules Trans Teacher Must Misgender Herself In Classroom In Accordance With FL Law”

9: “Prominent conservatives are calling for ‘transgender ideology’ to be ‘eradicated’ from society entirely. This is genocidal language.”

Source: Los Angeles Times. “What the CPAC speaker meant when he said ‘transgenderism must be eradicated’”

“But why?”

1: See above PRRI Survey

10, 11: “And with left-wing figures¹⁰ and media¹¹ staying silent (or even supporting the attacks)), the right’s campaign is working.”

Source (10): “Newsom’s Bizarre Interview with MAGA Podcaster Platforms Anti-Trans Conspiracies”

Source (11): Erin in the Morning: “After Getting The Ruling It Wanted, New York Times Publishes 6 Anti-Trans Articles”

"About transgender people”

12: “Over two million trans people live in America.”

Source: USAFacts. “What percentage of the US population is transgender?”

13: “Gender-affirming health care is endorsed by every major health care organization in the United States.”

Source: Advocates for Trans Equality. “Medical Organization Statements”

14: “94% of those who transition report increased life satisfaction.”

Source: US Trans Survey. “Early Insights”

15: “Trans kids and adults have a high risk of suicide, homelessness, and violence, due to hate and discrimination in our society. These disproportionately affect trans people of color, particularly trans women of color.”

Source: Trevor Project. “Facts About Suicide Among LGBTQ+ Young People”

Ok, so what do I do?

16: “Wear a t-shirt or put a sticker on your car”

These are readily available on Etsy and Amazon!

17: “Learn more about trans issues”

Books I recommend (These are not affiliate links, I earn nothing from these recommendations)

• “Free to Be: Understanding Kids & Gender Identity” - Jack Turban MD

• “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Trans (But Were Afraid to Ask)” - Brynn Tannehill

Journalists you should check out and subscribe to:

• Erin in the Morning

• Assigned Media

Feel free to comment if you have other resources you think everyone should check out! I’ll vet and add great ones to this list!

Leave a comment

18: Support trans non-profits

I recommend Lambda Legal, the ACLU, and the Trevor Project. Again, comment below if there are organizations you think are worth inclusion, and I’ll vet and add them to this list as I’m able!

19: House Budget Bill bans federal funding for gender-affirming care at any age

This one would definitely affect those on Medicaid and Medicare, could affect those on a plan purchased through the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), and a broad interpretation of this could affect hospitals receiving federal funding, requiring that they stop providing gender-affirming care entirely. Even the threat of this may have a chilling effect. For example, while this isn’t settled, in reaction to similar rules for minors, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles has stopped providing gender-affirming care for minors, potentially complying in advance.

20: The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) appears likely to overturn bans on conversion therapy.

Licensed therapists are prohibited from providing “conversion therapy” to minors in many states. Conversion therapy has been shown to cause immense damage, not to mention be ineffective. It’s not possible to change a person’s gender identity or sexuality through therapy, and it’d be an awful thing to do even if it did work. Nothing is wrong with LGBTQIA+ people. Conversion therapy is condemned by all relevant organizations, including the American Psychiatric Association and American Psychological Association. Read more from Human Rights Campaign here.

SCOTUS, including Justice Kagan, appears ready to overturn this ban on “free speech” grounds.

Thank you so much again for checking this out!

Regular readers will be familiar with my friend Billie Hoard. In addition to being an incredible friend, she’s also a phenomenal thinker and writer, as you may have seen over on her substack, TRANSposition, which you should subscribe to now if you haven’t already. I don’t know her brother, Paul, as well but have had the pleasure of meeting him a couple times now and wish I knew him better.

The two of them have been working on a project for years now, and it’s about to get published in book form next week: Eucontamination: Disgust Theology and the Christian Life (Go buy it now, using discount code “DISGUST 50”, July 24-25, to get 50% off!).

What’s in the book?

This book develops three points I want to talk about here (and more!), but the book expands each greatly with so much good stuff1 packed into it.

Here’s my summary of those three points (with apologies to Billie and Paul, who explain it much better than I can):

The Church’s Disgust Reaction

The church’s exclusion of various groups is a result of a misapplied communal “disgust” reaction - an attempt to keep the church “pure” by keeping “contaminants” out. I see this most clearly in my experience as a transgender lesbian woman, in seeing churches go to great lengths to expel not just me, but anyone who supports me, and anyone who supports them, etc.

And they do this because…

Contaminants change the thing they contaminate

Fundamentally, we fear a contaminant because it will change us into something different. Ingesting a bit of arsenic will change us from live to dead. The evangelical church allowing sexual predators to be leaders has changed it into a body that fails to safeguard the most vulnerable in the church, preferring instead to protect its leaders.

The problem is when this response occurs towards people who would actually bring life and flourishing to the body. For example, for many decades or centuries (and in some places, still today), white churches excluded black people, or at least kept them segregated. This created a disatrous “us” vs. “them” where white people failed to interact with and love their Black neighbors. The result of that was slavery and Jim Crow in the past and overincarceration of Black people today.

And the church isn’t wrong - incorporating a new group will change the church. When your church welcomes in a deaf person, it’ll become quickly apparent that it needs an ASL interpreter for sermons. When a church welcomes unhoused people, it will lead to hearts being moved to help the unhoused in the community. But beyond needing help, the people the church may shun can actually transform the church into something better by bringing their different lives and experiences and ways of being into the body.

Billie and Paul call that…

Eucontamination

The titular concept of “eucontamination”, a word Billie and Paul have coined, is basically, “good contamination.” If you take a probiotic or eat greek yogurt, you are intentionally taking bacteria into your body. But unlike dangerous bacteria, these bacteria actually help your body. They make it better.

Billie and Paul first argue that this is what Jesus did - that he “eucontaminated” the world by coming into it. And few could argue that Jesus didn’t change the world2. His teachings around loving our neighbor, his radical love for the most marginalized: the leper, the blind, those unable to walk, even the dead. All of these things should transform the body into one that practices radical love towards those people that Jesus would have.

But then they take it further, arguing that those people the church shuts out can actually be eucontaminants into the church. That, for example, gay people can demonstrate love in ways that the church might have missed. That trans people can cause us to think more deeply about the incredible diversity in God’s creation. And on and on.

I have argued before that the exclusion of queer people (or immigrants, or the unhoused, or people of color, etc) is the body of Christ amputating its limbs. Billie and Paul argue for the vital importance of bringing those people back into the body.

Who is this book for?

If you’re a Christian, please read this book - it’s among the most transformative thinking I’ve come across and I’ll be recommending it to anyone who will listen for some time. If you’re not affirming of queer people, then you especially need to read this book. If you’re not a Christian, there’s still a lot of good in it, though it is a fundamentally Christian book.

When does it come out?

August 1st, but you should seriously go order it now so you can get 50% off (see link above), and because pre-orders really help out authors by sending signals to publishers that people want the book.

Why am I so excited about this?

I’ve heard Billie and Paul talk about this a number of times. I’ve participated in a service they developed with two friends of theirs (also brilliant) which followed what they call the “Liturgy of Eucontamination”, and I cried multiple times during it at the power of what was happening. It’s an idea that can change how we see our neighbors, ourselves, Jesus, and more.

I’ll have more to say soon, I’m only half way through my copy so far, but for now, I’m adding this to my must read list of recommended books, and you can expect to see me cite it regularly in the future!

Closing

Hope this finds you well. I made it through my May surgery and some health issues after it, plus travel, I’ve got a couple drafts in progress that I hope to publish soon - wish me luck!

-Celeste

To those of you who follow Billie and are already familiar with her work, Hi! I’m Celeste Irwin. I’m a trans woman and a Christian. I’ve loved Billie’s series and can only hope that I can do justice to these portions. Welcome to my blog, and if you want to get future updates to this series as well as my other writings, you can subscribe (free) here:

Introduction

Have you ever said or thought any of these things?

• “Wow, there are a lot of trans kids now, and there didn’t used to be - what’s making all of these kids trans?”

• “I think [person] transitioned because their friend or family member did,”

• “That person transitioned because of social media or because it’s cool to be transgender.”

• “What if these people transitioning regret it someday?”

• “Why should teenagers be getting medical treatments for gender dysphoria?”

• “Couldn’t therapy be a better option?”

• “What if they have mental health issues or are autistic? Doesn’t that cast doubt on a gender dysphoria diagnosis?”

If so, then this post (and the subsequent posts about this chapter) are for you. I’ve also linked dozens of sources for you to read more about. I want to say at the outset: I do not judge anyone for having those questions. But I do expect someone with those questions to do the work to learn whether there is merit to them, and I hope this post and the ones following it help those who are in that spot. And, as always - feel free to ask questions below!

A difficult topic

I’ve wanted to write about the concept of “social contagion” or “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria” (ROGD) for a couple years now. It’s a difficult topic to write about, because it requires one to try to prove a negative. It’s hard to do, just like “Prove that cell phones don’t cause cancer,”1 “Prove that vaccines don’t cause autism,”2 “Prove that Sasquatch (Bigfoot) doesn’t exist,”3 or others.

But it’s an important topic, because of just how easy it is for this concept to take hold, and how destructive it can be once it does. The idea that “transness is a social contagion” categorizes gender dysphoria as a kind of virus. A disease that can be caught and transmitted. Julia Serano captures the impact of that quite well4:

This thinking leads to things like “Don’t Say Gay/Trans” bills5, libraries refusing to stock books containing LGBTQIA+ content6, and the wholesale erasure of anything to do with transgender people from federal government websites in the first weeks and months of President Trump’s second term. According to NPR:7

It's not the first time transgender people became a target of governments, historians say. They were one of the groups that were persecuted early alongside suspected communists and Jews by Nazi8 Germany, said Laurie Marhoefer, a specialist on the history of Weimar and Nazi Germany at the University of Washington who also studies transgender and queer history.

"Transgender people are the canary in the coal mine of democracy,"9 said Marhoefer.

The erasure includes the truly depraved act of removing mentions of trans people from the National Park Service website for the Stonewall Inn National Monument, site of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, widely considered a pivotal moment in the fight for queer rights in the United States.10

“Social Contagion” thinking relies on two fundamental premises. First, that some trans youth are not “actually trans.” And second, that trans identities are somehow “worse” than non-trans identities. That they are an unfavorable outcome; that it is, in a word, better to be cisgender. There is a word for a view that one class of people is better than another: bigotry. In this case, the specific form of it is called “cis supremacy.”11 Like white supremacy, it defines those on the margins as “other”, and treats them as lesser. Sometimes it even treats them as not human, as evidenced every time I’ve been called a “monster”, or “virus”, or seen trans people referred to as a “plague.”

But concern over the spread of a way of life only happens when it’s seen as a bad thing. No one loses sleep over something like an “electric vehicle social contagion.” When a thing is seen as good, we generally are happy if more people do it. When a thing is seen as neutral, at worst it’s seen as a trend or fad, mostly harmless (for those of you old enough, remember furbies, Tickle-Me-Elmo or the Macarena). But when a thing is seen as bad? That’s the makings of a moral panic.

Now, it is likely that I’ve offended some readers - that some of you are saying “hey now, I’m not prejudiced against trans people - I just am worried that maybe there’s a lot of kids getting caught up in this.” And I’d like you to ask a few questions of yourself:

1. Why would that bad?

2. Have you looked for evidence of the “why” actually happening. If you said, “too many people transitioning could lead to a lot of them regretting it,” have you looked into the data to see if that’s happening?

3. Have you actually looked for evidence that the contagion effect is happening? What form would that evidence take?

We’ll look into all of those questions as we go through the next few posts. Just keep this all in mind. This is a difficult conversation precisely because of how weak the concept is, how the conversation itself invokes a skepticism regarding whether it is acceptable to be transgender, and how it literally pathologizes transness into some kind of virus.

Ok, let’s get to it.

Summary: ROGD is not a thing

Chapter 10 of Embodied is titled “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria.” It was tempting for me to keep this post to a single sentence:

“Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) is junk science12 that has not been validated by any reputable study and should therefore be completely disregarded in any discussion of trans people, and anyone pushing this theory is revealing either their agenda, their unfamiliarity on the topics, or both.”

If you want a summary of Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria, that’s it. That really is the summary. ROGD is not a thing.

Dr. Preston Sprinkle spends this chapter discussing something that simply does not exist. A 2021 statement by Coalition for the Advancement & Application of Psychological Science reads, in part:

There are no sound empirical studies of ROGD and it has not been subjected to rigorous peer-review processes that are standard for clinical science. Further, there is no evidence that ROGD aligns with the lived experiences of transgender children and adolescents.13

The statement is co-signed by, among others, the American Psychological Association and American Psychiatric Association. It further opposes any use of the concept in clinical settings.

At this point, I would encourage you to ask yourself who is more credible on topics related to child psychology. Would you be inclined to trust the American Psychological Association or would you rather trust Dr. Preston Sprinkle (PhD, New Testament)?

But I’m going to continue with this analysis of Dr. Sprinkle’s writing for two reasons:

1. There’s a lot of other claims mixed into the chapter that are worth examining.

2. Some of you may have heard of ROGD (or, as it is sometimes discussed: the “social contagion” theory of transness) and it’s helpful to walk through how it became an anti-trans talking point, despite having no reputable evidence for it.

However, I must note up-front: this chapter is a Gish Gallop14 within a Gish Gallop. The length of Billie’s critique of Embodied is in part due to the huge number of claims Dr. Sprinkle makes which require rebuttal, despite him having failed to support them to begin with. Here, Dr. Sprinkle builds an entire chapter on a concept with no scientific backing. But, I suspect that, for some of you, you will be unsatisfied with my simple statement of: “No. That’s not a thing.”15 Hopefully this post and linked resources will help you.

Preface

Dr. Sprinkle writes this as the first of three chapters talking about “the practical aspects of our topic.” Such a framing implies that he does not mean this as a philosophical exploration but rather a “rubber-meets-the-road”, practical discussion which informs action. This is made clear by how he describes the other two practical chapters, found at the end of the interlude preceding this chapter16:

1. Chapter 11, “whether a disciple of Jesus should transition”

2. Chapter 12: “various questions related to pronouns, bathrooms, and sleeping spaces.”

That practical framing makes it notable that Dr. Sprinkle first introduces Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) as “a social phenomenon that has become a highly publicized part of this conversation… which has to do with the massive increase in teenagers identifying as trans*17."18

One might hear Dr. Sprinkle as making several assertions in that statement:

• Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria exists

• It’s a social phenomenon

• It’s driving a massive increase in teenagers identifying as transgender

Throughout this analysis, I will be evaluating his support for those claims.

As background, in case it needs stated, Dr. Sprinkle does not believe that transitioning is correct for anyone. So even if he believes there is a “true gender dysphoria” to contrast with ROGD, he still doesn’t think transition is ever a correct choice. In the previous chapter, he bluntly stated, “I don’t think gender should override sex when there is an incongruence”19.

What is Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria?

The easy answer? As I said before, it’s nothing. It doesn’t exist. It’s difficult to prove a negative, but we can minimally say that there is no evidence that it exists in any kind of widespread clinically useful way.

I can’t really overstate the importance of that. This chapter is literally named after an idea that has no merit and has indeed been debunked numerous times. A good place to start is transgender writer and activist Julia Serano’s article, “All the evidence Against Transgender Social Contagion.”20

Dr. Sprinkle never gives a succinct definition of ROGD, but the claim is typically phrased something like this: there is some subset of teenagers who do not experience some innate form of gender dysphoria, but that their experience of gender dysphoria is:

• Sudden (Rapid-Onset)

• Caused by exposure to transgender people, either in person or online (i.e. it is a social contagion)

Where did the idea come from?

The concept of gender dysphoria as a “social contagion” was being discussed in 2016 and 2017, notably by Lisa Marchiano21, but truly entered public discussion22 with the publication of Lisa Littman’s August 2018 paper, “Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria.”23 The circumstances of Littman’s paper are very worth discussing, a topic I will revisit as I continue in the next post. For now, several facts are exceedingly important:

1. A substantial correction was made and the entire corrected paper republished in March 2019.24

2. The study only interviewed parents, not the children themselves.

3. The parents were recruited from three online spaces critical of the entire concept of transgender people, creating obvious sampling bias.

4. The recruitment for the study was clear in its goal of demonstrating that ROGD existed (researcher bias).

5. The recruitment for the study specifically recruited parents who already believed that their children had experienced ROGD: “If your child has had sudden or rapid development of gender dysphoria beginning between the ages of 10 and 21, please consider completing the following online survey.”25 I trust I don’t need to elaborate on how problematic this is.

6. The corrected paper only claims to generate a hypothesis that ROGD exists, it does not claim that ROGD has been shown to exist.

From there, despite the correction and severe limitations, ROGD has continued to garner widespread discussion by those opposed to gender transition. For example, you can find it referenced as fact by other evangelical publications such as The Gospel Coalition26, Desiring God27, or Christianity Today28.

And with all that background (sorry), we are finally ready to dive into Chapter 10 of Embodied, which begins with an anecdote about a detransitioner named Helena. Dr. Sprinkle introduces her to ground the conversation of ROGD in a real person’s story.

Helena’s Story

Timeline

Dr. Preston Sprinkle opens the chapter with a story about Helena Kerschner29, a woman who transitioned and then eventually detransitioned. Before we proceed, I need to note that, since February 2022, Helena Kerschner works for Genspect30, an organization designated as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.31

The chapter begins:

Helena was fourteen when she realized she was attracted to both boys and girls and began to explore what this meant for her through online communities on Tumblr. It was there that she learned about various gender identities. She read story after story of people identifying as trans*. “I eventually started relating to [these stories],” she later explains, “and identifying as trans*.”[1]32

Helena learned on Tumblr that taking testosterone was the next step she must take as a trans* person. So she began cross-hormone therapy (CHT): “On Tumblr specifically, there’s this attitude that if you have the slightest inclination that you might have gender identity confusion, the healthiest thing you can do is explore that and experiment with that.”

Getting testosterone was easy.[2]33 All it took was a one-hour consultation with a counselor who asked about her dysphoria.

After reading that, how old do you think Helena was when she began taking testosterone? If you’re like me, you might have guessed she was fourteen, maybe fifteen, especially in a chapter titled, “Rapid-onset Gender Dysphoria.”

Well, if you watch the video Dr. Sprinkle links to in the first footnote in that passage, you’ll hear Helena say, “I actually did end up being on testosterone for almost two years … from like the week after I turned 18 to just before I turned 20”.34

Helena was eighteen when she started T, so not even a minor anymore. She says in the video35 that, “I identified as trans for five years in total, so three years not transitioning and then two years I actually physically transitioned.” This was not a rushed decision being made by a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old, but a decision over three years in the making by an adult. In Dr. Sprinkle’s discussion of Helena, he never mentions this. The closest he gets is saying that Helena was, “on CHT for two years,” and then later, “I lost five years of my life to gender ideology…”. If the reader does not do the math themselves and then go listen to the primary sources, they would have little reason to guess Helena was an adult when she started medical treatments.36

Pressure

Next, I want to point out Dr. Sprinkle’s phrase, specifically because it is his, and not Helena’s. He writes, “Helena learned on Tumblr that taking testosterone was the next step she must take as a trans* person.” (emphasis mine). The follow-up quote from Helena does not support this claim in any way, and in fact it is contradicted by the three-year gap between her coming to see herself as transgender and her starting testosterone.

I cannot say that no one told Helena that she “must” take testosterone as a next step, but even Helena doesn’t make that claim, so I see no reason to believe it happened.

My own experience on forums like Reddit or Twitter trying to learn about my own transgender identity in 2022 was that absolutely people will suggest that you explore feelings about your gender. Get some clothes and try them on. Try creating an avatar online with a different name and pronouns and see how it feels when people call you that. This is all harmless stuff - I did a lot of it with no one even knowing.

But when it comes to decisions about legal or medical decision? There, the community had a very strong ethic of leaving those decisions to the individual. The most you might see would be a statement that, early on, hormones have minimal effects other than potential effects to one’s mental state, and that they are typically reversible if one stops taking Hormone Replacement Theraply (HRT)37 early on.38 I actually asked people on one of the trans Reddit forums, “Should I start HRT?”, and had people either say, “up to you” or “be careful.” And the medical community is even less prescriptive. I have had to ask for every medical treatment I have received as part of transition, and had to get my therapist to sign-off on many of them as well. At no point did anyone say, “you should do this,” much less, “you must do this.”

Lying to the doctors

Dr. Sprinkle continues:

All it took was a one-hour consultation with a counselor who asked about her dysphoria. “I had all these rehearsed answers that I didn’t genuinely believe, but it’s really popular for the trans* community to … help each other rehearse answers and tell each other what to say to doctors.”39

Remember, this is an adult we’re talking about. And… I feel for Helena. But, this implies to me that Helena likely did not meet the standards for gender dysphoria at the time. And I hope everyone will agree: if you lie to your doctor, you’re putting yourself at risk of incorrect treatments. That said, it is somewhat understandable, given how difficult it can be to get gender affirming care under the best of circumstances.40 But Helena cannot claim that doctors pushed her into transition, when she in fact had to deceive them to access testosterone.

A more recent development is the publication of a new paper titled, “Gatekeeping gender-affirming care is detrimental to detrans people,” which supports the idea that gatekeeping causes people to be untruthful with their doctors, possibly leading to situations like Helena’s.

Problems begin on HRT

Dr. Sprinkle then writes:

Helena was on CHT for two years. At first, she really enjoyed the experience. But after a while, several problems flared up.

“It is a common thing for women on testosterone to experience a lot of anger. Then there’s this weird phenomenon where you get upset and want to cry, but you can’t cry. Even though I was really elated at first, eventually these kinds of problems started getting more apparent and I started feeling really miserable.… I was angry, like, all the time. Everything made me angry. I felt like I had been put through the wringer with all these emotional changes.… It really messed with my mental health.”41

There are several issues with this passage, which implies that Helena was satisfied with HRT for some time and then discusses issues which “flared up.”

“At first, she really enjoyed the experience.” is Dr. Sprinkle’s summary phrase. Here’s what Helena says in the video42, leading into to his quote:

At first, I was definitely really excited, I was really elated, I was really optimistic. But it is a common thing for …

Dr. Sprinkle summarizes Helena’s terms “really excited”, “really elated”, and “really optimistic” with “really enjoyed.” That seems like a stretch to me - “excited” and “optimistic” are forward looking terms, while elated is typically a temporary euphoria associated with a specific event. “Enjoyed,” on the other hand, implies some level of satisfaction with something that is happening.

After that, Dr. Sprinkle simply inserts the phrase, “But after a while,” which is completely absent from Helena’s account.

Next up, are a couple of quotation errors. First, harmlessly, Dr. Sprinkle adds the word “but” to make it, “but you can’t cry.” More troubling, and contrary to any writing style guide I have seen, but without changing the meaning dramatically in this case, Dr. Sprinkle fully omits a phrase, with no ellipsis to mark the omission. (emphasis mine for the phrase he omits)

… you can’t cry. It's really strange but I've heard a lot of trans guys say that they've been through that and I went through that. So even though I was really elated at first …

Dr. Sprinkle’s first ellipsis is valid, omitting a question from the interviewer and a leading phrase by Helena.

But after that, he makes another omission, also not marked with an ellipsis. Just like the first couple issues, this could skew the reader’s perception of Helena’s timeline. (emphasis mine for the phrase he omits):

… Everything made me angry all the time. And it was the strongest for like the first three months or so and then it kind of evened out. But by that time I just felt like I had been put through the wringer …

Put simply, this is unacceptable writing practice by Dr. Sprinkle. I would have more grace for this if Dr. Sprinkle did not have a PhD and “New York Times bestselling author” in his biography43, and if Embodied were not the fourteenth book he had authored or co-authored.44

The effect of all of these is that it makes it sound like Helena was satisfied on HRT for some time, when she doesn’t indicate that in her telling of her story. To listen to Helena, it sounds like the problems started quite quickly, possibly immediately.

Helena, later in the video, does say, “eventually these kinds of problems kept getting more apparent.”45 But this is not in conflict with her statements that the problems were, “strongest for like the first three months or so.”

I feel that Dr. Sprinkle damages his own credibility by summarizing and paraphrasing in ways that leave the reader with an impression that more neatly supports his conclusions, but which are not clearly supported by the sources he cites. His altering of quotations goes against every writing style guide I checked.

In summary, Helena was an adult who deceived her medical provider and experienced early effects she did not like. Such a person could easily stop the HRT at any time, potentially with no long-term effects from having taken it.

Anger Issues

Dr. Sprinkle rightly presents the anger issues Helena experienced as being distressing. But here is the part I wish he could have empathy for: I could have said everything Helena said, word for word, about my own experience pre-transition.

I was constantly angry. I was constantly on edge. I had to deaden all of my emotions just to avoid doing damage. I’m not proud of it in any way, but I used to lose my temper frequently at work or at home. The testosterone in my body made my life something of a living hell, constantly fighting myself.

Then, I began taking an anti-androgen (Testosterone blocker) and Estrogen. And life changed. I was able to regulate my emotions. I could feel them, listen to them, but not be controlled by them. Within weeks, my kids could see a difference. My partner began to be able to notice, with high accuracy, if I had forgotten to take my HRT for a couple of days.

Within a month, I knew this was maybe the best decision I had ever made in my life. Two years later, I continue to feel that way.

But here is my question: how can Dr. Sprinkle see detransition for Helena as a good thing, where for me, my transition is unacceptable, despite us both benefiting from those decisions, in largely the same way?

Wishful thinking

Dr. Sprinkle writes this about Helena’s expectations:

Helena also learned that high doses of testosterone in females often cause their ovaries and uterus to atrophy after about five years. “I was aware of this … but [I assumed that] probably by the time that becomes my problem, the doctors will figure something out.”46

This is just wild. Once again, Helena herself is responsible for the error. She is a consenting adult, aware of this risk, simply dismissive of it. And what Dr. Sprinkle omits is Helena herself immediately taking accountability for this. Immediately following the quote above, she adds, “So, I didn't — I did not take it as seriously as I should have.”47

Helena Now

Sprinkle summarizes Helena’s story:

Helena is now living as a bisexual female who still wrestles with dysphoria, and she has some strong words to describe her experience identifying as trans*:

“I lost 5 years of my life to gender ideology … 5 years. [O]f believing a lie. [O]f centering all of my identity, friendships, actions, and thoughts on a lie. [A] falsehood. 5 years of repressing my trauma and sexuality in favor of a lie.”[3]48

I do find it quite interesting that Helena, like some other detransitioners I have heard speak, still speaks of “wrestling with dysphoria.” That is, she’s not saying the dysphoria was never there, she’s saying she’s found another path for dealing with it. That is hugely relevant to the inclusion of her story in a discussion aobut ROGD. The entire premise of ROGD is that it is a kind of “fake” dysphoria that is only created by peer pressure and social contagion. If her dysphoria is persistent even after detransitioning and becoming an activist against gender transition, that would imply that her dysphoria was and still is quite real, and that whatever we can learn from her story, it’s not some kind of proof case of ROGD.49

How the trans community feels

But I want to note this: I have never met a trans person or advocate who wants people to transition if it is not right for them, and the reason is quite simple: we know what gender dysphoria feels like. We know how horrible it is. And we know that if someone transitions and it’s not right for them, that’s what they will experience. If people ask me, “do you think I am transgender,” or, “do you think I should transition,” I always lead with, “I cannot answer those questions.”

If a large percentage of people transitioning were finding it was wrong for them, the trans community would be among the first to stand up and say, “We have to figure out what’s wrong here, this is not ok.”

Finally, it should go without saying that many trans people feel exactly the same as Helena, but regarding the time they were told they could not transition. I know I feel exactly that way about how the evangelical church taught me to suppress my own gender and sexuality.

Why does Helena’s pain matter while my own does not?

Just one story

Dr. Sprinkle concludes his discussion of Helena with this:

Helena’s story is one story. And one story is just one story. We should never view an entire idea or concept through the lens of just one story.

I wholeheartedly agree, and Helena deserves to be able to share her story, just like any other trans person or detransitioner. When they do, their stories deserve to be respected, and not forced to fit a narrative in the way that Dr. Sprinkle has done above.

For what it’s worth, I am personally thankful to the detransitioners who have shared their stories on Reddit and elsewhere. Their stories, though a small percentage of those who transition, help us understand if there are commonalities that lead someone to transition when that ultimately won’t help them.

But Dr. Sprinkle regularly uses anecdotes throughout his book, using each of them to support his conclusions, never sharing stories like mine50. He excludes stories like mine or Billie Hoard’s, or the more than 94% of US transgender individuals who say they are more satisfied with life after transition.51

Next up

Believe it or not, that only covers the first two pages of this chapter. But with that context, we are now ready to tackle the next section of this chapter, which directly engages with the false concept of rapid-onset gender dysphoria. That’ll be the next blog post, so please make sure to subscribe (for free!) so you don’t miss it. Thank you for reading, and feel free to ask questions in the comments!

Apologies for the delay coming: much of the next post is already written, but I’m having surgery on Thursday, May 29th, so recovery will keep me from writing for a week or two. I’ll get it posted as soon as I can.

To those of you who follow Billie and are already familiar with her work, Hi! I’m Celeste Irwin. I’m a trans woman and a Christian. I’ve loved Billie’s series and can only hope that I can do justice to these portions. Welcome to my blog, and if you want to get future updates to this series as well as my other writings, you can subscribe (free) here:

After Chapter 9, Dr. Preston Sprinkle (whose PhD is in New Testament) pivots the book, using a short chapter titled “Interlude”. This chapter functions as a summary of what’s come before, and pivot to the practical application section after. Particularly, it functions as a kind of hardening of what came before. Where, as Billie Hoard noted repeatedly, Dr. Sprinkle expressed at least some humility and uncertainty in earlier chapters, here he pivots to greater certainty. This lays the foundation for the practical applications in following chapters, which would have to be less direct if the uncertainty remained.

In addition, Dr. Sprinkle attempts to reinforce his image as someone who compassionately cares for transgender people, but does not demonstrate engaging with trans Christians who disagree with him. Billie’s name for this series, “The Sweetest Poisons”, captures the contrast here: Dr. Sprinkle claims to be kind, and he is certainly polite, but underneath his civil tone is a message that frequently does great harm while being untethered to truth.

Opening: Story about Biola Conversation

Dr. Sprinkle begins the interlude with a talk about an experience of his at Biola University giving, “a bunch of talks on transgender identities.” He initially frames it as scary for him because Gen Z college students, “have many LGBT+ friends, or they are LGBT+ themselves.”

This is disingenuous.

Biola’s student policies1 forbid same-sex romantic relationships or medical gender transition. On-campus housing is placed based on sex assigned at birth. And students know this when attending. This is not a hostile audience for Dr. Sprinkle - this is a group of students who chose to go to a university which prohibits LGBTQIA+ people from openly living as themselves.

Now, undoubtedly there are closeted LGBTQIA+ individuals there, including those who did not understand their gender identity or sexuality until they had already chosen Biola. There’s likely some non-queer individuals there who support queer rights but since the policy doesn’t affect them, they were ok with Biola.2

But it’s very important to note: this is a school where if someone had expressed disagreement with Dr. Sprinkle, they would have been expressing disagreement with the school policies, and therefore may have been subject to school discipline. This is not the challenging environment Dr. Sprinkle makes it out to be.

On the other hand, Dr. Sprinkle shows little track record generally of inviting conversations with those who don’t agree with him. Despite having literally written a book and given talks on transgender people, I can find no example where he has ever spoken with a transgender Christian who was happy with their transition and holds mainstream views of the trans community3. Myself and Billie Hoard have repeatedly offered this engagement, to no avail.

The pivotal moment of this story is a quote from a “trans* person” who is involved in Biola’s “the Dwelling” group (a Side B group where LGBTQIA+ people support each other in trying to live out a life without embracing their gender identity or sexuality). Dr. Sprinkle quotes him as saying (ellipses original):

I don’t know how to say this, but … I was really nervous about hearing you speak. People like me, we’re so used to hearing cisgender men like you tell us about our experience. But I want you to know, I was truly shocked by how concerned you were to humanize the conversation. To humanize me. I’m not sure if I agree with everything you said. I’m still just trying to figure myself out. But when you were talking, I felt … seen. And I felt loved. I felt like you cared. And I can’t tell you how much that means to me. I just needed you to know that. (pp. 155-156)

Before I discuss it, I need to point out: unless Dr. Sprinkle was recording the meeting (which would have been wildly unorthodox), this is his recollection of what was said. It’s a long quote and he says it was emotional for him to hear. So, let’s take it as what’s most likely: a paraphrase written after the fact. I’ll let you decide for yourself how accurate it is, because it’s likely impossible to verify at this point.4

Assuming Dr. Sprinkle has at least captured the spirit of what was said, the person has every right to say that, and they may have been authentic. That person may have truly been grateful for someone like Dr. Sprinkle to show up and simply… not demonize them. There have been times when I thanked non-affirming people in a similar fashion.

But, it’s worth noting that a number of trans people have specifically told Dr. Sprinkle they have problems with his discussion of trans people. They’ve been mostly met with silence, and Dr. Sprinkle doesn’t exactly highlight our concerns when he speaks about trans people publicly.

Dr. Sprinkle closes this story with his true point: to say that he was spurred on by this person, and inspired to go through the manuscript for the book one last time, thinking of them. He says:

I know that some of you reading this book are trans*. As I said in the preface, my primary audience is the general Christian population, most of whom aren’t trans*. But I hope you have felt dignified and humanized as you have read my words. You may not have agreed with everything I’ve said or even how I’ve said it. We’re all on a journey, and mine is an imperfect one. But one day, we might find ourselves sitting next to each other. And I hope we’ll be able to call each other friends. (p. 156)

There are two sentences I want to respond to specifically:

“I hope you have felt dignified and humanized as you have read my words.”

Since Dr. Sprinkle uses the second person to refer to trans people here, I will respond directly, as a trans person.

Dr. Sprinkle, let me say this clearly: I felt neither dignified nor humanized. I felt misrepresented much of the time and flat out erased at others. You leave no room for those satisfied with gender transition. You failed to grapple with the decades of research into transition. As we’ll see in the next chapter, you uncritically parrot the worst anti-trans junk science5 while simply ignoring or dismissing the volumes of scientific literature and statements from major medical organizations which support trans people and gender affirming care. Worst of all, since publication of your book, you have completely ignored those who have tried to correct you. There is nothing of humanization in that approach. There’s only the arrogance of a man unaffected by these issues telling others how they should wrestle with them.

And then, in a worse gut punch:

But one day, we might find ourselves sitting next to each other. And I hope we’ll be able to call each other friends.

Again, Dr. Sprinkle, how is this supposed to happen when you simply will not talk to us? Billie herself has reached out numerous times. You’d learn a lot from her if you’d listen. She’s friends with plenty of people who disagree with her. If you truly hope to call those who disagree with you “friends”, it seems to me that an important first step might be to actually talk with those who disagree with you.

Instead, you tokenize6 a nameless, faceless individual on a college campus with strict rules, claiming they endorse your approach if nothing else. And then you leave it there.

I would love nothing more than to spend a weekend with you and Billie talking over these issues. We both love a good conversation, and you might not ultimately agree with us, but if nothing else it would help you base your discussions of these issues in truth and real understanding of the people and the issues. That’s something you say you want, and I hope you consider it.

“Looking back”

Dr. Sprinkle spends the next couple paragraphs landing the summary of his book thus far.

He asks the question, “If someone experiences incongruence between their gender and biological sex, which one determines who they are—and why?” He then answers it: “I don’t think gender should override sex where there is incongruence.” (emphasis mine).

To put it more sharply, a reasonable paraphrase might be: “to transition is to sin.”

Billie Hoard has already done an excellent job explaining the issues with his arguments up to this point, so I won’t repeat them, but as a guest writer on this series, I feel the need to say I co-sign her critique. If Dr. Sprinkle is saying “If I felt incongruence, I would not transition”, that’s one thing. It’d be another if he were saying, “If someone asked me if I thought transition was good, I’d say ‘it’s your choice, it’s complicated, but I don’t think so.’” But he’s writing that he believes transition “should” not happen. That’s prescriptive advice, advocating for rules within evangelicalism. We should all hesitate before doing such things.

I obviously disagree strongly with Dr. Sprinkle, but won’t belabor that point here. It simply strikes me that he is laying the heaviest of weights on trans Christians, and telling them to bear it, when it costs him absolutely nothing.7 Even worse, he seemingly won’t actually engage with us on our stories. It grieves me just how many trans kids have likely been confronted with Dr. Sprinkle’s words by their parent or pastor who might say, “See, Preston Sprinkle says no.”

And however politely Dr. Sprinkle says it, however much he caveats that he understands this will be hard for trans people, it doesn’t the change the fact of what he is asking these kids and adults to do.

Evidenced-Based Approach

One last thing I want to say is that at no point has Dr. Sprinkle even attempted to demonstrate yet that his recommendation leads to life and flourishing. He hasn’t actually recommended a protocol for support, there’s no specifics other than “don’t transition.” When you contrast this with overwhelming evidence that those who transition are very happy with their choice8, it’s difficult not to see the double standard.

Given the well-documented positive effect gender affirming care has for transgender individuals, the burden is on Dr. Sprinkle to show that his recommendation is as good or better, or for him to show why the existing research is incorrect. Here, I will remind the reader that Dr. Sprinkle’s doctorate is not in psychology, psychiatry, endocrinology, or any other relevant medical field, but rather in New Testament.

Wrapping Up

In this interlude, Dr. Sprinkle attempts to land a summary of the preceding chapters, while also offering an anecdote that serves to bolster his empathetic credentials. However, all he’s really shown is that he’s not aggressively hostile (which is good) and that he disagrees with the reasons one might transition. He has yet to chart out a well-supported path to flourishing for the person with gender dysphoria who he thinks should not transition.

Next chapter, Dr. Sprinkle will cover one of the main talking points against transition - Rapid-onset Gender Dysphoria. If you’ve appreciated this post, please don’t forget to subscribe (free) before you leave! You’re also welcome to leave a comment or question below!

My public comment

My comment on: "Prohibition on Coverage of Sex-Trait Modification as an EHB (§ 156.115(d))".

I am a transgender woman, and this rule could have highly negative effects on me, as well as over two million other transgender Americans (https://tinyurl.com/37e7y9wp).

Gender Dysphoria is a recognized condition in the “principal authority for psychiatric diagnoses”, the DSM-5, produced by the American Psychiatric Association (https://tinyurl.com/kk7sbr6x). “Sex-trait modification” (STM), or, as it is referred to in the medical community, “gender-affirming care” (GAC – the term I will use throughout), is endorsed as the appropriate treatment for gender dysphoria by every major medical organization in the United States (https://tinyurl.com/2z5yxmub). Furthermore, satisfaction with it is found to be incredibly high – 97% or higher (https://tinyurl.com/48eczwfe, page 18). The regret rate is much lower than many other common medical treatments (https://tinyurl.com/4533f547, https://tinyurl.com/y848zvwd). This is true even for minors (https://tinyurl.com/ycxpm6v4), where there are also decades of supporting research to back gender-affirming care as being sound medicine.

No other treatment for gender dysphoria has an evidence base that shows positive results, meaning that this rule’s limits on gender-affirming care would deny effective treatment to many transgender Americans. “Conversion therapy”, broadly the umbrella of attempting to treat gender dysphoria via psychological therapy, is found to be a net negative (https://tinyurl.com/2e4dk8yn), causing increases in mental health issues and suicidal ideation and attempts. It is denounced by numerous medical organizations (see link).

This matches my own experience. I did not begin my transition until I was in my early 40’s, and it has been the best thing ever for my life. My entire life was marked by a struggle with gender dysphoria. Since transitioning, I am happier and healthier. My mental health has improved dramatically, though the stress of societal prejudice against transgender people is not insignificant, including having to worry about rules such as this one. My kids report that I am a better parent, and my wife reports that I am a better partner. My friends say that they can see how much easier life is for me now. After having had facial feminization surgery, I finally recognize myself in the mirror, and like what I see.

Put simply: transgender Americans and our medical providers are overwhelmingly in favor of evidence backed gender-affirming care (again, what this rule refers to as “sex-trait modification), and the government should be promoting it for the public good, not curtailing access to it when there is no comparable body of research to support such limits.

Economic considerations should not matter, as we do not decide what treatments should be covered based on how much they cost (this would be a form of eugenics, and Republicans stood strongly against the potential for this during the debates about the Affordable Care Act - https://tinyurl.com/nhcpcrnd). It is surprising to me to see a Republican administration now proposing to do exactly that. But if economics are the issue, a study showed that as of 2020, there were still only ~13,000 gender-affirming surgeries annually. If each cost $10,000, that would amount to only $130 million/year, or 0.003% of the total $4.1 trillion (https://tinyurl.com/8ns3radz) United States spending on health care. This amounts to less than fifty cents for each of the over 300 million people living in America. Surely this is no burden for the richest nation on earth (https://tinyurl.com/kcccxdwu). Furthermore, recall that the lack of this care leads to mental health issues, which can lead to medical treatment or losses of productivity, meaning the overall burden on taxpayers may be higher by denying this care.

Finally, in addition to the harm done to transgender Americans, there is a precedent laid here for HHS to further insert itself into decisions that should be between a patient and their relevant health care professionals. For HHS to forbid something like conversion therapy makes sense, because it is denounced by the relevant medical organizations. But for it to forbid gender-affirming care (aka “sex-trait modification”) opens pandora’s box of big government, by saying that the federal government can override those personal medical decisions, even when those decisions are in line with universally accepted best practices.

I understand that good comments are supposed to provide alternatives. Mine is this: strengthen coverage for gender-affirming care instead of weakening it. At least, simply do not make this rule, which is driven by prejudice against transgender Americans. It will likely be rightly struck down by the courts for the animus involved in its passage, the rights that it infringes on, and more.

Please retract this proposal and instead strengthen access to gender-affirming care.

And that’s it!

Good luck to all of you writing, and remember: trans rights are human rights!

HHS Rules go through a public comment period, typically 30 days or longer, but this one only got 22. The deadline for this one to “ensure consideration” is 11:59pm Eastern (9pm Pacific) on Today, April, 11th, 2025. Any comment is better than nothing - I’ve got thoughts below on easy talking points, and will share my whole verbatim comment shortly when I’ve written it (wanted to get this out).

The public comment form is here. (it contains a link to the proposed rule)

Even if all you can do is write “Please do not do this, it will unjustly harm transgender Americans,” that’s helpful! Any additional details or personal elements you can add will help even more.

How to comment

The form

There is a drop down field “What is this comment about” on the form. Choose “Individual”!

Anonymity

You can leave the comment anonymously! Do not out yourself or anyone else. Cis folx, please do not mention “I have a trans sibling” if that sibling is not already out publicly and ok with that. “I know a trans person” is much better.

Talking Points

The following are great talking points to include, but you can write your own or look at other public comments. (and feel free to leave your own talking point in the comments here).

Leave a comment

Read about the rule

You can read more about the rule here:

MadyCast News

Proposed HHS Rule Would Ban Trans Healthcare From Essential Health Benefit Coverage In ACA Plans

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Read more

a year ago · 94 likes · 3 comments · Mady Castigan and corinne green

Gender-Affirming Care is Medical Best Practice

All major medical organizations in the US endorse gender-affirming care, including the American Medical Association (AMA), American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Acadamy of Pediatrics, and Endocrine Society. They do this based on study after study over decades showing that gender-affirming care is the right course of treatment for gender dysphoria. Given that this care is medical best practice, we should be improving insurance access to it, not limiting access to these life-changing and sometimes life-saving treatments.

The HHS Should Never Curtail Access to Medically Necessary Care

In the debates over the Affordable Care Act, much was said by Republicans about the potential for beuarocrats to be making health care decisions that should be left between the patient and the relevant medical professionals. The phrase “death panels” was on the lips of many politicians. This rule attempts to do the very thing Republicans rallied against. It is one thing to make illegal a treatment that is found by medical organizations to be unsound and harmful (e.g., lobotomy). But to override the evidence-backed medical consensus is anti-science, anti-medicine, and anti-patient. It curtails freedom of individuals.

The precedent being set could then be used for any number of other treatments, for example vaccines, mental health medications, and weight loss medications (all of which HHS Secretary RFK Jr. has expressed skepticism about, see here and here).

These are all critical parts of our health care system, and tens of millions of Americans rely on them.

Make no mistake - all efforts to limit or eliminate access to gender-affirming care set precedents that can harm so many others.

Limiting Insurance Coverage for Gender-affirming Care is a Functional Ban for Many Transgender Americans

Gender-affirming care, though used by a tiny fraction of Americans, can be prohibitively expensive if insurance coverage is unavailable. Surgeries can cost thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars, just like anyone else having reconstrctive surgery.

This is not a case where these patients can easily cover their own costs - instead, this is a functional ban for many trans people, who disproportionately experience poverty.

Summary

In conclusion, limiting access to gender-affirming care will result in reduced quality of life and increased mental health issues among those with gender dysphoria. Those will, in turn, lead to a higher number of deaths of despair. Our country should be ensuring that every American has access to the health care they need in order to flourish and live long, happy, healthy lives.

Ok, your turn!

The public comment form is here.

Even if all you can do is write “Please do not do this, it will unjustly harm transgender Americans,” that’s helpful! Any additional details or personal elements you can add will help even more.

Thank you so much!

-Celeste

The bill she was speaking against was introduced to committee on Monday, February 24th. By the end of the week, it was signed into law by Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. The law, which takes effect on July 1st, 2025, now allows discrimination against transgender people in housing, employment, and credit. It completely bans changing the sex marker on birth certificates in Iowa.

Did you watch it? Ok, good.

This bill makes Iowa the first state in our nation to *ever* remove civil rights protections from any group. This is hate made into law. It is shameful. It is evil.

But perhaps worse... I suspect the vast majority of Americans don't know it happened. The apathy is crushing. Every time a state legalized gay marriage, it was national news. But it seems that taking civil rights protections away isn't newsworthy.

This is what I mean when I say we *must* reframe the conversation this way: anti-LGBTQ+ views are immoral. They are hurtful. They are deadly. LGBTQ+ acceptance is simply what you get when you don’t do that harm. We don’t praise those who don’t murder. We don’t honor those who don’t steal. But we should speak loudly against those who murder, steal, and pass anti-LGBTQ+ laws.

They are, in fact, unamerican. The land of the free? I can imagine few deeper affronts to that freedom than trying to control some of the most intimate aspects of people’s lives. The home of the brave? Most anti-trans folx are so cowardly they won’t dare to listen to an actual trans person, and certainly don’t seek us out. They run away and believe all the vile things Rep. Wichtendahl recounted, and more.

From our Declaration of Independance, I was told that I, like all people, have an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

As a trans person, my liberty is under assault by the country that told me I have a right to it. My pursuit of happiness is being hindered by the daily slander and attacks on me and my community. Lives are being lost regularly in the trans community, as members face stress upon stress upon stress - a rogue wave of oppression, with too little support to stay afloat. More will be lost as trans members end up unhoused, unemployed, and without health care due to poverty.

Today, I am ashamed to say I was born in Iowa. This law will be challenged in court, and hopefully struck down as the unconstitutional discrimination it is. But the hate is still real. Elected representatives took five days out of their schedule to expose a hugely vulnerable community to even more danger. Not to focus on inflation, housing prices, health care, education, or other important things. Just to say, “Sure, you can fire or evict that person for being trans.”

Make no mistake - their attempts to erase trans people from the world will fail. As Abigail Thorn said in her recent video:

For centuries, they've called [trans people] weird or mad or perverts. That was the dominant morality. I mean, look at what they're doing now! They're trying to use the entire force of the United States government to stop us and they still can't do it!

They can call me what they want.

They’ll just be wrong.

To my non-trans friends - now is the time to stand up and support the trans community, whether you have a trans friend or not.

To my trans friends - big hugs to all of you. I’m with you, I’m here, and I’ll keep fighting with you and for you.

-Celeste

1. “How did you decide to transition?”

2. “What was life like before that?”

3. And they probably would ask something like “How do you reconcile being transgender while being a Christian?”

They don’t typically ask, but I want to add: “Are you happy now?”

I’ve shared a lot of this before, but never all in one place for easy sharing and reference.

Timeline

Let’s go way back

So around the time I was six or seven, I remember being in my room, by myself, thinking: “There was some coin flip before I was born and it went wrong.” Not that I thought that my parents had literally flipped a coin, but like, there was a 50/50 chance and I got the bad result. But at that age, I very much was aware: “I wish I was a girl.”

This is a common but not universal age for trans kids to start to know something about their gender identity.

And the feeling never went away. I preferred hanging out with girls if I could. I’d see girl clothes my size and that absolutely made me feel something. I didn’t like that things were “masculine” or “feminine”.

But I was told to be the “man of the house” if my dad was away, and there were all kinds of expectations around being a “man.” It wasn’t a house that ran on strict patriarchy, but still - gender roles were pretty clear and at least, to me, felt expected.

Teen years

Teenage years got harder. Sometime around age 11 or 12 I made an attempt at wearing a girl outfit and it was made very clear to me that I should never do that again. I also tried to do masculine things like Boy Scouts and honestly it was awful. I just didn’t fit in. Sports actually gave me something of a respite - I stayed away from the very-masculine sports of football and wrestling, in favor of basketball, cross country, and track. The latter two had the distinct advantage of being co-ed school teams, so I wasn’t just “with the boys.” Basketball still worked for me because I don’t think I ever really saw it as a gendered sport - my mom would play in the drive-way with me, and her and both of my grandma’s were big sports fans.

I also got into computers and video games. When I would play Mario Kart with no one around, I would always choose to play as Princess Peach, never really understanding why.

This was also when I started occasionally trying on my sister’s clothes if I got the chance, always making sure no one knew.

When I would go to church camps or something, once again - I always found myself hanging out with the girls more than the guys, if I had the option.

At this age, my attraction to women started to confuse things - did I want to be “one of the girls” or was I just attracted to them? Looking back, the answer was, of course:

That said, testosterone-driven puberty had two effects:

1. It made me taller, which I counted as “success” at masculinity.

2. It made me dislike my body quite a bit. This I mostly experienced as just ignoring my body. I didn’t want to think about style, etc. I started wearing a hoodie, t-shirt, jeans, and running shoes, which I would wear pretty much every day until I started transitioning, with brief attempts to be more stylish, which never lasted long.

Pressure to conform

The 90’s were a bad time to be a gender-dysphoric teenager (has there yet been a good time?). The first time I remember hearing the term “sex change operation” the person talking about it was laughing as though it was completely absurd.

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective included a brutally transphobic punch line that the “whodunnit” (a man, at least that’s what the film says he is) had been “disguising” “himself” as a woman. In fact, in the end, his “disguise” was seen as far more of a transgression than the actual crime (to the extent that I’m not actually sure what the crime was). Jim Carrey’s titular character Ace is far more disgusted by having kissed “him” (thinking “he” was a woman). (yes I’m using a lot of quotes here because I think there’s a plausible reading that the suspect really was a transgender woman who also happened to do a crime).

Robin Williams’ role as Mrs. Doubtfire was somewhat better, because it avoided any claim to be about a transgender woman, but still, it fed the stereotype that a man wearing women’s clothes was *highly* objectionable, an also that anyone doing this must be doing so for deceptive purposes, not just because it suits them better. Also, many of the comedic moments were still just the gender-non-conformity of it all.

There’s a lot more examples, and YouTube Creator Lindsay Ellis has a phenomenal video: “Tracing the Roots of Pop Culture Transphobia” about how films since the 60’s have fed transphobia at large, from Psycho to Silence of the Lambs to modern sitcoms. She does an expert job early on of showing that even the early stereotypes of dangerous trans people were literally made up, but stuck in the cultural consciousness.

And this was all before I had ever actually heard the word “transgender”.

College and beyond

In college, my dorm was co-ed which was amazing. It meant that throughout college, most of my friends were women, with whom I felt far more comfortable. Even the guy friends I had were typically romantically involved with women I hung out with, not guys I’d just hang out with on my own.

I’m sure that at some point in college I was aware of the term “Transgender” because the student group was *probably* the “LGBT alliance”, but it also might have still been the “GLBA”. Either way, the “T” hadn’t really made an impression on me yet.

It wasn’t until I noticed that a tech reporter I followed had a mention of her own transition in her bio, and also when the Wachowski Sisters (creators of The Matrix) came out as transgender, that I truly became aware of the concept, but even then only just.

I was so unfamiliar with it that when Lady Gaga’s Born this Way was a smash hit, which I had to have heard dozens of times, I simply missed that she mentioned transgender people by name in it.

Oh, and I became evangelical at this time.

My junior year saw me join a conservative Christian group on campus and become obsessed with my new-found faith. Once graduated, I ended up at the famously toxic Mars Hill Church, and then left that to join the cult that I’ve written about extensively.

And while I was in those spaces, the lack of psychological safety1 to explore my gender kept me from doing so even as we hit cultural milestones like The Transgender Tipping Point (2014, Time), the coming out of Caitlyn Jenner (2015).

The discourse around transgender people began in earnest, typified by the 2016 North Carolina bathroom bill (repealed due to outrage) and the 2018 cover story in The Atlantic by Jesse Singal, which said: “Your Child Says She’s Trans. She Wants Hormones and Surgery. She’s 13.”2

Note: Please read that footnote about how this article was very wrong and engaging in fearmongering.

My response to these? “Trans people can’t be real, because if they were, I’d be one.” That response was shameful, though on the latter claim I guess I ended up being right.

Throughout my adulthood, all the same patterns held, including trying on feminine clothes when I would get the chance, and always loving it in the moment and feeling brutal shame after, especially if I heard pastors bashing transgender people.

Regardless, it wasn’t until 2021 that I finally could start figuring out who I am.

Egg Crack

In the trans community, we talk about the “Egg crack” moment - that moment where you realize you might be or probably are trans. A person before that is referred to (retroactively) as an “egg”, and we talk about the egg cracking because, just like you can’t uncrack an egg, you can’t really unrealize you’re trans.

In 2021 I left the conservative evangelical space I was in, and started reevaluating a lot of things. As I went online, looking for others who had left similar spaces, I found something I never expected: Transgender Christians.

Yes, it took me longer to really wrestle with it, but just their very existence put a significant crack in my egg. My very first thought: “Why do they get to live that life and I don’t?”

In June 2022, I finally tried on my first full femme outfit and I felt *amazing*. It was exactly right, even though my style left much to be desired.

The problems

There were several problems I had to work through, though.

Problem #1: I was still not affirming

The space I was in was “non-affirming” of LGBTQ+ people. I am ashamed that I agreed with them, knew the arguments, even taught them. I could quote all the passages. I could tell you which ones I thought were more compelling than others. And I could do it all while maintaining that I loved the people I was judging.

So… among the list of things I was reevaluating, I needed to figure out whether I, still a Christian, could support LGBTQ+ people. The result of that is this article I wrote in June 2022, sharing how I became affirming. I poured countless hours of research and reflection and writing into it. I wanted to be very careful to hold to Biblical inerrancy as I did it, and not to let my own exploration of my gender identity influence it.

Fortunately, what I found was that, once I finally listened to real counter-arguments, and not just what conservatives told me the counter-arguments were, it was relatively easy to become affirming and very difficult to hold to non-affirming views anymore.

But gender transition was even easier: I simply never found any compelling argument against it from the Bible.

Problem #2: I’m too old

I was closing in on 40 by the time I told my partner “If I was growing up today, I think I would have transitioned.” And I phrased it that way because I couldn’t imagine how to take this and ever even begin to “look like a woman”. I’m 6’2”. My nose was big and crooked (though I didn’t notice my nose being crooked for years due to just really never looking at mirrors). My hairline had receded quite a bit. My voice was still quite masculine.

But I found the r/translater subreddit where people 20-30 years older than me were transitioning and finding joy. Not only that, but people my age were transitioning into objectively beautiful women. Once I learned that Facial Feminization Surgery existed, and what the effects of HRT would do, that’s all I really needed to know.

This was possible.

Married with Children

I had a wife and two kids at the time. What would they say?

Well, I told my wife, and we worked through it. It’s still a change - not what either of us expected, and I respect anyone who gets through it in any way. It took a few months, but eventually she became supportive of my transition.

Coming out to the kids was even easier - I told them, and within 30 minutes they were both on board - honestly probably much faster. They’re both awesome and have been fully supportive of me the whole way. They both call me “Maddy” now, which I love.

For the record, our dog never had a problem with it, and also quickly learned my new name of “Maddy”.

Transition!

So then I started coming out to people, slowly, which went well.

I started hormones in November 2022, and knew within weeks that I would never go back. My mind is so much quieter on Estrogen, without testosterone, and I’m much less angry and irritable. The effects were so noticeable that my kids and wife all saw it, and my wife got so that she could tell if I’d missed taking my meds for a couple days. It’s a miraculous transformation and I’d never give it up.

I finally came out to my fam around Christmas 2022, and then to the world in January.

And of course, like so many trans people, it immediately cost me friends. Some are gone, others there is a profound distance that has been gutwrenching to experience. I’ve received judgy letters from people I thought loved me, and even more judgy letters from people who barely knew me.

But it was all worth it.

Surgeries didn’t start until 2024, but I have had three so far with a minimum of three remaining. And… I wasn’t disappointed - today, I look like this, even with minimal makeup.

And then this with makeup:

Faith Journey

I still consider myself Chrisitan, though it’s hard. As I say elsewhere on this blog, the bullying I’ve received from Christians has been intense, and that’s not even counting the Christian Nationalists now running this country.

But through it all, my transition has given me new perspectives on my faith that have enriched it rather than being opposed to it. And I’ve met the most amazing Christian friends through this all.

Are you happy now?

Yes. Without hesitation, yes. So much yes. Yes all day. There’s no moments where I regret my transition. None where I wish I could go back (which would only be possible to a certain extent). If I may go biblical for a moment, Jesus tells us that his yoke is easy, his burden light. I finally feel that. Paul tells us that the following are the fruits of the spirit, and I want to comment on each of them:

• Love - my capacity for love is so much greater, in part becasue I’m able to bring my real self to relationships, and be seen by people for who I really am. Even towards people who hate me, I find myself feeling more sad for them than hateful in return.

• Joy - The joy I have experienced is beyond what I knew was possible. From finally seeing me in the mirror to making friends with similar experiences, to those little moments where I get to feel like me. And even other joys - a kid’s birthday, a Christmas morning, etc - those feel more joyful without the constant drag of gender dysphoria.

• Peace - I said it before - my mind finally feels peaceful. Quiet. I can relax in a way I never could before.

• Patience - those around me will vouch that so much less irritable, and also that I have more patience for those who are trying to understand me as they go through their journey.

• Kindness - I can be more focused on others, I have so much more to give without this constant weight.

• Generosity - Becoming a marginalized person has given me so much more understanding of other marginalized people and a desire to help where I can.

• Faithfulness - I continue to be dedicated to being a good spouse, parent, friend, and more.

• Gentleness and self-control - just going to combine these and say I rarely yell anymore, rarely get angry enough that I “see red”. It’s so much easier to just… be who I want to be.

And finally, Jesus said he wanted us to have abundant life. What I had before was hardly that. I was playing a role much of the time, though a lot of it was still me. But what I have now is absolutely that.

I take joy in who I am, and also in the process of getting there. I like being transgender - it’s an experience that has brought me a lot of insight into areas I never would have had before. It’s brought me friends I never would have made. And also the trans colors are just awesome.

Thanks for reading, as always, and don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already.

Love y’all,

Celeste

• The condemnation, exclusion, and demonization of LGBTQ+ people by the white, American evangelical church is rightly labeled as spiritual abuse.

• That we cannot end spiritual abuse in the church while we allow it to be done to LGBTQ+ people.

This post is the script from which I gave a recorded talk on YouTube, but I much prefer it in its written form at this point. This talk was not delivered at Restore, which I discuss at the end of the talk. You can see my past essays on Julie Roys’ treatment of the LGBTQIA+ community here (July 2023) and here.

Spiritual abuse is a horrific experience, as so many of you know.

I left a toxic, abusive church in Spring 2021, and it nearly destroyed me.

I left for many of the same reasons you might have: the church’s failure to fight racism. Their embrace of patriarchy, which systemically treated women as “lesser.” Their rampant controlling behavior in the minutiae of members’ lives. Dishonesty, even slander by leaders. Domineering pastors. Psychological and emotional abuse, including the brutal tactics of gaslighting and DARVO. And in the end, a proven willingness to disregard the Bible when it did not suit their ends, or to weaponize it when they could twist it to support unethical actions.

Like many of you, I lost many of my friends when I left. At the time, I appeared to be a straight man.

When I came out as a transgender lesbian woman, almost two years after I left that church, I lost nearly all of my remaining friends.

I have no interest in playing “who is more victimized”, but I will say this about my own experience: the abuse I have taken by Christians for being transgender is so much worse than any I ever took before.

I have received death threats. I have been called a groomer. People have said that I am a pedophile. People have told me to kill myself. People have called me a child abuser. But the more shocking thing is this: All of those things have been said by Christians.

I would have thought that being their enemy would spark some form of love, but no - the hatred has been more intense than I could have ever imagined.

The result of queer people being treated this way is this:

“Actually, religious involvement reduces the risk of suicide for EVERY demographic in this study EXCEPT queer people. If you flock to the church when you’re suicidal, you are less likely to die… …unless you are queer.” (ellipsis original)

Bridget Eileen Rivera, author of Heavy Burdens, summarizing a 2018 study in June 2023.

And yet… if you read about spiritual abuse, or go to a conference talking about it… you may not even hear LGBTQIA+ people mentioned. In fact, of the original seven books I owned about spiritual abuse, only one mentioned queer people at all.

And that one book mentioned it to explicitly state that condemning homosexuality was not spiritual abuse:

“[A report by the Evangelical Alliance in the UK] reviews a number of cases where the term spiritual abuse is being applied (wrongly) to legitimate church functions. For example, if a pastor declares certain controversial behaviors to be sinful (for example, homosexuality), then some have insisted this is a form of spiritual abuse.” - Michael Kruger (Bully Pulpit, page 23)1

That it’s definitely allowed, and not abuse. Interestingly, this was the first example the author gave of sin that must be called out, and the only example of given for someone who is not a pastor. Not, say, child abuse, or slander, or husbands who neglect their wives. Nothing that actively harms anyone. Just… being queer.

And so, today, for Restore 2025, I want to correct that. The view I will lay out is this: Using church discipline to punish LGBTQIA+ people for being themselves, or spreading misinformation and fear about queer people from the pulpit or other Christian platforms, is absolutely spiritual abuse. And then, importantly for the broader church: We cannot stop spiritual abuse while continuing to make an exception for it when done to queer folx.

Part 0: They deserve it

Before I get into this, I need to say a word to the non-affirming folx I hope will be watching this.

I want you to think about any other form of spiritual abuse you’ve seen in the church. Whether it’s demands to tithe, prohibitions on styles of dress, or commands to “just do what the leader says”, there is one tactic that enables spiritual abuse more than any other: when the people in the church agree that the treatment is justified, deserved, or even needed. Patriarchal churches normalize treating women as second-class citizens. They would never call it abuse, but it is. White supremacist churches would never call their attempts to make Black people assimilate to the white culture abuse, but it is. Churches that require a strict 10% tithe are full of people who are convinced such giving is right. But that requirement is abuse.

“But we need these rules”, members will say.

Each of you can almost certainly point to a rule that is seen as necessary in a church, but which you can recognize as an abuse of spiritual authority.

And so, for this moment, I’m going to ask you to do a very hard thing for a little bit here. Leave aside whether or not you think it is ethical to be in a same-sex relationship or go through gender-transition.

Instead, I want you to consider the aspects of spiritual abuse and see if you agree with me that the treatment of queer people checks all the boxes.

Part 1: Spiritual Abuse

Chuck DeGroat outlined several characteristics of spiritual abuse in his 2020 book “When Narcissism Comes to Church”

Silencing

Spiritual authority is invoked to silence someone because of their gender, a difference of opinion, or a rigorous hierarchy. Those who speak may be scolded and will likely feel shame around having a voice or opinion.

If we take DeGroat’s first example, women in evangelical churches are frequently welcomed, but denied the pulpit or even any ability to speak to the pastor directly.

But for queer people: we are eliminated entirely. Most evangelical churches would not even allow us to be members. Some would ask us to leave the moment we say, “I have no intention of being any less queer.” And many preach such hateful messages about us that it can be traumatic to just sit and listen to the sermon. As I said before, even conferences about spiritual abuse rarely have a queer speaker.

We get scolded and shamed from the pulpits, and frequently in the belief statements on church websites.

In the end, we typically aren’t just told to be quiet. We are told to be gone, because they understand that our very presence is an act of communication. For an evangelical church or conference to see me, happy in my transition; or see a gay couple celebrating a 10-year anniversary, would be a message they have no interest in allowing, and so we must be eliminated, lest we cause people to start asking: “are we sure those queer people are so bad?”

But beyond this, many churches will excommunicate someone for even being affirming. I know a man who is an elder in his evangelical church. I’ve known him for twenty years. I was in his wedding party, and he was in mine. And when I came out to him, there was immediate distance. He later confirmed that even just saying he accepted my transition, and possibly even just using my name and pronouns, would mean he would have to resign his eldership and probably his membership in his church.

Moralizing

Legalism2 in service of abuse is particularly harmful, as strict codes of behavior or moral expectations are elevated above trusted relationship. The victim will internalize a sense of shame around who they are when they cross the artificial boundaries of a spiritual abuser.

This one should be pretty obvious. Queer people are deeply familiar with being told “the bible is clear”. But I want to focus on the rest of this one.

As with my friend - the trusted relationship we had for years barely mattered compared to the strict codes he and his church subscribed to. While he did ask questions, he also made it clear right from the start that he did not approve. As we discussed, he asked question after question, and I provided answer after answer. And… it made no difference.

Prior to coming out, I felt my gender identity in various ways for decades. And yes… I felt deep shame. Every time I would try on something feminine. Every time I would even act slightly feminine. Shame was preached, and I internalized it deeply - something I am still unlearning.

Of course, Christians regularly call me degenerate, an abomination, sick, disgusting, a freak, or any number of other horrible words. Their goal is for me to feel shame, in much the same way my former pastor wanted me to feel shame for the slightest transgressions of his own rules.

Certainty

A belief system is offered as inerrant and infallible, the only valid expression of the Scriptures, and a member’s good standing requires signing off on the whole of the belieff system. There is often a tribalism3 in which the church or denomination has the truth and the others do not. If anyone deviates or raises questions, they are shamed or ostracized.

Again, I almost feel like I don’t need to say anything here. Once again, “the bible is clear” and any attempt to ask questions is shot down without even wrestling with the points.

This is made particularly laughable by the church’s opposition to transgender people. There simply is no text in the Bible that even comes close to forbidding gender transition, and there are some that could be read to endorse it. But let’s look past the individual. There are several podcasts or forums in what I’ll call the centrist evangelical crowd. These are folx who love the book, Jesus and John Wayne, by Kristin Du Mez. They probably oppose the current president. They want to learn to be more aware of racism, and push back on it. They probably believe in compassion and generosity towards immigrants. They likely won’t sign up for a patriarchal church.

These podcasts continue to judge queer folx. Not only that, they won’t even interview a queer guest, and in many cases won’t even interview a queer-affirming guest.

The in-group marker of being anti-LGBTQIA+ is so strong that, to many, that issue alone marks the boundary of who can be thought of as evangelical. If you become affirming, you are out.

Christians such as Pastor Andy Stanley or Jars of Clay lead vocalist Dan Hasseltine have been subject to mass outrage when they just wanted to be kinder to queer people. These weren’t even statements of support, but they were enough to bring down a storm on those figures.

And once again - I suspect that many who care deeply about restoring the church, those who fight against the misuse of power, turned off this video the moment they realized I am transgender. The certainty is so powerful that it has become unthinkable that someone like me would have something valid to say.

Experientialism

The most spiritual people have the most ecstatic experiences, and those who don’t are questioned, marginalized, and made to feel like they don’t have enough faith or aren’t as blessed by God. They are made to feel deficient and wonder why God wouldn’t give them the same experiences.

This one is a little less obvious, but there is an insidious version of it. Evangelicals will hold up the story of the “ex-gay” or “ex-trans” Christian, and say, “look! it’s possible!” These stories regularly include some form of experience like DeGroat describes. Let’s look past the fact that many of the subjects of these stories will later come out and say “actually I’m still gay, and always was.”

But let’s look instead at the rarity of these cases. In fact, they are so rare that despite the evangelical’s obsession with transgender people, there is no prominant ex-trans person in their ranks. I’m not saying that there are no ex-trans people in the church, but they are vanishingly rare. The effect of this is that the church is telling queer people “you can change if you pray hard enough!” when they know full well that such supernatural change experiences are few and far between. “Pray away the gay” has never been anything more than anecdotally successful, and has regular stories of harm and even many individuals held up as “success stories” end up coming out again later.

Unquestioned Hierarchy

Hierarchy in abusive situations isn’t empowering but disempowering. Those who are not in charge are made to feel small, insignificant, and unenlightened. Some may wonder why they’re not good enough or smart enough to be given some authority or at least be considered.

For queer people, the hierarchy is so disempowering that the queer person is denied authority even over themselves. For me, I eventually wondered why a pastor gets more of a say over who I am than I do.

But you see this in other ways - I have tried, in vain, to speak with various conservative Christian pastors or leaders. Some are in churches, others are influential figures in the broader community. And none of them have even been willing to engage, or at least they put restrictions on such engagement that I could not safely agree to.

Power can be expressed in many ways, but one way is this: the ability to simply never listen to those you have power over.

The people in these systems simply do not listen to queer people when we try to tell our stories. And because of that, they try to force their anti-queer will on queer people and those who might otherwise support us.

Checking the Boxes

It should be very clear from that brief overview that the church’s tactics toward LGBTQIA+ people are familiar to anyone who has experienced spiritual abuse.

Devastation

Like I said before, it has the same devastating effects as other forms of spiritual abuse.

My own story had me trying to live as the wrong gender for decades. The secrets I carried, so deep that at times I hid them from myself, were a source of shame for my entire 18 years spent in Evangelicalism. This was the thing I could not confess. This was the thing that made me feel horrible every time a Pastor would ask us to confess those secret sins, and I could not.

And I tried to be what they wanted, or at least be something useful to God. This made me vulnerable to the high control “church” I eventually found myself in for nearly ten years. It was a big part of why I was so susceptible to their language telling me that God wanted faithful followers to help plant more of their churches. The destruction of my true self was a huge abuse that enabled more and more abuse.

There are so many other ways this harm manifests: gay people entering into straight marriages (to the detriment of both partners), trans women enlisting in the armed forces to prove their masculinity, and the incredible weight of living a life feeling like you are under surveillance at all times.

Of course, this whole campaign for no one to be queer results in depression, anxiety, and suicide. Real costs, for real people loved by God. We are told that this is all because the leaders love us so much, but as Emily Joy Allison says,

“Love the sinner, hate the sin” pretends that there is a way to reject LGBTQ persons and relationships while not contributing to their oppression and death. This is a dangerous fiction.” - Emily Joy Allison (#ChurchToo - Page 112)

This is as good a time as any to say this: I do not believe anyone who says they love me, who then judges me for being transgender without ever listening.

Biblical support

And just like many other forms of spiritual abuse, those doing it will cry “but the Bible!”

As I said before, this is already falling into DeGroat’s critique of certainty. But let’s look at some other examples:

• For patriarchy, we might see the invocation of Ephesians 5, “wives submit to your husbands.” Or they might quote 1st Timothy 2:12 “I do not permit a woman to teach or assume authority over a man.”

• Author and Christian Ethicist David Gushee, in his book “Changing Our Minds”4 discusses how, a century ago, antisemitism was yet another area where “the bible is clear.” And of course, today, many Christian Nationalists are eager to bring back those same views that led to the Holocaust.

• Recently, Christian nationalists have been promoting kinism, a view that we take care of “our own” first, which gives them license to not care about immigrants or even just those different from themselves. While it boggles my mind, they too will make an appeal to the clarity of scripture in their argument.

In all of these instances, Jesus’ commands to love our neighbor, to break boundaries, or to accept the “other” were ignored. Some of these views are fortunately fringe views now, others have directly affected those watching right now.

I say all of that because it is critical to understand that “the bible is clear” has been used to support all manner of atrocities. Perhaps even more importantly, those carrying out evil truly believed that they must do so. These weren’t grifters or people cynically misapplying the Bible. They were people who firmly believed that Jesus told them to control women, hate Jews, enslave black people, and alienate immigrants.

And today, having already lost on all of those fronts, evangelicalism continues to demonize and destroy queer image bearers of God.

I haven’t the time in this talk to lay out all the ways in which I believe the “Clobber passages” are misapplied, but I will include high-quality resources in the show notes.

The weapon of Spiritual Abuse

To build on DeGroat’s work, I would argue that spiritual abuse relies on the ability to declare someone to be in sin, with authority and certainty. It then requires the ability to take action on that declaration: to discipline, to exclude, or to demonize those who are so clearly in sin. Moreover, it requires the ability to do this even when the individual has done no harm to the community or people within it, unless of course you view their very presence as “harm” or “danger”5. But that exception would just beg the question - “queerness is harmful because queer people influence others to be queer” is a statement so circular and question-begging that it’s hard to even know where to start.

But, in a familiar pattern to many, it’s so successful because those who could show it to be false are cast out. Last summer, I was in a church service where the pastor applied 1st Corinthians 5 to queer people. In this passage, Paul says to “not even eat with such a one” after giving a laundry list of sins, including greed and slander. On slander, it’s worth noting that I do not believe I have ever heard a Christian leader denounce transgender people without spreading false information about us. And I have never heard one apologize for this, either. On greed, it’s worth noting that I am well aware of many “secretly affirming” Christian leaders who won’t take a public stand because it would cost them their jobs.

Yet I know of no one who would argue that we should not meet with such leaders. I myself have offered repeatedly to meet, but have never had someone take me up on that. Meanwhile, hosts of Christian conferences and podcasts clearly make great effort to attempt to ensure they do not platform people who might support LGBTQ+ people, and certainly would never platform a queer person themselves (unless of course that queer person is going to help the host score points against other queer people). I can only say that I have the absolute utmost respect for any of these leaders who ignore the expectations and go ahead and support LGBTQ+ people anyways.

Information Control, a core tactic of high control groups identified by Steven Hassan, is nearly total when it comes to LGBTQ+ people, such that an evangelical church, or indeed the broader sphere of white American evangelicalism, will never be threatened by their presence. The only exposure many sitting in those pews have to transgender people, or even gay people, are the blatant misinformation coming from their pastor or other influencers. People like me never even get a chance to say, “I’m sorry, but that is not true.” And even when we try, we are ignored or worse.

I hope by now you can see that the tactics used against queer people are the exact same tactics used in so many other instances of spiritual abuse, and I guess I want to pause here and beg the non-affirming among you to consider whether you are absolutely sure that this time is different. That *this time* exclusion and demonization are truly needed. And you must understand as you say it that all of the white supremacists, patriarchists, and antisemites before you have said exactly those words: “This time, we’re right.”

Spiritual abuse cannot end while it is still done to queer people

Spiritual abuse requires a particular collection of tactics. And so long as we say “those tactics are ok as long as you are sure,” there will be people who say, “I am sure.” Recall that in many cases those who inflict spiritual abuse are truly convinced that they are doing right.

In order to end this, we must dismantle the tactics themselves, and restore the dignity of each individual. We must become people who, as Paul says in Romans 14, respect the consciences of others. If someone doesn’t think they would transition if they were me, I may find that annoying, but it doesn’t bother me or prevent me from being that person’s friend. But it’s quite another thing to try to coerce me to live by their convictions.

And that’s how we want leaders and churches to be on a whole host of issues. If a leader believes they have a wise course of action, they are free to make that argument. But first, they must be humble enough to listen to the responses from those who would be affected, especially if they are affected more than the leader. And second, they must accept that some may simply disagree.

Does this make the church messier? Does it bring up more interesting questions? Yes, and thank God for that! The church thrives when it is not all the same, as Paul so eloquently put when he spoke of the different parts of the body.

But today, we have churches who amputate the hand rather than respecting and celebrating its difference. How will the inclusion of queer people benefit the church? Well, to some extent, this is unpredictable. But some ways are obvious:

1. They are fellow image bearers, with other stories.

2. The more examples of love we can have, the more we understand what love is.

3. Queer people challenge so many things about purity culture that it is impossible for it to stand while queer people are included. This is not because queer people are inherently more sexual than others, but because so many “rules” of purity culture are made and enforced with heterosexuality in minds, and not only are they ill-fitted for queer people, in some cases they don’t make sense.

4. Ask a trans person sometime what they think about the incarnation or resurrection. There may be others who understand transformation like us, but I know you will see such passion.

Breaking our Conscience

I want to share two examples as I wrap up, to show you the damage done to our consciences when we cling so tightly to our fear of queer people.

#ChurchToo

I read a quote by Emily Joy Allison earlier, and I suspect that many of you don’t know who she is. That’s understandable, because she is not mentioned in any of the books I mentioned earlier. But I suspect many of you are aware of the hashtag #ChurchToo. Well, Emily is the woman who launched it. She even wrote a book by the same name. She has been at the front lines of speaking about sexual abuse in the evangelical church since 2017, three years before most of the well-known books came out. And she is queer.

How could books ostensibly focused on the problem of spiritual abuse in the church fail to even mention the woman who kickstarted the #ChurchToo movement, who continues advocating in that space to this day?

Emily says this, in her book:

But we all knew why. #ChurchToo began when a queer woman came forward about her abuse in the evangelical church. A queer woman who wasn’t sorry for being queer, who wasn’t running back to the evangelical church with her tail between her legs promising to be celibate or go to conversion therapy if only they’d accept her. A queer woman who was well educated in the finer points of evangelical apologetics and held a degree from one of their most respected institutions of higher learning. A queer woman who had nothing left to lose.

I was basically the worst nightmare of the evangelical Christian purity industrial complex. And they wanted nothing to do with me.

Joy Allison, Emily. #ChurchToo: How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing (p. 109).

It’s hard not to agree that she is right.

But consider this: the many people who say they want to end abuse in the church gave up their opportunity to give #ChurchToo more momentum because its creator was queer. It is hard not to draw this sickening conclusion: they cared more about protecting the church from queer people than from abusers.

Let me say that again: There are many who prove by their actions that they care more about protecting the church from queer people than from abusers.

Child Sacrifice in the Modern Evangelical Church

In one of the worst examples I have seen, a nationally-known evangelical group published an article by the parents of a trans girl right before Thanksgiving 2023. The article aimed to tell other similar parents that they not only did not have to affirm their child’s gender identity, but that, to follow Jesus, they must not.

But it got much worse - at one point they acknowledge that their rejection of their child left their child deeply depressed, and they worried that their child would die by suicide.

But then… these parents. These poor parents who so desperately want to love their child… they came to the conclusion that their child’s death may well just be something they have to bear for following Jesus, that it was part of them “dying to themselves.” Aside from them putting the cost of their following Jesus on their daughter, I responded with the following6:

I simply don’t have words for how upset it makes me to see you talk about dying to yourself when your daughter’s literal life is on the line. You are arguing that your obedience to your God demands that you treat your child in ways that the Bible likens to murder and could easily result in her actual death. There is a term for that: Child Sacrifice. Jesus does not ever demand child sacrifices. Ever. If your “love of Christ” is contributing to the death of your child, then you have to know that you’re not walking in the way of Christ.

This is good news. Please hear it for what it is - you really can truly love your daughter. You can have the amazing relationship with her that so many parents of trans kids will tell you has been nothing but a blessing. You don’t have to lose her. And I don’t want you to lose her either to suicide or estrangement.

As I said before, while the passages used against queer people at least leave some room for debate, there simply is no biblical basis for standing against transgender people. But these parents have been so pressured into seeing their anti-trans stance as a test of their true faith, that they are willing to sacrifice their daughter, and encourage others to do the same.

And while that may be extreme, is that not the bargain many spiritually abusive churches make? They will say, “We know that this may, or probably will harm those we’re doing it to, but it’s necessary for the gospel.” How can we call that Christ-like?

Repentance Needed

Let me try to wrap this up: we must recognize that the treatment of LGBTQIA+ people in non-affirming churches uses the exact same tactics used for any other spiritual abuse. If we want to truly combat all forms of spiritual abuse, we must dismantle the weapon and cease its use against LGBTQIA+ people.

But how do we do that? Let me offer a few suggestions.

• Listen: To break the silencing, we have to listen. The exclusion of LGBTQIA+ people depends on evangelicals not engaging too deeply with queer people like me. We need to practice humbly listening to the queer people around us. I deeply regret failing to do this early in my faith with the one gay friend I had, and then really never had a chance again. This will be uncomfortable, but … that’s how we grow. But in general I find that most queer people are willing to answer many good faith questions (and sometimes bad faith ones). I know I am, and you can reach out to me in the comments below or my other contact info.

• Learn quickly: In the past three weeks, the rights of queer people have been under assault by the US Government, and that stance has been primarily driven by Christian Nationalists and other evangelicals. In 2022, I gave myself a deadline: by the end of Pride month, I either wanted to be affirming, or I wanted to be able to state clearly why I was not (which of course I would have needed to hear rebuttals for). Give yourself a clear goal and make a plan. Again, resources in the description, including my article on exactly how I got there.

• Repentance and Repair7: Privately and/or publicly - do the work of repentance, and truly make amends. Maybe you aren’t fully affirming yet (please work on that), but you recognize that some of the ways you have treated queer people are not ok. Maybe you’ve spread falsehoods about trans people, even unintentionally, but without having checked the facts first - begin by apologizing for that. You can do this as a process. But this step is so important, because if you don’t do it, you won’t truly wrestle with the harm you’ve likely done.

• Advocate: I cannot overstate: a straight person is far more likely to be listened to than a queer person. It’s an ugly truth, but like I said - many people will look at me and say “you’re biased because you’re trans.” And like… of course I am? But that’s a more valid bias than someone deciding my gender identity is invalid when they cannot understand what it’s like to be transgender. Use your voice to amplify queer voices, and to push back when you see harm being done to us.

Beloved

Jenai Auman, author of the excellent book Othered: Belonging with the God Who Pursues the Hurt, Harmed, and Marginalized, and someone I am proud to call a friend, said once, about abusive leaders, “They forgot that before God called me anything, he called me beloved.”

If you travel this road, like all good roads, I can say two things:

1. Travel is difficult. People will leave you, and I know how hard that is.

2. You will find yourself getting to witness queer joy.

And with that, I close with this photo, taken at a conference of queer christians in 2024

The joy in that room as hundreds met, worshipped, prayed, heard outstanding teaching was truly sacred. But I was not prepared for the experience of taking communion with them. Rachel Held Evans, who was not queer, once went to the same conference, and here were some of her thoughts:

I spoke at the conference as an ally, but within hours of arriving … it became clear I had little to teach these brothers and sisters in Christ and everything to learn from them. I speak at dozens of Christian conferences in a given year, but I’ve never participated in one so energized by the Spirit, so devoid of empty showmanship, so grounded in love and abounding in grace. As one attendee put it, “this is an unapologetically Christian conference.”

Indeed it was. There was communion, confession, worship, and fellowship. There was deep concern for honoring Scripture and loving as Christ would love, even through differences and pain. There was lots of hugging and crying and praying . . . and argyle.

But what startled me the most was the degree to which so many attendees had suffered, sometimes brutally, at the hands of Christians …

And yet here they were, when they had every right in the world to run as far away from the church as their legs would carry them, worshipping together, praying together, healing together. Here they were, being the church that had rejected them. I felt simultaneously furious at Christianity’s enormous capacity to wound and awed by its miraculous capacity to heal.

Evans, Rachel Held. Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church (pp. 211-213)

Friends. We are your beloved siblings in Christ, eagerly waiting for you to be in community with us, to see us as family. We want to sit around a table and exchange stories and encourage each other and support each other. We want to grieve with you when you grieve, and celebrate with you when you celebrate. We want to love you.

Sending love to each of you.

Thank you for listening.

A Note on Restore

Keen observers will note that this is a video on Youtube shot in my bedroom, and not delivered from the stage at Restore 2025. Let me explain.

I attended Restore in 2022 and it was a wonderful experience. No one knew it at the time, but I was deep in my wrestling with my gender identity, weighing whether or not to transition.

But as a survivor of spiritual abuse, Restore 2022 was such a safe place - one of the first places I had been where everyone just got it.

I left, fully intending to go back in 2023. Sadly, that never happened.

Between those events, I heard that Julie Roys had a history of anti-trans remarks and behavior, and so I began researching. The results of that research were far worse than I feared. Some of it was just your normal evangelical anti-queer stances, which would have been bad enough, but some of it was clearly and dangerously incorrect information about trans people in particular.

I reached out, and to make a very long story short, Roys, a journalist, refused to even correct the incorrect information she had spread. As such, I felt compelled to speak publicly on the matter.

I implored Roys to listen, to make Restore 2023 more inclusive, to include an LGBTQIA+ speaker. I did the same again in advance of Restore 2025, that time explicitly offering to be the speaker. I received no response in either case8.

However, just as I do not believe that anyone has the authority to bar people from Christ’s communion table, I do not believe that Julie Roys owns the charter of Restoring the Church.

And so, this video is my unsolicited contribution to the conference.

I hope that many attendees and speakers watch it. I hope that Roys herself watches it. I deeply hope that future Restore conferences will include myself or one of the many gifted queer speakers who would be a great addition to such a conference. I would treasure time to sit with other survivors as we support each other and heal together.

I grieve that we are not yet at such a time.

To anyone at the conference - I pray that you do not forget that an entire segment of the Body of Christ has been excluded. If you have opportunities to speak up for us, I ask that you consider taking them. But mostly, I pray that your experience at Restore is, well, restorative. That it brings some healing to you, and some hope. Spaces like this have failings, yes, but they are also holy ground where I fully believe God is working.

And while the organizers did not mean to include voices like mine, I can only hope the Holy Spirit is moving beyond even their dreams.

And that’s it for the talk - I would be very interested in hearing stories of others who have seen or experienced the abuse of LGBTQ+ people in the church - if you are willing to share, please feel free to do so in the comments.

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On Inauguration Day, 1993, I stayed home from school. I was sick - my stomach wasn’t feeling well. And so, on a grainy TV, with rabbit ear antennae, I watched parts of the first inauguration of Bill Clinton, who I didn’t know much about.

But that’s not what I remember most that day.

My dad came home from work at his usual time. There was a big windstorm blowing as well, and for whatever reason1 the family decided to go out to dinner at a sit-down restaurant a little north of us. Normally I’d jump at the chance, but I was feeling sick enough that I said I shouldn’t go. My dad insisted that I go anyways, sure that it wasn’t that bad. And so, I went.

His certainty vanished when, mid-dinner, I threw up on the table we were all sitting at.

When I got back from cleaning myself off in the restroom, I remember him saying, “well, I’ll believe you in the future when you say you’re not feeling well.”

The moral: each of us is the authority on our own lives. We’re generally best positioned to say how we feel and what is happening to us.

Inauguration 2025: Anti-Trans America

I spent much of 2024 trying to sound the alarm of what would happen with another Trump presidency. I tried hard to base my concerns in things Trump himself said, so that people wouldn’t have to believe my speculation, they just needed to believe Trump.

And an enduring, sometimes paralyzing, response from others was that I was just wrong. Trump didn’t care about trans people, they said. Trump can’t do anything to trans people, they said.

Well?

Today, Trump announced the end of America’s recognition of transgender people. His executive orders end non-binary passports, move trans women in federal prisons to men’s prisons, cut funding for medical grants to research trans health care (the very thing that many on the right say we need more of), and attempt to restrict funding for gender-affirming care, though it’s unclear how much effect that will have. The important thing to note about the last one is: he tried. And there’s no reason to think he won’t try again.

And every single one of these things was a thing I previously said he was going to do.

So, my question to those who may have considered me to be overreacting or too afraid, or something like that, is this: Will you be like my dad was 32 years ago, and finally have the humility to admit you were wrong not to listen to me and so many other trans voices, and indeed the person who said he would do these things?

Or will you continue to play pretend? Will you continue to listen to whatever sources were wrong about this? And if so, for what reason?

I’m not even asking for an apology, though one would be appropriate, I’m just asking that you finally listen. To me and so many others.

First - if you’re scared, I’m with you. We may be scared of different specifics, and we may each have more or less to be scared of, but I join you in this and I want you to know that you are, in no way, alone.

Second, if you feel that fear is an overreaction, I want you to hear this: I want you to be right. That’d be amazing. Few things would make me happier. But I think you know the things he has promised to do, and if you don’t, you should go read my previous post just on what he has said he would do. Please, please stop telling trans people that Trump isn’t going to harm us, when he has said he will. Rather, work with us to make sure he doesn’t carry out what he said he would do.

But for those who are afraid, angry, tired, or any other similar emotions tonight, here’s a few thoughts mean to make us feel a little less powerless.

We’re going forward

Trump, famously, and in a common tactic of fascism1, appeals to the mythical past with his phrase “Make America Great Again.” This imagines some time in the past that was better than now that we need to go back to. I continue to not hear many Trump supporters actually be willing to say when this better time was.

Kamala Harris did better with, “We’re not going back,” but (armchair diagnosis incoming), being against what your opponent wants to do, but not having that much of your own vision, is usually not going to inspire people. A campaign that only envisions a lack of regression, but not any progress, is a hard sell.

So, I’m not campaigning for anything, but may I suggest we all think about this: We’re going forward.

Yes, I know, the laws in many states aren’t going to go forward. But hear me out.

The Stonewall Riots kicked off the gay rights movement in earnest in 1969. No, they were not the first thing to happen. And yes, they were actually started by trans women. But they were a watershed moment. But gay marriage didn’t become the law of the land until 46 years later, in 2015.

Being transgender was pathologized by the medical world until the DSM-V came out in 2013. The Affordable Care Act only started covering gender affirming care in 2016.

Prior to that, in the latter half of the 20th century, trans people were often presented as comical in TV and film2.

I can’t speak authoritatively on how progress has felt for other marginalized groups, but strides have been made, and that’s despite frequently having governments opposed to them.

So… we are going forward.

If only to encourage myself, I wanted to list some things we can do regardless of what Trump does that will only strengthen writes for LGBTQ+ people. Similar things could be done for other marginalized groups, but I’m speaking from what I know best.

• Education - We can keep educating people about trans issues and the rights that we need. (For example, my latest episode of my YouTube Channel, once again featuring , is up now! Go check it out and don’t forget to subscribe while you’re there! Lots more good stuff coming!)

• Visibility - For those of us who can do it safely, stay visible - the more people who know us, the more people will have a hard time seeing trans people as an abstraction.

• Community - We can continue to build relationships within the trans community - we can support each other and fight for each other.

• Organizing - We need a new generation of politicians who truly supports those that Jesus referred to as “the least of these”. Who are unwilling to throw a small marginalized group under the bus in order to benefit the majority. The Tea Party was borne out of outrage at the Republican party in 2008, and (this may be controversial), I think those of us on the left can learn a lot from that about what it looks like to transform a party from within, seeing as how today’s Republican party is farther right than even Tea Party folx could have dreamed in its early years.

• Support - If Trump tries to crack down on our rights, we need to work together to make sure each of us has what we need. Mutual aid will be even more vital going forward.

• Hyper-local to State-level wins - We can work on neighborhood groups to churches up to school boards up to city councils up to county positions up to state government to move things in the right direction at every level, building up that new generation of leaders in the process.

• Take care of ourselves - Existence is resistance. Those of us who are transitioning, every step we take is a step they can never take away from us.

• Inspiring Allies - the fight for trans rights cannot be successful without passionate, engaged allies. We need them (you, if you’re reading this). I need to work to inspire them.

Ok, I said I’d keep this short, but in the spirit of building feelings of empowerment amongst ourselves, would you consider leaving a comment with something you plan to do to move things forward regardless of what’s coming down from the top?

Finally - everyone needs to treat themselves kindly the next few days. Do not give up no matter how bad the initial wave of executive orders and congressional bills is. We will push back. We won’t make this easy on those who try to harm us.

Sending you love and hugs, and letting you know I’m not going anywhere.

-Celeste

Second Note: I am not a lawyer. I’ve done my best to provide citations for legal claims, but please add “As far as I understand” as a qualifier to pretty much any statement on law in this piece.

The First Amendment to the US Constitution protects speech, expression, and more from government suppression. This was and still is a vital component of our democracy, and I strongly support it. Historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall coined this famous phrase in 1906: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”1

Over the years, the judicial branch of our government has had to weigh in on how far these freedoms go. In doing so, many exceptions have been carved out, such as defamation or incitement to imminent lawless action2. One contentious type of speech that remains protected is that of hate speech3. This is important in part because hate speech is so difficult to define that anti-hate speech laws could easily be weaponized for political means, precisely what the First Amendment was trying to avoid.

More recently in the country’s history, tremendous debate has been had over the decisions and obligations of social media platforms when it comes to hate speech. In general, organizations and individuals have every right to enforce rules around the speech they will tolerate. For example, a conservative Christian church can legally deny membership to someone who says, “God blesses gender transition.” I would disagree with that church, and I can say so publicly, but I have no legal recourse against that church.

On an individual level, I can (and will) block, remove, and hide comments on this blog, my Youtube channel, or in response to me on social media platforms. This has been incredibly important to me on platforms such as Twitter where I regularly received some of the most hateful comments I could imagine.

• Allegations of pedophilia

• Death threats

• Accusations of mental illness

• Being called “it”

• Anti-trans slurs

• Intentional, aggressive misgendering

• And so much more

I have no legal obligation to allow those to exist in spaces I control. If someone came to my house and started saying that “transness is a disease”, I would ask them to apologize. If they refused, I would ask them to leave.

Furthermore, those who own social media spaces have the right to decide what speech is allowable. They are providing a meeting space of sorts, and they can decide what’s acceptable and what’s not. So, Bluesky can ban someone for saying, “Trans women are men.” And, likewise, 4chan could ban someone for saying, “Trans women are women.”

I use this lengthy preamble to underscore this: The First Amendment has little to do with any decisions any social media platform makes about what speech is and is not allowable. When a platform chooses to limit the types of speech on it, its users may disagree with those decisions, but there is no legal issue with this.

Similarly, platforms have broad freedom to allow speech, with narrow exceptions4.

Meta rolls back limits on anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech, among others

On Tuesday, January 7th, Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp5, and Threads, rolled out an update to their “Hateful Conduct” policy6. Importantly, I am making no claim that what they have done is illegal. Others have already covered some of the highlights7, but I always like to get into the primary source and go through it in detail.

First, it has always been permissible on Meta’s platforms to say things like, “Homosexuality is a sin.” That’s a religious belief and expresses no wish of harm toward someone. Second, death threats or other wishes of violence are still prohibited across the board.

But a number of changes allow for much more hateful and problematic speech than was previously acceptable on Meta’s platforms, which will make it much more difficult for LGBTQ+ people to feel safe on them. Let’s look at the changes. These are screenshots from Meta’s policy page, with additions in green highlight, removals in red strikethrough.

No longer listing the impact of hate speech

Previously, Meta included this statement about the impact of hate speech: “It creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion, and in some cases may promote offline violence.” In doing this, Meta dramatically reduces the “why” behind these policies, just to allowing people to, “use their voice and connect more freely”. But this is coming at a time when, for example, trans people have been the targets of stochastic terror, in which prominent individuals spread hateful rhetoric which leads to real world violence and threats of violence8. In 2020 and 2021, there was a dramatic rise in hate crimes against people in the Asian and Pacific Islander community, due in part to those spreading hateful rhetoric blaming them for the spread of COVID-199.

Hate speech drives real world impact towards marginalized people. And Meta no longer recognizes that fact.

Supremacist speech is now allowed.

Previously, Meta forbid “statements of inferiority.” Now, that’s missing. That is, statements like, “whites are better than blacks” are now permitted on Meta’s platforms. The rest of the stricken comments were moved to a later piece of the paragraph, but “statements of inferiority” were not.

Exclusion and insulting language towards LGBTQ+ people and immigrants are permitted now

In the previous policy, it was acceptable to “use gender-exclusive language to control membership in a health or positive support group, such as a breastfeeding group for women only.” They could also “express contempt or curse at a gender in the context of a romantic breakup,” presumably making room for statements like, “omg men are the worst,” when their boyfriend breaks up with them. Those were the only acceptable instances in which someone could use exclusionary language around sex or gender.

But now?

Now, someone can advocate for gender or sex exclusion for the following:

• Access to bathrooms10

• Access to schools

• Military roles

• Law Enforcement roles

• Teaching roles

In other words, it’s now acceptable for someone to argue that I should not be permitted to be a teacher, based on my being a transgender woman. Presumably, this also permits people to say, “women shouldn’t be police officers”, or “only women should be teachers.”

Additionally, people can “call for exclusion or use insulting language” in the context of discussing “political or religious topics”, including when discussing “transgender rights, immigration11, or homosexuality.” There are no limitations on context here. It’s acceptable to use insulting language about queer folx and immigrants now, full stop.

Dehumanization

Dehumanization is a common tactic by groups with power to make their enemies seem even more, “other”, and it is something I personally try very, very hard to avoid. E.g., I will not say “so and so is a monster”, because they are a human and I want to respect that.

Here’s the new dehumanization policy:

Newly allowed, include:

• Comparing women to household objects

• Referring to Black people as farm equipment (this specific one is now forbidden as a “harmful stereotype” elsewhere in the policy).

• Calling trans or non-binary people, “it.”

All of those are reprehensible. Regarding calling trans or non-binary people, “it”, this is infuriating, as there’s very few words that truly offend me other than that one12. Viewing people as “it”, also leads to violence, as shown by the murderers of Brianna Ghey repeatedly referring to her as “it.”13

Feces and filth are of course also horrible to allow, but the worst one in that category is the allowance of comparison to disease. Many anti-trans people refer to trans people as a “plague” or spread rumors that transgender identification is a “social contagion” (which is false). The framing of any group as a “disease” or “cancer” implies that the broader population will not be healthy until that group is eliminated, which can obviously serve as pretext for violence up to an and including genocide.

Go ahead, advocate for erasure and genocide

The new allowances of denying that groups even exist (something I was told about trans people often on Twitter) are quite bad. But that last one is beyond the pale, allowing for targeting any group with “That group shouldn’t exist.” Black people? Women? Muslims? Jews? Christians? Disabled people? The elderly? Trans people? Gay people? Immigrants? On Meta’s platforms, feel free to argue that your least favorite group just shouldn’t exist. Not just that they shouldn’t be in a given space. Not just that they shouldn’t be in a given country. But that the group in question just should cease existing. I cannot begin to understand what went into making this acceptable on Meta’s platforms.

Now inclusive of exclusion!

Meta’s policies discuss four types of exclusion: General, Political, Economic, and Social. All four are forbidden, but with exceptions in the rules about Economic and Social exclusion.

In economic exclusion, exceptions are made for “gender-based limitations”, as discussed earlier. Similarly, discussions of exclusion “based on sexual orientation” is fine, but only if it’s based on “religious beliefs.” That is, you can argue against the inclusion of trans people regardless of your reason. But to argue against gay people, you at least have to claim that you have a religious reason. But nevertheless, both are now permitted. Social exclusion is now permitted in more areas when it’s “sex or gender-based”.

I cannot emphasize this enough: sex and gender (for any reason) and sexual orientation (for religious reasons) are the only two cases where exclusion is permissible.

You can hate us because lots of people hate us

Bigotry is still bigotry even if lots of people are bigots. Racism is still racism even if lots of people are racists. The “they were a man of their time” argument does not exonnerrate someone from charges of racism if they owned slaves, the only thing it does is perhaps give us a little sense of “maybe they didn’t know it was wrong.”

Make sure you don’t miss it. You cannot refer to any group as having a mental illness, except those who are queer. The truly absurd justification is “given the political and religious discourse.” Basically, Meta is saying, “hate speech is fine as long as there are enough people doing it to make it look like ‘discourse.’”

But guess what? Hateful language is still hateful language even if everyone agrees with it who isn’t in the group it’s targeted at. Furthermore, the phrase “mental illness” is a medical phrase. It has a definition, and those who issue standards on it do not qualify either gender identity or sexual orientation as a mental illness. Sexual orientation was depathologized in the early 70’s. Gender dysphoria was depathologized with the DSM-V in 2013. And now Meta is making it possible to say “anyone who thinks they are trans is mentally ill”, or “all gay people are mentally ill.”

Are they planning to allow allegations of intellectual inferiority of some group if at some point a large percentage of Americans think that’s true?

What do we do?

I don’t know. I know many are leaving Meta’s platforms. As someone who enjoyed Twitter prior to Elon Musk’s takeover, and then watched it devolve into the hellscape it is today, it’s difficult for me to say they are wrong. It is quite likely that these new policies will make the platforms much more difficult for queer people to exist, particularly on Instagram and Threads, where the communications are much more public.

For me, this settles the question of whether to start using Threads - my answer is no. I already have a platform on which I am not protected from hate, and I don’t need another one.

I’ve also removed Facebook from my phone and will talk with friends about moving off of Facebook Messenger going forward.

I don’t use Instagram much anymore, and that probably won’t change.

I do recommend people use Bluesky - so far it has been much more chill than the other platforms, and I hope it stays that way. I will also continue writing here on Substack and posting my videos to YouTube.

It’s awful that some of us are being forced into these decisions. Sadly, Meta took a gigantic step towards enabling hate towards queer people and others, and that means some of us just cannot be there safely anymore.

You can watch the episode now, and don’t forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel while you’re there!

-Celeste