June 27 Friday roundup

This week’s episode of the podcast looks at how a rogue Supreme Court denying due process in new ways is almost guaranteed to exacerbate and generate concentration-camp settings at home and abroad. You can watch it on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you want to read instead of watching or listening, or if you’d like to explore links to people and events mentioned in the episode, you can find them in this week’s Tuesday post.

Today, I want to share some events from my childhood that underline the ridiculousness of the bizarre lies that U.S. lawmakers and bigots spread about gender-affirming care for trans people. With last week’s Supreme Court ruling in the Skrmetti case, this kind of care now can be denied to minors in some states.

The obsession that groups of adults have with the genitalia of children is disturbing, but it’s not limited to that. State legislators make laws on trans athletes when most legislators “couldn’t point to a single trans athlete in their own region,” according to this Washington Post story. In many cases, they can’t name one because there are so few as to be statistically nonexistent. Yet the attempt to portray trans people as perverted and a threat to American culture has been milked for political rage in ways very familiar to anyone who grew up in the U.S in the 1970s and 1980s—because contemporary tactics mirror the ways queer folks were smeared in those decades, especially gay men.

So many people have written well about these issues. It’s heartbreaking that people in positions of influence don’t listen, and instead seem willing to accept propaganda. The level of vitriol is such that it’s easy to lose sight of how a unicorn-wizard-kid cohort has always been around—the children parents thought of as boys who wanted to wear princess dresses, the others who were thought of as girls but only wanted to race cars and be pirates, or the kids who didn’t fit in any box at all.

I was none of these exactly, but I was a very odd child, and my early years have echoes of trans’ kids experiences. (Whatever you’re thinking I mean by that, sit tight for a minute, because it’s probably something else.) For various reasons in a difficult childhood, I became dramatic, annoying, and strange—different in ways that confused people and made peers hesitant to stand too close to me for fear of lightning strikes, or of being associated with me (or both).

My mother’s nickname for me when I was very small was “Miss Peach.” By the time I went to preschool, that got shortened to Missy, which was all I was ever known by at home or at school for years, though it bore no relation to the name on my birth certificate.

At the age of seven or eight, I dropped my nickname and wanted to go by another name. But my “real” first name seemed too common. I felt like my middle name better represented my unique nature. So the following fall when I went back to school, I didn’t go by the name everyone at the school had known me by for years. I did not adopt the legal name on the school roster. I went by a name I wanted to be called that happened to be my middle name: Andrea.

And in the town of Parkersburg, West Virginia, no one blinked. Occasionally, if we had a new teacher at my elementary school, they would read off my legal first name from the roster on their first day, and I or someone in the class would correct them, and that was that.

Later, I went through a stage where I signed my writing and artwork with various diminutives of Andrea. Two friends began calling me by one of those as a nickname. As with all my other vaguely chameleon antics, no one ever asked what I thought I was doing or insisted I used a prior name.

As an adult, when I got married, I didn’t take my husband’s last name, though it’s far more elegant than my own. After they were reminded once or twice, most people who had expected me to do so remembered.

All this is not to declare my many naming evolutions equivalent to the sometimes profound changes felt by trans people when they switch to their pronouns of choice. It’s more to say that though I was (unlike most trans kids) in fact a freak of a child with no social skills who owned only one pair of pants that I wore every day for more than a year, much of the world I grew up in—which was not a particularly tolerant corner of the world—accommodated my name identity shifts without protest, or even comment. It was a choice afforded to me simply because I never claimed not to be a little girl.

***

I was a year younger than my classmates, and by the time junior high came around, my body hadn’t caught up to theirs. In addition, I had no feminine charms to speak of and didn’t know if I wanted them. While I didn’t claim to not be a girl, other girls were entirely another species, and I seemed to have no stake in joining them, let alone the means to do so. What I did have was a wicked case of acne.

The doctor visits over it started because of my mom’s friends. It’s not clear to me how they ended up going to a university clinic two hours from our town, but I have vague memories that both of them wanted help getting pregnant. Straight women married to men, they were younger than my mother, and both were heavy.

My suspicion now is that they had polycystic ovarian syndrome. A doctor ran tests at the clinic and diagnosed them with hyperandrogenism, an excess of testosterone.

As for my mother, her opportunity to get pregnant had lasted only about four years. It ended when she had her tubes tied in the early 1970s, over a decade before her friends drove halfway across a neighboring state to see the endocrinologist.

During those four years of fertile married life, she gave birth to two children conceived without any special effort beyond the obvious minimum—which makes it unlikely that she had polycystic ovarian syndrome herself. Yet soon after her friends were diagnosed with hyperandrogenism, she visited the same clinic and received the same diagnosis. She was put on medicine.

A few months later, I rode with her to the clinic in her worn-out copper-colored Plymouth Duster. Our electricity had been shut off, and we were so poor in that moment, I have no idea how she found gas money to drive that far. But she had insurance for herself through her job. My coverage came from my father through his policy at DuPont, even though I didn’t live with him.

I’d started menstruating at a normal age and had regular, if sometimes painful, cycles. I was maybe five or ten pounds past what anyone would call thin, but the bonus weight was nothing that could be stretched into a medical diagnosis, even back then.

How could a teenager with no symptoms beyond being an odd kid with a raging case of acne wind up diagnosed with hyperandrogenism, too? Did my mother hope that I would become more feminine? Without a doubt. Was that part of her motivation for getting me treated? I don’t know.

Did the doctor find my testosterone levels alarming, though acne was the only outward manifestation of any problem? Was there some other disturbing result in the bloodwork and tests they did on me? It’s a mystery I’m still trying to unravel.

I’ve tracked down the doctor in question, who’s now in his mid-nineties. I hope to write about all this at some point. The important part to know today is that I was put on a daily dose of steroids to reduce my testosterone levels and manipulate my hormones to make me a more conventional girl—in theory, one without acne.

This isn’t a plea for pity or a claim to have experienced suffering. I don’t think the pills did much either way. I may have a higher risk of osteoporosis as I age, due to how long the treatment lasted. But my health is good. Even my acne cleared up a few years later, as it does in most people whose parents likewise don’t go the more reliable routes my mother never tried for me: antibiotics and Accutane.

What strikes me now is that no one around me at the time appears to have found it remarkable to manipulate a child’s hormones in the absence of any significant medical symptoms or distress beyond mortification over pimples. No one explained to me exactly why I needed this treatment for my acne, how long it would last, whether there would be side effects, what might be accomplished beyond reducing testosterone in my body, and how permanent it would be. At the time, I was given nothing beyond the name of my diagnosis and the pills I needed to take to inhibit testosterone production.

So it might be funny, if it were not so tragic, that the Skrmetti decision will be used to deny trans children the kind of care I was given at that age, though in my case I never asked for it and likely didn’t need it. As many have written before, the idea that children’s hormones have never been altered or that doctors haven’t intervened in the past to shape gender in a number of ways is ridiculous.

The biggest common denominator now is that children, in consultation with their parents and doctors, know what they need and are asking for it. But politicians have realized that ostracizing them and criminalizing their medical care is a potent wedge issue. Such a small group of people is easy to misrepresent with impunity. Meanwhile, some of the people in a place to correct the record over this persecution seem to want to shift the blame for it to trans people instead.

I wish journalists would stop playing along with these “just asking questions” games. We’re a cruel society for denying children medical treatment. And it’s inhumane to allow one of the most vulnerable groups of people on the planet to be targeted for no reason other than political gain.

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