Transgender Ideology Is Superstition, Not Science

In a recent piece for The New York Times, Jack Turban — a California psychiatrist who has made his career by promoting and practicing the medical “transition” of children — wrote, “The most basic part of gender identity is what I call our transcendent sense of gender. In a way that goes beyond language, people often just feel male or female.” He adds, “As is the case with many emotions, it’s hard to describe this transcendent feeling in words. But it is the foundation of our gender identity, the scaffolding we’re born with.”

This talk of indescribable, transcendent feelings is just a roundabout way of saying we have gendered souls, that there is a masculinity or femininity to us that is more real than our bodies, and which our bodies must be reordered to match, so far as it is possible, on demand.

This belief in an insubstantial gender identity is mystical, not medical, which is emphasized by Turban’s efforts to argue that research “suggests these transcendent gender feelings have a strong innate biological basis.” But the closest the research he cites comes to demonstrating such a “biological basis” for a “transcendent feeling” is speculation about possible genetic sources for transgender identities. Furthermore, even if some people have a genetic predisposition toward being uncomfortable with their sex, a propensity to dislike one’s body is not proof of a “transcendent” gender identity.

Turban undermines his theory of transcendent (but somehow also biologically based) innate gender identities even more when he turns his attention to social life. He writes, “As we move through life, we build on the biology of gender identity with language and social experience, influenced by everything from the TV shows we watch to how we interact with classmates and our families.” Apparently it is no longer a conservative conspiracy to say that “gender identity” can be socially influenced. This admission then raises the question of how innate such identities are.

After all, as Turban admits, “these feelings can evolve over time — the way an 18-year-old college student thinks about her womanhood is likely different from how she thinks about it when she becomes a 40-year-old mother of three.” Indeed. Most adults are aware that the desires and self-identifications of the young may be fleeting, and we therefore do not acquiesce to every fad they embrace, especially if it has major and irreversible consequences.

Turban even admits that gender ideology appeals to some young women because it offers an escape from our culture’s toxic treatment of them. “I’ve had patients, for example, who hate the expectations placed on women in American society. They began using they/them pronouns as a way to express rejection of those expectations. However, they loved their birth names and bodies and had no interest in gender-affirming medical interventions.” It does not seem to occur to Turban to ask whether some of the girls and young women who do get cross-sex hormones or surgery are also adopting their trans identities for similar reasons.

The presumption that each person has a “transcendent” gender identity allows Turban to presume that his minor patients are, despite all the social factors he also notes, fundamentally right in their self-identification. Indeed, when he finally addresses the reality of human embodiment, he still writes about it in terms of feelings, asserting, “The third part of gender identity is the physical domain — how we feel about our bodies.” In this view, bodies are incidental to who we are and should be rearrangeable on demand — “Meat Legos,” as Mary Harrington evocatively put it.

In the end, Turban’s model of gender identity is incoherent. He tries to pass this off as complexity, but the contradictions are really a sign of desperation. Turban and his ilk began large-scale, low-gatekeeping transition of children based not on a sober review of the evidence, but on ideological, even mystical, fervor. They assumed they were right and therefore that the data would eventually come in to back them up. But the supporting evidence has not arrived.

Instead, the opposite has happened, as a series of revelations has demolished the case for transitioning children. Most significantly, the Cass Report in the United Kingdom has stripped away the pretense that there is any good evidence to support transitioning children — despite the efforts of Turban and his allies to manufacture some.

Meanwhile, WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health) has been revealed as an activist fraud, rather than a serious medical organization. The WPATH Files showed doctors admitting that they were making it up as they went along and that their procedures were potentially deadly.

There is also the report that Biden administration officials, led by Rachel Levine (a man pretending to be a woman), successfully pressured WPATH to eliminate any recommended age restrictions for medical transition procedures. The reasons for this were explicitly political, rather than medical.

It has also been revealed that WPATH tried to censor and suppress a report it commissioned from outside experts who, like the Cass Report, found that there is no good evidence supporting giving children who are unhappy with their bodies puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries that remove healthy body parts. And there is the revelation that parts of WPATH’s standards of care were written by someone who literally wrote child sex-abuse fantasies.

The facade is falling apart. And Turban bet everything on gender ideology and transitioning children — his career, his reputation, his self-respect. He and other “gender” doctors were convinced that they were medical heroes saving children from the anguish of living in the “wrong” bodies. But if they were wrong, then not only are they not heroes, they are monsters.

The incoherence and mysticism Turban put on display in The New York Times is the self-justifying babble of a man desperately trying to convince himself that the horrible things he has done to children were somehow good.

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.