dr vincent pak

everyone’s an authority when it comes to someone else’s gender. what is it about a teenager wanting to present as visibly feminine – an arguably autonomous decision unless you’re under an arbitrarily defined age – that unsettles so many adults? what is it about gender as a dimension of one’s identity that invites ‘a wide range of stakeholders’, including government officials, educators, and Facebook users, to intervene? what exactly are these stakes that we seem to want to have her self-presentation?

the discussions surrounding the transgender teen in question, Ashlee, largely involve her diagnosis of gender dysphoria and the subsequent recommendation for her to undergo hormone replacement therapy (HRT). there are people who are more interested in how the therapy affects everyone else other than Ashlee (‘what would the other students think!), and there are those who are concerned about her insofar as she will regret her transition later in life (‘look at these isolated cases of detransitioning!’). these discussions mutate into crash courses on biology, falling back on science as immutable, empirically-driven fact that must explain Ashlee’s experiences. pathologising trans kids seems to be the crowd-favourite hermeneutic to understand gender. why do we not express the same panic about menopausal women who choose to undergo HRT, or bodybuilders who boost their testosterone levels artificially, in the same way that we fuss over Ashlee’s therapy? debates on nature surface only when trans individuals are concerned, as if medical interventions on the body that we undertake everyday are any more natural than HRT or gender-related surgeries. pare it down, and it becomes apparent that it has always, always been about our discomfort with someone else’s gender expression. identify as whatever you want, just don’t let me see it.

in her 1991 seminal essay ‘How to bring your kids up gay’, Eve Sedgwick drew attention to the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (used in the US) and its criteria for ‘Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood’, where boys merely had to be behaviourally effeminate to be diagnosed with this ‘disorder’. a lot has changed since the 90s, but it remains public sentiment, as Sedgwick observed, for us to fail ‘to offer… even the slightest resistance to the wish endemic in the culture surrounding and supporting it: the wish that gay people not exist’. we have an entire government ministry using male pronouns in its statement to refer to Ashlee, and then choosing to eschew pronouns completely in a follow-up statement, presumably to circumvent criticism without ceding that Ashlee is, as she self-identifies, transgender. in both statements, not only is the term ‘transgender’ never used, but even the pathologising ‘gender dysphoria’ is not associated with Ashlee in any way (for instance, ‘the student with gender dysphoria’); the closest allusion was ‘individuals diagnosed with gender dysphoria’. admitting that there exists transgender students in our schools is a Herculean task. i want to believe that this is not a calculated linguistic strategy, just as i want to believe that (state) discourse can be ideologically neutral.

for the massive visibility of gender and all of its signs, for all the grunting about the encroaching presence of the queer community, most of us haven’t actually seen Ashlee. we don’t know how beautiful, kind, and intelligent she might be. but in the name of social stability, personal discomfort, and ‘conducive learning environments’, some of us already would rather her, simply, not be.