This week, NHS England announced it was discontinuing the use of puberty blockers in the treatment of gender-confused children, following a public consultation and evidence review. Across the pond, meanwhile, and despite the mushrooming scandal around recent leaks from WPATH, the gender juggernaut rolls on.
Just ahead of the NHS announcement, NY Mag published an essay by trans-identified writer Andrea Long Chu, in which Chu argues that everyone, including children, should be free to modify their sexed appearance for any reason, at any time. Gender identity, he says, is a dead end for activism. The only possible coherent ground for trans rights should be claiming “freedom of sex”, by which he means a “fundamental birthright” to seek any combination, or variation, of sex or gender identity one desires.
Decried as “nihilism” by Matt Taibbi earlier this week, nonetheless this stance makes perfect sense, indeed more sense than the “moderate” liberal support for trans medicine with some gatekeeping, once you follow through the logic of what elsewhere I’ve called “normophobia”.
By this I mean the endemic bigotry now visible everywhere in Anglophone culture, against patterns, phenotypes, or norms:
Normophobia frames everything conventional, average, given, assumed, traditional, and normative—whether its origin be physiological or cultural—as arbitrarily and coercively constructed to support vested interests, particularly those of white, Christian, heterosexual men. Radical normophobes describe their aim explicitly as the total eradication of this (they claim) artificially naturalized domain of the “natural,” in favor of untrammeled, free-floating, individual desire.
Normophobia presents itself as a battle for individual freedom. What it is, though, is a war on children. The most normalised vector for this war is the liquidation and exploitation of the social commons that children depend upon for care and normal development. As we’ll see, Andrea Long Chu articulates its vanguardist edge, where the war is waged by proposing to turn children themselves into sites of commerce and exploitation - all in the name of individual freedom.
For a normophobe, normative patterns are not natural. Rather, they’re politically motivated fabrications hiding their own partisanship. According to Judith Butler, perhaps the world’s most influential living normophobe and author of the new book whose publication occasioned Chu’s essay, norms matter only insofar as “opportunities arise to derail their reproduction.” This view is endemic in progressive sociology: this typical recent instance, for example, rejects a mountain of evidence on the benefits to children of stable two-parent families as in no way grounded in anything real, but merely a stalking-horse for “white heteropatriarchal supremacy”.
Chu takes normophobia as his unstated and never-questioned premise. From its standpoint, arguments from biology are not factual statements of what “is”, but moral ones of what “ought to be”. As he puts it, when “members of the anti-trans movement” claim “sex cannot change” […] “what they really mean is that sex shouldn’t change except in accordance with social norms”. Otherwise, why would people denounce transgender surgeries but shrug at surgeries that restore this morally freighted dimorphic order? He cites breast reconstruction after cancer, treatments for erectile dysfunction, and hair replacement treatments for male-pattern balding, declaring that these represent “sex-affirming care governed by strong normative ideas of health, productivity, and moral worth”.
Most people understand medicine as a restorative project that refers to a normative understanding of health. As Pessoa puts it in The Book Of Disquiet: “A doctor tries to bring a sick body into conformity with a normal, healthy body”. But for this to be true, there would have to be some independent reality to our understanding of “normal, healthy body”. Chu’s starting premise is that this is a lie. Rather, the normative Gestalt understanding of human health, to which restorative medical treatments refer, is not a set of facts independent of our desires. It merely represents “strong normative ideas”: implicitly, the Big Bad of “white heteropatriarchal supremacy”, a set of partisan political manoeuvres and hierarchies masquerading as neutral fact. If we could only be honest about this, we’d see that all medical interventions that address embodied sex have fundamentally the same moral weight, whether they set out to support or disrupt such “normative ideas”.
And if “normal” is not real, “healthcare” can be anything we want. The sole yardstick for medical intervention should be individual desire: “the freedom to bring sex and gender into whatever relation one chooses is a basic human right”. (No explanation is offered for why this should be limited to gender-based self-modification.) All should have this freedom, he argues, even though some will change their minds and regret the interventions: for “where there is freedom, there will always be regret.” The general expansion of freedom, he claims, justifies the certainty that some will make mistakes.
But what if “normal” is not, in fact, a political fabrication of “white cisheteropatriarchy”? What if “normal” describes something real, however muddied and contested this is, and however inextricable from culture and ideology? In this case, some aspects of our nature are not amenable to remodelling, but just are. And if this is so, it’s simply false to claim that the only moral weighting we can give to medical interventions is whether or not an individual wants it.
We could argue the toss about how medically necessary a breast reconstruction or Viagra prescription is. But once you accept that healthy adult women normally have two breasts, and healthy adult men are normally capable of erections, it remains true that such treatments are ordered to human “normal”, and seek to restore some approximation of that state. By contrast, puberty blockers are ordered against human “normal”: specifically, against the normal path of sexual maturation. Sorry, Andrea: one of these things is not like the others.
Such natural limits are evident to anyone not blinded by ideology. Normophobes, though, ignore this - and hand-wave the inevitable dystopian consequences through a kind of reflexive doublethink. Andrea Long Chu’s argument reveals this at work in two classic normophobic slippages: the first concerning who pays for it all, and the second concerning who is eligible to self-modify.
In the essay, Chu calls for the right to limitless medical interventions for cosmetic, identity-purposes. He also calls for universal, socialised healthcare. But as is typical among bio-libertarian leftists, he ignores the reality that taxpayer money is not a limitless pot. In practice, that means socialised healthcare is structurally more conservative than the insurance-based kind, as the taxpayer has a stake in which treatments are collectively funded. This is a key reason why several European medical systems are now reining in ballooning demand for gender-based body modifications, where the American insurance-based system is still strongly skewed toward individual choice.
The NHS ban on puberty blockers is an illustrative recent case in point: the financial incentives in Britain tend toward critical review of the evidence, in the interest of disciplining spending. This strongly implies that American leftists who want both bio-libertarianism, and also universal socialised medicine, will have to pick one. (History suggests they’ll pick the libertarianism, or rather have it picked for them, while protesting theatrically and publishing wistful texts about alternative, utopian worlds.)
And the second thorny question is that of consent. This is really a question of who counts as a person, and - more importantly - what that means. The NHS decision was based in part on an independent review that expressed concerns over the potential side-effects of puberty blockers, and the inability of barely-pubescent children to consent to interventions of this magnitude. While we can argue the toss about this, as the former director of the Tavistock’s gender clinic, Polly Carmichael, did in 2020, really it’s a question of what it means to be a person.
Anyone of averagely sound mind who has met a baby or toddler understands that 1) babies and toddlers are people, and 2) cognitively speaking they aren’t the same as a mature adult, though they will become so in time. This should not need spelling out. But it does - for normophobes are obliged to attack this idea, however obvious it is to most people. If the only yardstick for what is right is individual desire, then the suggestion we might spend a time both being fully human, but not yet being full liberal subjects, is a critical threat. For if you accept this in principle, you must also accept that part of becoming an adult capable of liberal freedom implies formation - and this implies the necessity of other, positive values in addition to desire and freedom evacuated of moral content. And that’s just a roundabout way of saying “moral norms”. If you accept that children need to be formed, you accept some limits on normophobia.
So in order to be coherent, normophobia must - despite the evidence of all our senses - pretend childhood is not real. In order for self-remodelling to become a universal basic freedom, Chu’s argument must abolish the idea of childhood as such: “parents must learn to treat their kids as what they are: human beings capable of freedom”. And when Chu says “capable of freedom” he means now, not once grown up.
Of course, this ignores the reason most parents constrain their children’s freedom, namely to protect them, and to form them. I treat my 7-year-old as a human being capable of freedom, once she has matured; but for now it’s my responsibility to tell her when it’s time to go to bed, both for her everyday wellbeing and also to aid her in forming healthy habits for adult life. The same goes for innumerable other everyday ways parents assert benevolent authority over their kids, in the long-term interests of their maturation into full freedom. By contrast, for Chu and his bio-libertarian fellow-travellers, this can only mean children are “politically disenfranchised”.
Though he does not say so, he signals clear understanding of what it actually means to “enfranchise” children, which in his terms means extending liberal subjecthood backwards into infancy: opening children’s bodies up to exploitation, whether of the commercial or the sexual kind. He references the queer theorist Gayle Rubin, notorious for arguing that efforts to preserve childhood as a domain free of sexuality is merely a “tactic for stirring up erotic hysteria”, that social taboos on cross-generational and even adult/child sexual interaction are culturally constructed, and that we should recognise “the sexuality of the young” and “provide for it in a caring and responsible manner”.
Chu argues only for children’s right to self-create. Children, he says, “do not owe us an explanation. They are busy taking charge of their own creation. They may not change the world, but they will certainly change themselves.” But the reality of this utopian call for children’s self-fashioning, once you map it onto the observable reality of children’s actual need for adult guidance, is that in practice “taking charge of their own creation” means someone doing this for them. Parents’ motives may not always be pure, as attested by a litany of grim headlines. But the chances of parents having altruistic motives is higher than random strangers being thus selfless, simply because the human “normal” of attachment to one’s own offspring makes it so.
If you abolish “normal”, though, you can pretend parents’ stake in their kids’ wellbeing is on a par of every other adult. Abolish normal development, and you can level the agency of adults and children. This accomplished, children are left rhetorically defenceless against exploitation of every kind. To be clear: I am not accusing Andrea Long Chu of pedophilic motives. But inasmuch as normophobia must by necessity construct children as full liberal subjects in a sense that requires no formation, his arguments carry water for those who would re-order children to the market, whether as objects of commerce, of sexual desire, or both.
We should be under no illusions about the telos of the war on human “normal”. It may style itself as progress, or as the pursuit of freedom. But it doesn’t just mean some encroachment of market logic into adult bodies. At its root is a blind, remorseless hunger: a cold logic according to which all of us - even infants - are mere resources to be consumed.
I feel like "Make America Normal Again" would be both a powerful political slogan and a philosophically coherent position.
With all due respect to Mr. Long Chu's "norm based right" to publicly spout absolute nonsense and make money doing so - I must add that this is the same openly misogynistic porn-clown who gained notoriety, and a Pulitzer no less, for such breathtakingly woke and derogatory observations as - (The “barest essentials” of “femaleness” are “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes.”). And of course who can forget? - ("Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is."). Who better to weigh in on the "rights" and "needs" of children? Mengele perhaps, or maybe the Marquis de Sade?