I don’t know the book acquisition budget of the public library in the town of St. Michaels, a quaint little tourist trap on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I hope it’s large enough to buy several copies of Ryan T. Anderson’s new book, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. Given the strange new world they’ve been cast into, the patrons will find it useful.
Last week, a U.S. District judge named George L. Russell III declared that the local high school in St. Michaels is violating the rights of a student named Max Brennan, who was born a girl but has decided he is a boy. (Like the parties to the case, judge, defendant, and plaintiff, we’ll refer to Max as a boy, for courtesy’s sake.) When Max told school authorities about his decision, they did what they could to accommodate him, calling him by his new name and referring to him with masculine pronouns. On Max’s behalf, they even subjected school staff to a “professional development workshop” on the subject of transgender students.
Max wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to use the boys’ locker room when changing clothes for gym class and showering afterwards. The school administration offered him instead the use of a “gender-neutral” restroom where he could change, and gym teachers allowed him additional time to get to class.
Max says he has been “generally accepted and recognized as male” by his classmates. But when he used the restrooms to change clothes, he reported receiving “weird looks.” A gay rights activist group called FreeState Justice volunteered to take the school district to court. Judge Russell agreed that not allowing Max full use of the locker room “harms his health and well-being.” Max now has the right to shower with the boys, while the case continues its way through the courts.
Doubtless some parents in St. Michaels are wondering why, all of a sudden, the law requires their sons to shower with a girl, just because the girl says she is a boy. They join many parents around the country under similar circumstances who are wondering the same thing. This is where When Harry Became Sally will come in handy.
As the debate about transgender rights is forced upon one community after another, frequently through the cynical deployment of schoolchildren by professional activists, Anderson’s book serves as a guide for the perplexed. Sharply argued and admirably brief, it offers a compendium of facts and reasoning for parents and anyone else who seeks confirmation of their moral intuition and common sense. How delighted they will be to discover that they’re not crazy after all.
In our transgender moment, as Anderson calls it, bullying is the favored method of advancing the cause. It is, after all, easier than debating a change in government policy. Laymen, ordinary citizens, are generally unaware of the extent to which the vocations of medicine, psychology, and psychiatry have been overrun by cultural warriors, especially through their professional organizations. Politicized psychologists and psychiatrists are quick to flash their guild cards the moment an uncredentialed skeptic questions their “scientific” findings, no matter how implausible.
No less a personage than the director of the Center for Child and Adolescent Gender Care at Duke University, Dr. Deanna Adkins, can make claims like this about “gender identity”—the feeling we all carry within us about whether we are a man or a woman—and face only the mildest dissent from her peers: Gender identity, she declares, is “the only medically supported determinant of sex.” In other words, the doctor says, we are what we think we are rather than what we are.
Nobody likes to argue with a doctor. But surely that can’t be right, can it? What about chromosomes, genetic makeup, sexual organs? For that matter, what about reality—the world that exists beyond our feelings about the world? Adkins, like her fellow warriors in the transgender cause, doesn’t cite research or medical evidence for her claim. That’s just as well. For at bottom it is not a medical claim at all. It is a metaphysical claim—an assertion about the nature of what’s real. And what is most striking about it is its sheer incoherence.
As he toys around with all the contradictions of transgender ideology, Anderson makes better use of his doctorate in philosophy than Adkins makes of hers in medicine:
From the transgender philosophy, Anderson moves on to the strong-arming and shaming tactics of the activists, and from there to the research. In the field of transgenderism, research is sparse. And much of what there is of it is tailored to conclusions that advance the cause. None of it is dispositive for either side.
The mainstream press, which gives lavish space to trans issues on the assumption that they represent the latest stage in the march toward the perfect society, has not been kind to Anderson’s book. The New York Times ran an op-ed by a professor at Barnard attacking the book even as she refused to name its title, which she called “insulting.” (And she’s got a point: The one false note in the book is the too-cute title.) When Harry Became Sally, she wrote, “suggests that transgender people are crazy, and that what we deserve at every turn is scorn, contempt and belittlement.”
It does nothing of the sort, needless to say; Anderson’s sympathy and good faith come through on every page. A Washington Post news story criticizing the book didn’t even bother to quote Anderson directly, only his critics. (It was later rewritten after an interview with Anderson.) Mostly, though, the press has put the book to one side—maybe a tribute to its strength, but probably because the activists no longer think the argument needs to be joined.
If his book has a weakness, it is that Anderson underestimates the shameless advantage that trans activists take of politeness and good manners—not their own, but those of ordinary people, who sense the suffering of friends and strangers in the grip of gender confusion and who are reluctant to assert the awful claims of reality in the face of it. Most of us will find it far more comfortable to duck the cause altogether and defer to the judgments of the experts, to the lawyers and doctors and judges and journalists, activists all.
And then the girl walks into the boys’ shower room and the cause becomes unavoidable. Good manners and good faith are indispensable to democratic disagreement. Intellectual submission is not. Ryan Anderson shows the parents of St. Michaels and elsewhere why deference is unnecessary, and undeserved.
