Rob McGee
Rob McGee
Jul 10, 2017 · 1 min read

Jazz Jennings. One of a handful of cases where the child was exhibiting opposite-gender inclinations/desires even before he could talk, and never wavered.

Hmmm. It seems to me this only demonstrates that Jazz Jennings was unambiguously a gender-nonconforming young child, and I’m not sure this is the same thing as being unambiguously transgender. (I read Brendon’s link to that Slate article on whether it’s really true that 80% of children with significant gender-identity issues ultimately outgrow it, and end up being “cis.”I don’t think the authors persuasively debunked that 80% figure, though they did a good job of explaining why it should be taken with a grain of salt.)

The unanswerable question, to me, is how things would’ve turned out if Jazz’s parents had just figured, “Oh, he’ll grow out of this I’m-a-girl schtick in a few years,” and therefore hadn’t thought it worthwhile to take their 4-year-old child to a gender clinic, where a formal diagnosis of GID was made.

I’m not sure how to exclude the possibility that Jazz’s subsequent development of full-blown gender dysphoria followed by social transitioning followed by puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones were NOT a long chain of “iatrogenic consequences”? (Not just iatrogenic, but also, possibly, Mom-o-genic — it’s difficult to read profiles of the family without suspecting that Jazz’s mother is the other half of a folie à deux.)

    Rob McGee

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    Rob McGee

    Openly homosexual man, but “gay” sounds stupid. Anti-anal, pro-Frot. Bible-believing atheist. Non-Randroid libertarian. Can “гаварить па-рюсски” a little.