He looked at me for a second, then he picked up the specimen-jar, but it slipped from his fingers, fell to the floor and smashed. He gave a nervous laugh, bent, and stood back up holding what had been inside the jar. He held it out for me to see, but I was looking into his face. He closed his hand, then opened it again, like a magician. He was holding a pink ball. Not a testicle: a pink ball, like a lump of plasticine. I stared back into his eyes.
‘Tell me,’ I said.
So he told me.
Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory
Apologies for the massive spoiler if you’ve not read this book (still worth reading, mind). I’ve been thinking about The Wasp Factory ever since reading Baroness Hilary Cass’s recent justifications for continuing with the Pathways puberty blockers trial.
Frank, the narrator of Banks’ novel, is a girl whose father has led her to believe she is a boy whose genitals were destroyed in a dog attack. Upon discovering male hormones, tampons and the missing genitals – in fact candle wax – in a jar, Frank starts to suspect that her father is a woman, only to learn that he has secretly been dosing her with testosterone: “when Old Saul savaged me, my father saw it as an ideal opportunity for a little experiment, and a way of lessening – perhaps removing entirely – the influence of the female around him as I grew up”. This, the reader is in no doubt, was a bad thing, and not just because of all the terrible things Frank has done to others, driven by a sense of being mutilated and denied. The experiment was always impossible, an act of gross cruelty and deception.
The book was published in 1985 and one wonders how it might be received today. Would Banks be accused of transphobia? Genital obsession, at the very least? Certainly, being a boy or a girl is understood in terms that would lead to misguided accusations of biological essentialism. What, after all, is Frank’s gender identity (everyone has to have one) if Frank has always understood herself to be male? Why would it change on being told her father lied to her about her body (a mere container for her gendered soul)? How could she now, at 16, instantly switch to understanding herself as female? That’s not how gender is supposed to work! Or at least, that’s not how it’s supposed to work now. If you’ve lied to a child and they believed you, their identity is apparently fixed.
In a recent speech defending the Pathways trial, Baroness Cass gave the example of ‘Jo’, “a biological male, socially transitioned at two and a half by his parents”:
“At eleven, she – which I say advisedly because the chances of her reverting to her biological gender is vanishingly remote – she has been in stealth and will not go to secondary school because she is so afraid of being outed in that environment. She’s now refusing to come out of her room except very rarely and she now has weak bones, not as a result of puberty blockers but through inactivity. I ask the noble lady the minister should her subsequent treatment be decided by politicians or by the clinicians who are looking after her?”
As many have pointed out, this reads like a case of child abuse. A two and a half-year-old child may have a strong awareness of gender stereotypes and personal preferences, but no sense of sex constancy (the fact that people don’t change their sex when they change their appearance or habits). By age six or seven they are better at working this out. If a child still believes they are the opposite sex and that their body can be ‘fixed’ to match what it ‘really’ is, it’s because what they’ve been told about sex and gender isn’t true. One doesn’t have to think children are blank slates – or that actual gender non-conformity shouldn’t be supported – to know that misleading a child in this way does enormous harm. What Cass describes is a point – similar, I think, to that reached in many cases of fabricated or induced illness (FII) – where telling the truth will also be incredibly harmful and destructive to a child’s sense of self and security. It’s not a reason to keep on lying, and especially not to go one step further, loading lifelong physical damage on top of the psychological kind.
Yet Cass has doubled down on this in a letter to peers and MPs. She brushes off the question of “why safeguarding procedures would not have been initiated when ‘Jo’ was a toddler” with the argument that “these children are frequently living in stealth (i.e. those around them do not know their biological sex) and do not come to medical attention until much later as puberty looms”. In other words, if parents have warded off any form of scrutiny and intervention, there comes a point where you just have to let them have their way:
“They [the child] are not making a decision to be a girl – by that time they just believe themselves to be a girl and have no frame of reference to think differently. Even with input from the very skilled therapists in the new services, encouraging them to think more flexibly about their identity is rarely successful, regardless of what their natural trajectory would have been if they had not been socially transitioned at that very early stage.”
Every time I read this, it sounds even madder than it did the first time. The child in question is an eleven year old, with an as-yet unharmed body. They have been lied to in a way which is going to harm them whatever decisions are made in future. There is no backing out of that. To maintain the pretence that they are ‘really’ the opposite sex would require increasingly conscious self-delusion, and adherence to the belief that anyone who thinks otherwise, or so much as hints that an alternative path was possible, must hate them. To abandon it would be bewildering, for why would those closest to you, and others in authority, go along with the lie? How could you ever trust anyone again? Again, I think the comparison with FII is apt. If your entire understanding of yourself is as a sick person, and of the adults closest to you, heroic protectors standing between you and a hostile world, wouldn’t it destroy you to let it go? For some time, at least. Not forever, I’d hope.
There was a time when, even in crazily dark novels, it was widely agreed that parents who deceive you about your sex – either out of malice or their own misguided sense of ‘doing the right thing’ – were doing something bad. What Cass is demanding is not a reckoning with the harm, but a form of collective complicity – we must all go along with it because hey, for some kids, the damage is already done. What timescale is Cass even thinking of when she claims that “encouraging them to think more flexibly about their identity is rarely successful”? At what age do you write off a child’s ability to live honestly with themselves and their bodies after years of being misled? (A question relevant for all forms of abuse, not just this.) There is, one would hope, a lot of life to live after the age of eleven. Is she picturing this child at 20, 30, 40 etc.? What kind of quality of life will they have if their ability to think flexibly about themselves in relation to others was dismissed before they’d even hit their teens? And how far is this supposed inability to “think more flexibly about their identity” being reinforced by those who tell them that anyone proposing flexible thinking is a bigot?
