First off, thank you Hudson!
I wasn’t keeping up with these recent blog posts because I had a feeling they would leave me disappointed. Well, I finally have read them and ,suffice to say, boy was I right! I can’t in good conscience understand someone who would on one hand sell LE Pride month creams called “Hot Tranny Mess” and “Theirs” and in the other link these ill-informed posts. While I can’t articulate my feelings better than the other recent comments to your posts (seriously, read them), I can do my part in not supporting this company further.

Just trying to wrap my head around several recent posts that appear to have have culminated in this one. You spent 6 months with two colleagues preparing a series of newsletter/blog posts about “dangers” of gender affirming care, which laid the groundwork for releasing this “Proposal for an Improved Gender Dysphoria Treatment Process”? (A body products blog seems a strange place to offer such a proposal, but okay.) You state this work is based on an assembled bibliography (added ex post facto, 5 days after your initial writings received some criticism), as well as your personal experience counseling clients, and selected Youtube videos.

You also note that you have academic/university expertise around psychology and human sexuality, and you’ve been teaching for 14 years.

I know this isn’t a university setting, so maybe you feel you don’t need to apply academic rigor here, or offer context that would indicate deep knowledge or care about this issue. Yes, you belatedly posted a bibliography— but you made claims and statements that are not supported by it. To simply post a list of articles without any context or annotated connection to your content lends a false intellectual and ethical veneer to your project.

Given that this is a serious topic that impacts people’s real-life access to health care (not to mention their overall well-being), given that this issue has been highly politicized, given that the average person’s overall literacy on this topic is dismal, and given that many of the claims you’re making have previously been made in bad faith by bad actors using flawed data— given all that, your articles show a disturbing lack concern or care for the communities and people you are impacting. The lack of concern, reflected in the some of the language you chose in these posts, coupled with the casual way you intersperse unfounded claims next to evidence-informed information, is painful to witness.

You’re concerned about “danger” lurking within the medical-industrial complex, and in “gender-affirming” care models (which you attack yet don’t even bother to define), but you’re not concerned about any danger your own writing might pose by mixing medical facts with value judgements that you present as facts. That is not only dangerous, it is irresponsible. I doubt you’d get away with this kind of writing and argumentation in an academic setting. Just because you can get away with it on your blog doesn’t excuse your carelessness.

You’ve said that you want to give people “all the facts” so they can (presumably) make decisions that are right for their unique situation. You claim:

“My way of dealing with that is to simply break through the cloud of affirmation and provide you with all the information I’d give to someone who asks me in real life. This blog is the entirety of that information. If you get to the end of this and are still willing to risk it, that alone proves your commitment and authenticity.”

Being willing to “risk it” “proves your commitment and authenticity”? For someone who rails against nudging people toward medical treatment, you’ve just set up a false goalpost and a declaration about what that means about someone’s authenticity. But no pressure, right?

I’d hope that you’d want to offer people facts and a breadth of possible options so they can weigh them carefully, without feeling pressure in any specific direction. But you’re failing by that measure. You do a disservice when you offer vague statements of danger, or pieces of your subjective experience as fact. Then you burnish it all by acting like you’re making an informed contribution to the professional field of care.

Here are just a few things you offered in related posts that are vague, value-laden, and/or not clearly supported by the sources you offered:
-
“Current guidlines in Denmark, Norway, & Sweden have changed the age limit for any medical interventions to 18.”

But the documents you offered show they haven’t. Care teams continue to have discretion around medical treatment for those under 18 years old. There are (and were already) guidelines around what care for young people should look like, but there is no strict age limit. I’m not arguing pro or con here, just noting that you are misrepresenting the documents you offered in your bibliography.

“you have a high liklihood of health complications from hormones eventually.”
(Unsupported and vague, not to mention anyone prescribed hormones is informed of known risks, possible/expected changes, and how those changes might be potential pros/cons in the eyes of the patient.)

“The density of your body will not change very much, meaning you will physically feel like your natural sex to people who touch you.”
(Unsupported, subjective speculation.)

“You also will almost always still smell like the gender you were born even after decades… This will primarily be an issue with heterosexual and homosexual partners. Pan and bisexual partners are more likely to welcome the variety.”
(Unsupported, subjective speculation.)

“these procedures involve… permanently disfiguring your body”
(Emphasis mine. Value-loaded language implies that these particular procedures have a negative valence.)

“gender reassignment surgery and gender affirmation surgery on a perfectly healthy human body can be considered forms of mutilation”
(Emphasis mine. Again, value-loaded language that denigrates anyone’s path that alters their body.)

“Gender transition is a decision that should never be made before fully experiencing and understanding the natural development of one’s physical adult body.”
(Opinion. You’re entitled to your feelings, but you’re supposedly presenting actual proposals for care in this section, which should be based on evidence and improving outcomes when appropriate.)

“Once they have taken hormones or undergone surgical procedures, they are left with permanent scars, damage, and disfigurement.”
(Emphasis mine. Again, value-laden language. I’ve had a shoulder surgery that left scars, and involved shaving some bone to improve functionality. I don’t refer to that as “damage” or “disfigurement” because the outcome of the surgery, over decades, has proven a benefit to me. I would question the motives and compassion of my care practitioner if they referred to my shoulder using those words.)
-

You mentioned that you counsel people. Then you should know better than to allow your own value-judgements to influence a client’s decisions. If you can’t assist a client in sorting through their experiences, feelings, and needs without denigrating other people’s experiences and bodies, then maybe you need to find a new way to approach this topic.

You have (legitimate) concerns for any person for whom medical transition may not be a good choice. But do you fail to see how your words might impact a person for whom medical transition might allow them to thrive? How do you think some of the value statements quoted above might impact such a person if they sought your counsel? Or do you think it is your “job” to put clients through a gauntlet of negative statements about their own or other people’s bodies so they can prove their “authenticity”?

Care can’t be divorced from the reality of the inequities of the culture we live in. I don’t want to see any person feeling pressured to make choices— in any direction— that don’t feel right for them. I do not seek to silence or ignore the voices of those who feel the care they received didn’t serve them. The voices of the individual folks you linked to in your bibliography are important. Care around gender issues is obviously not one-size-fits-all, and can always be improved. Indeed, trans people have been advocating for improvements in care for decades.

Despite the concerns you’ve voiced, I think you’ve done far more harm than good with these posts. The discourse around gender-based care is already rife with misinformation, bad-faith actors, and people contributing their takes without knowing anything about the history, context, or reality of this topic. Your work here hasn’t shown any real effort to differentiate yourself from the noise.